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.

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 the result of over a year of planning and jockeying amongst various military and political leaders. On January 31, 1944, several key leaders agreed to postpone the invasion over concerns that there would not be enough ships available by early May, finally setting the stage for the June invasion.

American forces invade and [take control](http://Finally, the Division halted movement for the night of 3 February and issued a new order for the 32nd Regiment to finish off the last 600 yards or so of island clearing remaining. After fending off five night attacks by desperate Japanese, the fresh attack kicked off on the morning of the 4th of February, and by that afternoon the island was declared secure.) of the Marshall Islands, long occupied by the Japanese and used by them as a base for military operations.

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 of the Japanese military.

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. Hitler was less than enthusiastic about the idea.

On March 2, 1944, a train stops in a tunnel near Salerno, Italy, and more than 500 people on board suffocate and die. The details of the incident, which occurred in the midst of World War II, were not revealed at the time and remain somewhat murky.

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 and was making nearly $50 million a year from his various enterprises. His downfall came when several members of his notorious killing squad turned into witnesses for the government.

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.

German occupiers shoot more than 300 Italian civilians as a reprisal for an Italian partisan attack on an SS unit.

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 power. The attack would result in the breaking of German defensive lines in just four days, eventually sending the Germans retreating.

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. As it occurred during World War II, some initially claimed that the massive explosion was caused by Japanese sabotage; in fact, it was a tragic accident.

On June 4, 1944, U.S. naval forces seize one of Adolf Hitler’s deadly submarines, the U-505, as it makes its way home after patrolling the Gold Coast of Africa The German submarine was the first enemy warship captured on the high seas by the U.S. Navy since the War of 1812.

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 English Channel in preparation for the invasion of Normandy—D-Day.

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, commonly known as D-Day.

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 of the ninth inning in an 18-0 loss to the St. Louis Cardinals; he was pulled only after one wild pitch and allowing five runs on five walks and two hits. The game was played during World War II, when it became common for adolescent and older players to fill in for big leaguers fighting overseas.

Lieutenant John F. Kennedy receives the Navy and Marine Corps Medal—one of the Navy’s highest honors for gallantry—for his heroic actions as the commanding officer of a motor torpedo boat during World War II on June 11, 1944. The future president also received a Purple Heart for wounds received during battle.

Six 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.

On June 15, 1944, American aircraft bomb German-occupied Budapest—with leaflets threatening “punishment” for those responsible for the deportation of Hungarian Jews to the gas chambers at Auschwitz. The U.S. government wanted the SS and Hitler to know it was watching, to deter further deportations.

On June 19, 1944, the U.S. begins a two-day attack that decimates Japan's aircraft carrier force—and shifts the balance of naval air power in World War II's Pacific theater. The Battle of the Philippine Sea, an epic carrier duel that came to be known as the “Marianas Turkey Shoot,” would incur only a minimum of losses for the Americans.

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 efforts in World War II.

In Hartford, Connecticut, a fire breaks out under the big top of the Ringling Bros. and Barnum Bailey Circus, killing 167 people and injuring 682. Two-thirds of those who perished were children. The cause of the fire was unknown, but it spread at incredible speed, racing up the canvas of the circus tent.

On July 11, 1944, Count Claus von Stauffenberg, a German army officer, transports a bomb to Adolf Hitler’s headquarters in Berchtesgaden, in Bavaria, with the intention of assassinating the Fuhrer.

An ammunition ship explodes while being loaded in Port Chicago, California, killing 320 people on July 17, 1944. The United States’ World War II military campaign in the Pacific was in full swing at the time. Poor procedures and lack of training led to the disaster.

On July 20, 1944, Hitler cheats death as a bomb planted in a briefcase goes off, but fails to kill him.

On July 21, 1944, Adolf Hitler takes to the airwaves to announce that the attempt on his life—code-named Operation Valkyrie—has failed and that “accounts will be settled.”

Anne Frank, the young Jewish girl hiding out in Nazi-occupied Holland whose [diary](http://U.S. forces attempt risky air raid on Axis oil refineries) came to serve as a symbol of the Holocaust, writes her final entry three days before she and her family are arrested and placed in concentration camps.

During World War II, an advance Soviet armored column under General Konstantin Rokossovski reaches the Vistula River along the eastern suburb of Warsaw, prompting Poles in the city to launch a major uprising against the Nazi occupation. The revolt was spearheaded by Polish General Tadeusz Bor-Komorowski, who was the commander of the Home Army, an underground resistance group made up of some 40,000 poorly supplied soldiers. In addition to accelerating the liberation of Warsaw, the Home Army, which had ties with the Polish government-in-exile in London and was anti-communist in its ideology, hoped to gain at least partial control of Warsaw before the Soviets arrived.

