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WWII Timeline – Fall 1942
I’m continuing my WWII Timeline series with a look at October – December 1942 in this post.
A Timeline of WWII, Fall 1942
October 5, 1942
In the Ukraine, two employees of a German construction firm accidentally came across an execution squad killing Jews from the Ukraine’s small town of Dubno. One, an engineer named Hermann Graebe, gave an eyewitness account of the executions. (See link to The History Place article in Sources at the bottom of this page for Graebe’s account).
October 11/12, 1942
Cruisers and destroyers of the U.S. Navy were victorious over the Imperial Japanese Navy in the Battle of Cape Esperance, also known as the Second Battle (or Sea Battle) of Savo Island, off Guadalcanal.
October 12-14, 1942
On October 12 at the Mizocz Ghetto in the Ukraine, the Ukrainian Auxiliary Police and the German police prepared to liquidate the ghetto. The 1,700 Jews of Mizocz fought back and half of them were able to escape or hide during the two-day uprising. On October 14, those recaptured were taken to a ravine and shot.
October 13, 1942
The 164th Infantry Regiment, the first of the U.S. Army troops, landed on Guadalcanal.
October 14/15, 1942
Overnight, Japanese warships bombed Henderson Field on Guadalcanal in the Solomon Islands. The next morning they sent troops ashore.
October 18, 1942
Hitler issued the Commando Order through the High Command of the German Armed Forces, an order to execute all captured British commandos.
October 22, 1942
The Nazi SS suppressed a Jewish revolt at Sachsenhausen (Oranienburg) of those about to be sent to Auschwitz.
October 23, 1942
The Second Battle of El Alamein began.
October 23–24, 1942
British troops were victorious over the Germans and Italians at El Alamein in Egypt. Axis forces retreated across Libya to the eastern border of Tunisia.
October 25, 1942
Deportations of Norway’s Jews to Auschwitz began.
October 26, 1942
The U.S. aircraft carrier USS Hornet was lost in the Battle of Santa Cruz off Guadalcanal between U.S. and Japanese warships.
The War Production Board gave the Manhattan Project its highest wartime priority rating.
October 28, 1942
The first SS transport from Theresienstadt Concentration/Transit Camp arrived at Auschwitz. It carried 1,866 people of which only 247, mostly men, were chosen as prisoners by the SS. The remainder (1,619) were executed in the gas chamber.
November 1942
One hundred seventy thousand Jews were killed in a mass execution near Bialystok, Poland.
November 1, 1942
The Allies broke through the Axis lines at El Alamein in “Operation Supercharge.”
November 4, 1942
Nazi troops began their retreat from El Alamein.
November 8, 1942
The U.S. invasion of North Africa known as Operation Torch began. Allied (U.S. and British) troops landed on Algerian and Moroccan beaches in French North Africa. Vichy French troops failed to defend their territory and the Allies advanced to the western border of Tunisia.
November 11, 1942
Axis (German and Italian) forces invaded unoccupied Vichy (southern) France.
November 14/15, 1942
The U.S. Navy cruiser USS Juneau was sunk by Imperial Japanese Navy warships off Guadalcanal. Five brothers, the sons of Thomas and Alleta Sullivan of Waterloo, Iowa, who served together on the Juneau, were all killed. The five Sullivan brothers were George Thomas (27), Francis Henry “Frank” (26), Joseph Eugene “Joe” (24), Madison Abel “Matt” (23), and Albert Leo “Al” (20).
November 16, 1942
Robert Oppenheimer was appointed the director of the Los Alamos, New Mexico atomic bomb facility.
November 19, 1942
Under General Zhukov, the Soviet Red Army began a counter-offensive against the Germans at Stalingrad in the USSR.
November 23/24, 1942
The Japanese attacked Darwin, Australia in an air raid.
