This is where the Daily Chronicles are posted
Moscow, Soviet Union · June 23, 1944 On this date in 1944 along a 450-mile front some 2.4 million Soviet frontline and support troops, 5,200 tanks, and 5,300 aircraft smashed through German lines in present-day Belarus (White Russia in some earlier sources). Sabotage of rail networks and bridges by guerrillas several days before June 23 impeded German…
Berlin, Germany · June 22, 1941 The largest military force ever assembled—three million soldiers, 4,300 tanks, nearly 4,400 aircraft, and some 46,000 artillery pieces—assaulted the Soviet Union on this date in 1941. Since the 1920s Adolf Hitler had championed a crusade against “Jewish Bolshevism,” with its political, ideological, and economic center in Moscow. Hitler believed that only when…
Cairo, Egypt · June 21, 1942 After a disorderly retreat by the British Eighth Army into Egypt following Erwin Rommel’s breakthrough of the Gazala line in mid-June, the Desert Fox (Rommel’s popular nickname) stormed the Mediterranean fortress and harbor of Tobruk in Eastern Libya on this date in 1942. The newly minted German field marshal…
Mont Mouchet, South Central France · June 20, 1944 During the Allied invasion of France (Operation Overlord), the Maquis and other French resistance groups played a role in delaying the arrival of German reinforcements to the Normandy beachhead as well as in the eventual Allied victory in France. The FFI (Forces Françaises de l’Interieur for…
Mariana Islands, Central Pacific · June 19, 1944 On this date in 1944 a huge gale hit the two gigantic artificial harbors known as Mulberry harbors that the British had built in England, floated across the English Channel, and deposited on Normandy’s beaches several days after the Allies’ June 6 invasion of German-occupied France. The…
London, England · June 18, 1940 Four days after the fall of Paris to German invaders, Charles de Gaulle, a tall (6 ft, 5 in/196 mm), young (49), relatively unknown French general who had escaped to England on June 17, 1940, addressed the French people in a radio broadcast from London on this date in 1940. In a…
Munich, Germany · June 17, 1940 On this date in 1940 Joseph Stalin of the Soviet Union, drawing on provisions of the secret protocol in the August 1939 Molotov-Ribbentrop Nonaggression Pact with his Nazi ally, ordered an attack on the Baltic state of Latvia. (The 1939 protocol had already returned dividends to the two conspirator…
Foggia Airfield Complex, Southeast Italy · June 16, 1944 On this date in 1944 nearly 600 B‑17 Flying Fortresses and B‑24 Liberators from the U.S. Fifteenth Air Force took off from bases in Foggia, Southeastern Italy, to attack oil refineries around Vienna, Austria, and Bratislava, Czechoslovakia. After Romania, Austria was the biggest Axis crude oil producer,…
Chengtu, China · June 15, 1944 On this date in 1944 67 B‑29 Superfortresses took off from their base in Chengtu, mainland China, to release 221 tons of bombs on the Imperial Iron and Steel Works at Yawata on the southernmost Japanese Home Island of Kyūshū. This was the first attack on the Japanese homeland…
Paris, Occupied France · June 14, 1940 On this date in 1940 German troops marched into Paris, forcing the French government to move to Tours, then to Bordeaux, where it set up an impromptu headquarters. In a futile plea to U.S. President Franklin D. Roosevelt, the French government under Prime Minister Paul Reynaud implored the…