Britannia Triumphant at the Nile
By Joshua ShepherdSmoke drifted across the quarterdeck of H.M.S. Vanguard, occasionally obscuring the figure of a slender officer bowed with battle wounds and outright exhaustion. Read more
The Nazi ‘Gold Train Incident’
By Peter KrossBy the spring of 1945, Hitler’s thousand year Reich had come crashing down in flames. The Allied armies that had landed at Normandy almost one year earlier had penetrated deep inside Germany. Read more
Collecting Tanker Helmets
By Peter SuciuSince the first tanks rolled across the battlefield in World War I, armored crews have required specialized equipment to protect them inside the giant metal beasts. Read more
Thomas McKelvey Cleaver’s ‘Bloody Skies’
By Kevin SeabrookeThough the “Mighty Eighth” based in England earned the most headlines, the U.S.A.A.F.’s Fifteenth based in Italy played no less important—and every bit as dangerous—a role in bombing targets in Nazi Germany, France and Eastern Europe. Read more
Eight World War II Book Reviews for Summer 2026
By Kevin Seabrooke Full ReviewsGhosts of Sicily: The True Story of the Naval Intelligence Agents Who Courted the Mob to Fight Nazis in America and the Battlefields of Italy (Mark Harmon and Leon Carroll, Harper Select, New York, NY, 304 pp., Read more
Mark Harmon and Leon Carroll’s ‘Ghosts of Sicily’
By Kevin SeabrookeKapitänleutnant Reinhard Hardegen watches through his periscope as the shape of an oil tanker moves dimly past Long Island’s Montauk Point, both the ship and the lighthouse are under blackout orders now that America is in the war. Read more
Prit Buttar’s ‘Berlin: Endgame 1945’
By Kevin SeabrookeWith nearly a million Soviet soldiers taking on the entrenched Germans outside of Berlin, there was little doubt about the outcome in May 1945. Read more
Sara Vladic’s ‘The Dangerous Shore’
By Kevin SeabrookeWhile the fighting raged in Europe and the Pacific during WWII, those on the homefront had to deal with all manner of threats—both imagined and real, maintaining constant vigilance in the hunt for spies and saboteurs, both homegrown and those landed on America’s shores by German submarines. Read more
Evelyn Iritani’s ‘Safe Passage’
By Kevin SeabrookeLong and difficult, beset by bureaucracy, xenophobia and suspicion, the process of trading Allied civilians who had become trapped in Axis countries with the outbreak of world war for Axis civilians who had likewise become trapped in the United States was an exhausting process for American diplomat James Hugh Keeley Jr., Read more
Stephen R. Platt’s ‘The Raider’
By Kevin SeabrookeThe enigmatic Colonel Evans Fordyce Carlson, a “racially progressive, bleeding-heart communist sympathizer,” returned to China in 1937 for almost two years to observe the Chinese Communist Party’s 8th Route Army, led by Mao Tse-Tung, and spent nearly a year with guerrillas behind Japanese lines. Read more
Jasper Craven’s ‘God Forgives, Brothers Don’t’
By Kevin SeabrookeCraven first delved into this topic with an investigative article featured in the May/June 2022 issue of Mother Jones with the headline, “Hazing, Fighting, Sexual Assaults: How Valley Forge Military Academy Devolved Into ‘Lord of the Flies.’” Read more
Paul Smiddy’s ‘Moonlight Crusaders’
By Kevin SeabrookeA pilot since the age of 16, later trained by the RAF, the author has assembled a dashing narrative of the Royal Air Force’s Special Duties pilots, who performed clandestine operations such as inserting or extracting agents, dropping supplies, and flying secret missions into occupied Europe, often using aircraft like the Westland Lysander—noted for its Short Take-Off and Landing (STOLT) capabilities. Read more
The Dawn of Destruction
By John WukovitzThe seaplane tender USS Tangier floated at its moorings that peaceful day at Pearl Harbor. Little disrupted the serenity of the beautiful Sunday morning. Read more
Through the Vosges
By Daniel R. ChampagneOn the morning of October 3, 1944, an all-out assault was launched to drive the enemy from Cleurie Quarry in northeast France. Read more
Ending the Divide
By David H. LippmanThree German armies surprised the Allies by breaking across the Our River and storming into the Ardennes on December 16, 1944. Read more
Bitter Road to Tobruk
By Michael D. HullWhen powerful German forces stormed through the Low Countries and France was about to fall in the late spring of 1940, Great Britain faced the darkest hour in its history. Read more
Roar of the Lightning Brigade
By Joshua ShepherdConvinced that a major fight was in the offing, 33-year-old Colonel John T. Wilder clambered up the branches of a nearby tree as the sun dipped below the horizon. Read more
Bloody Brotherhood
By Kelly BellBy 1119, the Holy City of Jerusalem had been back under Christian control for 20 years. The soldiers of the First Crusade had secured the city and re-opened it as a center for Christian pilgrimage. Read more
Hell In The Hedgerows
By Bill WarnockRudolf Jackl dove headfirst from the aircraft door, stretching his arms toward the ship’s port wing to keep from getting tangled in his parachute’s shroud lines as he was slammed by turbulent air. Read more
The Unforeseen Precipice
By Roy Morris Jr.Every war will astonish you,” American General Dwight D. Eisenhower said after World War II. As the leader of the Allied forces that successfully landed on D-Day and marched into Berlin 11 months later, Eisenhower obviously knew what he was talking about. Read more
