I’m continuing my WWII Timeline series with a look at October – December 1940 in this post.
A Timeline of WWII, Fall 1940
October 3, 1940
Vichy France passed its own version of the Nuremberg Laws against the Jews.
October 7, 1940
Nazis invaded Romania, with their Jewish population of 34,000, with the pretext of protecting its oil fields from the British.
October 12, 1940
After many previous postponements, the Germans again postponed Operation Sea Lion until Spring of 1941.
October 22, 1940
Twenty-nine thousand German Jews were deported from Baden, the Saar, and Alsace-Lorraine into Vichy France.
October 23, 1940
Spain’s Fascist leader, Francisco Franco, met with Adolf Hitler at the Hendaye Railway Station near the Spanish-French border in Hendaye, France. In the seven- to nine-hour meeting, Franco and Hitler could not come to an agreement for the conditions for Spain to join the Axis powers of Germany, Italy, and Japan. The only outcome of the meeting was the signing of a secret agreement in which Franco committed to entering the war at a future date he would choose and Hitler gave vague guarantees that Spain would receive “territories in Africa.”
October 28, 1940
Italy invaded Greece from Albania, which Mussolini justified by claiming that Greece had attacked Albania.
In Great Britain, 489,000 children were evacuated from the London area.
October 31, 1940
The Battle of Britain air war ended in defeat for Nazi Germany and proved Great Britain’s air superiority.
November 1940
The Krakow Ghetto was sealed off with 70,000 Jews inside.
November 5, 1940
Franklin Delano Roosevelt was re-elected to his third term as U.S. president.
November 11/12, 1940
The Battle of Taranto took place overnight between British naval forces and Italian naval forces. The British Royal Navy launched the first all-aircraft ship-to-ship naval attack in history using aerial torpedoes from the aircraft carrier HMS Illustrious in the Mediterranean Sea against the battle fleet of the Italian Royal Navy anchored in the harbour of Taranto. The raid crippled the Italian fleet at Taranto. The Japanese noted the superiority of naval aviation over the big guns of the battleships as they planned their Pearl Harbor attack.
November 14/15, 1940
The city of Coventry, England was bombed many times during WWII, but the most devastating attacks occurred on the evening of November 14 and continued into the morning of November 15.
November 20, 1940
Hungary joined the Axis Powers of Germany, Italy, and Japan.
November 22, 1940
The Greeks defeated the Italian 9th Army.
November 23, 1940
Romania joined the Axis Powers of Germany, Italy, Japan, and Hungary.
November 24, 1940
Slovakia joined the Axis Powers of Germany, Italy, Japan, Hungary, and Romania.
December 9/10, 1940
The British began a western desert offensive in North Africa against the Italians.
December 29/30, 1940
President Roosevelt delivered his Arsenal of Democracy speech on December 29 in a radio broadcast to the United States, Europe, and Japan in which he pledged to supply Great Britain with war materials. He began his address at 9:30 p.m. Eastern time from Washington D.C.
Before his re-election, Roosevelt pledged during the campaign that America would not declare war on the Axis unless it were attacked. He held to that promise, but during his almost forty minute speech, made a case to provide military support to Great Britain and warned,
If Great Britain goes down, the Axis powers will control the continents of Europe, Asia, Africa, Australia and the high seas. … It is no exaggeration to say that all of us, in all the Americas, would be living at the point of a gun.
On the evening of that same day, the Luftwaffe (German Air Force) firebombed London. Keep in mind, London is five hours ahead of Washington, D.C. I don’t know what time the bombing started in London that evening, but it likely started before Roosevelt started his radio address.
It was London’s most devastating air raid of the Blitz at the hands of the Nazis and the resulting fire from approximately 100,000 bombs dropped from one hundred thirty-six German bombers became known as the Second Great Fire of London. The raid focused on a part of the city with churches, offices, warehouses, and other non-residential buildings.
Hundreds of fires burned in London, but firefighters saved much of the city from the destruction caused by the exploding bombs even as the bombs rained down all around them, and even while hindered by a water shortage. St. Paul’s Cathedral was in the midst of the smoke and flames and could not be seen well during the firefight, but in the end, when the flames died down and the smoke cleared, the cathedral still stood.
Ernie Pyle, the Pulitzer Prize–winning American journalist and war correspondent, witnessed the raid in London and wrote,
Into the dark shadowed spaces below us, while we watched, whole batches of incendiary bombs fell. We saw two dozen go off in two seconds. They flashed terrifically, then quickly simmered down to pin points of dazzling white, burning ferociously…
The greatest of all the fires was directly in front of us. Flames seemed to whip hundreds of feet into the air. Pinkish-white smoke ballooned upward in a great cloud, and out of this cloud there gradually took shape—so faintly at first that we weren’t sure we saw correctly—the gigantic dome of St Paul’s Cathedral. St Paul’s was surrounded by fire, but it came through. It stood there in its enormous proportions—growing slowly clearer and clearer, the way objects take shape at dawn. It was like a picture of some miraculous figure that appears before peace-hungry soldiers on a battlefield.
Ernie Pyle was killed by enemy fire on the island of Iejima, Japan (then called Ie Shima) during the Battle of Okinawa on April 18, 1945.
Sources:
This series of posts is based on a compilation of timelines from:
The History Place:
The National WWII Museum Interactive Timeline
United States Holocaust Memorial Museum
World War II Chronicle by the Editors of Publications International, Ltd.
Roosevelt’s Arsenal of Democracy Speech
Roosevelt’s Arsenal of Democracy Speech
Most recent post from the series:
© Cindy Farrar Bryan and The Arrowhead Club, 2019
The Arrowhead Club 