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 October 14, 1944, German Gen. Erwin Rommel, nicknamed “the Desert Fox,” is given the option of facing a public trial for treason, as a co‑conspirator in the plot to…
After advancing island by island across the Pacific Ocean, U.S. General Douglas MacArthur wades ashore onto the Philippine island of Leyte, fulfilling his promise to return to the area he…
On October 25, 1944, during the Battle of the Leyte Gulf, the Japanese deploy kamikaze (“divine wind”) bombers against American warships for the first time. It will prove costly—to both…
On November 7, 1944, Richard Sorge, a half‑Russian, half‑German Soviet spy, who had used the cover of a German journalist to report on Germany and Japan for the Soviet Union,…
On November 7, 1944, President Franklin Delano Roosevelt is elected to an unprecedented fourth term in office. FDR remains the only president to have served more than two terms. Roosevelt…
After departing from an airfield outside London on December 15, 1944, a single‑engine aircraft carrying trombonist and bandleader Glenn Miller goes missing over the English Channel. Miller was traveling to…
On December 16, 1944, the Germans launch the last major offensive of the war, Operation Autumn Mist, also known as the Ardennes Offensive and the Battle of the Bulge, an…
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…
Gen. Dwight Eisenhower endorses the finding of a court‑martial in the case of Eddie Slovik, who was tried for desertion, and authorizes his execution, the first such sentence against a…
On December 26, General George S. Patton employs an audacious strategy to relieve the besieged Allied defenders of Bastogne, Belgium, during the brutal Battle of the Bulge. The capture of…
On December 27, 1944, as World War II dragged on, President Franklin D. Roosevelt orders his secretary of war to seize properties belonging to the Montgomery Ward company because the…
The provisional government of Hungary officially declares war on Germany, bringing an end to Hungary’s cooperation—sometimes free, sometimes coerced—with the Axis power. Miklos Horthy, the anticommunist regent and virtual dictator…
