366 Days
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June
News Headlines
1
NISEI ENROLLED IN U.S. ARMY’S JAPANESE LANGUAGE SCHOOL (MISLS)
Camp Savage, Minnesota • June 1, 1942 On this date in 1942 Japanese linguistic classes began at the U.S. Army’s Camp Savage, 15 miles from Minneapolis, Minnesota, for 200 enlisted men, of whom 193 were Nisei (second-generation U.S. offspring of Japanese immigrants) and the remainder Caucasian. Camp Savage’s 6-month curriculum trained Japanese-speaking soldiers in gathering, translating, analyzing, […]
2
CHURCHILL-DE GAULLE RIFT ON EVE OF D-DAY
London, England • June 2, 1944 In June 1943 in Algeria, North Africa, the Free French founded the Comité Français de Libération Nationale (CFNL). Much political maneuvering was needed to merge the Free French, whose nucleus consisted of Frenchmen who had escaped German capture at Dunkirk, the Channel port in Northwestern France (May 26 to June 4, […]
3
GLIDER PHASE OF D-DAY BEGINS
RAF Aldermaston and Ramsbury Airfields, England • June 3, 1944 On this date in 1944 in Aldermaston, England, men of the 434th Troop Carrier Group and the 101st Airborne Division (“Screaming Eagles”) began moving 52 CG‑4A engineless combat gliders and C‑47 Skytrain tug planes onto the airfield to lead the glider phase of Operation Overlord, the invasion […]
4
D-DAY LAUNCH DATE RESET
Southwick House, Southeast England • June 4, 1944 Tomorrow, June 5, 1944, a Monday, was to have been an epic day—the day Allied forces invaded a 50‑mile/80‑km stretch of German-occupied beach on the French Normandy coast. The cross-Channel invasion of Northwestern France, codenamed Operation Overlord, had been pushed from May, when there had been roughly […]
5
WEATHER REPORTS KEEP D-DAY PLANNERS ON PINS AND NEEDLES
Southwick House near Portsmouth, England • June 5, 1944 Weather conditions over France’s Normandy beaches on invasion day, D-Day, tentatively set for this date, June 5, 1944, had to be as ideal as possible before Supreme Allied Commander Gen. Dwight D. Eisenhower would issue the “go” signal for the largest sea, air, and land invasion ever executed. […]
6
ALLIES ASSAULT NORMANDY’S BEACHES
Normandy, Liberated France • June 6, 1944 It was a cloudy and chilly late spring day, D-Day, arguably the least ordinary day of the 20th century. Already Hermann Goering’s Luftwaffe, stalked relentlessly by Anglo-American air forces, had surrendered air supremacy over the English Channel. Sadly for him, the Luftwaffe chief had just 327 aircraft to oppose the Allied […]
7
ALL-BLACK BATTALION RAISES BARRAGE BALLOONS OVER D‑DAY BEACHES
Normandy, Liberated Northwestern France • June 7, 1944 On this date in 1944 soldiers of the U.S. First Army’s 320th Barrage Balloon Battalion succeeded in permanently raising the first of a slew of 35‑ft/11.6‑m‑long hydrogen-filled, low-floating barrage balloons that would bob in the skies over Omaha and Utah invasion beaches. The morning before, hundreds of trained […]
8
D-DAY CEMETERY ESTABLISHED IN FRANCE
Colleville-sur-Mer, Normandy • June 8, 1944 On this date in 1944, 2 days after the D-Day landings, a small piece of Normandy, France, became the site of the first American military cemetery to be established in Europe during World War War II. On that first day the makeshift graveyard near the badly damaged village of […]
9
JEDBURGHS, FRENCH RESISTANCE TEST NAZI HOLD ON FRANCE
RAF Fairford, England and Blida near Algiers, Algeria • June 9/10, 1944 In planning the successful June 6, 1944, sea- and airborne invasion of German-occupied Normandy, France, Supreme Allied Commander of the Allied Expeditionary Force, Gen. Dwight D. Eisenhower, fully appreciated the necessity of coordinating French Resistance actions with the Allies’ strategic and tactical plans […]
10
U.S., BRITISH AIR FORCES KICK OFF COMBINED BOMBER OFFENSIVE
London, England • June 10, 1943 On this date in 1943 U.S. and British air forces unleashed their Combined Bomber Offensive (CBO) against industrial targets valuable to Nazi Germany’s war machine, particularly to the Luftwaffe. The CBO had several antecedents. In late 1942 both the British and the Americans had identified “bottleneck” German industries (Great […]
