What was happening when your M1 was being built...
July 1944
1: The Leningrad diarist Tanya Savicheva dies of starvation at the age of 14. Her diary of her family's death during the siege becomes famous.
2: V-1's continue to have devastating effects in South-East England in terms of material destruction and losses of life.
3: Minsk in Belarus is liberated by Soviet forces.
: The Allies find themselves in the "battle of the hedgerows", as they are stymied by the agricultural hedges in Western France which intelligence had not properly evaluated.
: Siena, Italy falls to Algerian troops of the French forces.
6: Largest Banzai charge of the war: 4,300 Japanese troops are slaughtered on Saipan.
7: Soviet troops enter Vilnius, Lithuania.
9: After heavy resistance Caen, France is liberated by the British troops on the left flank of the Allied advance.
: Saipan is declared secure, the Japanese having lost over 30,000 troops; in the last stages numerous civilians commit suicide with the encouragement of Japanese military.
10: Japanese are still resisting on New Guinea.
: Tokyo is bombed for the first time since the Doolittle raid of April, 1942.
11: President Roosevelt announces that he will run for an unprecedented fourth term as U.S. President.
12: Hitler rejects General Field Marshal Walther Model’s proposal to withdraw the German forces from Estonia and Northern Latvia and retreat to the Daugava River.
13: The Soviets take Vilnius, Lithuania.
: The Lvov-Sandomierz Offensive begins.
16: First troops of the Brazilian Expeditionary Force (FEB) arrive in Italy
17: Field Marshal Rommel is badly wounded when his car is strafed from the air in France.
18: General Hideki Tojo resigns as chief minister of the Japanese government as the defeats of the Japanese military forces continue to mount. Emperor Hirohito asks General Kuniaki Koiso to form a new government.
: St. Lo, France is taken, and the Allied breakout from hedgerow country in Normandy begins.
19: American forces take Leghorn (Livorno), Italy far up the Italian boot.
20: The July 20 Plot is carried out by Col. Claus von Stauffenberg in a failed attempt to assassinate Hitler. Hitler was visiting headquarters at Rastenburg, East Prussia. Reprisals follow against the plotters and their families, and even include Rommel.
21: US Marines land on Guam.
22: Hitler gives permission to retreat from the Narva River to the Tannenberg defence line in the Sinimäed hills 20 km West from Narva.
23: The Poles rise up against the Germans in the Lwow Uprising
24: Marines land on Tinian Island, last of the Marianas (after Saipan and Guam); Tinian will eventually be a B-29 base, and the base from which the atomic bombers departed.
: Operation Cobra is now in full swing: the breakout at St. Lo in Normandy with American troops taking Coutances.
: At the start of the Soviet Narva Offensive, July 24–30, the Soviet 8th Army is beaten by the Estonian 45th Regiment and East Prussian 44th Regiment. The army detachment "Narwa" begins to retreat to the Tannenberg line.[11]
: Majdanek Concentration Camp is liberated by Soviet forces, the first among many. The Soviet Union is now in control of several large cities in Poland, including Lublin.
: US bombers mistakenly bomb American troops near St. Lo, France.
26: The first aerial victory for a jet fighter occurs, with an Me 262 of the Luftwaffe's Ekdo 262 damaging a de Havilland Mosquito reconnaissance aircraft of the Royal Air Force's No. 540 Squadron RAF.
: The Leningrad Front's Narva Offensive captures the town.[11]
27 July to 10 August: Battles on the Tannenberg Line. At the start of the battles there are 25 Estonian and 24 Dutch, Danish and Flemish infantry battalions on the German side at the Narva Front. The artillery forces, and the tank, engineer and other special units are composed mainly of Germans. The attack by the Soviet Armed Forces is stopped, tens of thousands of men are killed in both sides.
28: The Red Army take Brest-Litovsk, the site of the Russo-German peace treaty in World War I.
: The first operational use of the Me 163B Komet rocket fighter occurs by units of JG 400 in defense of the Leuna synthetic fuel facilities, the Third Reich's largest synthetic fuels complex.
29: A decisive day in the Battle of Narva, allowing the German army detachment "Narwa", including Estonian conscript formations to delay the Soviet Baltic Offensive for another one and a half months.[11]
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