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Soldiers of the 290th Infantry Regiment, 75th Infantry Division march through a Belgian woods during the Battle of the Bulge. It was in a forest like this that Staff Sergeant Darrell Bush tried to carry a fellow scout off the battlefield until he took a bullet from Germans firing down from the trees.

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Infantryman in Bastogne

By Kevin M. Hymel

Staff Sergeant Darrell Bush had just carried a wounded soldier on his back to the rear when five enemy bullets seemed to hit him simultaneously. Read more

British troops, just rescued from the beach at Dunkirk on May 31, 1940, reflect desperation and relief after their ordeal on the European continent. Operation Dynamo did succeed beyond the expectations of its organizers.

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Desperation at Dunkirk

By Michael E. Haskew

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

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Resurgent U.S. Navy

By Christopher Miskimon

The United States Navy entered World War II well before Pearl Harbor and long before the rest of the nation. Read more

Japanese soldiers ride atop Type 89 I-Go medium tanks during their push toward the Philippine capital of Manila in this photo taken on December 22, 1941. A car lies toppled on its side after being removed from the roadway. Obstacles to the advance were brushed aside as the Japanese moved swiftly across the island of Luzon to confront the American and Filipino defenders in their last-ditch defensive positions at Bataan and Corregidor.

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Bataan and Corregidor: Valor Without Hope

By Michael D. Hull

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

SAS veterans of the Desert War photographed just after completing a three-month patrol. Their Jeeps are armed with machine guns and include Jerry cans containing fuel and water.

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SAS: Owning The Desert

By Frank Johnson

Second Lieutenant David A. Sterling of the Scots Guards was serving with Lt. Col. Robert E. “Lucky” Laycock’s No. Read more

Soldiers of the U.S. 5th Infantry Division, part of General George S. Patton’s Third Army, march through the snowy streets of the town of Ettelbruck, Luxembourg, in January 1945. These soldiers were involved in the Allied counteroffensive that reduced the bulge formed by the German Ardennes Offensive. Some of these soldiers are wearing white sheets as camouflage.

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Flattening the Bulge

By Patrick J. Chaisson

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

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Gray Wolves and the Ides of March

By Kelly Bell

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

After completing a reconnaissance mission in the jungles of Guadalcanal, a group of U.S. Marines poses for a photographer while delivering a Japanese prisoner for interrogation. The Marine at right has taken a Japanese sword as a souvenir. Prisoners were rarely taken in the Pacific, as Japanese soldiers preferred suicide to captivity.

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Bare-knuckle Brawl at Guadalcanal

By Michael E. Haskew

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

An Afrika Korps antiaircraft gun crew scans the sky for enemy planes in 1941. Homeland antiaircraft units were also raised in Germany to augment the air defenses against massive Allied bombing raids.

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Defending the Skies Above the Reich

By Allyn Vannoy

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

The three leaders with advisors during the Yalta Conference. The relationship between Churchill and Stalin was at times fractious, but the leaders managed to maintain the alliance that eventually defeated Nazi Germany and Imperial Japan.

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The Uneasy Alliance

By Jon Diamond

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

American OSS officers accompanied by Chetnik guerrillas on the move from the original evacuation airstrip in Pranjani, Serbia in anticipation of Soviet Red Army advances, September 10, 1944. The OSS officers were part of OSS operations Halyard and Ranger.

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Hazardous Balkan Air Rescue

By Kevin Morrow

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

The crew of a British Sopwith Camel flying at 10,000 feet downs the first Gotha on British soil during a night raid on London in January 1918. Germany reinvigorated its strategic bombing campaign late in the war by using Gotha aircraft instead of zeppelins.

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Germany’s Gotha Heavy Bombers

By Eric Niderost

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

A Federal battery fords a tributary of the Rappahannock on the day of battle. At the outset of the campaign, Jackson hoped to defeat the newly established Federal Army of Virginia one corps at a time.

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Bloody Collision at Cedar Mountain

By David A. Norris

In the shadow of Cedar Mountain on the southern outskirts of Culpeper, Virginia, Major General Thomas “Stonewall” Jackson deployed the troops at the head of his column of march against a reinforced Union corps on August 9, 1862. Read more

From Around the Network

  • U.S. Navy Lieutenant Alex Vraciu, who shot down six Japanese aircraft in the Battle of the Philippine Sea, takes off in his F6F Hellcat from the deck of the USS Lexington in a painting by Nicolas Trudgian. By 1944 the Japanese carrier fleet had only half the number of aircraft of the United States, making it highly unlikely they would reverse the tide of the War in the Pacific.

    WWII

    Carrier Clash in the Marianas
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  • The USS Langley, the first operational aircraft carrier of the U.S. Navy, was converted from the fleet collier Jupiter in 1922. The carrier served as the cradle of U.S. naval aviation and was nicknamed “Covered Wagon” due to its resemblance to the wagons that crossed the American West in the 1800s.

    WWII

    USS Langley: The U.S. Navy’s Covered Wagon
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  • The Swedes proved it was possible to deploy artillery more than once in battle to support their musket and pike troops.

    Military History

    Lennart Torstensson’s Winning Artillery Tactics in the 30 Years War
    Read More