11
ITALY BOMBS MALTA, BRITISH ISLAND FORTRESS
Malta, Central Mediterranean • June 11, 1940 On this date in 1940, one day after Italy entered World War II on the side of Axis partner Nazi Germany, the Italian Royal Air Force opened a nearly nonstop series of air raids on the Mediterranean island of Malta, a British possession since 1800. Benito Mussolini speculated […]
12
U.S. NAVY FLIERS FIND RICH TARGETS IN MARIANAS
Off the Mariana Islands, Central Pacific • June 12, 1944 On this date in 1944 in the Marianas, U.S. carrier aircraft began attacking Japanese defenses on Saipan, Tinian, and Guam in preparation for the 3‑week battle for the archipelago’s administrative center, Saipan. Eight hundred U.S. warships carrying 162,000 fighting men were set to smash into the […]
13
U.S. AIRBORNE TROOPS LIBERATE FIRST FRENCH TOWN
Carentan, Cotentin Peninsula, France • June 13, 1944 Late Monday, June 5, 1944, the largest amphibious invasion in history was set to launch. The next day, June 6, D-Day, three Allied armies began depositing their precious cargo of men and equipment on five Normandy beaches and in multiple aerial drop zones behind them. By evening […]
14
HOLOCAUST AND GERMAN BUSINESSES JOINED AT HIP
Auschwitz, German-Occupied Poland • June 14, 1940 On this date in German-occupied Poland 728 male political prisoners, Catholic priests, and Jews left Tarnów’s train station for Auschwitz concentration camp (Konzentrationslager Auschwitz), 80 miles/129 kilometer away. It was the first mass transport of prisoners to Auschwitz (Polish name, Oświęcim) since the camp was opened for business on April 27, 1940, […]
15
ARADO AR 234 BLITZ FLIGHT TESTING BEGINS
Rheine Airfield, Lower Saxony, Germany • June 15, 1943 On this date in 1943 the world’s first jet-powered bomber, the Arado Ar 234 Blitz (English, Lightning), made its appearance in the skies over Northwestern Germany. The flight of this all-metal, single-seat, twin-jet prototype came 11 months after the first flight test of a fully configured Messerschmitt Me 262 […]
16
BOMBERS BLAST VIENNA OIL REFINERIES
Foggia Airfield Complex, Southeast Italy • June 16, 1944 On this date in 1944 nearly 600 B‑17 Flying Fortresses and B‑24 Liberators from the U.S. Fifteenth Air Force took off from bases in Foggia, Southeastern Italy, to attack oil refineries around Vienna, Austria, and Bratislava, Czechoslovakia. After Romania, Austria was the biggest Axis crude oil producer, […]
17
STALIN SNATCHES LATVIA, HITLER HALTS WAR AGAINST FRANCE
Munich, Germany • June 17, 1940 On this date in 1940 Joseph Stalin of the Soviet Union, drawing on provisions of the secret protocol in the August 1939 Molotov-Ribbentrop Nonaggression Pact with his Nazi ally, ordered an attack on the Baltic state of Latvia. (The 1939 protocol had already returned dividends to the two conspirator […]
18
“BRACE YOURSELVES” CHURCHILL TELLS BRITISH
London, England • June 18, 1940 Four days after the fall of Paris to German invaders, Charles de Gaulle, a tall (6 ft, 5 in/196 mm), young (49), relatively unknown French brigadier general who had escaped to England on June 17, 1940, addressed the French people in a radio broadcast from the BBC in London on this date in 1940. […]
19
JAPAN MOVES TO STRENGTHEN IWO JIMA GARRISON
Chidori Airstrip, Iwo Jima, Volcano Islands • June 19, 1944 On this date in 1944 Japanese Lt. Gen. Tadamichi Kuribayashi stepped from his plane onto the dirt runway of Iwo Jima’s Chidori airstrip, or Airfield No. 1. Roughly 8 square miles/21 square kilometer of mostly black volcanic ash and stone (cinder) anchored by 554‑ft/169‑m‑high Mt. Suribachi, Iwo Jima had […]
20
FRENCH RESISTANCE, WEHRMACHT CLASH
Mont Mouchet, South-Central France • June 20, 1944 During the Allied invasion of France (Operation Overlord), the Maquis and other French resistance groups played a vital role in delaying the arrival of German reinforcements to the Normandy beachhead as well as in the eventual Allied victory in France. The FFI, or Fifis (Forces Françaises de […]
