World War II calendar
What happened on December 8 during World War II? This date brings together 4 events from 1941, with period photographs and links to the full operations documented across WW2 Theatres.
Chełmno became the first stationary site where Nazi authorities used poison gas for the mass murder of Jews. Victims were locked inside sealed vans and killed by carbon monoxide from the vehicle exhaust. The SS and police murdered at least 152,000 Jews and about 4,300 Roma there during two periods of operation between December 1941 and January 1945.
Continue in The Holocaust: Timeline and Evidence →
At about 01:45 on 8 December, Japanese assault troops came ashore at Kota Bharu while other forces were entering Thailand and opening the wider southern offensive. The Malayan landing was the first step in a plan whose timetable depended on taking airfields and road junctions quickly enough to keep the next convoys and aircraft moving south. The defenders did not yet know which local attack would become the main danger. Northern Malaya contained several possible lines, but Japanese movement through Thailand threatened to turn them from the west while air…
Continue in The Fall of the Southern Empires →
President Franklin D. Roosevelt addressed a joint session of Congress and asked for a declaration of war against Japan. The Senate approved the resolution unanimously; the House passed it with Jeannette Rankin casting the sole dissenting vote. Pearl Harbor achieved the Japanese operational aim of disabling much of the U.S. Pacific Fleet's battle line at the opening of the wider Pacific offensive. Strategically, it brought the United States fully into the war and left the American carriers, submarines, repair capacity and fuel infrastructure available for the conflict that followed.
Continue in Attack on Pearl Harbor →Japanese aircraft from Formosa struck Clark and Iba after weather had delayed their morning schedule. B-17s and pursuit aircraft were destroyed or damaged on the ground in large numbers, sharply reducing the Far East Air Force before Homma’s main invasion force had landed on Luzon. MacArthur still commanded a large army, but the enlarged 1941 defence of the Philippines had assumed that American air power would help contest the approaches to the islands. That assumption was badly damaged in a few hours. The consequence was operational rather than merely numerical:…
Continue in The Fall of the Southern Empires →