November 23, 1942–February 2, 1943
In the Soviet counter-offensive against the Germans, Soviet troops broke through the Hungarian and Romanian lines northwest and southwest of Stalingrad. They trapped the German Sixth Army in the city. Adolf Hitler forbid the Sixth Army to retreat and they surrendered on January 30 and February 2, 1943.
November 30, 1942
The naval battle of Tassafaronga (also known as the Fourth Battle of Savo Island or the Battle of Lunga Point) took place off Guadalcanal between U.S. Navy and Imperial Japanese Navy warships. Five U.S. cruisers and four destroyers engaged eight Japanese destroyers. The U.S. sank one Japanese destroyer and the Japanese sank one U.S. cruiser and damaged three others. The rest of the Japanese ships escaped undamaged.
December 1942
After the exterminations of 600,000 Jews at the Belzec extermination camp, operations at the camp ceased and it was dismantled, plowed over, and planted.
December 2, 1942
Professor Enrico Fermi set up an atomic reactor at the University of Chicago and conducted the world’s first nuclear chain reaction test.
December 10, 1942
The first transport of Jews from Germany arrived at Auschwitz.
December 13, 1942
German General Erwin Rommel withdrew his forces from El Agheila in Libya in the Western Desert Campaign.
December 16, 1942
Soviets forces defeated Axis (Italian) troops on the River Don in the USSR.
December 17, 1942
British Foreign Secretary Anthony Eden reported the mass executions of Jews by the Nazis in the British House of Commons. He said the Nazis were,
now carrying into effect Hitler’s oft repeated intention to exterminate the Jewish people of Europe.
The United States then declared that the Nazi crimes would be avenged.
December 20-24, 1942
The Japanese attacked Calcutta, India in a series of air raids.
December 28, 1942
The Nazis began sterilization experiments on women at the Auschwitz-Birkenau concentration camp.
December 31, 1942
The German Navy and British Navy engaged in the Battle of the Barents Sea north of North Cape, Norway.
Emperor Hirohito of Japan gave his permission to Japanese troops to withdraw from Guadalcanal.
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.
German Eyewitness Account of Einsatz Executions/SS Mass Murder
Theresienstadt Concentration and Transit Camp
Most recent post from the series:
© Cindy Farrar Bryan and The Arrowhead Club, 2020
WWII Timeline – Summer 1942
I’m continuing my WWII Timeline series with a look at July – September 1942 in this post.
A Timeline of WWII, Summer 1942
July 1-27, 1942
The First Battle of El Alamein began on July 1 and lasted through July 27. It was a battle fought in Egypt of the Western Desert Campaign between the Axis forces of Germany and Italy under Field Marshal Erwin Rommel and Allied forces of Britain, British India, Australia, South Africa and New Zealand of the Eighth Army.
July 2, 1942
Berlin Jews were sent to Theresienstadt, a hybrid concentration camp and ghetto established by the SS in the town of Terezín, which was located in the Protectorate of Bohemia and Moravia.
July 3, 1942
Nazi forces took Sevastopol, a port in the Crimea which was the Soviet’s main naval base on the Black Sea.
July 5, 1942
Soviet resistance in the Crimea ended.
July 6, 1942
Jewish diarist Anne Frank and her family went into hiding the day after older sister Margot learned she would be deported to a Nazi work camp. The family was living in Nazi-occupied Holland, to which they had fled in 1933 to escape Nazi persecution in their native Germany. The Frank family went into hiding as the Nazis began to purge Amsterdam of its Jewish population.
July 7, 1942
Nazi leader Heinrich Himmler allowed sterilization experiments at Auschwitz.
July 9, 1942
Nazi forces began a drive toward Stalingrad in the Soviet Union.
July 14, 1942
The deportation of Dutch Jews to Auschwitz began.
July 16/17, 1942
Almost thirteen thousand Parisian Jews were sent to Drancy Internment Camp located outside Paris.
