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 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 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…
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…
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 June 4, 1944, U.S. naval forces seize one of Adolf Hitler’s deadly submarines, the U‑505, as it makes its way home after patrolling the Gold Coast of Africa The…
On June 5, 1944, more than 1,000 British bombers drop 5,000 tons of bombs on German gun batteries placed at the Normandy assault area, while 3,000 Allied ships cross the…
On June 6, 1944, Supreme Allied Commander General Dwight D. Eisenhower gives the go‑ahead for the largest amphibious military operation in history: Operation Overlord, the Allied invasion of northern France,…
On June 10, 1944, 15‑year‑old Joe Nuxhall becomes the youngest person ever to play Major League Baseball when he pitches in a game for the Cincinnati Reds. Nuxhall threw two‑thirds…
Lieutenant John F. Kennedy receives the Navy and Marine Corps Medal—one of the Navy’s highest honors for gallantry—for his heroic actions as the commanding officer of a motor torpedo boat during…
Six days after the D‑Day landing, the five Allied landing groups, made up of some 330,000 troops, link up in Normandy to form a single solid front across northwestern France.…
On June 15, 1944, American aircraft bomb German‑occupied Budapest—with leaflets threatening “punishment” for those responsible for the deportation of Hungarian Jews to the gas chambers at Auschwitz. The U.S. government…
On June 19, 1944, the U.S. begins a two‑day attack that decimates Japan’s aircraft carrier force—and shifts the balance of naval air power in World War II‘s Pacific theater. The…
On June 22, 1944, U.S. President Franklin D. Roosevelt signs the G.I. Bill, an unprecedented act of legislation designed to compensate returning members of the armed services—known as G.I.s—for their…
