Also Within This Year in History:
1944
Allied troops stormed the beaches of Normandy on D-Day in 1944, the largest amphibious invasion in history. Weeks later, the Allies liberated Paris from its Nazi occupiers. Meanwhile, Soviet forces battered the Nazis on WWII’s eastern front. In the U.S., Franklin Roosevelt won an unprecedented fourth presidential term and Humphrey Bogart and Lauren Bacall starred in their first film together, “To Have and Have Not,” introducing the immortal line, “You know how to whistle, don’t you?”
On this day, U.S. aircraft begin dropping supplies to guerrilla forces throughout Western Europe. The action demonstrated that the U.S. believed guerrillas were a vital support to the formal armies…
On this day, Operation Panther, the Allied invasion of Cassino, in central Italy, is launched. The Italian Campaign had been underway for more than six months. Beginning with the invasion…
On January 27, 1944, Soviet forces permanently break the Leningrad siege line, ending the almost 900‑day German‑enforced containment of the city, which cost hundreds of thousands of Russian lives. The…
June 6, 1944 is considered one of the most pivotal moments in modern history. Better known by its codename, D‑Day, the Allied assault on five beaches in Nazi‑occupied France was…
American forces invade and take control of the Marshall Islands, long occupied by the Japanese and used by them as a base for military operations. The Marshalls, east of the…
On this day in 1944, Alice Walker is born in Eatonton, Georgia, the youngest of eight children born to sharecroppers. In their poor, rural community, Walker’s mother set an example…
On this day in 1944, novelist Richard Ford is born in Jackson, Mississippi. The son of a traveling salesman, Ford lost his father when he was 16. He graduated from…
Operation Catchpole is launched as American troops devastate the Japanese defenders of Eniwetok and take control of the atoll in the northwestern part of the Marshall Islands. The U.S. Central…
On February 21, 1944, Hideki Tojo, prime minister of Japan, grabs even more power as he takes over as army chief of staff, a position that gives him direct control…
On this day, Maj. Gen. Frank Merrill’s guerrilla force, nicknamed “Merrill’s Marauders,” begin a campaign in northern Burma. In August 1942, President Franklin D. Roosevelt and Prime Minister Winston Churchill…
Hanna Reitsch, the first female test pilot in the world, suggests the creation of the Nazi equivalent of a kamikaze squad of suicide bombers while visiting Adolf Hitler in Berchtesgaden.…
On March 2, 1944, a train stops in a tunnel near Salerno, Italy, and more than 500 people on board suffocate and die. The details of the incident, which occurred…
Louis “Lepke” Buchalter, the head of Murder, Inc., is executed at Sing Sing Prison in New York. Lepke was the leader of the country’s largest crime syndicate throughout the 1930s…
The U.S. Eighth Air Force launches the first American bombing raid against the German capital. The British Royal Air Force (RAF) had been conducting night raids against Berlin and other…
On this day, Britain announces that all travel between Ireland and the United Kingdom is suspended, the result of the Irish government’s refusal to expel Axis‑power diplomats within its borders.…
Maj. Gen. Orde Wingate, leader of the 77th Indian Brigade, also called the Chindits, dies in a transport plane crash. He was 41 years old. Wingate, a graduate of the…
German occupiers shoot more than 300 Italian civilians as a reprisal for an Italian partisan attack on an SS unit. Since the Italian surrender in the summer of 1943, German…
On April 8, 1944, Russian forces led by Marshal Fyodor Tolbukhin attack the German army in an attempt to win back Crimea, in the southern Ukraine, occupied by the Axis…
The cargo ship Fort Stikine explodes in a berth in the docks of Bombay, India (now known as Mumbai), killing 1,300 people and injuring another 3,000 on April 14, 1944.…
On this day in 1944, the Soviet Red Army occupies Tarnopol, one of the principal cities of Eastern Galicia, across the former Polish border. Tarnopol, traditionally a part of Poland,…
