WWII

Under heavy fire from Japanese defenders, Marines move quickly through the rubble of Garapan, principal city on the island of Saipan. The battle for Garapan in July 1944 was the first experience of street fighting for American Marines in the Pacific.

WWII

To Die in the Marianas

By Robert A. Rosenthal

The tranquility of early dawn on June 15, 1944, was interrupted by the sounds of powerful naval guns and the roar of amtraks churning the water. Read more

SS General and Police Chief Kurt Daluege reviews troops in Luxembourg, 1940.

WWII

Third Reich Police Helmets

By Brian Bell

A challenging but rewarding pursuit for collectors of World War II headgear is the acquisition of authentic helmets worn by military and civilian organizations of the Third Reich. Read more

A British airborne soldier, identifiable by his sleeve patch showing Bellerophon riding the flying horse Pegasus, poses for a publicity photo with his Sten gun. To assault the Merville Battery, airborne troops landed both by glider and parachute, but the attack began unraveling from the beginning.

WWII

D-Day Disaster at the Merville Battery

By Flint Whitlock

The small French village of Merville (1940 population: 470), located just south of the coastal town of Franceville-Plage, had as its neighbor on its southern fringe an unwelcome German battery consisting of four concrete bunkers housing artillery pieces that pointed northwest toward Ouistreham and the mouth of the Orne River. Read more

In a painting by John Hamilton, the battle cruiser HMS Hood (left) explodes and breaks up as the battleship HMS Prince of Wales moves out of range of the assailant, the Bismarck, in the Denmark Strait, May 24, 1940. Over 1,400 British sailors went down with Hood in one of history's last clashes between capital ships.

WWII

Three Minutes of Fury

by Mark Carlson

The era of the battleship reached its apogee at Tsushima Strait in May 1905, when Admiral Heihachiro Togo’s powerful Japanese battleships annihilated the Russian fleet in the Russo-Japanese War. Read more

British soldiers hoist a lightweight, inflatable dummy Sherman tank. Soldiers in the U.S. Army’s top-secret “23rd Headquarters Special Troops” unit, also known as the “Ghost Army,” were detailed to deceive the Germans about Allied troop build-ups and positioning and draw the enemy away from the actual Allied intentions.

WWII

Deception in WWII

by Mason B. Webb

For Operation Neptune/Overlord, the Allies had 6,939 naval vessels, 11,590 aircraft, and 156,000 infantrymen and airborne soldiers (both parachute and glider) ready to participate in the D-Day invasion of northern France on June 6, 1944. Read more

Ground crewmen check the B-17 Flying Fortress Yankee Doodle of the 97th Bomb Group, which participated in the first bombing raid of U.S. Eighth Air Force planes in World War II, targeting the railroad marshaling yards at Sotteville, near Rouen in northern France, on August 17, 1942. Eaker was aboard as an observer.

WWII

Eaker and the Mighty Eighth

By Michael D. Hull

Forty-eight Wright Cyclone aero engines coughed into life on the hardstands at windswept Polebrook Airfield in Northamptonshire, England, early on the afternoon of Monday, August 17, 1942. Read more

WWII

Tigers on the Prowl

Written by: Mason B. Webb

By Mason B. Webb

During World War II, the United States fielded 16 armored divisions, and all contributed to the Allied victory. Read more

WWII

Operation Catapult: Churchill’s Desperate Measure

By Brooke C. Stoddard

Steaming through the summer Mediterranean night, the world having gone sour in two awful months, British Vice Admiral Sir James Somerville read the message just sent to him from London: “You are charged with one of the most disagreeable and difficult tasks that a British Admiral has ever been faced with, but we have complete confidence in you and rely on you to carry it out relentlessly.” Read more

The wreckage of the American Boeing B-17 bomber named Raunchy is removed from a lake in Switzerland, where it ditched during a mission to bomb Stuttgart, Germany, on September 6, 1943. The crew survived and were interned in Switzerland for the duration of the war.

WWII

“What Are You Doing in My Country?”

By Duane Schultz

Lieutenant Martin Andrews was not scheduled to fly that day. He and his Boeing B-17 Flying Fortress bomber crew had survived 12 missions out of the required 25 and were due for a much needed week of rest and recuperation. Read more

Sergeant W.W. Bigoray, radio operator aboard the harrowing flight to learn the properties of the Germans’ airborne Lichtenstein radar, though wounded, continued to perform valiantly.

WWII

Reading Nazi Radar

By Neil Taylor

To the crews of the Royal Air Force Bomber Stream Droning Toward Germany in the early morning hours of December 3, 1942, this mission seemed indistinguishable from the countless others that had preceded it. Read more

WWII

The Nazi ‘Gold Train Incident’

By Peter Kross

By the spring of 1945, Hitler’s thousand year Reich had come crashing down in flames. The Allied armies that had landed at Normandy almost one year earlier had penetrated deep inside Germany. Read more

WWII

Eight World War II Book Reviews for Summer 2026

By Kevin Seabrooke Full Reviews

Ghosts of Sicily: The True Story of the Naval Intelligence Agents Who Courted the Mob to Fight Nazis in America and the Battlefields of Italy (Mark Harmon and Leon Carroll, Harper Select, New York, NY, 304 pp., Read more

WWII

The Dawn of Destruction

By John Wukovitz

The seaplane tender USS Tangier floated at its moorings that peaceful day at Pearl Harbor. Little disrupted the serenity of the beautiful Sunday morning. Read more

Staff Sergeant Audie Murphy races through the set of a war-torn village in a scene from the the 1955 autobiographical film, To Hell and Back, based on his 1949 memoirs of the same name. Murphy, the most decorated U.S. soldier of World War II earned 33 awards, decorations, and citations—including the Medal of Honor, Distinguished Service Cross, two Silver Stars, Legion of Merit, two Bronze Star Medals (one with a “V” device), three Purple Hearts, a French Legion of Honour and a French Croix de Guerre with silver star—played himself in the film.

WWII

Through the Vosges

By Daniel R. Champagne

On the morning of October 3, 1944, an all-out assault was launched to drive the enemy from Cleurie Quarry in northeast France. Read more

A 12th Armored Division GI stands guard over a group of surrendering Wehrmacht soldiers in April 1945. Manpower shortages forced the U.S. Army to retrain soldiers in service units—including African-Americans—as combat riflemen in 1945.

WWII

Ending the Divide

By David H. Lippman

Three German armies surprised the Allies by breaking across the Our River and storming into the Ardennes on December 16, 1944. Read more

This illustration shows Britain’s “desert workhorse,” the Valentine Mk. III navigating the heat of North African combat in WWII. Though celebrated for its mechanical grit and reliability in the sand, the tank’s 2-pounder gun eventually proved inadequate. Large numbers of “Valentines” were later shipped to the Soviet Union to bolster the Eastern Front.

WWII

Bitter Road to Tobruk

By Michael D. Hull

When powerful German forces stormed through the Low Countries and France was about to fall in the late spring of 1940, Great Britain faced the darkest hour in its history. Read more

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  • WWII

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    WWII

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