MAPS OF HISTORY · ON THIS DAY · December 8

THE DAY IN HISTORY · DECEMBER 8

December 8 in history

1914 — The Falklands

8 Dec 1914 — Von Spee’s cruiser squadron, having destroyed a British force at Coronel, is caught coaling by battlecruisers and annihilated. The oceans belong to the Allies; Germany’s surface war outside the North Sea is over in four months.

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1941 — The Kota Bharu landings

8 Dec 1941 — Japanese troops storm ashore in British Malaya an hour BEFORE Pearl Harbor, across the date line. The southern advance — oil, rubber, tin — begins.

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1949 — The republic offshore

8 Dec 1949 — The Nationalist government moves to Taipei with the navy, the air force, two million soldiers and refugees, the treasury’s gold and the Palace Museum’s crates. Two states now claim this map — and the strait between them is still governed by that December.

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1991 — Belovezha Accords

8 Dec 1991 — In a hunting lodge in the Belarusian forest, the leaders of Russia, Ukraine and Belarus sign the USSR out of existence: “the Soviet Union as a subject of international law… has ceased to exist.”

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