After Operation Market-Garden failed make it into Germany in September 1944, U.S. Lt. General “Lightning” Joe Collins suggested the Hürtgen Forest might offer a safer route into the Reich through the German Siegfried Line.

Into the Hürtgenwald

By Robert A. Lynn

The 1944 invasion of France, the breakout from the beaches, the surprise German counterattack in the Ardennes, and the final reckoning with the Third Reich have all been exhaustively chronicled. Read more

The Berezina Bridges

By Jonathan North

The shattered remains of Napoleon’s once brilliant Grande Armée entered Smolensk on November 9, 1812. Taking stock of the situation, the emperor realized that he and his army couldn’t possibly winter in the charred remains of the city. Read more

Members of the Military Telegraph Construction Corps, including two balancing atop freshly cut tree trunks, hanging telegraph wire near Brandy Station, Virginia.

The Telegraph

By Jim Haviland

Early in the American Civil War, during the first months of 1862, Union General Henry Halleck, commanding from his headquarters in St. Read more

Early in World War II, Edward tours the front line in France with Lord Gort, commander of the British Expeditionary Force. With the fall of France in June 1940, the Duke and Duchess of Windsor were sought by the Nazis.

King Turned Pawn

By Eric Niderost

It was around noon, June 19, 1940, when a small caravan of cars set out from Antibes in southern France en route to the Spanish border. Read more

To the Mons

By Eric Niderost

Southwestern Belgium echoed with the ceaseless tramp of heavy boots on cobbled roads as long brown lines of khaki-clad men marched into Mons and its suburbs. Read more

Soldiers man a quad .50 anti-aircraft gun on the Place de la Concorde. Behind them stands the Hôtel de Crillon on the left, the Obelisk of Luxor in the center, and the Church of Madeline, to the immediate right of the Obelisk, and the French Naval Ministry on the far right. Belgian gates—German anti-tank obstacles—surround the gun nest.

Americans in Paris

By Kevin M. Hymel

Almost every soldier on western European battlefront wanted to get to Paris. Once it was liberated on August 25, 1944, it became a mecca for Allied soldiers on leave who filled the streets, bars, and historic buildings, enjoying a brief respite from the war. Read more

Erwin Wickert (center), with, from left, Shinzaku Hogen, a future Japanese ambassador to Vienna, according to Wickert, and Adam Vollhard, who wrote for the German News Agency in Tokyo.

Decades of Diplomacy

By Sherri Kimmel

I am riding a borrowed bike along the Rhine, passing the Schaum-Hof, where last night I dined on a deck overlooking the river with a stately Dutch lady friend of a friend. Read more

In an ambush led by Arminius (later known as Hermann), three Roman legions were destroyed in Germania in 9 CE. The event, one of Rome’s worst defeats, was seized upon by nationalists in the 19th-century, and later by the Nazi Third Reich, as the mythological origin of the German state. Paintings such as “The battle of Hermann in the Teutoburg Forest,” (1840) by Wilhelm Lindenschmit the Elder, helped popularize Hermann as the father of the German nation.

Havoc in the Teutoburger Forest

By Michael D. Greaney

One of the most devastating events to shake the early Roman Empire was the defeat of Legate Publius Quinctilius Varus and his army at the hands of Arminius in the Battle of Teutoburgerwald in 9 ad. Read more

Deck crewmen race to an SBD Dauntless dive bomber after a barrier crash. The extended tailhook failed to catch the arresting wire, but the propeller stopped the forward momentum, almost flipping the plane. Aviators claimed that SBD stood for “Slow But Deadly.”

Hard Charging Landings

By Kevin M. Hymel

To naval aviators, any landing they could walk away from was a good landing. The escort aircraft carrier USS Charger trained men in good landings, but bad landings were also part of the education. Read more

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