WWII Archives

A GI rushes past the hulk of a burning German tank, destroyed by the resurgent Americans who first fought their enemy on land at Kasserine.

WWII

American Baptism of Fire at Kasserine Pass

By Roy Morris, Jr.

The North African sky was clear and cold on the evening of February 13, 1943, as American General Dwight D. Read more

British prisoners march off under German guard after the capture of Tobruk. Rommel was aided in this astonishing coup of June 1942 by knowledge of British plans intercepted from messages by the U.S. Military Attaché in Cairo.

WWII

Colonel Bonner Fellers

By Harold E. Raugh, Jr.

German Field Marshal Erwin Rommel, renowned as “the Desert Fox,” was a master of mobility and maneuver warfare during the see-saw North African campaign of World War II. Read more

Layton intercepted Japanese Admiral Yamamoto’s itinerary. Army P-38s rose to shoot down the admiral’s plane on a inspection tour of Bougainville in 1943.

WWII

Edwin T. Layton

By Mike Mclaughlin

On the morning of December 31, 1941, Admiral Chester W. Nimitz assumed command of the U.S. Pacific Fleet. Read more

WWII

A struggle for the planet and for the soul of humankind.

1939-1945. The world had never seen anything like it. Fifty million dead. Every continent except Antarctica inflamed in some way. Europe, the most powerful continent, overrun with fighting, whole cities, some a thousand years in the making, reduced to rubble. Read more

WWII

Get the Transports!

By Eric Hammel

The seesaw land, air, and sea battles on, over, and around desperately contested Guadalcanal island had been raging since August 7, and still there was no victor. Read more

The USS West Virginia, Tennessee, and Arizona smolder and smoke in the aftermath of the surprise aerial attack by a fleet of Japanese aircraft carriers.

WWII

Presaging Pearl Harbor

By Steven Weingartner

When Lt. Cmdr. Matsuo Fuchida, commander of the Japanese strike force at Pearl Harbor, arrived over the naval base on the morning of December 7, 1941, the sight that greeted him—enemy battleships resting placidly at anchor—put him in mind of an earlier war. Read more

WWII

Pearl Harbor: Irredeemable Defeat

By Frank R. Shirer

EDITOR’S NOTE: The following is a work of fiction written as if it were historical fact. It is a chapter in a book of alternate history entitled Rising Sun Victorious (Greenhill Books, London, 2001), which is a compilation of like chapters and was a Main Choice of the Military Book Club and Alternate Selection of the History Book Club. Read more

Monsignor Josef Tiso led Slovakia into an alliance with Hitler and the Nazis.

WWII

Drawn to the Axis

By Blaine Taylor

According to the 1960 memoirs of Henriette Hoffmann von Schirach, Adolf Hitler called Father Josef Tiso, a monsignor in the Roman Catholic Church and premier of Fascist Slovakia, “The little parson.” Read more

WWII