European Theater Archives

European Theater

Too Many Close Calls

By Flint Whitlock

Clarence M. “Monty” Rincker was born in Cheyenne, Wyoming, on September 8, 1922. When he was a year old, his parents bought a farm in eastern Wyoming and the family moved there. Read more

Paratroopers of the 101st Airborne Division march into Bastogne, Belgium, on December 19, 1944. Combat veteran Private Brad Freeman, a mortarman with the division’s East Company, 506th Parachute Infantry Regiment, passed through the town, thinking to himself, “Here we go again.”

European Theater

Easy Company Mortarman in Bastogne

By Kevin Hymel

When word reached 21-year-old Private Bradford “Brad” Freeman in Mourmelon-le-Grand, France, that the entire 101st Airborne Division was being put on 24-hour alert for movement to the front, he was neither surprised nor shocked. Read more

Members of a U.S. Congressional committee investigating German atrocities and war crimes inspect a rocket engine captured at an underground Nazi manufacturing facility at Nordhausen. A top American priority, Operation Paperclip was tasked with gathering German scientists and rocket technology for development in the U.S. after World War II.

European Theater

Operation Paperclip

By Don Smith

At first, Major Robert Staver seemed to have plenty of time. An Army Ordnance officer with a mechanical engineering degree from Stanford, he had been sent to Germany as part of the Combined Intelligence Objectives Subcommittee. Read more

A soldier of Company G, 335th Infantry Regiment, fires on German positions near the town of Beeck, Germany, November 29, 1944. The 335th Regiment was part of the 84th Infantry Division—a training unit deployed to Europe as the U.S. Army experienced a shortage of combat troops.

European Theater

84th Infantry: From Training to Trial

By James G. Bilder

As casualties mounted in the fall of 1944, the U.S. Army began experiencing a problematic manpower shortage in the ranks of its infantry. Read more

European Theater

Finnish Sniper Simo Häyhä

By Ronald Anderson

The 1939 war between Finland and Soviet Russia has been a minor inclusion in most histories of World War II. Read more

Canadian tanks and troops advance across the Liri Valley toward the so-called Hitler Line in May 1944. The tanks seen in the distance likely belong to the 8th “Princess Louise” Hussars, which accompanied the Cape Breton Highlanders during this movement forward in the Italian campaign.

European Theater

Bouncing the Hitler Line

By Patrick J. Chaisson

A Polish flag, followed minutes later by a Union Jack, appeared above the ruins of the abbey on the summit of Italy’s 17,000-foot Monte Cassino. Read more

European Theater

Charles de Gaulle seized the opportunity to oppose the Nazis and assert political control in France.

When Charles de Gaulle flew to London in 1940, his country was on its knees and days later Nazi jackboots were tromping down the Champs Élysées in Paris. Read more

Soldiers of the 320th Barrage Balloon Battalion work on the moorings of a barrage balloon on the coast of Normandy after D-Day. The balloons were made of two-ply cotton fabric impregnated with vulcanized or synthetic rubber, then coated with aluminum. Typically, the balloons were raised in the evening after Allied aircraft had returned to bases in England.

European Theater

African American D-Day Heroes

By Dr. Forest Issac Jones

The heroics of African American soldiers during the D-Day invasion of Normandy on June 6, 1944, have not been taught regularly in high school or college history classes. Read more

The Nazi concentration camp at Dachau was liberated by American soldiers of the 45th Infantry Division, Seventh Army, on April 30, 1945. Prisoners who were able to stand and to comprehend that the hour of deliverance had come cheered the liberators just days before the final collapse of the Third Reich.

European Theater

Evil on Trial

By Flint Whitlock

In the spring of 1945, after more than five-and-a-half years of total, merciless war in Europe––and the deaths of millions of human beings on the battlefields, the bombed-out cities and in the concentration and extermination camps––the carnage and destruction in Europe had finally come to an end. Read more

Armament on display: HMS Warspite, with her 15-inch guns in the forward position, sails from Gibralter through the Mediterranean enroute to take part in support of Operation Husky, the Allied invasion of Sicily, July 1943. By the time she was decommissioned, Warspite had earned the most battle honors ever awarded to an individual ship in the Royal Navy and the most awarded for actions during World War II.

European Theater

The ‘Grand Old Lady’ Packed a Wallop

By Glenn Barnett

HMS Warspite fought in two world wars and several major battles against a combination of enemies to become the most decorated ship ever to serve the Royal Navy. Read more

European Theater

Commandos: Origins

By Joseph Luster

The vaunted Commandos series is going back to the beginning in the latest entry, appropriately titled Commandos: Origins. Read more

During the opening hours of Operation Goodwood, a Sherman tank carrying infantrymen, a Sherman flail tank nicknamed a “Crab,” and a halftrack serving as an ambulance await orders to advance on July 18, 1944. Caen was a D-Day objective, but the Allies were required to fight for weeks to capture the town.

European Theater

Capturing Caen

By Alan Davidge

One of the most important tasks for Allied troops after the D-Day landing was to seize the city of Caen, nine miles behind Sword Beach. Read more

European Theater

Bold Gamble Above Cologne

By Michael D. Hull

Air Chief Marshal Sir Arthur Travers Harris, the burly, red-haired chief of Royal Air Force Bomber Command, was an anxious man on the evening of Saturday, May 30, 1942. Read more

European Theater

Italian Blunder in the Balkans

By Roy Morris, Jr.

A thin shaft of moonlight played over the broad, deserted boulevard leading to the suburban Athens home of Greek Prime Minister John Metaxas on the night of October 28, 1940. Read more

Portuguese soldiers board the passenger ship Mouzinho in Lisbon harbor, April 1941. Their destination was the Azores, where they would reinforce the garrison against the threat of German invasion.

European Theater

Portugal’s Political Tightrope

By B. Paul Hatcher

“With the coming of the Second World War, many eyes in imprisoned Europe turned hopefully, or desperately, toward the freedom of the Americas. Read more

European Theater

Q-Ships in World War II

By William H. Langenberg

As an effective naval weapon, submarines were in their infancy when World War I began in August 1914. Read more

European Theater

The Many Faces of Adolf Hitler

By Kevin M. Hymel

As the Allied armies in the West closed in on Germany in late September 1944, one question began to dog many of democracy’s leaders. Read more

George S. Patton’s bull terrier Wille waits quietly for his late master to return.

European Theater

Patton’s Death

By Blaine Taylor

It was 11:45 am, on December 9, 1945, and former U.S. Third Army Commanding General George Smith Patton, Jr., Read more

European Theater

The Plot Against Einstein

By Eric Niderost

When Albert Einstein arrived in Pasadena, California, in early 1933, he was to take up his duties as visiting professor at the California Institute of Technology for about three months. Read more

American soldiers drive by a destroyed German vehicle and the bodies of its former occupants during the Battle of the Bulge. U.S. Army PFC Frank Cohn and his team were suspected of being German spies when they were stopped and interrogated at an American checkpoint in Belgium.

European Theater

‘Vat Goes on Here?’

By Kevin M. Hymel

On a Belgian hillside at the height of the Battle of the Bulge, an American lieutenant watched as a jeep carrying four men dressed in American uniforms stopped on the road in front of him. Read more

European Theater

From Around the Network

A stirring chapter of naval history steeped in controversy.

The Indian Ocean Raid: Disaster for the Royal Navy

Famous Navy Ships: The Triumph of the USS Batfish

Gaius Suetonius Paulinus