1941German forces cut Leningrad off and the siege begins
When Germany invaded the Soviet Union in June 1941, one of its three great army groups drove north-east through the Baltic states towards Leningrad, the former imperial capital and the Soviet Union’s second city. From the north, Finland’s army advanced around Lake Ladoga. Hitler did not plan to storm the city; he meant to surround it and starve it into surrender.
On 8 September 1941 German troops captured Shlisselburg, the old fortress town where the river Neva leaves Lake Ladoga, and cut the last land route into the city. About three million people were trapped. Through the winter that followed, rations fell to a few slices of bread a day, and people froze and starved in their homes. Supplies came in by boat across the lake and, once it froze, by lorry over the ice along the ‘Road of Life’. The siege was not fully lifted until 27 January 1944, nearly 900 days later. Estimates of the civilian dead range from about 650,000 to more than a million, most of them from hunger.
Read the full storyHistory & Timeline →Source: Britannica: Siege of Leningrad ↗
1565The Ottoman army abandons the Great Siege of Malta
In 1530 the Knights of St John, a military religious order driven out of Rhodes by the Ottomans, were given the island of Malta. From there their galleys raided Ottoman shipping across the Mediterranean. In May 1565 Sultan Suleiman the Magnificent sent a huge fleet and an army of perhaps 30,000 men to destroy them. Against them the Grand Master, Jean Parisot de Valette, had a few hundred knights and several thousand Maltese and other soldiers.
The small fort of St Elmo held out for a month before it fell. Through the hot summer the Ottomans then battered and stormed the fortified towns around the Grand Harbour, Birgu and Senglea, but the defenders beat back every assault. Early in September a relief force from Spanish Sicily landed in the north of the island, and on 8 September the Ottoman commanders gave up the siege and began to withdraw. The knights built a new fortified capital, named Valletta after their Grand Master, and Malta still marks the day as Victory Day.
Read the full storyHistory & Timeline →Source: Heritage Malta: Victory Day celebrations at Fort St Angelo ↗
1565Spanish settlers found St Augustine in Florida
Spain claimed Florida, but in 1564 French Protestants built Fort Caroline near the mouth of the St Johns River, close to the route of Spain’s treasure fleets. King Philip II sent the experienced admiral Pedro Menéndez de Avilés to drive them out and to settle the coast. Menéndez sighted land on 28 August 1565, the feast of St Augustine, and named the harbour he found after the saint.
On 8 September 1565 Menéndez came ashore with about 600 soldiers, sailors and settlers, including families, and formally took possession of the land for Spain, near a village of the Timucua people. Within weeks his men had captured Fort Caroline. St Augustine survived attacks by pirates and the English, and in the 1670s the Spanish began the stone fortress of the Castillo de San Marcos to protect it. It is the oldest continuously occupied settlement of European origin in the United States, founded 42 years before Jamestown.
Read the full storyHistory & Timeline →Source: City of St. Augustine: Our history ↗
1951Japan and 48 nations sign the peace treaty at San Francisco
After Japan’s surrender in 1945 the country was occupied by the Allies under General Douglas MacArthur, who oversaw a new democratic constitution and sweeping reforms. By 1950, with the Cold War deepening and war raging in Korea, the United States wanted Japan as a sovereign ally rather than an occupied enemy, and the diplomat John Foster Dulles negotiated a peace treaty that asked for no heavy reparations.
Delegates from more than 50 countries met at the War Memorial Opera House in San Francisco, and on 8 September 1951 Japan and 48 nations signed. The Soviet Union, Poland and Czechoslovakia attended but refused, and neither Chinese government was invited. Japan gave up its claims to Korea, Taiwan, the Kuril Islands, southern Sakhalin and its former Pacific mandates. The same day Japan and the United States signed a security treaty that let American forces stay. When the peace treaty came into force on 28 April 1952, the occupation ended.
Read the full storyHistory & Timeline →Source: US Office of the Historian: Occupation and reconstruction of Japan, 1945-52 ↗
