This is where the Daily Chronicles are posted
Tokyo, Japan · August 12, 1945 In 1945 the endgame in Europe was to take Berlin, the epicenter of Nazi resistance, which the Red Army did in the last week of April. On May 7 and 8, 1945, Adolf Hitler’s political heir, Adm. Karl Doenitz, surrendered Nazi Germany unconditionally to the Allies. The endgame in the…
Salzburg, Austria · August 11, 1939 On this date in 1939 near Salzburg, Austria, Adolf Hitler’s foreign minister Joachim von Ribbentrop told Italian dictator Benito Mussolini’s foreign minister, Galeazzo Ciano, about Hitler’s decision “to set Europe on fire.” “We want war,” Ribbentrop said to Ciano, though he omitted saying that Hitler had just signed the…
Paris, Occupied France · August 10, 1944 On August 1, 1944, almost two months after the initial D-Day landings in Normandy, France, more than 14,000 personnel and equipment from Gen. Philippe Leclerc’s Free French 2nd Armored Division began landing on Utah Beach. Leclerc (1902–1947) juggled three roles: He was a subordinate divisional commander in an American…
509th Composite Group HQ, Tinian, Mariana Islands · August 9, 1945 Despite the shockwaves that Hiroshima’s destruction on August 6, 1945, sent through Imperial circles, Japan’s government refused to agree to an unconditional surrender, their leaders insisting on preconditions that protected the status of Hirohito as emperor. (Had there been no Japanese foot-dragging, would the Pacific…
509th Composite Group HQ, Tinian, Mariana Islands · August 8, 1945 On this date in 1945 in Japan, two days after 40,000 Hiroshima men, women, and children had died in an instant (90,000–166,000 would die from burns and radiation exposure within days), U.S. airplanes carpet-bombed the country with over five million leaflets. The leaflets described…
Berlin, Germany · August 7, 1944 On July 20, 1944, Col. Claus von Stauffenberg left a bomb in his briefcase in a conference room at the East Prussia headquarters of Adolf Hitler, the Wolf’s Lair (Wolfsschanze), before excusing himself to take a call in the telephone exchange hut. In the conference room were Hitler and…
509th Composite Group HQ, Tinian, Mariana Islands · August 6, 1945 For several months the U.S. had dropped more than 63 million leaflets across Japan, warning civilians of devastating aerial bombings. Many Japanese cities suffered terrible damage from napalm bombs that set their wood-frame buildings on fire. On August 1, 1945, some 80 percent of Hachioji, a…
Cairo, Egypt · August 5, 1942 On this date in 1942 British Prime Minister Winston Churchill and Gen. Sir Alan Brooke, chief of the Imperial General Staff, flew into Cairo. They arrived in the Egyptian capital 44 days after the British garrison at Tobruk in Eastern Libya had fallen to German Gen. (soon Field Marshal) Erwin…
London, England · August 4, 1944 The British had begun deploying the first of several bunker-buster bombs (Tallboy and its successor Grand Slam) in 1944 while the Americans had nothing similar to deploy. On this date in 1944 the U.S. Eighth Air Force kicked off Operation Aphrodite, a program developed in total secrecy and designed…
Prague, Czechoslovakia · August 3, 1945 Following Germany’s defeat in 1945, Czechoslovakia’s president Edvard Beneš pursued a policy of “no mercy” toward the roughly three million ethnic Germans and Hungarians living in his country. The 61‑year-old Beneš had held the same office of president in prewar Czechoslovakia when, abandoned by his French and British allies,…