This is where the Daily Chronicles are posted
Paris, France • November 7, 1938 On this date in 1938, 17-year-old Herschel Grynszpan, an unemployed German-born Polish Jew living illegally in the French capital, severely wounded Ernst vom Rath, Third Secretary at the German embassy on the Rue de Lille on Paris’s Left Bank. He shot Rath, the young assassin told French authorities, to…
Cape Torokina, Bougainville, Territory of New Guinea • November 1, 1943 Guadalcanal, the largest island in the southern Solomon Islands, was the site where the string of Japanese conquests, starting in Janunary 1942, finally ran its course. The bloody fight for Guadalcanal (August 7, 1942 to February 9, 1943) was a recognized turning point in…
Off the China Coast • October 25, 1944 By October 1944 U.S. Navy submarine Tang and her skipper Richard O’Kane were legendary. (O’Kane had earlier made a name for himself aboard the U.S. Navy sub Wahoo as executive officer under Dudley Walker “Mush” Morton.) The Tang, a 312‑ft Balao-class submarine, was credited during the war…
Moscow, Soviet Union • October 15, 1941 On June 22, 1941, the day Adolf Hitler sprang his surprise attack on the Soviet Union, a country of 180 million people to Germany’s east, he reportedly confided to some of his intimates: “I feel as if I have opened a door into a dark, unseen room—without knowing what lies behind…
Berlin, Germany • September 27, 1940 On January 6, 1939, Japan was approached by Germany with a proposal to reshape the Anti-Comintern Pact. The anti-communist pact, which Japan had signed with Nazi Germany in 1936 and Fascist Italy in 1937, largely targeted the Soviet Union, Tokyo’s decades-long adversary on the Asian continent. The January proposal…
Berlin, Germany • September 15, 1940 On this date in 1940 Adolf Hitler wrote a letter to Gen. Francisco Franco, the Caudillo (political-military leader) of Spain, asking for naval bases for Germany in the Spanish Canary Islands off Africa’s west coast and in other places flying the flag of Spain. Hitler believed Franco owed him…
SHAEF HQ, Versailles, France • September 5, 1944 On this date in 1944 Gen. Dwight D. Eisenhower, Supreme Commander of the Allied Expeditionary Force, determined that the route U.S. forces would take from liberated areas in France and Belgium eastward into Nazi Germany would pass through the ancient city of Aachen, once the seat of…
Berlin, Germany • August 26, 1939 Serious discussions between the Nazi and Soviet regimes began secretly in late July 1939. On August 21 Germany announced that Foreign Minister Joachim von Ribbentrop had been invited to Moscow. Two days later the world learned that Ribbentrop and his Soviet counterpart, Vyacheslav Molotov, had initialed a neutrality pact between…
London, England • August 17, 1943 In mid-June 1943 a Royal Air Force reconnaissance mission flew over the top-secret Peenemuende Army Research Center and V‑2 rocket launch site on the German Baltic coast. Images confirmed the presence of long-range ballistic missiles at the site. A month later British Prime Minister Winston Churchill ordered an attack…
Marseille, Occupied France • July 31, 1944 On this date in 1944 French poet, writer, and pioneering aviator Antoine de Saint-Exupéry vanished on a reconnaissance flight off the Mediterranean coast near Marseille, France. Best known for his novella The Little Prince (Le Petit Prince), and to a lesser extent for books about his aviation adventures,…