Acting on tip from an informer, the Nazi Gestapo captures 15-year-old Jewish diarist Anne Frank and her family in a sealed-off area of an Amsterdam warehouse. The Franks had taken shelter there in 1942 out of fear of deportation to a Nazi concentration camp. They occupied the small space with another Jewish family and a single Jewish man and were aided by Christian friends, who brought them food and supplies. Anne spent much of her time in the so-called “secret annex” working on her diary. The diary survived the war, overlooked by the Gestapo that discovered the hiding place, but Anne and nearly all of the others perished in the Nazi death camps.

On August 5, 1944, Polish insurgents liberate a German forced-labor camp in Warsaw, freeing 348 Jewish prisoners, who join in a general uprising against the German occupiers of the city.

On August 20, 1944, Soviet forces launch Second Jassy-Kishinev Offensive, an offensive in northeastern Romania in which they ultimately surround the invading German Sixth Army. One of the most successful, and little-remembered, joint operations between Soviet and American forces (who provided air support), the operation succeeded ultimately in convincing Romania’s king to sign an armistice with the Allies and concede control of his country to the USSR.

On August 25, 1944, after more than four years of Nazi occupation, Paris is liberated by the French 2nd Armored Division and the U.S. 4th Infantry Division. German resistance was light, and General Dietrich von Choltitz, commander of the German garrison, defied an order by Adolf Hitler to blow up Paris’ landmarks and burn the city to the ground before its liberation. Choltitz signed a formal surrender that afternoon, and on August 26, Free French General Charles de Gaulle led a joyous liberation march down the Champs d’Elysees.

On September 2, 1944, future President George Herbert Walker Bush is serving as a torpedo bomber pilot in the Pacific theater of World War II when his squadron is attacked by Japanese anti-aircraft guns. Bush was forced to bail out of the plane over the ocean.

On September 12, 1944, in Galveston, Texas, pop singer Barry White—or “the Maestro”—is born. He went on to have a stunningly successful career as a singer that spanned five decades, and made him a star of the disco era.

On September 15, 1944, the U.S. 1st Marine Division lands on the island of Peleliu, one of the Palau Islands in the Pacific, as part of a larger operation to provide support for Gen. Douglas MacArthur, who was preparing to invade the Philippines. The cost in American lives would prove historic.

On September 23, 1944, during a campaign dinner with the International Brotherhood of Teamsters union, President Franklin D. Roosevelt makes a reference to his small dog, Fala, who had recently been the subject of a Republican political attack. The offense prompted Roosevelt to defend his dog’s honor and his own reputation.

On September 24, 1944, Allies begin their retreat from the Dutch town of Arnhem after Operation Market Garden, a plan to seize bridges there, fails, and thousands of British and Polish troops are killed, wounded or taken prisoner.

On October 2, 1944, Gen. Dwight D. Eisenhower distributes to his combat units a report by the U.S. Surgeon General that reveals the hazards of prolonged exposure to combat. “[T]he danger of being killed or maimed imposes a strain so great that it causes men to break down. One look at the shrunken, apathetic faces of psychiatric patients…sobbing, trembling, referring shudderingly to ‘them shells’ and to buddies mutilated or dead, is enough to convince most observers of this fact.”

The Warsaw Uprising ends on October 2, 1944, with the surrender of the surviving Polish rebels to German forces.

On October 7, 1944, in a bold act of resistance, several hundred prisoners incarcerated in the Nazi death camps of Auschwitz-Birkenau stage the Sonderkommando revolt, destroying most of the gas chambers and crematoria where they were forced to work. While some of the inmates manage to kill a handful of Nazi officers and briefly escape the camp, the uprising is swiftly crushed and its perpetrators executed.

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 was forced to flee in 1942.

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 sides.

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.

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, is hanged by his Japanese captors.

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 France for a congratulatory performance for American troops that had recently helped to liberate Paris.

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 attempt to push the Allied front line west from northern France to northwestern Belgium. The Battle of the Bulge, so-called because the Germans created a “bulge” around the area of the Ardennes forest in pushing through the American defensive line, was the largest fought on the Western front.

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 to their homes.

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 U.S. Army soldier since the Civil War, and the only man so punished during World War II.

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.

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 company refused to comply with a labor agreement.

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.