WWII Archives

WWII

Across the Wide River

By David H. Lippman

Major Julian A. Cook stood on the ninth floor of a power plant west of the Dutch city of Nijmegen and stared north across the 400 yards of the fast-moving Waal River at German defensive positions on the other side—the square turn-of-the-century Dutch Fort Hof van Holland, its machine-gun emplacements, 20mm guns, and dug-in troopers of the 10th SS Panzer Division. Read more

Movie theater poster for the 1951 Allied Artists film based on the amazing life of Claire Phillips, starring Ann Dvorak. Phillips was a consultant on the production.

WWII

“Manila’s Mata Hari”

By Sig Unander

It is a usual evening at Club Tsubaki, wartime Manila’s most exclusive nightspot. On stage, a statuesque brunette in a clinging white dress, olive skin, and raven hair illuminated by a spotlight, is singing a “torch” song in a low, seductive voice, dark eyes flashing. Read more

Forced south along the coast after their sterling performance at the Battle of Abbeville, the Argyll and Sutherland Highlanders, part of the 51st Highland Division, hold the line at the River Bresle.

WWII

Still Fighting After Dunkirk

By Alan Davidge

Background: When the German army burst through Belgium’s Ardennes Forest in May 1940, it cut the Allies’ front line in half, then turned northwards through France towards the Channel coast. Read more

British commandos sit aboard a Whitworth Whitley aircraft during exercises.

WWII

Operation Biting: ‘The Bruneval Raid’

By Nathan N. Prefer

By January 1942, Britain was still in the fight of her life. Germany had occupied all western Europe, controlled the Mediterranean, and was threatening British colonies in North Africa. Read more

WWII

Letters from Oblivion: Auschwitz and Buchenwald

By Katrina Shawver

Henry Zguda, a Polish Catholic, spent three and a half years interned at Auschwitz and Buchenwald as a political prisoner. Read more

Caught in an attack by U.S. Army Air Forces bombers, a Japanese merchant ship takes hits off the coast of Dutch New Guinea during a June 1944 raid. Codebreaking work by cryptanalysts like Sergeant Joseph Richard helped detect enemy convoy movements.

WWII

Codebreaking Sergeant Richard

By Patrick J. Chaisson

Wewak Convoy 21 was being annihilated, and the Japanese Army could do nothing to stop it.

The first vessel to die was Yakumo Maru. Read more

In this painting by artist Gary Sheahan titled “Birth of the Atomic Age,” scientist Enrico Fermi and his colleagues anxiously proceed with the first sustained nuclear chain reaction in history at the University of Chicago.

WWII

First Sustained Nuclear Reaction

By Eric Niderost

Enrico Fermi’s face was a study in concentration as his fingers deftly moved across the well-worn surface of his slide rule. Read more

WWII

Conrad Veidt Lived Out His Anti-Nazi Commitment

The 1942 film Casablanca remains one of the most popular Hollywood creations of all time, immortalizing the characters played by Humphrey Bogart (Rick Blaine) and Ingrid Bergman (Ilsa Lund). Read more

A Tiger tank of Waffen SS division Das Reich goes into action against Soviet forces in the southern part of the Kursk salient. Its 88mm gun could penetrate the armor of a Soviet T-34 at 1,800 yards.

WWII

Last Lunge in the East

By Victor Kamenir

Soviet machine-gunner Mykhailo Petrik and his platoon comrades lay in their makeshift bunker on the open steppe land 30 miles northwest of Belgorod awaiting the enemy’s advance on the first day of the titanic clash at Kursk. Read more

Six steward’s mates who received Bronze Stars for heroism pose aboard the USS Intrepid around the gun they manned until a Japanese kamikaze dive-bomber crashed into their position, July 28, 1945.

WWII

My War On Two Fronts

By J. (Joseph) Conklin Lanier, II

How I, then a teenager of African descent, found myself thousands of miles away from my placid, rural Mississippi home and on a dangerous volcanic island known as Iwo Jima in the middle of the Pacific Ocean, where tens of thousands of men met violent deaths, is a journey at which I still marvel today, some 65 years later. Read more

WWII

For All The Wrong Reasons

By Edward G. Miller

Hürtgen Forest. Chilling rain, freezing fog, mud, impenetrable forest. Unremitting misery for GIs and Landsers alike. War correspondent Ernest Hemingway famously called it “Passchendaele with tree bursts.” Read more

Twenty-two members of the Nazi regime on trial at Nuremberg for their part in war crimes. This, the first of 13 tribunals, lasted 11 months—from November 1945 until October 1946. Ten men were hanged; three committed suicide in prison.

