WWII
Background: In this, the third and final installment of a three-part series excerpted from The Lions of Carentan, the 2011 book by a respected German military historian, Fallschirmjäger Regiment 6 (FJR 6) has been pushed out of Ste.-Mère-église, Read more
WWII
Background: Fallschirmjäger Regiment 6, under the command of Major Friedrich August Freiherr von der Heydte, had the fortune (or misfortune) to be stationed in Normandy at the time of the Allied invasion of France on June 6, 1944. Read more
WWII
Background: Fallschirmjäger Regiment 6 was organized in February 1943, under the command of Major Egon Liebach. It was part of the 2nd Fallschirmjäger Division and was stationed in France, where it trained in parachute and glider operations. Read more
WWII
During the late morning of August 8, 1944, the day famed tank commander Michael Wittmann would meet his end in combat, German SS-Oberführer (Colonel) Kurt “Panzer” Meyer sat in his staff car as his driver made his way toward the town of Cintheaux, France, near the front lines. Read more
WWII
This picture was taken by Army Pfc. Sidney Gutelewitz roughly a month after the D-Day Invasion, according to the Los Angeles Times. Read more
WWII
The Battle of the Atlantic was a life-and-death struggle between the German Kriegsmarine and the Allied navies that was fought for control of Britain’s lifeline to its empire and to the United States. Read more
WWII
The men and women who imagined and then built the atomic bomb thought they were doing something different from what makers of “conventional” weapons did. Read more
WWII
In an age before television and instant communications, Americans wanted to see what was going on in the world’s “deadliest conflict in human history,” and LIFE magazine was making a name for itself as THE war magazine during World War II. Read more
WWII
Some 16 million Americans served during World War II, and tens of thousands of sons of the State of Louisiana served in every branch of the U.S. Read more
WWII
“When 400,000 men couldn’t get home, home came for them.” These words could not better describe the amazing effort that the British military and civilian volunteers put toward saving the British and French soldiers trapped at Dunkirk. Read more
WWII
In early 1945, the island of Iwo Jima in the Volcanoes Group, only 660 miles from the Japanese capital of Tokyo, became the focus of the American drive across the Pacific Ocean during World War II. Read more
WWII
At exactly three o’clock in the afternoon on February 25, 1944, a crowd gathered at the Boston Navy Yard for the commissioning ceremony of the USS O’Brien (DD725), a destroyer of the Sumner class. Read more
WWII
The island of Guadalcanal loomed in the distance as the warships of Task Force 36.1 approached the waters of Iron Bottom Sound on July 5, 1943. Read more
WWII
The Time magazine article was titled “It Flies!” It was a note of triumph and vindication, but also an epitaph, of an aircraft that was five years in the making—the “Spruce Goose,” a plane that should not have existed. Read more
WWII
On a serene Sunday morning the residents of Oahu enjoyed the dawning of another gorgeous day in paradise. Read more
WWII
Although located 420 miles west of Tokyo, the city of Hiroshima is today a tourist mecca, drawing tens of thousands of visitors from around the world for one single reason: to stand at the epicenter of history’s first nuclear explosion used against an enemy population. Read more
WWII
May 16, 1943, had been a sweltering spring day in England. At 9:39 pm, as the sun was dipping below the western horizon, leaving a rim of light and still good visibility, the first three of 19 Avro Lancaster bombers of No. Read more
WWII
After the carrier attack by the Imperial Japanese Navy (IJN) on Pearl Harbor, Hawaii, on December 7, 1941, Japanese forces conducted offensive operations across an incredibly broad front of 7,000 miles from Singapore to Midway Island. Read more
WWII
After the Battle of the Bulge delayed their advance by six critical weeks, the British, U.S., and Canadian armies went on the offensive in mid-January 1945 and pushed toward the German frontier. Read more
WWII
On September 17, 1944, a massive but hastily planned airborne invasion of the Netherlands was launched. Codenamed Market-Garden, the operation called for three Allied airborne divisions (British 1st and American 82nd and 101st) to land along a narrow corridor reaching from advanced positions along the Dutch-Belgian border to a bridgehead on the northern bank of the Rhine River at Arnhem. Read more
