WWII

WWII

Heroic Warsaw Airlift

Warsaw was burning. Captain Jack Van Eyssen first saw it as a dull glow on the night horizon, 35 miles distant. Read more

WWII

Junkers Ju-87 Stuka: What Made the Luftwaffe Vulture so Fearsome

One of the deadliest and most effective airplanes of the Axis powers, the Junkers Ju-87 Stuka, owed its origin to a fearless World War I ace and, ironically, to innovative American aviation visionaries in the peaceful early 1930s. Read more

WWII

Battle of Berlin Prelude: Küstrin, and Death on the Oder

 “We felt that we were already dead men,” wrote former Captain Albrecht Wüstenhagen in a May 1988 letter to the author of his time in the fortress garrison of Küstrin. Read more

WWII

The T-34 Tank: The Story of Soviet Russia’s Rugged Armored Vehicle

December 1941 was a dark month and the end of a dark year for the Soviets as the Germans pressed ever onward toward Moscow, the lair where Joseph Stalin and his minions plotted what to do next against the Nazi juggernaut that had, in a few short months, rolled over everything before them. Read more

WWII

A Tale of Two German Snipers on WWII’s Eastern Front

The three Soviet T-34 tanks edged forward slowly as the drivers scanned for the concealed Germans that lay ahead. Read more

WWII

The Battle of Carentan: “You’re Gonna Die Here!”

“Move out!” shouted Lieutenant Richard “Dick” Winters to the men of Easy Company. It was 6 o’clock on the morning of June 12, 1944, and Easy Company’s paratroopers braced themselves to attack the southern section of Carentan. Read more

WWII

Ireland in World War II: The Swastika vs. The Shamrock

The south of Ireland, officially known as Eire and often referred to by many residing there as the “Free State,” declared its neutrality when World War II erupted suddenly in September 1939. Read more

WWII

The Soviet Invasion of Manchuria led to Japan’s Greatest Defeat

By Nathan N. Prefer

To the Soviet military, it is known as the Manchurian Strategic Offensive Operation. Although it had no official name to the Japanese, it has become known in the West as Operation August Storm.  Read more

WWII

The General Patton Memorial Museum

Thirty miles east of Indio, California, is the General Patton Memorial Museum, a special museum dedicated to General George S. Read more

WWII

Pearl Harbor Attack Cover-up

BACKSTORY: Although for the past 75 years history has had little to say about “Bally’s Project,” an effort to falsify State Department records to remove evidence of gross miscalculations prior to the attack on Pearl Harbor—the author recently discovered a small file of documents in the Frank A. Read more

WWII

The U.S. Navy’s Seabees: Bulldozing a Road to Victory

By Glenn Barnett

As war clouds gathered over the vast Pacific Ocean in the late 1930s, the United States belatedly began to think of protecting the nation’s possessions of far-flung islands and atolls. Read more

WWII

Fighting Across Europe with the 101st Airborne

“Oui.” It was one of the few words 101st Airborne paratrooper Norwood Thomas knew in French, and it served him well on the morning of June 6, 1944. Read more

WWII

Stalling Hitler’s Panzers at Mortain

A column of German Mark V Panther tanks advanced through a thick fog north of the French town of Mortain, blindly firing their machine guns. Read more

WWII

The Liberation of Nordhausen Concentration Camp

After leading his U.S. 3rd Armored “Spearhead” Division on the longest, one-day, enemy-opposed mechanized advance in American history, Maj. Read more

WWII

USS Nevada’s Run to the Sea

During the dark daysof December 1941, when it seemed as if American and British bases were falling like dominoes across the Pacific, two incidents during the Japanese attack on the naval base at Pearl Harbor gave American morale a much needed boost. Read more

WWII

World War II Soldier’s First Combat: “You Learn Fast”

Private Armand Lorenzi and his fellow soldiers were advancing through a snowy German forest when enemy machine guns opened fire. Read more

WWII

Operation Barbarossa: How Stalin was Blindsided by Berlin

By Richard Z. Freemann, Jr.

“War is mainly a catalogue of blunders.”   

—Winston Churchill (1950)

On Sunday, June 22, 1941, as the sun slumbered, 3.6 million soldiers, 2,000 warplane pilots, and 3,350 tank commanders under skilled German command crouched at the border of Soviet-occupied Poland ready to invade the Communist nation Joseph Stalin had ruled with steel-fisted brutality for years.  Read more

WWII

Armored Clash in Alsace-Lorraine

The American light tanks, bringing up much needed supplies, were in column as they began to take fire. Read more

WWII

Dumbos, Black Cats, and Coastwatchers during World War II

Even after the Battle of Midway in June 1942, the Japanese were still in a commanding position in the western Pacific. Read more

WWII

World War II British Submarine Operations in the Pacific

By Arnold Blumberg

During World War II, after the Royal Navy’s traumatic departure from the Pacific Ocean in early 1942, the 4th Submarine Flotilla and its depot ship, the HMS Adamant, operated with the Eastern Fleet based at Trincomalee––a large, natural harbor located on the coast of Sri Lanka in the heart of the Indian Ocean. Read more