WWII
In most people’s mind the Iron Cross is inescapably linked to the Third Reich. Indeed, Adolf Hitler was responsible for adding a “marching swastika” front and center, to the decoration’s black core in 1939. Read more
WWII
After years in obscurity, the story of the 6888th Postal Directory Battalion is coming to selected theaters and to Netflix in December with the release of the feature film, The Six Triple Eight. Read more
WWII
More or less in the center of the Mediterranean Sea, Malta became one of the most strategic locations in all of World War II. Read more
WWII
The contribution of the Union of South Africa’s armed forces to the winning of World War II is little known outside South Africa itself. Read more
WWII
It was the humid season on Malta that September of 1943. The hot Sirocco winds from North Africa blow from August to October across the cool sea, raising humidity. Read more
WWII
The island of Sicily, lying in the Mediterranean Sea between Tunisia and the toe of the Italian peninsula, is no stranger to war and conquest. Read more
WWII
Major Evans Carlson stood on a rickety platform built from wooden crates, the kind their rations came in. Read more
WWII
It’s called Mein Skizzenbuch (My Sketchbook)—a 72-page booklet of pencil drawings and watercolors by noted German war artist Ernst Eigener, a soldier with Propaganda Co. Read more
WWII
The U.S. military employed an organized system for the treatment of soldiers severely wounded while fighting in the Pacific, including their evacuation stateside if needed. Read more
WWII
“Passchendaele with tree bursts” was how war correspondent Ernest Hemingway described it. The three-month slugfest that became known as the Battle the Hürtgen Forest was that and much more. Read more
WWII
Letters home provide us with a glimpse into the daily lives of soldiers during the best and worst times. Read more
WWII
The heady days of summer—when Third Army made 600 miles in a week as the German troops fled for their lives—were a distant memory, a sort of story the veterans told the waves of replacements. Read more
WWII
They weren’t originally supposed to be there. In the early planning for the invasion of the island of Okinawa, the 27th Infantry Division was to be held in reserve as the eventual garrison force after the defeat of the Japanese 32nd Army. Read more
WWII
On the evening of September 26, 1940, American radio announcer and journalist William L. Shirer noted in his later famous Berlin Diary that the next day Italian Foreign Minister Count Galeazzo Ciano would arrive there from Rome, adding that most people thought it was for the announcement that Francisco Franco’s Spain was entering the war on the side of the Axis. Read more
WWII
Lieutenant Jimmie Monteith, Company L, 16th Infantry Regiment, arrived off Omaha Beach with the first assault wave, on D-Day, June 6, 1944. Read more
WWII
The final months of World War II saw the liberation of hundreds of ghastly concentration camps and the awful reality of Nazi racism. Read more
WWII
It crossed silently on a chilly winter evening over the southern Oregon coast, descending slowly, its ballast spent. Read more
WWII
Vice Admiral Norman Denning said of Ian Fleming, the “ideas man” who worked at British Naval Intelligence, that a lot of his proposals “were just plain crazy.” Read more
WWII
A man who was close to Adolf Hitler and hardly impartial later saidthat the Führer had “a mood of merriment” for a brief period that day. Read more
WWII
“I say, better wake up.”
Red Tobin opened one eye, rolled over, and found his squadron mate, Pilot Officer John Dundas, shaking him by the shoulder and staring into his face. Read more
