This is where the Daily Chronicles are posted
Moscow, Soviet Union • February 28, 1942 On this date in 1943 the 13-day Battle of Demyansk ended with the evacuation of the last batch of German armed forces from the Demyansk salient. Beginning the previous February 96,000 (eventually 131,000) German troops and auxiliary service personnel forced themselves into what was a relatively insignificant village…
Manzanar, Owens Valley, Inyo County, California • February 27, 1942 On February 19, 1942, President Franklin D. Roosevelt signed Executive Order 9066. The order empowered the U.S. Army’s recently established Western Defense Command to designate areas on the Pacific Coast of the United States from which “any and all persons may be excluded” in the interests of…
Munich, Germany • February 26, 1932 On this date in 1932 in Germany, Austrian-born Adolf Hitler was granted German citizenship. A decade earlier the stateless Austrian (Hitler had formally renounced his Austrian citizenship in April 1925) was the unlikely leader of a fringe Populist-nationalist movement, the National Socialist German Workers’ Party. In November 1923 he…
Berlin, Germany • February 25, 1941 The first flight of the German prototype Me 321 Gigant (“Giant”) took place on this date in 1941. The previous October German aircraft maker Messerschmitt had been given just 14 days to submit a proposal for a large-capacity troop- and cargo-carrying glider. The prototype glider’s maiden flight encouraged Messerschmitt to…
Tokyo, Japan • February 24, 1945 The first appearance over Japan in June 1944 of the massive 4‑engine B‑29 bomber—with its service ceiling of 33,000 ft./9,144 m, an operational range of over 3,200 nautical miles/5,926 km, and a maximum takeoff weight of 133,500 lb./60,555 kg—meant that the enemy’s Home Islands were squarely in the crosshairs of the war’s deadliest delivery system….
Santa Barbara, California • February 23, 1942 Japanese submarines initiated the first shore bombardments of the war with an attack on the U.S. Navy base at Johnston Island in the Pacific in mid-December 1941, just days after Japanese carrier-based planes had destroyed, in their surprise attack on Pearl Harbor, Hawaii, one‑half of the United States’…
Munich, Germany • February 22, 1943 On this date in 1943 siblings Sophie (age 21) and Hans Scholl (24) and their friend Christoph Probst (24), members of the underground White Rose (Weisse Rose) resistance circle, were charged with sedition for writing, printing, and distributing anti-Nazi leaflets; “tried” by “Hitler’s Hanging Judge,” the notorious Nazi jurist…
SHAEF HQ, Reims, France • February 21, 1945 On this date in 1945 U.S. fighter-bombers attacked the Berghof, Adolf Hitler’s three-story Alpine retreat on the 6,700‑foot/2,042‑meter Obersalzberg near Berchtesgaden on the Bavarian-Austrian border. The Berghof, bought and developed with royalties from the sale of Hitler’s crackpot political testimony, Mein Kampf (My Struggle), served as an…
London, England • February 20, 1944 On this date in 1944, while Soviet armed forces were ridding their country of the German Wehrmacht (German armed forces) on the Eastern Front, U.S. and British air forces embarked on Operation Argument in the skies over the Western Front. Unofficially dubbed “Big Week,” Operation Argument was an intensive…
Washington, D.C. • February 19, 1942 Eighty-four years ago on this date in 1942, celebrated today as the Day of Remembrance, President Franklin D. Roosevelt signed Executive Order 9066. It authorized the War Department to designate “military areas” in the U.S. and admit, exclude, or remove from these areas anyone whom the department felt to…