This is where the Daily Chronicles are posted
Berlin, Germany • September 23, 1934 On this date in 1934 Ludwig Mueller, a crew-cut former naval chaplain, was installed as the new Reich Bishop in a gaudy spectacle at the swastika-bedecked Berlin Cathedral. The year before, 1933, German chancellor Adolf Hitler had proposed, as part of an administrative overhaul of the German Evangelical (Lutheran) Church,…
Vichy, France • September 22, 1940 As early as June 1940, after French resistance to the German conquest of France crumbled, Japan made overtures to Vichy French authorities for permission to station troops in French Indochina (now Vietnam, Laos, and Cambodia) and for their warships to take up naval stations off Northern Indochinese ports in…
Manzanar War Relocation Center, Owens Valley, California • September 21, 1945 On June 23, 1942, 62 Japanese American orphaned, abandoned, and unwanted girls and boys arrived at Manzanar’s new Children’s Village. Chaperoned by adult caregivers and 2 soldiers armed with rifles and bayonets, the youngsters departed in several olive-green U.S. Army buses from 2 Los Angeles orphanages, making stops…
Berlin, Germany • September 20, 1940 On this date in 1940 the chief of the German high command, Field Marshal Wilhelm Keitel, announced that Wehrmacht troops were being dispatched to Romania “in case a war with Soviet Russia is forced upon us.” The announcement was Berlin’s warning shot across Moscow’s bow that the Soviets were…
Brest-Litovsk, Occupied Eastern Poland • September 19, 1939 Adolf Hitler’s armies stormed over Poland’s border on September 1, 1939, in what became known as the world’s first blitzkrieg—“lightning war.” Soviet dictator Joseph Stalin hastened to claim his share of the spoils under the terms of a secret protocol in the Molotov-Ribbentrop Nonaggression Treaty signed in Moscow less…
Tokyo, Japan • September 18, 1931 The assassination of the Manchurian warlord Zhang Zuolin in June 1928 was the first in a daisy change of major Sino-Japanese crises faced by the new Japanese emperor, Hirohito (posthumously referred to as Emperor Shōwa), whose reign began 18 months before. Manchuria (sometimes referred to by its historical name Guandong)…
Little Creek Naval Training Center, Virginia • September 17, 1941 On this date in 1941 the U.S. Navy created a camp for Armed Guard gun training at Little Creek, Virginia, 12 miles/19 km northeast of the huge naval complex at Norfolk. Few people then and even less now have ever heard of this branch of the U.S. Navy….
Washington, D.C. • September 16, 1940 On this date U.S. President Franklin D. Roosevelt signed the nation’s first peacetime draft law—the Selective Training and Service Act, also known as the Burke-Wadsworth Act. Created to conscript troops quickly in the event the U.S. was drawn into a second global war, the new law was in response…
Peleliu, Palau Islands, Western Pacific Ocean • September 15, 1944 Beginning on this date in 1944 3 U.S. Marine Corps infantry regiments—the 1st, 5th, and 7th—of the 1st Marine Division landed on Japanese-held Peleliu, a 6‑mile/9.7‑km-long by 2‑mile/3.2‑km-wide speck of coral in the Pacific Ocean’s Palau Island chain. The first wave of Marines was followed less than…
Berlin, Germany • September 14, 1930 On this date in 1930 German voters went to the polls to elect a new Reichstag, and the results were shocking. The National Socialist German Workers’ Party (Nationalsozialistische Deutsche Arbeiterpartei, or NSDAP) was the ninth and smallest of Germany’s political parties, with but 12 members in the national parliament. In…