Why Wasn’t Auschwitz Bombed?

By Brent Douglas Dyck

Former German President Horst Koehler once said that Auschwitz, the largest Nazi extermination camp, was home to the “worst crime in human history.” Read more

Freeing Mont Saint Michel

By Kevin M. Hymel

Of all the landmarks in Europe, few are as distinctive and instantly recognizable as the medieval fortress/ monastery of Mont Saint Michel, located on the French coast seven miles southwest of the city of Avranches. Read more

Wave of Persecution

By Blaine Taylor

At 8 PM on the evening of Friday, July 13, 1934, German Reich Chancellor Adolf Hitler stepped to the speaker’s lectern of the Reichstag in Berlin’s Kroll Opera House to explain his murderous conduct during the recent Nazi “Blood Purge” against the top leadership cadre of the brownshirted SA Stormtroopers during the weekend of June 30-July 2, 1934. Read more

Infantryman’s War atop Pork Chop Hill

By Phil Zimmer

The tennis-shoed soldiers emerged from the darkness on July 6, 1953, like a “moving carpet of yelling, howling men [with] whistles and bugles blowing, their officers screaming, driving their men” against the Americans as they swept up Pork Chop Hill (Hill 255), recalled Private Angelo Palermo. Read more

Liberating the Camps

By Christopher Miskimon

BACKSTORY: The final months of World War II in the European Theater were a harrowing and desperate time for the soldiers who fought there. Read more

Rising Sun, Descending Darkness

By William Strook

“Finally at Corregidor there was only a little crowd of American soldiers and Filipino soldiers and American nurses at the beaches, with nothing at their backs but the waters of the Pacific, and the flag came down. Read more

Baptism of Fire: The SS in Poland

By Blaine Taylor

At the mention of the letters “SS,” an image springs to mind of ruthless German troops, the epitome of the Nazi/Aryan ideal: tall, strong, blond-haired, and blue-eyed, enthusiastically ready to fight and die for Germany and their beloved Führer, Adolf Hitler. Read more

Brittany: Too High a Price?

By Nathan Prefer

At age 86, with a full and successful career behind him, General of the Army Omar Nelson Bradley sat down to write his uncensored memoirs. Read more

Incomplete Victory at Falaise

By Jon Diamond

Supreme Allied Commander General Dwight D. Eisenhower recalled, “The battlefield at Falaise was unquestionably one of the greatest killing fields of any of the war areas. Read more

Bombs, Booze, and Broads

By Glenn Barnett

The date of November 10, 1942, is still vivid in the mind of Albert Wayne Boam. That was the day that he enlisted in the Army Air Corps, hoping to become a fighter pilot. Read more

From Omaha Beach to Victory

By Ralph and Mark Puhalovich

Ralph Puhalovich was born on April 17, 1925, in Oakland, California, to Flora and Ivan Puhalovich. Read more

Death by Torpedo

By Chuck Lyons

In October 1939, illuminated by the northern lights, the German submarine U-47 threaded its way through sunken barriers and slipped into the British anchorage at Scapa Flow, a 125.3-square-mile natural port off the northern coast of Scotland, in the Orkney Islands. Read more

Combat and Fear: A Replacement’s Story

By Allyn Vannoy

After going on active service in May 1943, Robert W. Creamer was sent to take basic training at Fort Eustis, Virginia. Read more

Brutal Battle for a Dutch Island

By Jon Diamond

Look at a map of Holland. At the extreme southwest corner, connected to the mainland by a narrow causeway, is a peninsula known as Walcheren Island jutting into the North Sea. Read more

The Real Fury: A Sherman Tanker’s View of War

By Kevin M. Hymel

Private First Class Irving Bromberg saw a huge puff of smoke erupt from the German tank’s cannon muzzle as it headed straight for his M4 Sherman tank. Read more

Victory in the Mediterranean

By Colonel (USAF, RET.) Jeff Patton

Pantelleria is a small volcanic island rising out of the Mediterranean Sea 37 miles east of the Tunisian coast and some 63 miles southwest of Sicily. Read more

From Battlefield to Football

By Richard Statetzny with Ward Carr and Detlef Zer

BACKSTORY: Richard Statetzny was born on January 16, 1920, the youngest of five children, in Bieberswalde in the District of Osterode, East Prussia, Germany. Read more

Bombing Buchenwald

By Flint Whitlock

In early 1945, the 50,000 starved and brutalized prisoners incarcerated at KL Buchenwald—the infamous concentration camp located atop a hill known as the Ettersberg, just to the northwest of Germany’s cultural capital of Weimar—were growing desperate. Read more

Hellish Battle in a Tropical Paradise

By Nathan N. Prefer

“But here are men who fought in gallant actions, as gallant AS ever hero’s fought,” wrote the poet Lord Byron (1788-1824). Read more

A Screaming Eagle in Bastogne

By Kevin M. Hymel

“DON’T WORRY, GUYS––the Airborne is here!” shouted Private Howard Buford to the worn-out GIs he and his fellow paratroopers passed on the snowy road through Bastogne in the early hours of December 19, 1944. Read more