George S. Patton’s End Run: The Story of His Final Days

By Major General Michael Reynolds

By early 1945, less than a year before General George S. Patton’s mysterious death, Adolf Hitler’s armies were almost exhausted. Read more

The Norden Bombsight: Was it Truly Accurate Beyond Belief?

By Roaul Drapeau

In a 1921 bombing test, U.S. Army Air Corps General Billy Mitchell’s airmen sank the former German battleship Ostfriesland. Read more

Panzers at the Gates of Moscow

By Jonathan Jordan

The war map gave Adolf Hitler every reason to be confident. Operation Barbarossa, Germany’s invasion of the Soviet Union begun on June 22, 1941, had succeeded spectacularly on nearly every front. Read more

Rain of Terror: The Bombing of the British Isles

By Michael D. Hull

First, there was a faint drone, with black specks visible in the sunny sky. Then the drone grew into a thunder, and hundreds of bombers appeared over London. Read more

World War Toons Update

By Joseph Luster

We previously covered an upcoming virtual reality first-person shooter called World War Toons, which, as you might have guessed from the title, is a more cartoonish take on the WWII shooter genre. Read more

Game Review: UBOOT

by Joseph Luster

We’ve had plenty of strategy games in the past that have given players looming, distant control of military units, from land-based vehicles to those in the air and sea. Read more

Game Review: Battlefield 1 and Tales from the Void

By Joseph Luster

EA is trying something different with the Battlefield series, and oddly enough that involves dialing events back further than ever before. Read more

Secret Agent Man: The Story of Eddie Chapman

By Peter Kross

Nations have often pressed unsavory characters and criminals into service during wartime, rationalizing that such action is in the best interest of the country during extraordinary times. Read more

The Shinano Carrier: How Allied Forces Sunk Such a Secret

By Kelly Bell

The first torpedo struck the Shinano carrier farthest aft. Over the next 30 seconds three more warheads detonated against the massive aircraft carrier’s hull, working their way forward. Read more

Scandinavian Airborne Assault

By Henrik O. Lunde

The Polish Campaign in 1939 demonstrated the awesome effectiveness of aircraft as weapons platforms for close ground support. Read more

War Takes Wing

By Gregory Peduto

The army brass argued at length; the scheme proposed by behavioral psychologist B.F. Skinner was mad, foolhardy, but also ingenious. Read more

Mission Critical Overlord Weather

By Gene J. Pfeffer

Operation Overlord, the cross-Channel attack that hit the Nazi-occupied beaches of Normandy in 1944, was the culmination of a grand strategy adopted early in the war, followed sporadically during the years of conflict, and aimed at defeating Hitler’s Reich by striking directly at Germany by invasion. Read more

Night Jump into Tragedy

By Victor Kamenir

In August 1943, immediately after the Battle of Kursk, the Red Army launched a series of follow up operations, resulting in the liberation of a large swath of Nazi-occupied Soviet territory. Read more

German All-Terrain Vehicle

By Blaine Taylor

The first published photo of one of the odd—but highly versatile —frontline vehicles of World War II appeared on the cover of the July 1942 edition of German Propaganda Minister Dr. Read more

Red Sea Naval War

By Vincent P. O’Hara & Enrico Cernuschi

On May 9, 1936, four days after Italian troops entered Ethiopia’s capital, Addis Ababa, Mussolini appeared on a balcony of Rome’s Palazzo Venezia to proclaim Victor Emmanuel emperor of the newly created Italian East Africa. Read more

Hemingway Goes Sub Chasing

By Robert E. Cray, Jr.

“We are going to have Christ’s own bitter time to win it, if, when, and ever,” commented Ernest Hemingway to his friend and editor, Charles Scribner, at the start of World War II. Read more

Tale of the Biscuit Bomber: The C-47 in WWII

By Sam McGowan

Even though, technically at least, it was not a combat airplane, the performance of the Douglas C-47 transport led General of the Army Dwight Eisenhower to label it as one of the most important weapons of World War II. Read more

King Company at Bloody Lindern

By Frank Chadwick

In November 1944, an American infantry division underwent its baptism of fire in the worst conditions imaginable and acquitted itself with honor beyond anyone’s expectation. Read more

Fleeing to Fight

By John Osborn Jr.

“They had lost their country but kept their honor,” future British Prime Minister Harold Macmillan said of General Wladyslaw Anders and the Polish II Corps, men in the strange position of trying to win the liberation of their homeland by fighting in Italy. Read more

Barrier at Monte Cassino

By John Brown

The Gustav Line, stretching across Italy at its narrowest part between Gaeta and Ortona, was a formidable system of defenses, some of it in coastal marshes but mainly in mountainous country through which ran fast-flowing rivers. Read more