What happened on 23 August?

12 events from the Ever-When timeline, ranked by how much they mattered.

1. 1942 Battle of Stalingrad Five-month battle for the Volga city; entire German Sixth Army surrenders; turning point of the war in Europe.
2. 1939 Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact The Nazi-Soviet non-aggression pact with secret protocols carving up Eastern Europe, clearing the way for the invasion of Poland a week later.
3. 1942 Germans reach Stalingrad The German Sixth Army assaults Stalingrad, beginning months of brutal urban fighting.
4. 2023 Chandrayaan-3 Moon landing ISRO's lunar lander touches down near the Moon's south pole — India fourth nation to land on the Moon.
5. 1989 Baltic Way protest Two million Estonians, Latvians, Lithuanians form a human chain demanding independence.
6. 1514 Battle of Chaldiran Selim I's Ottomans rout Shah Ismail's Safavids, securing eastern Anatolia and beginning centuries of Ottoman-Persian rivalry.
7. 1942 The Luftwaffe burns Stalingrad On the day the first panzers reach the Volga north of the city, a thousand-sortie bombardment turns Stalingrad into a firestorm that kills tens of thousands of civilians in a weeke
8. 1921 The Battle of Sakarya Along the Sakarya river, sixty miles from Ankara itself, Kemal — granted dictatorial powers and issuing the order that 'there is no line of defence, there is a plain of defence' —
9. 1793 Levée en masse Conscription of all unmarried men in France to defend the Republic.
10. 1914 Battle of Mons First clash of British Expeditionary Force with Germans in WW1.
11. 1866 Austria excluded from Germany The Peace of Prague ends the Seven Weeks' War on terms of studied leniency — no territory taken, no victory parade through Vienna — but one clause changes the map of Europe: the Ge
12. 1914 Japan joins the Allies Honouring its 1902 alliance with Britain — and eyeing Germany's Pacific colonies — Japan declares war on Germany and besieges the German port of Tsingtao in China. The European qua