July 17/18, 1942
Nazi leader Heinrich Himmler inspected the construction and expansion of four large gas chambers and crematories at Auschwitz-Birkenau and observed the entire extermination process of two trainloads of Jews which had arrived from Holland.
July 19, 1942
Nazi leader Heinrich Himmler ordered “Operation Reinhard,” the secretive WWII German plan to exterminate German-occupied Poland’s Jews, with their mass deportation to extermination camps.
July 21, 1942
Japanese troops landed near Gona on New Guinea.
July 22, 1942
The deportation of the first Jews from the Warsaw Ghetto to concentration and extermination camps, including the extermination camp of Treblinka, began. The deportation of Belgian Jews to Auschwitz also began.
The Treblinka extermination camp opened in occupied Poland, east of Warsaw. The camp had two buildings and ten gas chambers, each chamber holding 200 persons. Initially, carbon monoxide gas was piped in from engines placed outside the chamber, but was later replaced with Zyklon-B gas. The dead were burned in open pits.
August 1942
The deportation of Croatian Jews to Auschwitz began.
August–November 1942
American troops halted the Japanese advance towards Australia at Guadalcanal in the Solomon Islands.
August 1, 1942
As part of the U.S. effort to design an atomic bomb, the Army Corps of Engineers created the Manhattan Engineering District for the Manhattan Project. Temporary headquarters were established in the Manhattan area of New York. The project was initially named the “Development of Substitute Materials,” but the name was feared to draw attention.
Since Army Corps of Engineers districts often carried the name of the city where they were located, the project was officially named the “Manhattan District” on August 13 and informally known as the “Manhattan Engineer District” or MED. The official code name remained “Development of Substitute Materials.”
August 7, 1942
British General Bernard Montgomery took command of Eighth Army in North Africa.
The 1st Marine Division invaded Tulagi and Guadalcanal in the Solomon Islands in the U.S.’s first amphibious landing of the Pacific War.
August 8, 1942
A day after landing, U.S. Marines took the unfinished airfield on Guadalcanal and named it Henderson Field after Midway hero Major Lofton Henderson.
General Dwight D. Eisenhower established his headquarters in the UK.
August 8/9, 1942
Overnight, eight Japanese warships sunk three U.S. Navy heavy cruisers and one destroyer and an Australian cruiser in under an hour. One more U.S. cruiser and two destroyers were damaged. Over 1,500 Allied crewmen were lost in the attack.
August 12, 1942
British Prime Minister Winston Churchill, arriving in a B-24 Liberator, met with General Secretary of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union and Premier Joseph Stalin at the Moscow Conference of 1942. Churchill intended to prove to Stalin that Great Britain was committed to winning the war as an ally of the Soviet Union.
On the first day of the assembly, Churchill said,
…we will continue, hand in hand, whatever our sufferings, whatever our toils, we will continue hand in hand, like comrades and brothers until every vestige of the Nazi regime has been beaten into the ground, until the memory only of it remains as an example and a warning for a future time.
This secret mission to Moscow by Winston Churchill to meet for the first time with Joseph Stalin and establish a personal relationship made future conferences of the wartime coalition known as the “Big Three” (the UK, US, and USSR) not only possible, but productive and successful.
August 17, 1942
The US Army Air Forces made it first attack on occupied Europe. Twelve B-17E Heavy Bombers of the 97th Bomb Group of the 8th Air Force were escorted by RAF (British Royal Air Force) Spitfires against the railroad marshalling yards at Rouen-Sotteville, France. Major Paul Tibbets piloted the lead aircraft with Brigadier General Ira Eaker aboard as an observer. Six other aircraft flew a diversion mission along the French coast. The mission was deemed a success with only minor damage to two aircraft.
One hundred twenty-two U.S. Marine raiders, transported by submarine, attacked Makin Atoll in the Gilbert Islands.
