WWII

WWII

Operation Shoestring

The night of October 26, 1942, was a hellish time for the soldiers and Marines on Guadalcanal, and it was about to get worse. Read more

WWII

Naomi Parker Fraley, the real “Rosie the Riveter,” has died at the age of 96.

She was just 20 years old, wearing coveralls, her hair in a polka-dot bandanna, operating a lathe on the floor of the machine shop at the Alameda Naval Air Station in California when the photographer snapped the photograph that became a poster that became a legend. Read more

WWII

The Ill-Fated Goettge Patrol

The summer of 1942 had brought uplifting news for the United States in the Pacific Theater. After a numbing series of setbacks, including the December 1941 surprise attack on Pearl Harbor and the subsequent fall of Guam and the Philippines, the nation’s Navy had husbanded its depleted forces and, with the crucial aid of naval intelligence, halted the Japanese in the May 1942 Battle of the Coral Sea and the June Battle of Midway. Read more

WWII

April World War II Games

It’s been a good year or so for one of the most famous military operations in World War II history. Read more

WWII

Dealers of Death

Lyudmila Pavlichenko had not moved for more than 24 hours. She was a small, stout 25-year-old woman able to crawl on her belly for hours at a time. Read more

WWII

Redemption at Hill 609

The inexperienced U.S. Army matured rapidly during the fighting in North Africa. There was no other choice. Its British allies had been immersed in World War II since 1939 and gained a hardened edge. Read more

WWII

“Unknown” no more.

In the last issue, I wrote about the pain of families of military persons listed as “missing in action.” Shortly after that issue was published, government sources announced that about 30 of the sailors who died when the USS Oklahoma (BB-37) was attacked and sunk at Pearl Harbor on December 7, 1941, and were buried as “unknown” have been identified. Read more

WWII

Bastogne’s Bedsheets: The Story of Lieutenant Colonel John Hanlon

Many people who never knew John Hanlon personally may remember him as that paratrooper who took the sheets back to Bastogne. Read more

WWII

Australian Raiders & The Assault On Singapore Harbor

Hours after Japanese planes bombed Pearl Harbor in December 1941, Japanese troops landed in northern Malaya and began moving south toward Singapore. Read more

WWII

Benito Mussolini & The Fascist March on Rome

On March 23, 1919, but four months after the armistice that ended the Great War—100 young toughs, ex-Italian Army war veterans, former socialist politicians, and newspapermen met in Milan’s Piazza San Sepolchro in industrial northern Italy to form a new political party. Read more

WWII

Portugal during WW2: Covering the Azores Gap

The year 1944 dawned with America already at war for over two years. In an event not marked by history books, the 96th Navy Construction Battalion, Seabees, crossed the Atlantic from Davisville, Rhode Island, on the Abraham Lincoln, a converted banana boat escorted by two destroyers, the USS Ellis and USS Biddle. Read more

WWII

The Battle of Britain: Leadership and Logistics in Britain’s Skies

It was a battle fought without armies. No rifles, no tanks, no barbed wire. In the summer of 1940, the skies above Britain served as the battlefield for the British Royal Air Force and the German Luftwaffe. Read more

WWII

The Lee-Enfield Rifle and its Effectiveness in World War II

By 1901, the Small Arms Committee—the body within the War Office tasked with arming the British Army with weapons—sought to replace their then-standard issue rifle: the Magazine Lee-Metford Rifle Mark II. Read more

WWII

Preview – Attentat 1942

Many of us have friends and family members who served in the military during World War II, but how intimately do we know their story? Read more

WWII

Review – Wolfenstein II: the New Colossus

When last we saw the mighty Captain William J. Blazkowicz, well, he wasn’t looking quite so mighty. Sure, he managed to score a major victory in the battle against the postwar alt-history Nazi regime, but he was left more or less on death’s fickle doorstep. Read more

WWII

Hitler’s blunder resulted in a devastating defeat for the German Army on the Eastern Front.

When Adolf Hitler launched Operation Barbarossa, the Nazi invasion of the Soviet Union, on June 22, 1941, he expected yet another in a string of spectacular victories. Read more

WWII

Operation Frantic On Eastern Front: Preview Of the Cold War

Early on the overcast afternoon of June 2, 1944, three white-starred Boeing B-17 Flying Fortresses in V-formation roared over the Soviet air base at Poltava. Read more

WWII

The Port Chicago Disaster: The Largest Mutiny Trial in U.S. History

After sundown on July 17, something happened at a small port town 40 miles northeast of San Francisco that has never been fully explained…

The 7,500-ton Liberty ship SS E.A. Read more

WWII

Lost, Now Found

A few weeks ago, a surprising story was announced: the wreckage of the heavy cruiser USS Indianapolis, which was torpedoed and sunk by the Japanese submarine I-58 on July 30, 1945, had been located. Read more

WWII

The Killing of Il Duce

At 3 am on Sunday, April 29, 1945, a yellow furniture truck stopped at the Piazzale Loreto, a vast, open traffic roundabout where five roads intersected in the northern Italian city of Milan. Read more