WWII
Although the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor was the event that served to galvanize America to fight World War II, President Franklin Roosevelt and his military advisers had pervasively decided that defeating the Japanese would be secondary to destroying the Nazi war machine in Europe. Read more
WWII
One of the successful strategies used by airmen in the Southwest Pacific Area of Operations was skip- bombing, a method of aerial attack in which a bomber approached an enemy ship at wave-top height, then released a bomb with a delayed-action fuse from some distance away. Read more
WWII
Felice Benuzzi’s part in the war may have been a small one, but his story is one of the oddest to come out of World War II. Read more
WWII
One of the most enduring questions emerging from World War II is the reaction of the West, and particularly the United States, to the plight of the Jews as they faced Hitler’s “Final Solution.” Read more
WWII
On September 14, 1938, fleet submarine USS Squalus (SS-192) was launched at the Portsmouth Naval Shipyard in Kittery, Maine. Read more
WWII
Early Navy submarines, notably the S-class models, were so dangerous and cramped they were derisively labeled “pig boats.” Read more
WWII
Adolf Hitler’s wartime Armaments Minister Albert Speer was right when he termed the Führer’s pilot from 1932 to 1945, Lt. Read more
WWII
The Pearl Harbor aftermath presented the U.S. Navy with a sobering question: how to recover? More than 2,000 men had died. Read more
WWII
During the Pearl Harbor attack, both Utah and Oklahoma capsized after suffering multiple torpedo hits. Utah had been converted to a training ship, and to the Japanese pilots, her modified deck resembled that of an aircraft carrier. Read more
WWII
In the late afternoon of April 6, 1945, five days after American GIs and leathernecks scrambled onto an Okinawa beach a scant 500 miles from Japan, two U.S. Read more
WWII
On June 2, 1939, the last great prewar military parade of the Third Reich came rolling past the reviewing stand under Nazi eagles with swastikas in their taloned grip in front of the Berlin Technical High School. Read more
WWII
One of America’s earliest heroes in World War II was the tall, soft-spoken son of a Connecticut Congregational minister who distinguished himself in some of the fiercest fighting in the South Pacific. Read more
WWII
Due largely to their use in the postwar U.S. Army Air Forces and present proliferation among the air show community, the North American P-51 Mustang is thought of by many as the most important American fighter of World War II. Read more
WWII
They came out of the sea, out of the darkness, and they brought death, terror, and destruction with them. Read more
WWII
When the United States entered World War II in December 1941, the nation’s most famous writer, a man who had built his reputation on gritty and intense novels about wars, soldiers, and “grace under pressure,” was nowhere to be seen—at least not on the home front. Read more
WWII
Captain Odd Isaachsen Willoch knew what had to be done. The 55-year-old career Norwegian officer, commander of an aging coastal defense ship, was looking down the five-inch gun barrels and 21-inch torpedo tubes of the Wilhelm Heidkamp, a state-of-the-art German destroyer. Read more
WWII
On July 16, 1945, the heavy cruiser USS Indianapolis, commanded by Captain Charles McVay III, steamed out of San Francisco, Calif. Read more
WWII
By 1945, the German Luftwaffe’s fighter wing had at its disposal jet fighters, rocket planes, and some of the most advanced, and most feared, piston-engine craft in the world. Read more
WWII
For Nazi Party Führer (Leader) and German Reich Chancellor Adolf Hitler, July 20th, 1944 dawned as a routine working day at his principal wartime military headquarters, the Wolfsschanze (Fort Wolf) in the East Prussian forest of Rastenburg, some three hundred air miles from Berlin, in what is today Poland. Read more
WWII
The story of the sinking of the USS Indianapolis minutes after midnight on August 30, 1945, by torpedoes fired from the Japanese submarine I-58, remains one of the most publicized tragedies of World War II. Read more
