Articles Archive

Adolf Hitler: On the Eve of the Battle of the Bulge

By Charles Whiting

By early autumn, he was taking 60 pills a day. They ranged from “speed” to the poison strychnine. Read more

The Malmédy Massacre and the Battle of the Bulge

By Major General Michael Reynolds

Malmédy is an attractive and prosperous town situated in eastern Belgium, 15 miles from the German border. Read more

Taking on water, the U-505 is perilously close to sinking. A towline is delivered from a whaleboat to a boarding party so that the submarine may be taken to safety.

The Capture of German Submarine U-505

by David Alan Johnson

“Frenchy to Blue Jay—I have a possible sound contact,” squawked from USS Guadalcanal’s bridge intercom at 1110 hours. Read more

WWII Spies: the Soviet Cambridge Network

by Peter Kross

In the modern era, the majority of those accused of spying have done so for monetary purposes—the quick acquisition of wealth as opposed to ideological or philosophical reasons. Read more

William R. Dunn: Eagle Squadron Pilot

By David Alan Johnson

“I jammed the throttle wide open and, attacking the Me-109 from the port quarter, fired one burst of four seconds and three bursts of two seconds each,” Pilot Officer William R. Read more

WWII Planes: The Curtiss P-40 Warhawk

By Sam McGowan

During the first year of American participation in World War II, the Curtiss P-40 Warhawk (Kittyhawk or Tomahawk to the British) came to symbolize the United States Army Air Corps as it fought a desperate war to hold the Japanese in check. Read more

The Battle of Kursk: Showdown at Prokhorovka and Oboian

By Ludwig Heinrich Dyck

With the German Sixth Army destroyed at Stalingrad, the Soviet juggernaut lunged west and southwest across the River Donets. Read more

The Argentia Conference: How the Allies Were Formed

by Michael D. Hull

A British battleship and an American cruiser converged secretly in a remote bay on the Newfoundland coast early in August 1941. Read more

Hit by Japanese fire, a wounded American soldier slides to his icy grave in this combat painting. The bitter fighting on enemy-held Attu resulted in the recapture of the Aleutian island at a cost of 600 dead American soldiers, 1200 wounded.

Bitter Cold, Bitter War: The Aleutian Islands in WWII

by Al Hemingway

In the early morning hours of May 11, 1943, the silhouettes of two subamarines silently rose to the surface in the icy cold waters off the coast of Attu, an island in the Aleutian chain. Read more

In this painting by Norman Wilkinson, the land, sea, and air around the port city of Dunkirk appear to be ablaze, beneath a pall of smoke. The epic evacuation of the British Expeditionary Force from the continent of Europe in June 1940 allowed thousands of Allied soldiers to fight another day.

What Happened in Dunkirk: a Royal Engineer Tells His Story

By Norman Wickman, as told to Pauline Hayton

Pauline Hayton was 52 years old before her father, Norman Wickman, talked about his life in the British Army, and what happened in Dunkirk as he saw it. Read more

A Defiant Stand During the Battle at Bloody Ridge

By Al Hemingway

Scanning over the maps unfolded before him in the division operations room, Colonel Gerald C. Thomas, 1st Marine Division G-3 officer, turned and muttered: “They’re coming.” Read more

General Phil Sheridan’s Ride during the Battle of Cedar Creek was one of the most famous vignettes in Civil War history. Sheridan commanded United States troops poised to cross the Mexican-American border as tensions rose shortly after the Civil War.

Could the United States Have Gone to War With France Over Mexico?

By Roy Morris

The continued presence of a handpicked French puppet emperor in Mexico, which had so worried the Lincoln administration during the Civil War, remained a sore point with American political and military leaders after the Union victory in 1865. Read more

We Check in on Driven Arts’ Successfully Crowdfunded Shooter

By Joseph Luster

We recently covered Driven Arts’ Days of War, a project that aims to deliver a “fiercely competitive shooter in a visually stunning WWII environment” and takes inspiration from Day of Defeat: Source, a team-based first-person WWII shooter from Valve (Half-Life, Team Fortress, Portal, Left 4 Dead) that originally hit PC back in 2005. Read more

Fury Software Digs into Classic Hex-Based World War II Strategy

By Joseph Luster

When it comes to strategy games, it doesn’t get more classic than top-down, hex-based maps. That’s the style developer Fury Software (Global Conflict, WWI Breakthrough, Assault on Communism, and many more in the Strategic Command series) is aiming to return to with Strategic Command WWII: War in Europe. Read more

Missed Opportunity

By Christopher Miskimon

In early April 1942, the Royal Navy was preparing for the worst in the Indian Ocean. Prior to the war this body of water was akin to an English lake, so much of it bordering Imperial territory and patrolled by its warships. Read more

Controversy swirls around the iconic Iwo Jima photo.

Perhaps no other image of Americans at war evokes such patriotic fervor as that of six servicemen raising the flag on the summit of 550-foot Mount Suribachi during the battle for the Pacific island of Iwo Jima. Read more

WWII French Resistance Fighters: Pearl Cornioley

When Pearl Witherington Cornioley died quietly in 2008 at the age of 93 in a retirement home in the Loire Valley of France, some who thought they knew her well may have been surprised to learn that she had risked her life during World War II as an agent for the British Special Operations Executive (SOE). Read more

Submarine Surgeon on the USS Seadragon

By George Tipton Wilson

In cramped quarters aboard the submarine USS Seadragon, beneath the Pacific Ocean, with enemy warships circling above, 22-year-old pharmacist’s mate Wheeler Bryson (Johnny) Lipes was ordered to perform an emergency appendectomy on seaman Darrell Dean Rector. Read more