August 19, 1942
In “Operation Jubilee,” 6,100 British and Canadian troops raided the port of Dieppe on the Normandy coast of northern France. In almost ten hours, 1,380 troops were killed, 1,600 wounded, and 2,000 captured. The RAF (British Royal Air Force) lost 107 aircraft and the British Royal Navy lost one destroyer. German losses were considerable smaller with 345 dead or missing and 268 wounded. The Luftwaffe (German Air Force) lost only 40 aircraft. Civilian casualties were 48 dead and 100 wounded.
The 6th German Army began an attack on Stalingrad.
August 21, 1942
U.S. Marines repelled the first major Japanese ground attack on Guadalcanal as Japan attempts to retake the airfield on Guadalcanal.
August 23, 1942
Germany staged a massive air raid on Stalingrad.
August 24, 1942
The Japanese were defeated in the Battle of the Eastern Solomons between U.S. and Japanese aircraft carriers.
August 26-28, 1942
Seven thousand Jews were arrested in unoccupied France.
August 29, 1942
According to the Red Cross, Japan refused to allow safe passage of ships containing supplies for U.S. POWs.
August 30, 1942
U.S. Troops invaded Adak Island in the Aleutian Islands.
September 2, 1942
In the Battle of Alam el Halfa (August 30 – September 5) in Egypt, German General Erwin Rommel planned an attack on the British Eighth Army led by Lieutenant-General Bernard Montgomery. The British were victorious when Montgomery drove the Axis forces back and Rommel ordered a withdrawal.
September 9, 1942
At the Auschwitz concentration/extermination camp, open pit burning of bodies replaced burial.
September 9/10, 1942
In Oregon state, a Japanese floatplane bombed U.S. forests with the intent of starting a forest fire. The damage done by the “Lookout Air Raids” was minor.
September 12-14, 1942
The Allies were victorious in the Battle of Bloody Ridge on Guadalcanal (also known as the Battle of Edson’s Ridge), a land battle of the Pacific campaign between the Imperial Japanese Army and Allied ground forces, which started on September 12 and ended on September 14.
September 13, 1942
The Battle of Stalingrad began, in which the Axis powers of Germany and its allies fought the Soviet Union for control of the city of Stalingrad in Southern Russia.
September 15, 1942
The U.S. Navy’s aircraft carrier USS Wasp and destroyer USS O’Brien were sunk and the battleship USS North Carolina was damaged when they were torpedoed by a Japanese submarine near the Solomon Islands.
September 17, 1942
Colonel Leslie Groves, a U.S. Army Corps of Engineers officer, was assigned the command of the Manhattan Project.
September 18, 1942
Food rations were reduced for Jews in Germany.
September 21, 1942
The Boeing B-29 Superfortress, a high-altitude long-range bomber, was manufactured in four main-assembly factories: two Boeing operated plants at Renton, Washington and Wichita, Kansas, a Bell Aircraft Corporation plant at Marietta, Georgia near Atlanta (“Bell-Atlanta”), and a Martin plant at Omaha, Nebraska. On September 21, the first prototype B-29 made its maiden flight from Boeing Field, Seattle.
[My Aunt Janet – my dad George Edwin Farrar’s sister – worked at Bell-Atlanta starting in March 1943.]
September 26, 1942
The Nazi SS began liquidating possessions and valuables confiscated from Jews who had been deported to the Auschwitz and Majdanek concentration and extermination camps. German currency was sent to the Reichs Bank. Foreign currency, gold, jewelry, and other valuables were sent to the SS Headquarters of the Economic Administration. Watches, clocks and pens were given to Nazi troops. Clothing was even distributed to the German public.
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.
The First Battle of El Alamein
USAAF’s First Attack on Occupied Europe
Most recent post from the series:
© Cindy Farrar Bryan and The Arrowhead Club, 2020
WWII Timeline – Spring 1942
I’m continuing my WWII Timeline series with a look at April – June 1942 in this post.
