WWII Archives

WWII

P-38 Lightning Restored

By Jim Opalka

Only a few months after the attack on Pearl Harbor a 24-four-year-old pilot, Lieutenant Brad McManus, scanned the sky as he was taught to do as an air cadet. Read more

WWII

Colonel Charles Hunter

Dear Editor,

I would like to make some corrections to Michael Hull’s otherwise excellent article, “Frank Merrill’s Jungle Trek” (July 2003). Read more

Before finishing it off, famed Japanese ace Saburo Sakai surveys the B-17 bomber flown by young Lieutenant Colin Kelly. Flying the nimble Zero fighter, Sakai is credited with 64 aerial victories.

WWII

Bomber Pilot Colin Kelly

By Wil Deac

The days following Pearl Harbor were grim ones for the United States. Headlines screamed of one Japanese victory after another. Read more

WWII

Of all the better-known Allied aircraft of World War II, the most controversial was Martin’s B-26 Marauder, a twin-engine cigar-shaped medium bomber that was loved by some and hated by many. Read more

In Evacuation Under Fire by Franklin Boggs, members of the 158th RCT carry their wounded to an aid station after a fierce battle with Japanese troops in the rugged New Guinea terrain.

WWII

Bushmasters’ Baptism of Fire: The Battle of Lone Tree Hill

By Al Hemingway

Lieutenant General Hachiro Tagami, commanding officer of the 36th Division, dubbed the Tiger Division, did not like the news he had received from Imperial Army Headquarters in Tokyo. Read more

WWII

USS Houston

Dear WWII History:

My compliments on your fine article by John Wukovits in the November 2003 issue, “Heroic Fight Against Long Odds,” describing the last battle of the Australian light cruiser HMAS Perth and the American heavy cruiser USS Houston (CA 30). Read more

WWII

General Curtis LeMay was the foremost advocate of massive B-29 raids on Japan.

The nightmarish vision that the Japanese high command had hoped to forestall with its Special Attack Unit raids on American airbases in the Marianas did, with devastating effect, become reality in the spring of 1945. Read more

WWII

The National D-Day Museum highlights the War in the Pacific via major expansion.

When the skies above Pearl Harbor were stained with the smoke of war on the morning of December 7, 1941, and other U.S. Read more

Fire from the guns of the Australian cruiser HMAS Perth splits the darkness in the opening moments of the Battle of Sunda Strait on February 25, 1942. The Australian vessel and the American cruiser Houston were lost in action against the Japanese.

WWII

Heroic Fight Against Long Odds

By John Wukovits

The haggard American sailors aboard the limping cruiser hoped that the journey upon which they had just embarked was the long-expected voyage back to the United States. Read more

An instructor flips a soldier backward in hand-to-hand judo training. Infantrymen also learned how to incapacitate a man using a stick.

WWII

Specific Training for Pacific Fighting

By Kevin M. Hymel

On the Hawaiian island of Oahu, soldiers learned how to close with the Japanese in the jungles of the Pacific. Read more

WWII

My Experience In The Low-Level Ploesti Raid

Dear Sir,

In the May issue of WWII History, the article “Low Level Run at Ploesti” by Sam McGowan contained many errors. Read more

WWII

Cartoonist Bill Mauldin portrayed the hardship of war tinged with unforgettable humor.

When a 21-year-old New Mexico boy began drawing cartoons for the 45th Division News, that outfit’s weekly newspaper, just about everybody was amused. Read more

His trusty wingman behind, the pilot of an American Curtiss P-40 Tomahawk fighter roars past a stricken Japanese Aichi “Val” dive-bomber he has just shot up. Although few U.S. pilots managed to get into the air over Oahu on December 7, 1941, those who did fought bravely.

WWII

Valiant Air Defense at Pearl Harbor

By Robert F. Dorr

A little-known sidelight of the Pearl Harbor attack is the air-to-air fighting that went on in the skies of Hawaii on December 7, 1941. Read more

While one U.S. Marine inches forward, another fires a Tommy gun at Japanese positions on Okinawa in April 1945.

WWII

The Thompson Submachine Gun

By Blaine Taylor

In 1939 Time magazine called the Thompson submachine gun “the deadliest weapon, pound for pound, ever devised by man….” Read more

A tough MK II (A14) Matilda tank of the British 7th Royal Tank Regiment stirs up a cloud of desert dust. The most modern tank in the British arsenal at the time of Beda Fomm, the Matilda had surprised Rommel’s elite 7th Panzer Division in May 1940 on the battlefield of Arras in France.

WWII

A Daring Desert Campaign

By David H. Lippman

“It is not a question of aiming for Alexandria or even Sollum,” the message read. “I am only asking you to attack the British forces facing you.” Read more

WWII

Taps for Mauldin

By Kevin M. Hymel

Bill Mauldin understood war from the grunt’s-eye view. An enlisted man with the 45th Infantry Division, he turned his hobby into an art, penning Army life in World War II from Sicily and Italy to France and Germany. Read more

A Boeing B-17 Flying Fortress heavy bomber of the U.S. Army Air Forces makes a bombing run over the city of Osnabruck, Germany, during World War II. When the B-17 was introduced, many observers considered it too expensive. However, the bomber was a workhorse in the European theater as army air power evolved during the war years.

WWII

The Army and Air Power

By Sam McGowan

When the United States Army first developed an interest in aviation and purchased its first airplane from the Wright Company in 1909, it and the pilots and mechanics who flew and serviced it were assigned to the Signal Corps, a specialty corps that had been established prior to the Civil War to develop visual signals, then later to develop and service telegraph lines. Read more

WWII

Actor Leslie Howard Died in Plane Shot Down by Nazis 80 Years Ago.

On the morning of June 1, 1943, the Douglas DC-3 lifted off from the airport at Lisbon in neutral Portugal. BOAC Flight 777 or Dutch KLM Flight 2L272, as it had been designated, carried 13 passengers and its crew on a flight bound for London. Read more

WWII