WWII

Donning camouflage, a team of OSS operatives lands ashore. Despite initial skepticism, the OSS more than proved its worth during numerous operations in Italy and North Africa.

WWII

OSS Operation Ginny

By Don Smart

The three rubber dinghies struggled through the rough surf in the pitch black night toward an inhospitable stretch of rocky beach. Read more

Soldiers watch from a distance as the Warsaw Ghetto burns.

WWII

Warsaw 1943: A War of Desperation

By Kelly Bell

In April 1940, Adolf Hitler’s SS began building a walled compound in occupied Warsaw in which to imprison Jews who had survived the previous autumn’s bitter fighting as the German juggernaut romped through western Poland. Read more

Masses of SS, SA, and members of the German army crowd the docks at Wilhelmshaven during the launching ceremonies for the pocket battleship Admiral Scheer. The Scheer was arguably the most successful German surface raider of WWII.

WWII

Marauding Kriegsmarine Raider

By Ralph Segman

Say the words “pocket battleship” and up pops the name Admiral Graf Spee. Her two sister ships, the Deutschland/Lutzow and the Admiral Scheer are virtually unknown to Americans. Read more

American soldiers rush to cross the captured Ludendorff railroad bridge over the Rhine River at Remagen, Germany, captured largely intact, by Combat Command B from the 9th Armored Division. The German officers in charge of defending, then destroying, the bridge at Remagen were court martialed and shot.

WWII

The Bridge at Remagen

By Victor Kamenir

By the end of January 1945, Hitler’s desperate Ardennes Offensive had ground to a halt. Though the last-ditch push to the west had inflicted heavy casualties on American forces, it was the German army that suffered irreplaceable losses in men, equipment, and materiel and was no longer capable of offensive operations. Read more

An M4 Sherman medium tank of the U.S. Army enters Old Fort Santiago in the city of Manila after the bitter fighting to liberate the “Pearl of the Orient” from Japanese occupation. This photo was taken on February 26, 1945

WWII

Destroying the Pearl: Liberation of Manila

By David H. Lippman

The “Pearl of the Orient” had lost all of its luster by January 1945.

Three years of brutal Japanese occupation had left many of Manila’s 800,000 native residents humiliated, tortured, or dead. Read more

WWII

WWII Spies: Oreste Pinto

By Robert Whiter

Two men were seated on either side of a paper-strewn table inside an office of MI5, the British intelligence service, in the Royal Victoria Patriotic School at Clapham, London, shortly after the fall of France in the spring of 1940. Read more

WWII

Roads to Bastogne

By Edward P. Beck

The Ardennes Forest in eastern Belgium seemed almost surreal in the last days of autumn 1944, a quiet backwater in a raging storm. Read more

During the daring mission to evacuate General Douglas MacArthur from the Philippines, a PT boat slices through the Pacific Ocean at high speed.

WWII

Mission for Mac Arthur

By Captain Lee R. Mandel, Medical Corps, U.S. Navy

In modern naval history, there is perhaps no more colorful figure than the late Vice Admiral John Duncan Bulkeley. Read more

From Around the Network

  • Goose-stepping German soldiers parade through the streets of Bergen, Norway, after occupying the country in a swift operation that began on April 9, 1940.

    Book Reviews

    Minge, Ward and Brun’s ‘The Viking Battalion’
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  • While the National Army Museum lacks the space for extensive display of vehicles or field guns, the outside is usually “protected” by an armored vehicle or two.

    Military Museums

    London’s National Army Museum
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  • Civil War

    The Crater: Explosion of Death
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