A Timeline of WWII, Spring 1942
April 1942
The first transports of Jews arrived at the Majdanek concentration and extermination camp, which was built and operated by the SS on the outskirts of the city of Lublin in German-occupied Poland.
April 1, 1942
The internment of Japanese Americans began.
April 3, 1942
The Japanese attacked American and Filipino troops at Bataan.
April 6, 1942
The first U.S. troops arrived in Australia.
April 9, 1942
U.S. forces on Bataan surrendered unconditionally to the Japanese.
April 10, 1942
The Bataan Death March of 60,000 to 80,000 Allied POWs (American and Filipino) began. They were forced to walk sixty to seventy miles under intense heat, with no food or water, and subjected to harsh treatment by the Japanese, to prison camps. They were divided into groups of one hundred and the march took each group about five days to complete. Many thousands perished.
April 18, 1942
Lieutenant Colonel James Doolittle (later General of the United States Army Air Forces) led the first U.S. bombing attack on Japan off the aircraft carrier USS Hornet. The air raid became known as the Doolittle’s Tokyo Raid.
April 20, 1942
German Jews were banned from using public transportation.
April 23, 1942
German air raids began against cathedral cities in Britain.
April 26, 1942
The Reichstag unanimously passed a decree proclaiming Hitler “Supreme Judge of the German People.” The decree officially allowed Hitler to act outside the laws of the Reich, to override the judiciary and administration in all matters, making him the final decision-maker, with the power of life and death over every German citizen.
April 29, 1942
The Japanese took central Burma.
May 1942
The Sobibor extermination camp in German-occupied Poland became operational. It had three gas chambers initially using carbon monoxide piped in from engines, but later was switched over to Zyklon-B gas.
May 1, 1942
The Japanese occupied Mandalay in Burma.
May 3, 1942
The Japanese took Tulagi in the Solomon Islands.
May 4 – 8, 1942
A major naval battle called the “Battle of the Coral Sea” was fought between the Imperial Japanese Navy and naval and air forces of the United States and Australia. Japan claimed a tactical victory since they sunk the American aircraft carrier USS Lexington, but the Japanese were not able to seize New Guinea and isolate Australia.
The Allies won a strategic victory in the Battle of the Coral Sea. It was the first time in history that two opposing aircraft carrier forces fought only using aircraft without the opposing ships ever sighting each other.
The final resting place of the USS Lexington was found March 4, 2018, more than five hundred miles off the coast of Australia seventy-six years after it was sunk in the battle.
May 5, 1942
The Japanese prepared to invade Midway and the Aleutian Islands.
May 6, 1942
The Japanese took Corregidor Island, an island located at the entrance of Manila Bay in the Philippines, as General Jonathan M. Wainwright unconditionally surrendered all U.S. and Filipino forces in the Philippines to the Empire of Japan.
May 8, 1942
The German summer offensive began in the Crimea.
May 12, 1942
The last U.S. troop holdouts in the Philippines surrendered on Mindanao.
May 15, 1942
Gasoline rationing began in the U.S.
May 18, 1942
An article included on an inside page of the New York Times reported that Nazis had exterminated over 100,000 Jews in the Baltic states, 100,000 in Poland and twice as many in western Russia by machine gun.
May 20, 1942
The Japanese completed the capture of Burma and reached India.
May 26, 1942
German General Erwin Rommel began an offensive against the Gazala Line (west of the port of Tobruk in Libya).
May 27, 1942
Czech resistance underground agents shot Reich Protector/SS Leader Reinhard Heydrich in Prague. In retaliation, all 152 members of a student group that had displayed anti-Nazi posters in Berlin on May 18, were shot.
May 30, 1942
The British RAF (Royal Air Force) launched a thousand-bomber air raid against Cologne (Köln), Germany.
June 1942
Gas vans were used in Riga, Latvia’s capital on the Baltic Sea. Victims were sealed inside the vans and choked to death through carbon monoxide poisoning.
