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 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

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

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

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

Charles ‘Swede’ Momsen: Submarine Pioneer

By Glenn Barnett

In July 1943, the American submarine USS Tinosa was on patrol in Japanese waters when she came across an unescorted oil tanker. Read more

A Covert Marine in the Balkans and China

By John Mancini

On the night of August 19, 1943, a lone British Handley Page Halifax bomber flew over Nazi-occupied Yugoslavia. Read more

Gottfried P. Dulias: Surviving the Soviet Gulag

By Gottfried P. Dulias

Gottfried P. Dulias was a young Luftwaffe pilot who had seen plenty of action in the skies above the Eastern Front. Read more

The Eastern Solomons: Death Struggle Off Guadalcanal

By David Alan Johnson

Lieutenant David C. Richardson spotted the four-engined flying boat silhouetted against the ocean by the late morning sun. Read more

Operation Dovetail: Guadalcanal Rehearsal

By Arnold Blumberg

By June 1942, the military might of Imperial Japan threatened Australia. The string of spectacular Japanese conquests in the South Pacific menaced lines of supply and communication between the United States and its allies and bases in the region. Read more

Heroes of the Red Duster: The British Royal Merchant Navy

By Michael D. Hull

None of the Allied services engaged in World War II was in action longer or suffered a higher percentage of casualties than the British Merchant Navy. Read more

A 101st Airborne Paratrooper’s Combat Journey

By Richard A. Beranty

In one of the most recognized photographs taken by U.S. Army cameramen during World War II, General Dwight D. Read more