WWII Archives

Traversing the rugged terrain of the interior of Burma, tanks of the 19th Indian “Dagger” Division roll down a dirt path while infantrymen pause to glance at the armored vehicles. General William Slim, commander of the British 14th Army, led his forces from the brink of total defeat to victory over the Japanese in the China-Burma-India Theater.

WWII

Out of Defeat, a Hard-Won Triumph

By Michael D. Hull

One ominous day in mid-May 1942, Lt. Gen. William J. Slim stood on the Imphal Plain, high in the Assam hills of northeastern India, and watched columns of tattered, malaria-ridden British, Indian, and Burmese soldiers straggle across the frontier from Burma. Read more

Soldiers of the U.S. 5th Infantry Division, part of General George S. Patton’s Third Army, march through the snowy streets of the town of Ettelbruck, Luxembourg, in January 1945. These soldiers were involved in the Allied counteroffensive that reduced the bulge formed by the German Ardennes Offensive. Some of these soldiers are wearing white sheets as camouflage.

WWII

Flattening the Bulge

By Patrick J. Chaisson

Corporal Thomas B. Tucker stood shivering in the bitterly cold night air as he looked down on a ribbon of water that separated his unit from the enemy’s front-line positions. Read more

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

Gray Wolves and the Ides of March

By Kelly Bell

Adolf Hitler and his military commanders were feeling a new and unsettling emotion early in 1943—desperation. A year earlier, they had seemed on top of the world as their forces ruled a region that surpassed Rome at its greatest. Read more

A tank crew of the 2nd Cavalry Regiment waits patiently for a French woman and her cow to cross a rain soaked road near the town of Luneville in the fall of 1944. The regiment was a component of the 4th Armored Division and played a key role in disrupting a German attempt to cut the 4th Armored off and destroy it. A derelict German helmet lies in the roadway.

WWII

Cavalrymen Stand at Luneville

By Allyn Vannoy

Lieutenant Wessling did not believe that his two 75mm assault guns could effectively deal with the German panzers. Read more

WWII

Fork-tailed Devil

By David H. Lippman

Technically and visibly, it was unique among World War II fighters. The P-38 stood on tricycle landing gear, with its twin Allison engines in separate booms and the pilot sitting in his cockpit in a cupola between the booms. Read more

After completing a reconnaissance mission in the jungles of Guadalcanal, a group of U.S. Marines poses for a photographer while delivering a Japanese prisoner for interrogation. The Marine at right has taken a Japanese sword as a souvenir. Prisoners were rarely taken in the Pacific, as Japanese soldiers preferred suicide to captivity.

WWII

Bare-knuckle Brawl at Guadalcanal

By Michael E. Haskew

Even after their stunning defeat at Midway in early June 1942, senior commanders of the Imperial Japanese armed forces were resolute in their grand plan to extend their defensive perimeter in the Pacific. Read more

WWII

During the Second Happy Time, the destroyer USS Roper struck a blow against marauding U-boats.

British Prime Minister Winston Churchill once admitted that the only issue to trouble him to the extent that he thought World War II might be lost was the uncertainty of the Battle of the Atlantic and the U-boat peril that threatened to starve the British Isles into submission. Read more

An Afrika Korps antiaircraft gun crew scans the sky for enemy planes in 1941. Homeland antiaircraft units were also raised in Germany to augment the air defenses against massive Allied bombing raids.

WWII

Defending the Skies Above the Reich

By Allyn Vannoy

During the Allied air campaign against the Third Reich in World War II, well over a million tons of bombs were dropped on German territory, killing nearly 300,000 civilians and wounding another 780,000. Read more

$The three leaders with advisors during the Yalta Conference. The relationship between Churchill and Stalin was at times fractious, but the leaders managed to maintain the alliance that eventually defeated Nazi Germany and Imperial Japan.$

WWII

The Uneasy Alliance

By Jon Diamond

In the Grand Alliance volume of Winston S. Churchill’s memoirs of the Second World War, the British prime minister lambasted his new ally, Josef Stalin, after Operation Barbarossa, the German invasion of the Soviet Union, began on June 22, 1941. Read more

American OSS officers accompanied by Chetnik guerrillas on the move from the original evacuation airstrip in Pranjani, Serbia in anticipation of Soviet Red Army advances, September 10, 1944. The OSS officers were part of OSS operations Halyard and Ranger.

WWII

Hazardous Balkan Air Rescue

By Kevin Morrow

Black puffs from flak bursts began blossoming in the air around Lieutenant Tom Oliver’s Consolidated B-24 Liberator bomber high over the town of Bor, Yugoslavia. Read more

WWII

British Paratrooper, 1st Airborne Division, Arnhem 1944

By William E. Welsh, Illustration by Johnny Shumate

The British Air Ministry established the British Airborne forces on June 22, 1940, at the request of Prime Minister Winston Churchill. Read more

WWII

Second Lieutenant Ernest “Red Eagle” Childers

By William F. Floyd, Jr.

After three years of brutal warfare in World War II, the Italians in July 1943 overthrew fascist leader Benito Mussolini in the hope of obtaining a separate armistice with the Allies. Read more

U.S. Marines cautiously advance after landing on February 19, 1945. U.S. forces needed the tiny island as a stepping stone for a possible invasion of Japan.

WWII

The Grinding Horror of Iwo Jima

By Joshua Shepherd

For the men of the 28th Marine Regiment, the morning of February 19, 1945, brought a sobering moment of truth. Read more

WWII

Chariot of Fire

By Alan Davidge

The year 1942 started disastrously for Britain, just as 1941 had ended badly for the United States. Japan’s entry into the war not only devastated the U.S. Read more

WWII

Flying “The Jug”

By Janis Allen

BACKSTORY: 2nd Lt. Edwin Cottrell served in the U.S. Army Air Forces from August 1942 through 1945, then enlisted in the Air Force Reserves in 1950 and completed 28 years in uniform, retiring as a colonel in the Air Force. Read more

WWII

Throwing Heroes Under the Bus

Here at WWII Quarterly, and in all my book writing, I spend a lot of time advancing my deeply held belief that military heroes—men and women who, over the decades, have put their lives on the line (and sometimes gave their lives in the process) to serve their country for a higher ideal and the causes for which they fought—deserve our enduring praise. Read more

As museum visitors emerge from the trench-like entrance of the Nation Overseas Gallery, cast figures, lighting effects, imagery, and sounds of distant battle recreate a setting based on a famous photograph of the Meuse-Argonne Offensive.

WWII

The long-awaited National Museum of the U.S. Army is a stunning tribute to America’s oldest branch of service.

by LTC Adam Morgan

After many years of planning, fundraising and construction, the spectacular, long-awaited National Museum of the United States Army was finally opened on Veterans Day, 2020, promptly shut down due to Coronavirus restrictions, and has reopened. Read more

WWII

The Legacy of Justice Jackson

A few weeks ago, I was able to take a long-delayed summer vacation, this time to New England, where I took in the Maine Maritime Museum and Bath Iron Works (where many American warships were constructed in WWII—and are still being built). Read more