WWII
On the island of New Britain, at the north end of the Solomon chain, lay a major base that provided Japanese forces with the naval power, supplies, and reinforcements to control the sea lanes of the Southwest Pacific. Read more
WWII
If there is an American combat airplane that has achieved an ill-deserved reputation, no doubt it would be the much-maligned Bell P-39 Airacobra, a tricycle landing gear single-engine fighter whose reputation was greatly overshadowed by the more famous, and of more recent design, Lockheed P-38 Lightning, Curtiss P-40 Tomahawk, Republic P-47 Thunderbolt, and North American P-51 Mustang. Read more
WWII
Today, in his nineties, Paul Tibbets is still a handsome man. He has a full head of silver hair. Read more
WWII
To their Russian enemies they were the “Spanish mercenaries of Hitler’s Fascist lackey, Franco.” To Hitler himself, “One can’t imagine more fearless fellows. Read more
WWII
Every man in uniform dreamed of taking that big boat home, but stepping foot on American soil was just part of the journey. Read more
WWII
Many people have heard of the six American Curtiss P-40 Tomahawk fighters that actually got off the ground and contested the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor, December 7, 1941. Read more
WWII
The three rubber dinghies struggled through the rough surf in the pitch black night toward an inhospitable stretch of rocky beach. Read more
WWII
In April 1940, Adolf Hitler’s SS began building a walled compound in occupied Warsaw in which to imprison Jews who had survived the previous autumn’s bitter fighting as the German juggernaut romped through western Poland. Read more
WWII
Say the words “pocket battleship” and up pops the name Admiral Graf Spee. Her two sister ships, the Deutschland/Lutzow and the Admiral Scheer are virtually unknown to Americans. Read more
WWII
Panic and confusion reigned across France as the bright, warm spring of 1940 turned into summer.
Blitzkrieg, a brutal new mode of warfare, was on the loose in Western Europe. Read more
WWII
In the popular history of World War II, the assertion that the United States was caught unprepared in Hawaii and the Philippines has become widely accepted as fact. Read more
WWII
By the end of January 1945, Hitler’s desperate Ardennes Offensive had ground to a halt. Though the last-ditch push to the west had inflicted heavy casualties on American forces, it was the German army that suffered irreplaceable losses in men, equipment, and materiel and was no longer capable of offensive operations. Read more
WWII
On September 17, 1939, in the wake of Hitler’s invasion of Poland, the Soviet Red Army crossed the Polish frontier from the east. Read more
WWII
On Saturday, December 6, 1941, the repair ship USS Vestal eased alongside the USS Arizona at her berth at Pearl Harbor. Read more
WWII
By 1944, many top generals in Adolf Hitler’s army understood the war was lost and that they had better make arrangements to ensure their safety. Read more
WWII
Following the forced evacuation of Allied forces at Dunkirk in June 1940, British leaders viewed a dim future. Read more
WWII
The “Pearl of the Orient” had lost all of its luster by January 1945.
Three years of brutal Japanese occupation had left many of Manila’s 800,000 native residents humiliated, tortured, or dead. Read more
WWII
Two men were seated on either side of a paper-strewn table inside an office of MI5, the British intelligence service, in the Royal Victoria Patriotic School at Clapham, London, shortly after the fall of France in the spring of 1940. Read more
WWII
The Ardennes Forest in eastern Belgium seemed almost surreal in the last days of autumn 1944, a quiet backwater in a raging storm. Read more
WWII
In the long and distinguished history of the U.S. Marine Corps, thousands of marines have been awarded medals for meritorious service on the battlefield. Read more
