This Year in History:
1944
Discover what happened in this year with HISTORY’s summaries of major events, anniversaries, famous births and notable deaths.
On January 27, 1944, Soviet forces permanently break the Leningrad siege line, ending the almost 900‑day German‑enforced containment of the city, which cost hundreds of thousands of Russian lives. The…
June 6, 1944 is considered one of the most pivotal moments in modern history. Better known by its codename, D‑Day, the Allied assault on five beaches in Nazi‑occupied France was…
American forces invade and take control of the Marshall Islands, long occupied by the Japanese and used by them as a base for military operations. The Marshalls, east of the…
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…
Hanna Reitsch, the first female test pilot in the world, suggests the creation of the Nazi equivalent of a kamikaze squad of suicide bombers while visiting Adolf Hitler in Berchtesgaden.…
On March 1, 1944, a train stops in a tunnel near Salerno, Italy, and more than 500 people on board suffocate and die. Occurring in the midst of World War…
Louis “Lepke” Buchalter, the head of Murder, Inc., is executed at Sing Sing Prison in New York. Lepke was the leader of the country’s largest crime syndicate throughout the 1930s…
German occupiers shoot more than 300 Italian civilians as a reprisal for an Italian partisan attack on an SS unit. Since the Italian surrender in the summer of 1943, German…
Maj. Gen. Orde Wingate, leader of the 77th Indian Brigade, also called the Chindits, dies in a transport plane crash. He was 41 years old. Wingate, a graduate of the…
On April 8, 1944, Russian forces led by Marshal Fyodor Tolbukhin attack the German army in an attempt to win back Crimea, in the southern Ukraine, occupied by the Axis…
The cargo ship Fort Stikine explodes in a berth in the docks of Bombay, India (now known as Mumbai), killing 1,300 people and injuring another 3,000 on April 14, 1944.…
One of Adolf Hitler’s deadly submarines, the U‑505, is seized as it makes its way home after patrolling the Gold Coast of Africa on June 4, 1944. The German submarine…
On June 5, 1944, more than 1,000 British bombers drop 5,000 tons of bombs on German gun batteries placed at the Normandy assault area, while 3,000 Allied ships cross the…
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,…
On June 10, 1944, 15‑year‑old Joe Nuxhall becomes the youngest person ever to play Major League Baseball when he pitches in a game for the Cincinnati Reds. Nuxhall threw two‑thirds…
Five days after the D‑Day landing, the five Allied landing groups, made up of some 330,000 troops, link up in Normandy to form a single solid front across northwestern France.…
Lieutenant John F. Kennedy receives one of the Navy’s highest honor for gallantry for his heroic actions as the commanding officer of a motor torpedo boat during World War II on…
On June 19, 1944, in what would become known as the “Marianas Turkey Shoot,” U.S. carrier‑based fighters decimate the Japanese Fleet with only a minimum of losses in the Battle…
On June 22, 1944, U.S. President Franklin D. Roosevelt signs the G.I. Bill, an unprecedented act of legislation designed to compensate returning members of the armed services—known as G.I.s—for their…
On July 2, 1944, as part of the British and American strategy to lay mines in the Danube River by dropping them from the air, American aircraft also drop bombs…
