WWII
The Japanese looked unstoppable. Two divisions of the 15th Army had crossed from Thailand into Burma in mid-January 1942, bent on capturing Rangoon before the British could land reinforcements and block the seizing of the Burma Road. Read more
WWII
Throughout the reign of the Nazi Party in Germany during the 1930s and 1940s, Adolf Hitler’s inner circle comprised a diverse group of men from many walks of life. Read more
WWII
Very few among the throngs of visitors to Pearl Harbor on the island of Oahu are aware of an anomaly, but it definitely exists in the case of the USS Utah. Read more
WWII
It was loud. It was violent. Gunfire ripped into 1st Lt. Grant G. Stout’s Republic P-47D Thunderbolt fighter high over Dortmund, Germany, near midday on March 19, 1945, and the aircraft trembled and shook. Read more
WWII
As 1944 drew to a close, the British in Greece found themselves in a parlous situation. They had agreed to support the restoration of Greek civil authority while overseeing the distribution of aid and the re-creation of armed forces to ensure internal security, all while commitments elsewhere were straining them almost to the breaking point. Read more
WWII
On June 6, 1944, hundreds of thousands of Allied troops, planes, and ships departed from their bases in England bound for the shores of France in what was to be the greatest invasion of all time. Read more
WWII
When the Marines put Willis “Bud” Dworzak into the cockpit of a Vought F4U-1C Corsair fighter aircraft, they expected him to provide close air support to fellow leathernecks who were slugging it out on Okinawa. Read more
WWII
By early 1944, the Luftwaffe was only a shadow of what it had been at the beginning of the war. Read more
WWII
On the humid morning of August 19, 1942, infantrymen from Company A, 1st Battalion, 1st Marines carefully eyed the landscape for any signs of Japanese soldiers as they slowly made their way through the thick jungle on the island of Guadalcanal, located in the Solomon Islands. Read more
WWII
The night of December 14, 1941, was bitterly cold in the North African desert. Midway between El Agheila and Tripoli, Libya, was the German and Italian air base outside the town of Tamet. Read more
WWII
The commander of the U.S. Third Army, General George Patton, Jr., took no great pleasure in the end of the war in Europe; he already knew that despite his lobbying of many influential figures in Washington, D.C., Read more
WWII
The art of sniping developed from the sharpshooting practiced during earlier conflicts. During the 19th century, the steadily improving technology of the rifle led to the use of sharpshooters during the American Civil War and the Boer War. Read more
WWII
In the 1960s the John Birch Society was well known to most Americans as a right-wing political organization noted for its anti-communism and conspiracy theories. Read more
WWII
By 1939 the German Reich possessed 3,800,000 horses while 885,000 were initially called to the Wehrmacht as saddle, draft, and pack animals. Read more
WWII
Sixty-five years ago, Reichsmarschall Hermann Göring’s Luftwaffe showcased its aerial triumphs in a 1942 commemorative book of photographs entitled Fliegen und Siegen (“Flying and Victory”). Read more
WWII
By May 1941, the German Luftwaffe’s fortunes had risen to great heights and plummeted to equally startling depths in the course of a single year of blitzkrieg warfare in Western Europe. Read more
WWII
By the spring of 1943, the Nazi deaths camps in eastern Poland—Sobibor, Belzac, and Treblinka—were running out of victims. Read more
WWII
American soldiers of Japanese ancestry made remarkable contributions to the Allied victory during World War II. Read more
WWII
The legendary Flying Dutchman of maritime lore was a spectral ship of disastrous portent that haunted the high seas and endangered anyone who came into contact with it. Read more
WWII
As the Japanese delegation stood on the deck of the battleship USS Missouri on September 2, 1945, preparing to sign the documents that ended World War II, a large formation of Boeing B-29 Superfortress heavy bombers swooped low over Tokyo Bay as a reminder of the terrible destruction that had befallen their nation and turned Japan’s cities into ruins. Read more