WWII

Was There Justice at Nuremberg?

By Blaine Taylor

After Imperial Germany lost the Great War (1914-1918), the Treaty of Versailles punished her severely in terms of ruinous restitution payments to the victors, economic sanctions, the loss of territory and colonies, the forced abdication of Kaiser Wilhelm II, and the heavy restrictions imposed on her armed forces. Read more

A little girl hands a flower to a lieutenant of the 110th Infantry Regiment, 28th Infantry Division, as flag-waving Luxembourgers welcome the liberating Yanks to their village, September 1944. Unfortunately, the celebration was premature; the Germans launched a counteroffensive that became known as the Battle of the Bulge three months later and nearly drove the Americans out of Luxembourg. Tom Myers was a soldier in the 110th Infantry whose unit was caught up in the chaos.

WWII

The Fight for Weiler

By Allyn Vannoy

IN a house in a small, nameless Belgian village, 26-year-old Sergeant Tom Myers, a newly assigned member of the 5th Armored Division, was upstairs changing his filthy uniform for a fresh one. Read more

San Francisco residents snap up the latest editions of the city’s newspapers and try to separate fact from rumor amid a swirl of information related to enemy activity in the early days of the war. The Japanese made numerous attempts to bring the war home to the U.S. West Coast, including submarines surfacing off the coast to shell targets or attempting to launch attack aircraft.

WWII

War on the West Coast

By Glenn Barnett

Throughout World War II, the Imperial Japanese Navy dreamed of taking the war to the West Coast of the United States. Read more

Robert Capa’s famous blurry image of the 1st Infantry Division’s amphibious landings at the Easy Red/Fox Green sectors of Omaha Beach indelibly captures the fear and chaos of the D-Day invasion. Four rolls of Capa’s film were rushed back to LIFE magazine’s London office, where a darkroom mistake ruined all but 11 images.

WWII

“A Hell of a Good Place to Die”

By Christopher Miskimon

Corporal Michael Kurtz stood on the deck of an attack transport ship sitting off the Normandy coast. Gazing out over the ship’s railing in the pre-dawn hours, he could see the ship’s crew working the davits and ropes for the landing craft. Read more

Arthur Beaumont’s depiction of the Japanese first wave attack that destroyed several VMF-211 aircraft and killed 23 Marines. A total of 52 U.S. military personnel died during the 16-day battle and over 400 were taken prisoner.

WWII

Wake Island: Japan’s First Setback

By Nathan N. Prefer

It didn’t look like much—just a speck in the vast ocean. Most travelers spent only a night in the Pan American Hotel and never ventured far from the small adjoining airfield. Read more

WWII

Faces of War

A Photo Essay By Eric Hammel

Noted chronicler of the Pacific Theater Eric Hammel recently spent three years sorting, scanning, cleaning, selecting, and captioning United States Marine Corps World War II photos for six pictorial books. Read more

A British M4 Sherman medium tank races past a knocked-out German PzKpfw. IV tank during the desperate fight for control of the crossroads and communications hub of Caen during the weeks after D-Day. Allied planners had projected that Caen would be in British hands on D-Day itself; however, a month of bitter fighting was required for Allied forces to capture the town.

WWII

Panzer Fury at Caen

By Kelly Bell

The black uniformed German panzer crews climbed into their Panther tanks at 10 pm on June 8, 1944. Read more

Two 100-pound Siberian Huskies await takeoff from a Canadian airfield. A flight surgeon, with protective gear and mask, is responsible for getting them out of the plane.

WWII

Raining Dogs! U.S. Army Parachute Animals in World War II

By Michael Dolan and Kevin Hymel

The U.S. Army trained dogs for a number of tasks during World War II. From checking for mines to guarding prisoners of war, the dogs performed admirably, but a few special dogs actually earned jump wings. Read more