June 1, 1942
The Luftwaffe (German Air Force) inflicted heavy damage on Canterbury, England.
Jews in France, Holland, Belgium, Croatia, Slovakia, and Romania were ordered to wear the yellow Star of David badge.
The mass murder of Jews by gassing began at the Auschwitz extermination camp.
June 4, 1942
Reich Protector/SS Leader Reinhard Heydrich, shot May 27 by the Czech resistance in Prague, died of his wounds.
June 4-5, 1942
The British Navy and American Navy stopped the Japanese naval advance in the central Pacific at Midway. The Allied victory was the turning point in the war in the Pacific. Squadrons of U.S. torpedo planes and dive bombers from the USS Enterprise, USS Hornet, and USS Yorktown attacked and destroyed four Japanese aircraft carriers, a cruiser, and damaged another cruiser and two destroyers. The U.S. lost the Yorktown.
June 5, 1942
The Germans overwhelmed Sevastopol, a port in the Crimea on the Black Sea, in a campaign fought by the Axis powers of Germany and Romania against the Soviet Union for control of the port.
The Nazi SS reported 97,000 persons “processed” in mobile gas vans.
June 6-7, 1942
Japanese forces invaded the Aleutian Islands of Kiska and Attu.
June 9, 1942
The Japanese postponed further plans to take Midway.
June 10, 1942
The Nazis liquidated the Czech town of Lidice as a reprisal for Reinhard Heydrich’s killing in Prague. In addition to the Gestapo and SS killings of Czech agents, resistance members, and anyone suspected of being involved in Heydrich’s death (totaling over 1000 persons), the deportation of 3000 Jews from the ghetto at Theresienstadt for extermination, and the arrest in Berlin of 500 Jews, with 152 executed as a reprisal, Hitler ordered the small Czech mining village of Lidice to be liquidated on the fake charge that it had aided Heydrich’s assassins.
All 172 men and boys over age 16 in the village were shot. The women of Lidice were deported to Ravensbrück concentration camp where most died. Ninety young children were sent to the concentration camp at Gneisenau, although some deemed to be German-looking were later taken to Nazi orphanages.
The buildings in Lidice were destroyed by explosives until the village was completely leveled and not a trace remained. The soil was planted over and the village’s name removed from all German maps.
June 11, 1942
SS leader Adolf Eichmann met with representatives from France, Belgium and Holland to coordinate deportation plans for Jews.
June 21, 1942
German General Erwin Rommel captured Tobruk in Libya.
June 25, 1942
General Dwight D. Eisenhower arrived in London and took control of U.S. forces in Europe.
June 28, 1942–September 1942
German troops and Axis partners fought their way into Stalingrad (Volgograd) on the Volga River in the Soviet Union by mid-September. They secured the Crimean Peninsula and made their way deep into the Caucasus, an area situated between the Black Sea and the Caspian Sea.
June 30, 1942
German General Erwin Rommel reached El Alamein near Cairo, Egypt.
The second gas chamber at Auschwitz known as Bunker II (the white farmhouse) was made operational at Birkenau due to the arrival of a large number of Jews.
June 30 (and July 2), 1942
The New York Times reported via the London Daily Telegraph that over 1,000,000 Jews had been killed by the Nazis. The story may have been the result of information passed to London and Washington in the Summer of 1942 by Swiss representatives of the World Jewish Congress regarding information they received from a German industrialist of the Nazi plan to exterminate the Jews.
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.
Most recent post from the series:
© Cindy Farrar Bryan and The Arrowhead Club, 2019
WWII Timeline – Winter 1942
I’m continuing my WWII Timeline series with a look at January – March 1942 in this post.
A Timeline of WWII, Winter 1942
January 1942
At Auschwitz-Birkenau, mass killings of Jews by Zyklon-B pellets began in Bunker I (the red farmhouse).
