-
Japan invades China, initiating World War II in the Pacific.
-
German forces bombard Poland on land and from the air, as Adolf Hitler seeks to regain lost territory and ultimately rule Poland. World War II had begun.
-
A German term for “lightning war,” blitzkrieg is a military tactic designed to create disorganization among enemy forces through the use of mobile forces and locally concentrated firepower.
-
Parisians awaken to the sound of a German-accented voice announcing via loudspeakers that a curfew was being imposed for 8 p.m. that evening-as German troops enter and occupy Paris.
-
-
Adolf Hitler launched his armies eastward in a massive invasion of the Soviet Union: three great army groups with over three million German soldiers, 150 divisions, and three thousand tanks smashed across the frontier into Soviet territory.
-
On January, 20, 1942, Reinhard Heydrich, Himmler's second in command of the SS, convened the Wannsee Conference in Berlin with 15 top Nazi bureaucrats to coordinate the Final Solution (Endlösung) in which the Nazis would attempt to exterminate the entire Jewish population of Europe, an estimated 11 million persons.
-
Was an aerial bombing campaign
-
The British 8th Army under Field Marshal Bernard L. Montgomery begins the Allied invasion of the Italian peninsula, crossing the Strait of Messina from Sicily and landing at Calabria–the “toe” of Italy. On the day of the landing, the Italian government secretly agreed to the Allies’ terms for surrender, but no public announcement was made until September 8.
-
The Allies invade Western Europe in the largest amphibious attack in history.
-
American soldiers make their first strike on the Japanese Home Islands at Iwo Jima.
-
Allied forces invade the island of Okinawa and engage the Japanese in the bloodiest battle of the Pacific War.
-
To mark the formal acceptance by the Allies of World War II of Nazi Germany's unconditional surrender of its armed forces.
-
The Soviets overran the sites of the Belzec, Sobibor, and Treblinka killing centers. The Germans had dismantled these camps in 1943, after most of the Jews of Poland had already been killed. The Soviets liberated Auschwitz, the largest killing center and concentration camp
-
continues to follow the war through to August 1945, although not every day - alongside these stories will be the dramatic events of 75 years ago, the first battles in France, Dunkirk, the Battle of Britain and the beginning of the Blitz.
-
The United States becomes the first and only nation to use atomic weaponry during wartime when it drops an atomic bomb on the Japanese city of Hiroshima.
-
A formal surrender ceremony was held in Tokyo Bay aboard the USS Missouri. At the time, President Truman declared September 2 to be VJ Day.
-
A major German offensive is launched against the Allies in the Ardennes Mountains region on the Western Front.
