WWII Archives

WWII

RCAF Pilot Bill Ash, The Cooler King

By James Reynolds

For Allied soldiers, sailors, and airmen interned in enemy prison camps during World War II, escaping was regarded as their unwritten duty. Read more

WWII

The Longest Struggle

By Michael D. Hull

For the duration of World War II, from the evening of Sunday, September 3, 1939, to the evening of Monday, May 7, 1945, the Battle of the Atlantic never ceased. Read more

B-25 Mitchell medium bombers fly over islands covered in snow and shrouded in fog to strike at Japanese forces.

WWII

Showdown In The Aleutians

By Phil Zimmer

With a sharp clatter of machine guns, the Japanese marines announced their presence by spraying bullets into the isolated U.S. Read more

Americans troops enter Messina on August 17, 1943. Despite Adolf Hitler’s orders to fight to the last man, Kesselring skillfully employed hundreds of antiaircraft guns to cover the withdrawal of 40,000 Germans to the mainland.

WWII

Drive to Messina

By Phil Zimmer

Sergeant Alfred Johnson peered from behind a boulder on a rock-strewn hillside at Piano Lupo about six miles inland from the southern coast of Sicily. Read more

From urban combat to fighting in flat, open fields, from tank-vs.-tank duels, to aerial bombardments to ceaseless artillery barrages, the action at Anzio took on every dimension. Here an American GI uses his carbine to keep German forces at bay during the battle for Anzio that lasted from January to May 1944.

WWII

The 45th Infantry Division’s Desperate Defense at Anzio

By Christopher Miskimon

The sunrise on February 16, 1944, dawned foggy over the Via Anziate—the only highway between Anzio and Rome. Read more

WWII

Death of Himmler’s Henchman

By Richard Rule

In a desperate bid to avoid another war in Europe, both Britain and France signed the notorious Munich Agreement in 1938, which annexed the Sudetenland of Czechoslovakia to the Nazis. Read more

WWII

The storming of Fortress Königsberg in April 1945 was the finale of a two-month Soviet siege. The city, one of the few triumphs of Hitler’s fortress strategy, had been encircled by late January and lay hundreds of kilometers behind the main front line by the time the Soviets launched their final assault toward the Nazi capital of Berlin. Read more

WWII

Desperate Days On Hill 314

By Alan Davidge

When the 230th Field Artillery Battalion was attached to the 30th Infantry (“Old Hickory”) Division in Mortain, France, on August 6, 1944, many of its men had already received their baptism of fire in Normandy. Read more

WWII

Letters From The Eastern Front

By Horst Fuchs Richardson

Backstory: My father, Karl Fuchs, was a German soldier in World War II who fought and died on the Eastern Front. Read more

WWII

On the trail of the Amber Room

Nearly 20 years ago, I met a fellow in Germany (we’ll call him “Hans”) who was on his life’s quest to find one of mankind’s greatest treasures and solve one of WWII’s greatest mysteries—the fabulous Amber Room. Read more

A bus leans against the side of a terrace in Harrington Square after a German bombing raid on London. The bus was empty but 11 people were killed in the houses two days after the start of the attacks.

WWII

Taking the Brunt

By Alan Davidge

Most of the action during the Battle of Britain in the late summer of 1940 took place over southern England where Royal Air Force Spitfires and Hurricanes began to dominate dogfights against their German rivals. Read more

WWII

Liberating Paris

By Jean René Champion (with Marc and David Champion)

Jean René Champion (or René, as he preferred to be called) was born in 1921 in Neuilly-sur-Seine, a commune on the west side of Paris. Read more

Naval artist John Hamilton depicted the night action on November 13, 1942, when eight U.S. destroyers and five cruisers engaged in an all-out slugfest against two Japanese battleships and 12 destroyers in “the Slot,” between Guadalcanal and Florida Island. The action lasted only 20 minutes but ended in a victory for the U.S. Navy. During the six-month-long campaign, the two combatants lost over 60 ships and more than 1,200 aircraft.

WWII

Guadalcanal: Ending with a Whimper

By John J. Domagalski

Admiral Ernest J. King wanted the battle for Guadalcanal to be over. There were additional objectives for the United States to pursue in the South Pacific and by the middle of January 1943 he was becoming impatient. Read more

A Finnish pilot at the controls of his Avro Anson FAF LeLv46 AN101 reconnaissance aircraft based at Tikkakoski, March 7, 1940, shortly before the Winter War ended in a truce. The Finns successfully blunted the Soviet invasion, thanks in large part to their air force.

WWII

David vs Goliath

By Glenn Barnett

When Stalin and Hitler signed a non-aggression pact in August 1939, they secretly created spheres of influence. Besides dividing up Poland, they agreed to allow each other free reign over nations and territories they deemed important. Read more

WWII

Infantry’s Armored Fist

By Brig. Gen. (ret.) Raymond E. Bell, Jr.

The 782nd Tank Battalion spent two years training stateside as part of the U.S. Read more

A long line of American soldiers are about about to begin their long journey into captivity. Most of the troops were moved by rail; Allied planes sometimes unknowingly attacked trains that carried American POWs.

WWII

Captured in the Bulge

By Flint Whitlock

It took the HMS Queen Elizabeth, the world’s largest passenger liner, only five days to transport 15,000 men of the 106th Infantry Division from New Jersey to Glasgow, Scotland, making port on November 17, 1944. Read more

Japanese American children at the Raphael Weill Public School in San Francisco recite the Pledge of Allegiance, April 1942. The two girls in the front row were both sent to internment camps along with their parents.

WWII

“Justice for All”

By Susan Zimmerman

In the fall of 1941, as relations worsened between the United States and Japan and war became imminent, the presence of 110,000 Japanese Americans living on the West Coast pushed the issue of internment to the forefront. Read more

Sergeant Fedor Pekov and Vladimir Mikeyev patiently wait for their enemy.

WWII

Training Stalin’s Red Army Sharpshooters

By Kevin M. Hymel

Snipers played an important a role in World War II, just as much as any tank, airplane, or artillery piece. Read more

Fighting men of the 92nd Infantry Division, the famed Buffalo Soldiers, march past the wreckage of a knocked out PzKpfw. VI Tiger tank in the vicinity of Ponsacco, Italy. The African-American soldiers of the 92nd Division fought racial injustice in their own army, as well as the Germans.

WWII

The Brave Buffalo Soldiers

By Michael D. Hull

Despite their gallant service in the Civil War, on the Western frontier, and in the Spanish-American War, black soldiers were used mostly for labor and given only a limited fighting role when the U.S. Read more

American infantrymen enter the war-ravaged French town of Argentan during the effort to trap thousands of retreating German troops in the Falaise Pocket during the final stages of the Normandy Campaign in 1944. The fighting around Argentan was the baptism of fire for the U.S. 80th Infantry Division.

WWII

The 80th Division’s Baptism By Fire

By Patrick J. Chaisson

As a late summer sun finally dipped below the horizon, Captain William L. Koob, Jr., came to realize that his unit had been abandoned on the battlefield. Read more

WWII

From Around the Network

The Forgotten American Airborne of Operation Market-Garden

An American College Goes To War

Charlemagne’s Shame: The Battle of Roncesvalles

The First Day of World War II