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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…
Southwest Pacific Area HQ, Brisbane, Australia • September 13, 1942 On May 14, 1942, after a voyage of 23 days and 9,000 miles, 12,000 men and equipment of the U.S. 32nd Infantry Division arrived in Australia for the purpose of bulking up the understrength defenses of that country. Gen. Douglas MacArthur, Allied Supreme Commander of all…
Fuehrer HQ, Rastenburg, Germany • September 12, 1943 On September 11, 1943, imprisoned in the Hotel Campo Imperatore high in the Apennine Mountains of Central Italy, deposed Italian dictator Benito Mussolini learned of the terms of the Long Armistice the Allies had presented to Marshal Pietro Badoglio’s new Italian government. (A Short Armistice had been…
Washington, D.C. • September 11, 1941 Eight months before Japan’s December 7, 1941, attack on U.S. assets at Pearl Harbor, Hawaii, Nazi Germany’s navy began mounting a series of U‑boat attacks on cargo ships crossing the North Atlantic from North America to Great Britain, a nation at war with Germany since September 3, 1939. The…
Nuremberg, Germany • September 10, 1935 On date in 1935 the Nazis convened their annual Party congress in Nuremberg completely fixated on the charismatic savior-figure Adolf Hitler, Germany’s chancellor since January 1933. The 1935 “Rally of Freedom” (Reichsparteitag der Freiheit) touted Hitler’s wildly popular reintegration of the Saar region into the German Reich (from 1920…
Rome, Italy • September 9, 1943 On this date in 1943 in Italy, the Allies from their strongholds in North Africa (since November 1942) and Sicily (since July‑August 1943) invaded the boot-shaped Italian mainland at Salerno, some 170 miles/274 km southeast of Rome, Italy’s capital, with diversionary landings at Reggio di Calabria (September 3,…
Washington, D.C. • September 8, 1940 On this date in 1940 the 7-member British Technical and Scientific Mission to the United States, or Tizard Mission as it was informally known, assembled in the nation’s capital. Sir Henry Tizard, brilliant visionary scientist and head delegate, had been in Washington, D.C., since August 22, meeting with notables, including President…
On an English Beach • September 7, 1943 On this date in 1943, on a popular beach near a seaside village in Southwest England, the British military not so secretly tested a giant rocket-propelled, explosive-laden contraption called the Panjandrum, known also as The Great Panjandrum. The highly experimental vehicle consisted of a pair of 10‑ft./3‑m-high steel…