WWII
On May 4, 1943, the U.S. Army Air Forces’ 56th Fighter Group was ordered to meet a formation of Boeing B-17 Flying Fortress heavy bombers returning from a run over Antwerp, Belgium. Read more
WWII
The interest in Brigadier Orde Wingate, founder and leader of the Commonwealth Chindits or Special Force, persists to this day, more than 75 years after his fiery death after his B-25 Mitchell bomber crashed in the hills of India. Read more
WWII
After the British Expeditionary Force’s (BEF) debacle at Dunkirk in northern France in May 1940, the new prime minister, Winston Churchill, needed a novel type of fighting force to strike back at Nazi Europe. Read more
WWII
Rostov was the key to the Caucasus and the rich Soviet oil fields that lay along the Black and Caspian Seas. Read more
WWII
The Fletcher-class destroyer was one of the finest, most versatile warships of World War II. More than 170 of them were built, a figure that far exceeds the total of any other type of warship of the era. Read more
WWII
War spared no one. As modern armies clashed in France’s Normandy countryside, French civilians found themselves in the crossfire or on the receiving end of bombs and heavy weapons. Read more
WWII
The Germans were gone. After more than four years of occupation, the soldiers of the Wehrmacht had been evicted from France’s Normandy region by the American and British armies. Read more
WWII
At the dawn of the Cold War, the United States probed the potential destructive power of nuclear weapons, particularly their effect on warships. Read more
WWII
The morning of February 16, 1944, dawned foggy over the Via Anziate near Anzio, Italy. The 45th Infantry Division’s 2nd Battalion, 157th Infantry Regiment had advanced overnight to take positions on the west side of the roadway, assuming its place on the front lines. Read more
WWII
The last train west chugged across the River Bug to the German-occupied side of the Russo-German border at 0200 on June 22, 1941. Read more
WWII
The word itself was bland. “Motti” is Finnish for a “bundle of sticks,” but the theory was how the tiny armies of Finland would deal with the long columns of Soviet troops that had been storming down the roads and logging the trails of that nation’s sub-Arctic wilderness since the Russo-Finland War broke out on November 29, 1939. Read more
WWII
By Patrick J. Chaisson
It was an amphibious commander’s worst nightmare—swarms of enemy tanks, spitting death with every cannon shell and machine-gun burst, smashing through the American beachhead. Read more
WWII
To this day, controversy continues to swirl around Operation Shingle and its agonizing aftermath. The Allied landings at Anzio, intended to outflank the German Gustav Line in Italy, occurred in January 1944. Read more
WWII
The original Steel Division first brought its real-time strategizing to PCs back in May of 2017, putting players in intense battles throughout Normandy, France, during World War II. Read more
WWII
If General Omar N. Bradley was “the GIs’ general,” then their best friend in World War II was undoubtedly a small, stringy reporter with graying red hair from Indiana who shared their foxholes and hardships while slogging across five battlefronts. Read more
WWII
Fregattenkapitän (Commander) Otto Kretschmer sank or damaged more Allied ships than any other U-boat commander during World War II. Read more
WWII
After more than two wearying years of seesaw fighting across the North African desert, the outlook was bleak for the British Eighth Army in the early summer of 1942. Read more
WWII
Gunther Prien grew up at sea, joining the merchant service as a cabin boy at 15. In October 1939, with World War II just a month old, the 31-year-old Prien stood in the conning tower of U-47, a German U-boat plying the North Sea toward the United Kingdom. Read more
WWII
Six months after the attack on Pearl Harbor, Admiral Isoroku Yamamoto, commander of the Combined Fleet of the Imperial Japanese Navy, sought to extend Japan’s defensive perimeter in the central Pacific with the seizure of Midway atoll, about 1,300 miles west of Hawaii. Read more
WWII
The German commander at the Battle of Aschaffenburg, Major Emil Lamberth, was a World War I veteran who had arrived in the city in June 1944 to assume command of the 9th Pioneer (Engineer) Battalion. Read more
