WWII
It’s a plain, old, pale yellow, three-story building in a small town (fewer than 20,000 inhabitants) north of Salzburg, Austria. Yet this architecturally unremarkable building stands in the center of a recent political firestorm. Read more
WWII
The Great Patriotic War, as World War II came to be known in the Soviet Union, provided the stage upon which Marshal Georgy Zhukov achieved lasting fame. Read more
WWII
On the evening of August 7, 1937, two neophyte radio broadcasters went to dinner together at the luxurious Adlon Hotel in Berlin, Germany. Read more
WWII
In December 1944, the Ardennes front or “ghost front” was an area where either veteran Allied units rotated in to rest and recover from terrible combat losses or where new, untested units arrived to gather some combat experience from the minor skirmishes that would occasionally flare up. Read more
WWII
The swinging beams of searchlights and the wail of air raid sirens had preceded the crash of the guns. Read more
WWII
At first, it was all about the ore. Magnesium, iron, and manganese ore were the lifeblood of German industry, especially the armaments industry, which used the iron and manganese to produce steel for Hitler’s war machine. Read more
WWII
On the second day of Adolf Hitler’s bold invasion of Russia in June 1941, the Germans were confronted with one of their most glaring shortcomings in weapons and armament. Read more
WWII
“I submit that it was the wrong decision. It was wrong on strategic grounds. And it was wrong on humanitarian grounds.” Read more
WWII
Laden with 500-pound bombs and incendiaries, 10 Japanese twin-engine Mitsubishi Ki21 Sally bombers took off from the Hanoi airfield in Indochina on the morning of Saturday, December 20, 1941. Read more
WWII
The bogey man of the U.S. Navy during the Guadalcanal campaign was not the Zero fighter or the I-class submarine. Read more
WWII
If Peleliu was one of the bloodiest campaigns of the Pacific Theater, it was also one of the least known until recently. Read more
WWII
Captured by the Red Army during World War II, diaries written by Heinrich Himmler, Reichsführer of the SS, lay forgotten in the vast, byzantine collections of the Russian Military Archive. Read more
WWII
During the early hours of December 7, 1941, five midget submarinesof the Imperial Japanese Navy waited to enter Pearl Harbor, the anchorage of the U.S. Read more
WWII
After crushing the first-line Soviet armies in brutal three-week cauldron battles at the border, the steamroller of German Army Group Center continued deeper into Soviet territory during the opening days of Operation Barbarossa, the invasion of the Soviet Union, which began on June 22, 1941. Read more
WWII
The fighting at Orsha saw the first battlefield use of the Red Army’s experimental battery of BM-13 multiple-launch rocket systems. Read more
WWII
Around 10 o’clock on the morning of December 13, 1937, New York Times correspondent Hallett Abend received an unexpected visitor: Rear Admiral Tadao Honda of the Imperial Japanese Navy. Read more
WWII
Thanks to the late historian Stephen Ambrose, his book Band of Brothers, and the HBO series of the same title, the legendary, extraordinary exploits of Easy Company, 506th Parachute Infantry Regiment (PIR), 101st Airborne Division, have become well known to a whole new generation. Read more
WWII
“The problem,” a member said, “is to make yourself so much master over the appalling difficulties of nature—heat, thirst, cold, rain, fatigue—that, overcoming these you yet have physical energy and mental resilience to deal with the greater object, the winning of the war.” Read more
WWII
The U-boat landings of German spies off the coast of Long Island during Operation Pastorius were not the only instances of U-boats putting German agents ashore on the Atlantic coast of the United States. Read more
WWII
It was just about midnight on June 12, 1942, and the Abwehr (Nazi Germany’s intelligence agency) hoped that Dasch and his three men, along with another four-man group to be put ashore on the coast of Florida, would be able to destroy factories of the Aluminium Company of America (ALCOA) located in the United States. Read more
