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Invasion of Poland
The German invasion began on 1 September 1939, one week after the signing of the Molotov–Ribbentrop Pact between Germany and the Soviet Union, and one day after the Supreme Soviet of the Soviet Union had approved the pact. The Soviets invaded Poland on 17 September. The campaign ended on 6 October with Germany and the Soviet Union dividing and annexing the whole of Poland under the terms of the German–Soviet Frontier Treaty. -
Battle of France
It was the German invasion of France and the Low Countries. On 3 September 1939 France had declared war on Germany, following the German invasion of Poland. In early September 1939, France began the limited Saar Offensive. By mid-October, the French had withdrawn to their start lines. In six weeks from 10 May 1940, German forces defeated Allied forces, conquering France, Belgium, Luxembourg and the Netherlands. -
Battle of Britain begins
On this day in 1940, the Germans begin the first in a long series of bombing raids against Great Britain, as the Battle of Britain, which will last three and a half months, begins -
Hitler sends the Afrika Korps to North Africa
German General Erwin Rommel arrives in Tripoli, Libya, with the newly formed Afrika Korps, to reinforce the beleaguered Italians’ position.
In January 1941, Adolf Hitler established the Afrika Korps for the explicit purpose of helping his Italian Axis partner maintain territorial gains in North Africa. -
Operation Barbarossa begins
Operation Barbarossa (German: Unternehmen Barbarossa) was the code name for the Axis invasion of the Soviet Union, which started on Sunday, 22 June 1941, during World War II. The operation put into action Nazi Germany's ideological goal of conquering the western Soviet Union so as to repopulate it with Germans. -
Attack on Pearl Harbor
The Attack on Pearl Harbor was a surprise, preemptive military strike by the Imperial Japanese Navy Air Service upon the United States (a neutral country at the time) against the naval base at Pearl Harbor in Honolulu, Territory of Hawaii, just before 08:00, on Sunday morning, December 7, 1941. -
US and British troops land on the beaches of Algeria and Morocco
Before dawn we lay off Algiers, the convoy having turned hard a starboard during the night. We could see the twinkling lights of the city straight ahead. Even as the first ALCS left for the shore we heard President Roosevelts speech to the French nation. -
Allied troops land on the beaches of Salerno
Having driven the German and Italian troops from North Africa and Sicily, the Allies decided to invade Italy in September 1943. Landing in Calabria and south of Salerno, British and American forces pushed inland. The fighting around Salerno proved particularly fierce and ended when British forces from Calabria arrived. -
Paris liberated by the allies
After more than four years of Nazi occupation, Paris is liberated by the French 2nd Armored Division and the U.S. 4th Infantry División.
All over France, from the BBC and the Radiodiffusion nationale (the Free French broadcaster) the population knew of the Allies' advance toward Paris after the end of the battle of Normandy -
D-Day
Codenamed Operation Overlord, the battle began on June 6, 1944, also known as D-Day, when some 156,000 American, British and Canadian forces landed on five beaches along a 50-mile stretch of the heavily fortified coast of France’s Normandy region. The invasion was one of the largest amphibious military assaults in history and required extensive planning. -
Japan formally surrenders
Following the signing of the instrument of surrender, many further surrender ceremonies took place across Japan's remaining holdings in the Pacific. Japanese forces in Southeast Asia surrendered on September 2, 1945, in Penang, September 10 in Labuan, September 11 in the Kingdom of Sarawak and September 12 in Singapore -
Hitler commits suicide
On April 30, 1945, holed up in a bunker under his headquarters in Berlin, Adolf Hitler commits suicide by swallowing a cyanide capsule and shooting himself in the head. Soon after, Germany unconditionally surrendered to the Allied forces, ending Hitler’s dreams of a “1,000-year” Reich. -
Dropping of first atom bomb on Hiroshima
On August 6, 1945, during World War II (1939-45), an American B-29 bomber dropped the world’s first deployed atomic bomb over the Japanese city of Hiroshima. The explosion wiped out 90 percent of the city and immediately killed 80,000 people; tens of thousands more would later die of radiation exposure.
