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The Corporal M2 Missile

By Peter A. Goetz

Six days after the Allies’ D-Day landings on the coast of Normandy in June 1944, Germany retaliated by launching its first Vergeltungswaffe, or Vengeance Weapon, at the city of London. Read more

Sergeant W.W. Bigoray, radio operator aboard the harrowing flight to learn the properties of the Germans’ airborne Lichtenstein radar, though wounded, continued to perform valiantly.

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Reading Nazi Radar

By Neil Taylor

To the crews of the Royal Air Force Bomber Stream Droning Toward Germany in the early morning hours of December 3, 1942, this mission seemed indistinguishable from the countless others that had preceded it. Read more

Baker’s men fought valiantly, but their counterattacks failed to reverse the tide of battle.

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Death on a High Bluff

By Mike Phifer

It was almost dark when Captain Chase Philbrick led a reconnaissance party of 20 volunteers from Company H of the 15th Massachusetts Infantry across to Harrison’s Island situated in the middle of the Potomac River. Read more

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Britannia Triumphant at the Nile

By Joshua Shepherd

Smoke 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

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The Nazi ‘Gold Train Incident’

By Peter Kross

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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Collecting Tanker Helmets

By Peter Suciu

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

Consolidated B-24 Liberator bombers of the U.S. Fifteenth Air Force fly through thick enemy flak during bombing runs against the oil refinery complex at Ploesti, Romania. These bombers executed one of the most hazardous missions of World War II, and accurate weather information decrypted from German sources facilitated such air operations.

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Thomas McKelvey Cleaver’s ‘Bloody Skies’

By Kevin Seabrooke

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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Eight World War II Book Reviews for Summer 2026

By Kevin Seabrooke Full Reviews

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

This artist’s impression of the sinking of Indianapolis shows the warship engulfed in flames in the distance with Japanese submarine I-58 on the surface in the foreground. The cruiser sank within minutes of being struck by a torpedo.

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Sara Vladic’s ‘The Dangerous Shore’

By Kevin Seabrooke

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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Evelyn Iritani’s ‘Safe Passage’

By Kevin Seabrooke

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

Carlson's Raiders pull away from a fast transport (APD) during training for the Makin Raid in early 1942. This exercise was to gain proficiency in the use of small rubber boats. However, heavy seas swamped several of the craft during the run-in from the submarines to the beach at Makin.

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Stephen R. Platt’s ‘The Raider’

By Kevin Seabrooke

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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Jasper Craven’s ‘God Forgives, Brothers Don’t’

By Kevin Seabrooke

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

An RAF Westland Lysander Mark I flies over the Beirut waterfront shortly after the city fell to the British in July 1941.

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Paul Smiddy’s ‘Moonlight Crusaders’

By Kevin Seabrooke

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 Dawn of Destruction

By John Wukovitz

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

Staff Sergeant Audie Murphy races through the set of a war-torn village in a scene from the the 1955 autobiographical film, To Hell and Back, based on his 1949 memoirs of the same name. Murphy, the most decorated U.S. soldier of World War II earned 33 awards, decorations, and citations—including the Medal of Honor, Distinguished Service Cross, two Silver Stars, Legion of Merit, two Bronze Star Medals (one with a “V” device), three Purple Hearts, a French Legion of Honour and a French Croix de Guerre with silver star—played himself in the film.

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Through the Vosges

By Daniel R. Champagne

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

A 12th Armored Division GI stands guard over a group of surrendering Wehrmacht soldiers in April 1945. Manpower shortages forced the U.S. Army to retrain soldiers in service units—including African-Americans—as combat riflemen in 1945.

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Ending the Divide

By David H. Lippman

Three German armies surprised the Allies by breaking across the Our River and storming into the Ardennes on December 16, 1944. Read more

This illustration shows Britain’s “desert workhorse,” the Valentine Mk. III navigating the heat of North African combat in WWII. Though celebrated for its mechanical grit and reliability in the sand, the tank’s 2-pounder gun eventually proved inadequate. Large numbers of “Valentines” were later shipped to the Soviet Union to bolster the Eastern Front.

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Bitter Road to Tobruk

By Michael D. Hull

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