WWII

WWII

How The RAF’s Eagle Squadrons Joined the Eighth Air Force

“We went to London in ones and twos during our precious 24-hour passes to transfer and pick up our U.S. Read more

WWII

Operation Market Garden: The American Airborne’s Audacious Role

With his troops in a bitter fight with German forces in northern France in the late summer of 1944, General Omar Bradley, commander of the Allied 12th Army Group, could not believe his ears. Read more

WWII

Hitler’s Bold Attack at Mortain

For once, the ULTRA message came late. Normally, the decoding machines and hard-working British cryptographers at Bletchley Park had an abundance of German Army messages to go through, but in the first days in August 1944, the German panzer divisions had gone to radio silence, which suggested they were going to attack, but not in which direction. Read more

WWII

The Film and Battle of San Pietro

By Michael E. Haskew

The monotonous rattle and snap of the film projector provided a steady accompaniment to the images flickering across the screen in the darkened room. Read more

WWII

General Jonathan M. Wainwright survived the privations of captivity at the hands of the Japanese.

Amid the great assembly of senior Allied officers who stood by while the representatives of the Japanese government and those of the victors of World War II in the Pacific signed the instrument of surrender aboard the battleship USS Missouri on September 2, 1945, in Tokyo Bay, two of the most unlikely attendees waited solemnly to step forward. Read more

WWII

Colonel William O. Darby and the U.S. Army Rangers

On the morning of Friday, February 18, 1944, fresh groups of German panzergrenadiers backed by tanks swept south from their defensive positions at Anzio and overran American forward positions at Aprilia, eight miles north of the landing beaches. Read more

WWII

Marine Sergeant Mitchell Paige: Valor on Guadalcanal

As the 33 men of his machine-gun platoon set up their four s along the ridge facing south toward a jungle-shrouded ravine on Guadalcanal where the Japanese were massing for an attack on the evening of October 25, 1942, Marine Sergeant Mitchell Paige crawled in front of their position and rigged a makeshift trip wire designed to alert his troops should Japanese forces approach their line. Read more

WWII

Hitler’s Waffen-SS and the Last Battle in Berlin

In the predawn hours of April 24, 1945, SS-Brigadeführer Gustav Krukenberg received orders from Army Group Vistula defending Berlin to immediately lead the remnants of the 57th Battalion of the 33rd Waffen Grenadier Division of the SS Charlemagne from its staging area at the SS training camp at Neustrelitz to the German capital. Read more

WWII

The RAF’s Dambusting Lancaster Bomber

In the summer of 2018 a British father and son who were catching crabs along Reculver Beach in Kent stumbled upon a historical item of intense value. Read more

WWII

Sinking Japanese Submarine I-1

Gordon Bridson was born in Wellington, New Zealand, in 1909, but shortly thereafter his family moved to Auckland, where he attended Auckland Grammar School. Read more

WWII

The Fight for Bougainville

The bloody fight for Guadalcanal, where the string of Japanese conquests in the Pacific had finally run its course, was a turning point of World War II. Read more

WWII

D-Day Assault on Juno Beach

Most students of World War II know that there were five invasion beaches included in Operation Overlord, the invasion of northwestern Europe, on June 6, 1944. Read more

WWII

Jimmy Doolittle: The Warrior from Shangri-La

Shortly after the Japanese sneak attack on Pearl Harbor on December 7, 1941, President Franklin D. Roosevelt remarked that he would like to bomb the enemy homeland in revenge as soon as possible. Read more

WWII

What the Devil’s Brigade Did in World War II

When General George C. Marshall visited London in April 1942, the new chief of the British Combined Operations Command, Lord Louis Mountbatten, introduced him to a “very odd-looking individual … [who] talks well and may have an important contribution to make.” Read more

WWII

Clash of Heavy Tanks at Cologne

Sergeant Nicholas Mashlonik watched closely as the Panzerkampfwagen (PzKpfw) VI Tiger heavy tank rampaged through the village of Elsdorf in the Rhineland-Westphalia region of Germany on February 27, 1945. Read more

WWII

Remembering D-Day

Few events in human history have been so fraught with drama as the Allied invasion of Normandy on June 6, 1944. Read more

WWII

USS West Virginia survived Pearl Harbor to reach Tokyo Bay.

Her wounds had been grievous that morning in 1941, when Japanese torpedo bombers swept low over the shallow waters of Pearl Harbor and unleashed their deadly cargoes at the easy targets moored along Battleship Row. Read more

WWII

German Bombing of Bath

On Monday evening, April 27, 1942, Kathleen Stainer and her family readied themselves for sleep in the English countryside. Read more

WWII

Recording the Pearl Harbor Attack

Fort MacArthur in San Pedro, California was established by the U.S. Army in 1914 as a Coast Artillery installation to defend the harbors of Long Beach and Los Angeles. Read more

WWII

Lucian K. Truscott: The Soldier’s General

In his Maxims of War, Napoleon Bonaparte wrote, “It is exceptional and difficult to find in one man all the qualities necessary for a great general. Read more