Within days of Nazi Germany’s invasion of Poland on September 1, 1939, and the British declaration of war two days later, the vanguard of the British Expeditionary Force (BEF) arrived on the continent of Europe. Read more
The United States Navy entered World War II well before Pearl Harbor and long before the rest of the nation. Read more
They had no armor, no air support, and little hope, but the American and Filipino troops on Luzon and the Bataan peninsula waged a fighting retreat that was the longest and most gallant in U.S. Read more
Kapitanleutnant Volker Simmermacher gazed intently through his attack periscope, sizing up the target that so far seemed oblivious to his presence. Read more
Second Lieutenant David A. Sterling of the Scots Guards was serving with Lt. Col. Robert E. “Lucky” Laycock’s No. Read more
One ominous day in mid-May 1942, Lt. Gen. William J. Slim stood on the Imphal Plain, high in the Assam hills of northeastern India, and watched columns of tattered, malaria-ridden British, Indian, and Burmese soldiers straggle across the frontier from Burma. Read more
Corporal Thomas B. Tucker stood shivering in the bitterly cold night air as he looked down on a ribbon of water that separated his unit from the enemy’s front-line positions. Read more
Forty-eight Wright Cyclone aero engines coughed into life on the hardstands at windswept Polebrook Airfield in Northamptonshire, England, early on the afternoon of Monday, August 17, 1942. Read more
Adolf Hitler and his military commanders were feeling a new and unsettling emotion early in 1943—desperation. A year earlier, they had seemed on top of the world as their forces ruled a region that surpassed Rome at its greatest. Read more
Lieutenant Wessling did not believe that his two 75mm assault guns could effectively deal with the German panzers. Read more
Technically and visibly, it was unique among World War II fighters. The P-38 stood on tricycle landing gear, with its twin Allison engines in separate booms and the pilot sitting in his cockpit in a cupola between the booms. Read more
Even after their stunning defeat at Midway in early June 1942, senior commanders of the Imperial Japanese armed forces were resolute in their grand plan to extend their defensive perimeter in the Pacific. Read more
British Prime Minister Winston Churchill once admitted that the only issue to trouble him to the extent that he thought World War II might be lost was the uncertainty of the Battle of the Atlantic and the U-boat peril that threatened to starve the British Isles into submission. Read more
The squat, gray brick Castle Aghinolfi sat on high ground over-looking a coastal road on Italy’s west coast. Read more
It was a quiet dinner on a side street in Berlin the evening of June 26, 1939, but more than food would be devoured that night. Read more
During the Allied air campaign against the Third Reich in World War II, well over a million tons of bombs were dropped on German territory, killing nearly 300,000 civilians and wounding another 780,000. Read more
In the Grand Alliance volume of Winston S. Churchill’s memoirs of the Second World War, the British prime minister lambasted his new ally, Josef Stalin, after Operation Barbarossa, the German invasion of the Soviet Union, began on June 22, 1941. Read more
Black puffs from flak bursts began blossoming in the air around Lieutenant Tom Oliver’s Consolidated B-24 Liberator bomber high over the town of Bor, Yugoslavia. Read more
It was the early-morning hours of June 13, 1917, when a group of German aircraft began its final preparations for a very special mission, which amounted to the first fixed-wing bombing of London. Read more
The British Air Ministry established the British Airborne forces on June 22, 1940, at the request of Prime Minister Winston Churchill. Read more
