This is where the Daily Chronicles are posted
Tokyo, Japan • September 6, 1941 On this date in 1941, in an Imperial Conference in Tokyo, Japanese military and political leaders embarked on a collision course with the West. It was decided that Japan would begin war preparations against the U.S., Great Britain, and the Netherlands (all countries with territorial claims in Southeast Asia;…
Alam el Halfa, Egypt • September 5, 1942 The yearslong back-and-forth Western Desert Campaign (June 11, 1940 to February 4, 1943) in the scrubby desert wastelands of Western Egypt and Eastern Libya had reached a stalemate at the end of July 1942. Both Allied and Axis sides licked their wounds in the wake of the quick fall…
London, England • September 4, 1943 On this date in 1943 the British War Office and Admiralty gave the go-ahead to build 2 temporary portable deep-water artificial harbors, one (codenamed Mulberry “A”) to be positioned off Omaha Beach at Saint-Laurent-sur-Mer and the second (Mulberry “B”) off Gold Beach at Arromanches-les-Bains. The components of both harbors were to be…
London, England • September 3, 1939 Addressing a national audience by radio on this date in 1939, Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain intoned the following words: “This morning the British ambassador in Berlin handed the German Government a final Note stating that, unless we heard from them by 11 o’clock that they were prepared at once to…
London, England and Paris, France • September 2, 1939 Shortly after British Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain and French Premier Édouard Daladier confirmed for themselves the German invasion of Poland on September 1, the 2 leaders gave the order for general mobilization and evacuation of hundreds of thousands of children and mothers, tens of thousands of hospital patients,…
Warsaw, Poland • September 1, 1939 Eighty-seven years ago World War II in Europe began on this date in 1939 in Danzig (now the present-day Polish city of Gdańsk) when the elderly German training ship Schleswig-Holstein, under the guise of a ceremonial visit to the city, bombarded Poland’s naval base in Danzig harbor. After a…
Berlin, Germany • August 31, 1939 On August 22, 1939, in a meeting at his Bavarian mountaintop retreat, the Berghof, Adolf Hitler told his generals he would fabricate “a propagandistic reason” to justify his planned aggression against neighboring Poland. The plan was for Nazi Party Schutzstaffel (SS) operatives to dress in Polish uniforms, attack a…
Warsaw, Poland • August 30, 1939 After his sudden decision on Friday, August 25, 1939, to cancel his invasion of Poland, Adolf Hitler ordered preparations for a second planned invasion of his neighbor to the east. From the Army’s Quartermaster General he learned that the earliest date on which mobilization could be completed was Thursday,…
Tokyo, Japan • August 29, 1944 From the summer of 1944 to the spring of 1945, Japanese forces continued their retreat from military outposts in Southeast Asia and the Pacific. Japanese losses in personnel, warships, and airplanes were minimized by frontline commanders, who exaggerated Japanese military successes against the Allied enemy in reports to Imperial…
London, England; Paris, France; Warsaw, Poland • August 28, 1939 Public opinion in Europe had shifted from dread of war and a longing for peace evident in the Czech Sudeten crisis of September 1938 to a fatalistic acceptance that war over Poland was now unavoidable. In Germany even Adolf Hitler’s political opponents assumed that if the…