Zyklon-B pellets, made of hydrocyanic acid, vaporized when exposed to air. The Nazis had discovered that the gas produced, which was originally intended for commercial use as a disinfectant and an insecticide, could be used to kill humans.
In their killing process, the Nazis forced the prisoners into air-tight chambers disguised to look like showers. They then dumped the Zyklon-B pellets into the room through special air shafts or openings in the ceiling. Upon being exposed to air, the pellets would vaporize and gave off a bitter almond odor. The prisoners would breathe the tainted air and the vapors would combine with their red blood cells, which deprived their bodies of oxygen, leading to unconsciousness and death through oxygen starvation.
The bodies were buried in mass graves in a nearby meadow.
January 1, 1942
Twenty-six allied nations signed the Declaration of the United Nations.
January 2, 1942
The Japanese captured Manila and the U.S. Naval base at Cavite.
January 5, 1942
Tire rationing began in the U.S.
January 7, 1942
The Japanese attacked Bataan in the Philippines.
January 11, 1942
The Japanese invaded the Dutch East Indies and Dutch Borneo.
January 13, 1942
The Germans began a U-boat offensive along the U.S. east coast.
January 16, 1942
The Japanese invaded and began an advance into Burma.
January 18, 1942
The German, Japanese, and Italian militaries signed an agreement in Berlin.
January 19, 1942
The Japanese took North Borneo.
January 20, 1942
Heinrich Himmler’s second in command of the SS, Reinhard Heydrich, convened the Nazis’ Wannsee Conference (Wannsee was a suburb of Berlin) to coordinate the “Final Solution.” Fifteen top Nazi bureaucrats and members of the SS met to determine how the Nazis would exterminate the eleven million Jews of Europe and the Soviet Union.
Heydrich declared,
Europe would be combed of Jews from east to west.
The minutes of the meeting (read the full minutes via a link at the bottom of this post) were taken by Adolf Eichmann, but Heydrich edited them and substituted the Nazis’ coded language in reference to lethal actions against the Jews. For example,
“…eliminated by natural causes,” meant death by hard labor and starvation.
“…transported to the east,” referred to mass deportations to ghettos in occupied Poland, then on to the gas chamber.
“…treated accordingly,” referred to execution by SS firing squad or death by gas, also sometimes referred to as “special treatment” or “special actions.”
January 21, 1942
Erwin Rommel began a counter-offensive from El Agheila.
January 23, 1942
The Japanese took Rabaul on New Britain in the Solomon Islands and invaded Bougainville, the largest island.
January 26, 1942
The first American forces arrived in Great Britain.
January 27, 1942
The first Japanese warship to be destroyed by the US Navy, I-73, was sunk by a U.S. submarine, the USS Gudgeon.
January 30/31, 1942
The British withdrew into Singapore, beginning the siege of Singapore.
January 31, 1942
SS Einsatzgruppe A (a paramilitary death squad) reported a total of 229,052 Jews killed.
February 1, 1942
Mass deportations of Jews from Western Europe to Poland’s extermination camps began.
The first U.S. aircraft carrier offensive of the war occurred as the USS Yorktown and USS Enterprise conducted air raids on Japanese bases in the Gilbert and Marshall Islands.
February 2, 1942
The Japanese invaded Java in the Dutch East Indies.
February 8/9, 1942
The Japanese invaded Singapore.
February 14, 1942
The Japanese invaded Sumatra in the Dutch East Indies.
February 15, 1942
The British surrendered to the Japanese at Singapore which had one million civilian inhabitants. Winston Churchill called it the “worst disaster and largest capitulation in British history” with nine thousand British, Australian, and other British Empire troops killed and 130,000 captured by the Japanese.
February 19, 1942
Japan staged their largest air raid since Pearl Harbor against Darwin, Australia.
The Japanese invaded Bali.
U.S. President Roosevelt issued Executive Order 9066, which authorized the internment of Japanese and Japanese Americans along the West Coast.
