To say so is missing the whole point parent comment is trying to make. Memorization is an important skill, that is one thing but saying memorizing random stuff to build that skill is entirely a different claim. I bet there are better ways so learn and hone memory skills than memorize history place/time/dates and kill a student's interesting in learning.
Still, I don't think that the claim that asking you to memorize (pseudo-)random things improves your skill at memorizing things is a strong claim, I think it's fairly obvious. It's not necessarily the best way, but if it's paired with fairly important education, I don't think it's that bad either.
It's also important to note that, whatever career you chose later in life, there will be lots of random factoids that you'll need to rote memorize to be effective at it - be it names, years and places in history, JavaScript frameworks in programming, diseases in medicine, or even hair styles and product names in hair styling.
Also, even if I agree that history classes often go overboard, having some notion of the years and even dates that some things happened is important to having a general understanding of history. If you know the who, what, why of WW II but have only a vague idea of when it started and when it ended, or when some of the major events within took place, you'll have a very hard time correlating with other events. It matters for example that WW II happened only 20 years after WW I, not 5 years after, not a century after. You won't get a decent picture of the sequence of events if you don't know some rough dates at least - especially for events happening in different parts of the world, with more indirect linking.