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?”
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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 of the Japanese military.
JAPAN – DECEMBER 08: On December 8Th 1942, General Hideki Tojo, Prime Minister Of The Japanese Empire, Gives A Speech For The First Anniversary Of The Beginning Of The Japanese Offensive On South-East Asia, Especially Indonesia And The Philippines. (Photo by Keystone-France/Gamma-Keystone via Getty Images)
Keystone-France / Gamma-Keystone / Getty Images
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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, commonly known as D-Day.
Colorized photo “Into the Jaws of Death,” photographed by Robert F Sargent of the United States Army First Infantry Division disembarking from a landing craft onto Omaha Beach during the Normandy Landings on D Day, June 6, 1944.
Smith Collection/Gado/Getty Images
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Acting on tip from an informer, the Nazi Gestapo captures 15-year-old Jewish diarist Anne Frank and her family in a sealed-off area of an Amsterdam warehouse. The Franks had taken shelter there in 1942 out of fear of deportation to a Nazi concentration camp. They occupied the small space with another Jewish family and a single Jewish man and were aided by Christian friends, who brought them food and supplies. Anne spent much of her time in the so-called “secret annex” working on her diary. The diary survived the war, overlooked by the Gestapo that discovered the hiding place, but Anne and nearly all of the others perished in the Nazi death camps.
2M4NPW5 Anne Frank. School photo of Annelies Marie "Anne" Frank (1929-1945), the young Jewish girl who's diary of life under Nazi occupation made her famous, 1940
Alamy Stock Photo
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The Warsaw Uprising ends on October 2, 1944, with the surrender of the surviving Polish rebels to German forces.
Sovfoto/Universal Images Group via Getty Images
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During World War II, U.S. Major General Henry C. Pratt issues Public Proclamation No. 21, declaring that, effective January 2, 1945, Japanese American “evacuees” from the West Coast could return to their homes.
Roosevelt controversially supported the internment of Japanese in America during the war.
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