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By 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
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Since 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
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Though 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
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Ghosts 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
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Kapitänleutnant 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
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With 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
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While 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
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Long 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
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The 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
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Craven 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
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A 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
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The 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
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On the morning of October 3, 1944, an all-out assault was launched to drive the enemy from Cleurie Quarry in northeast France. Read more
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Three German armies surprised the Allies by breaking across the Our River and storming into the Ardennes on December 16, 1944. Read more
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When 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
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Convinced 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
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By 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
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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
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When the first shots of the Revolutionary War were fired at Lexington Green on the morning of April 19, 1775, Black men had already been serving in colonial militias for some time, particularly in New England. Read more
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Ships of the line represented the pinnacle of military power by the end of the 18th century and would remain the dominating force on the seas for more than 200 years. Read more