February 20, 1942
Lt. Edward Henry “Butch” O’Hare, for whom Chicago’s O’Hare International Airport was later named, became the Navy’s first flying ace when he single-handedly attacked a wave of nine Japanese heavy bombers approaching his aircraft carrier, the USS Lexington off Rabaul. He managed to shoot down five of the enemy bombers.
[Two months later, on April 21, 1942, O’Hare became the first naval recipient of WWII’s Medal of Honor. On November 26, 1943, O’Hare was killed defending the USS Enterprise. See more about Edward O’Hare via the link below].
U.S. President Franklin D. Roosevelt ordered General MacArthur out of the Philippines.
February 23, 1942
The first Japanese attack on the U.S. mainland occurred near Santa Barbara, California when a Japanese submarine shelled an oil refinery.
February 24, 1942
The U.S. aircraft carrier USS Enterprise attacked the Japanese on Wake Island.
February 26, 1942
The U.S.’s first aircraft carrier, the USS Langley, was sunk by Japanese bombers.
February 27 – March 1, 1942
Allied naval forces were heavily damaged by the Imperial Japanese Navy in the Battle of the Java Sea, including the sinking of America’s largest warship in the Far East, the USS Houston.
March 1942
The Belzec extermination camp became operational in occupied Poland. The permanent gas chambers first had engines placed outside the chamber and carbon monoxide was piped into the chambers. Later Zyklon-B gas was used in exterminations.
March 4, 1942
Two Japanese “flying boats” bombed Pearl Harbor.
The USS Enterprise attacked Marcus Island, only a thousand miles from Japan.
March 7, 1942
The British evacuated Rangoon in Burma.
The Japanese invaded Salamaua and Lae on New Guinea.
March 8, 1942
The Dutch on Java surrendered to the Japanese.
Japanese forces captured Rangoon, evacuated by the British just the day before.
March 9, 1942
The Dutch East Indies surrendered to the Japanese.
March 11, 1942
Under orders from U.S. President Franklin Roosevelt, U.S. General Douglas MacArthur left Corregidor in the Philippines. Left behind were 90,000 American and Filipino troops who would soon fall to the Japanese. MacArthur and his family were flown to Australia. General Jonathan Wainwright became the new U.S. senior field commander of all U.S. and Filipino forces in the Philippine Islands.
March 13, 1942
U.S. Army Air Force airmen arrived in Karachi, India as America entered the China-Burma-India theater. [George Edwin Farrar’s older brother Carroll was stationed in Burma during the war as part of the 315th Air Service Squadron].
March 17, 1942
Jews were deported from Lublin, Poland to the Belzec extermination camp. Twenty-thousand were murdered in the camp by the end of the month.
March 18, 1942
U.S. President Roosevelt appointed General Douglas MacArthur commander of the Southwest Pacific Theater.
The U.S. War Relocation Authority was established. The Authority led to nearly 120,000 Japanese-Americans and resident Japanese to be forcefully transported to ten barb-wired internment camps. Despite this, over 17,000 Japanese-Americans signed up to fight for the U.S. in World War II in Europe, including the 442nd Regimental Combat Team, which was the most decorated unit in U.S. history.
March 23, 1942
The Japanese invaded the Andaman Islands in the Bay of Bengal.
March 24, 1942
U.S. Navy Admiral Chester Nimitz was appointed Commander in Chief of the U.S. Pacific theater.
March 24, 1942
The deportation of Slovak Jews to Auschwitz began.
March 27, 1942
The deportation of French Jews to Auschwitz began.
March 28, 1942
German Nazi politician Ernst Friedrich Christoph “Fritz” Sauckel was named Chief of Manpower to expedite recruitment of slave labor.
March 30, 1942
The first trainloads of Jews from Paris arrived at Auschwitz.
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.
The History Place: Full meeting minutes of the Wannsee Conference
Wikipedia: 442nd Regimental Combat Team
Most recent post from the series:
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