WWII

WWII

Teddy Roosevelt Jr.: Rare Photos from His Funeral in Normandy

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 Codebreakers’ War in the Atlantic

By Gene J. Pfeffer

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 Against the Bomb

By Andrew J. Rotter

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

LIFE Photographer Ralph Morse’s War

By Susan Zimmerman

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

Battle of Graignes: An HQ Company’s Heroic Last Stand in Normandy

By Martin K.A. Morgan

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

The New Trailer For the Film Dunkirk Will Give You Chills

“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

Iwo Jima: Primary Objective of the South Pacific

By Mike Haskew

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

The Amazing Voyages of the USS O’Brien

By Eric Niderost

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

Shootout in Kula Gulf

By John Damagalski

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 First and Last Flight of the Spruce Goose

By Allyn Vannoy

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

How Many Japanese Planes Were Shot Down During Pearl Harbor?

By Tom Yarborough

On a serene Sunday morning the residents of Oahu enjoyed the dawning of another gorgeous day in paradise. Read more

WWII

Hiroshima’s Ground Zero Museum

By Flint Whitlock

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

Operation Chastise: Night of the Dambusters

By Mark Simmons

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

Fighting Back in Papua New Guinea

By Jon Diamond

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

The U.S. Ninth Army’s Breakout: Crossing the Roer and the Rhine

By Michael D. Hull

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

The Guns of Finger Ridge: Airborne Artillery on the Defense in Market-Garden

By Joseph S. Covais

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

WWII

Blitzkrieg 1940: From the Invasion of Holland to the Fall of France

By John Brown

The ancient Chinese military strategist Sun Tzu wrote, “Go forth to the enemy’s positions to which he must race. Read more

WWII

The Battle of Biak: “A Terrifying Glimpse Into the Soul of Mankind”

By David Alan Johnson

“All I knew about Biak was that it was an island a degree south of the equator, one of the Schouten group lying north of Geelvink Bay toward the western end of New Guinea.” Read more

WWII

Operation Market Garden: the 82nd Airborne Division’s Pivotal Role

By Martin K.A. Morgan

By mid-August 1944, roughly one month before the now-famous Operation Market Garden, the U.S. Army’s 82nd Airborne Division had been fighting off and on for over a year. Read more

WWII

The Bombing of Berlin by Doolittle’s Eighth Air Force

By Robert F. Dorr

He was widely regarded as America’s best pilot, he was already a recipient of the Medal of Honor, he was commander of the Eighth Air Force caught up in 1,000-plane bombing missions deep into the Third Reich, and he was mad as hell. Read more