21
U.S. LAUNCHES NEW GEORGIA CAMPAIGN IN SOUTH PACIFIC
New Georgia Islands, Solomon Islands • June 21, 1943 On this date in 1943, the U.S. kicked off Operation Toenails, as the New Georgia campaign was called, with unopposed landings by the elite 4th Marine Raider Battalion followed the next day by the Army’s 43rd Infantry Division. The year before, in October, the Japanese had reconnoitered […]
22
GERMANS BOMB U.S. AIR BASE IN UKRAINE
Poltava, Ukraine SSR, Soviet Union • June 22, 1944 Since mid-1942 U.S. Army Air Forces brass had proposed to the Soviets an expansion of shuttle bombing missions that would strike hard-to-reach targets in Central and Eastern Europe. The concept of shuttle bombing was straight-forward: Allied bombers and fighter escorts would launch themselves from one airfield, […]
23
SOVIET OPERATION BAGRATION KNOCKS GERMANS OFF BALANCE
Moscow, Soviet Union • June 23, 1944 On tthis date in 1944 along a 450-mile/724 kilometer front some 2.4 million Soviet frontline and support troops, 5,200 tanks, and 5,300 aircraft smashed through German lines in present-day Belarus (White Russia and Belorussia in some earlier sources), an area of operations roughly half the size of California. Sabotage of rail networks […]
24
EISENHOWER TO COMMAND U.S. FORCES IN EUROPE
London, England • June 24, 1942 On this date in 1942 Maj. Gen. Dwight D. Eisenhower arrived in London, England, to assume administrative and operational command of the European Theater of Operations, United States Army. At the time (end of May) the U.S. Army in Europe consisted of three infantry regiments. Set up 16 days prior […]
25
BRITISH INTERN SUSPECT GERMANS, ITALIANS
London, England • June 25, 1940 Under the threat of imminent invasion from Nazi Germany, the British government on this date in 1940 began interning all suspect aliens living in the United Kingdom. Thousands of Germans, Austrians, and Italians, including Jewish refugees from the Nazis, were placed behind barbed wire in England (racetracks and unfinished […]
26
CHERBOURG’S CAPTURE TO REPLACE LOST MULBERRY HARBOR
Cherbourg, France • June 26, 1944 On June 19–22, 1944, a violent gale featuring 32‑knot/59‑km/h winds hit the two huge Mulberry artificial harbors that the Allies had built in England, towed across the English Channel under danger of wind, weather, and enemy air attack, and planted off the Normandy invasion beaches, one off Omaha, the […]
27
GERMAN AIR FORCE, NAVY DECIMATE ALLIED ARCTIC CONVOY PQ-17
Norwegian and Arctic Seas • June 27, 1942 In March 1941, 9 months before Pearl Harbor plunged the neutral nation into World War II, the United States inaugurated the “Lend-Lease” program. That program gave Great Britain, the Soviet Union, China, and other Allied nations resisting Axis aggressors, mainly Germany and Japan, vast amounts of war matériel to […]
28
NAZIS MOVE TO STRENGTHEN LAWS AGAINST SEX OFFENDERS
Berlin, Germany • June 28, 1935 On this date in 1935, Nazi Germany amended Paragraph 175 of the German penal code that had been in place since 1871 during the chancellorship of Prince Otto von Bismarck, the Iron Chancellor in Kaiser Wilhelm I’s Second Reich. Paragraph 175 outlawed acts of “unnatural indecency” only between men. Six years later […]
29
GERMAN CAPITAL, OTHER CITIES SCENES OF CARNAGE
Berlin, Germany • June 29, 1934 Late on this date in 1934 German Chancellor Adolf Hitler unleashed an extraordinary murder spree known as the “Night of the Long Knives” (“Nacht der Langen Messer”). President Paul von Hindenburg’s doctors had leaked news that the 86‑year-old German military hero had only months to live. Hitler feared that […]
30
JAPAN SHELVES WAR PLANS AGAINST SOVIETS
Tokyo, Japan • June 30, 1941 On September 19, 1931, soldiers of the Kwantung Army (eventually the largest, most prestigious branch of the Imperial Japanese Army) invaded Manchuria in Northeast China from their Chinese base at Port Arthur (known as Ryojun in Japanese; present-day Dalian or Lüshun Port) and established a puppet state they called […]
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