This is where the Daily Chronicles are posted
Sainte-Mère-Église, Liberated France · June 5, 1944 On this date in 1944 the people of Sainte-Mère-Église on the Cotentin Peninsula in Normandy, France, retired to their beds on the eve of the largest air- and seaborne invasion in history—Operation Overlord. As early as 1942, U.S. military planners had been eying this crossroads town. If the…
London, England · June 4, 1944 Tomorrow, June 5, 1944, a Monday, was to have been the big day, the Allied invasion of a 50-mile stretch of German-occupied beach on the French Normandy coast. The invasion, codenamed Operation Overlord, had been pushed from May, when the weather had been perfect, to June to allow another…
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 began moving 52 CG‑4A gliders and C‑47 Skytrain tow planes onto the airfield to lead the glider phase of Operation Overlord, the invasion of Nazi-occupied France….
London, England · June 2, 1944 In June 1943 in Algeria, North Africa, the Free French founded the French Committee of National Liberation. Much political maneuvering was needed to merge the Free French, whose nucleus consisted of Frenchmen who had escaped German capture at Dunkirk (May 26 to June 4, 1940), with politicians and armed forces from…
London, England · June 1, 1944 In June 1942 members of the French Resistance provided British intelligence with a copy of the top-secret blueprint of portions of Adolf Hitler’s Atlantic Wall—part of the defenses against the anticipated Allied invasion of Western Europe. The map had been spirited from the office of the German public works…
Pentagon, Washington, D.C. · May 31, 1945 On this date in 1945 a special group met in the Pentagon to search for an alternative to dropping the atomic bomb on Japan. The group had been called into existence by the new American president, Harry S. Truman. Neither Truman nor anyone else in the room knew…
San Leandro, California · May 30, 1942 On this date in California in 1942, California-born Japanese American Fred Korematsu was arrested for refusing to comply with President Franklin D. Roosevelt’s Executive Order 9066, which authorized the Secretary of War and his military commanders to require all people of Japanese heritage be removed from designated “military…
Off the Normandy Coast, Occupied France · May 29, 1944 The German Kriegsmarine possessed several notable midget submarines (Kleinst-U-Boote), one being the one-man Biber (German for “beaver”) and the other the two-man Seehund (German for “seal”). Neither U‑boot was particularly successful as a weapon against Allied supply and troop ships. Influenced by a captured one-man British…
Berlin, Germany · May 28, 1938 On this date in 1938 Adolf Hitler informed his senior military commanders of his plans to march into neighboring Czechoslovakia and erase that country from the map. No serious objections were raised by those who heard Hitler ring the death knell for Czechoslovakia and for the European order that…
Paris, Occupied France · May 27, 1942 On May 10, 1940, Adolf Hitler, having ended Poland’s existence in September 1939, turned his wrath on the democracies in the West. The Netherlands and Belgium capitulated to his war machine in May. Representatives of Marshal Philippe Pétain, who had recently been named premier of the French Third…