An Air Force KC-135 Stratotanker refuels a flight of F-105 Thunderchiefs on their way to strike targets in North Vietnam. Refueling operations in the Vietnam War peaked during Operation Rolling Thunder.

European Theater

With smoke rising and the barrel of their Bofors gun hot from rapid discharging, the weapon’s crew fires over open sights during support for British and Canadian troops in Operation Veritable. This photo was taken in the Netherlands at Nuttderden on the road to Kleve, as British and Canadian troops moved forward.

European Theater

Devils in the Forest

By William E. Welsh

The German paratroopers marched the captured Canadian officer through the dark forest to the damp underground bunker that served as their platoon headquarters. Read more

Company A, 116th Infantry Regiment, 29th Infantry Division in a landing craft heading for Omaha Beach in the first wave of the D-Day assault on Normandy.

European Theater

A Bedford Boy at Omaha Beach

By John Wukovits

Twenty-one-year-old Elizabeth Teass walked into the Western Union office in the small town of Bedford, Virginia, early on the morning of July 17, 1944, fully expecting a normal day as the teletype operator. Read more

European Theater

Normandy Breakout

By Brian Todd Carey

On June 6, 1944 the Allies opened the Second Front against Nazi Germany. Concentrated against the beaches of Normandy, Operation Overlord landed 20 army divisions plus support troops on five beaches in anticipation of a breakout across France and toward Berlin. Read more

The Regia Marina’s Luigi Torelli arrives at the BETASOM sub base in Bordeaux on February 4, 1941, after completing its first Atlantic patrol. She had begun her patrol on November 12, but had to return to base for electric motor repairs after 10 days. She set out again on January 9, 1941.

European Theater

Italian Sub Luigi Torelli

Patrick J. Chaisson

History has not been kind to the Italian Royal Navy. Since World War II scholars have largely ignored La Regia Marina Italiana and the often pivotal role it played in the Mediterranean Theater of Operations. Read more

A platoon of green troops from the U.S. 106th Infantry Division, somewhere near St. Vith, Belgium. Expecting to occupy a quiet sector of the Allied line in December 1944, the “Golden Lions” found themselves in the path of Hitler’s last major offensive—Unternehmen Wacht am Rhein (Operation Watch on the Rhine).

European Theater

The Most Serious Reverse

By Flint Whitlock

The HMS Queen Elizabeth, the largest passenger liner afloat, took only five days to transport the entire 106th Division from New Jersey to Glasgow, Scotland, making port on November 17, 1944. Read more

European Theater

German Heer Infantryman, Battle of the Bulge

By Johnny Shumate

The German unified armed forces were renamed Wehrmacht “defense force” from 1935 to 1945, comprising the Heer (army), Kriegsmarine (navy) and Luftwaffe (air force)—all distinctly separate from the paramilitary Waffen Schutzstaffel “armed-protection squad” of the Nazi Party. Read more

European Theater

Britain’s Decisive Aerial Victory

By David Alan Johnson

“I say, better wake up.”

Red Tobin opened one eye, rolled over, and found his squadron mate, Pilot Officer John Dundas, shaking him by the shoulder and staring into his face. Read more

European Theater

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

A German soldier surveys an antiaircraft defense gun on the bank of the Rhine near the Ludendorff Bridge, January 1945.

European Theater

A “Bright Opportunity” At Remagen

By Flint Whitlock

It was March 7, 1945––a gray, overcast day with a nasty chill in the air, the kind of day in which a soldier at the front wished he could relax in front of a toasty fire with a canteen cup full of hot coffee and think about home. Read more

On December 18, 1944, a patrol from the U.S. 1st Infantry Division (Company F, 3rd Bn., 18th IR) searches for Fallschirmjäger that were dropped between Eupen and Bütgenbach, Belgium.​ The “Big Red One” held out against the German 6th Panzer Army on the shoulder of the “Bulge” from December 17 until January 28, 1945.

European Theater

A Rifleman at the Battle of the Bulge

By Robert F. Dorr

To American infantryman Rocky Moretto, war on the European continent in the winter of 1944-1945 was mostly about never getting enough sleep, warmth, respite, or relief. Read more

Residents of Warsaw search for the bodies of their neighbors in the rubble of an apartment building destroyed by a German bombing raid in September 1939.

European Theater

Warsaw Witness

By Peter Zablocki

The large lamp shone down at him from the top of the ladder, the only light in the room of this bombed-out building. Read more

A bus leans against the side of a terrace in Harrington Square after a German bombing raid on London. The bus was empty but 11 people were killed in the houses two days after the start of the attacks.

European Theater

Taking the Brunt

By Alan Davidge

Most of the action during the Battle of Britain in the late summer of 1940 took place over southern England where Royal Air Force Spitfires and Hurricanes began to dominate dogfights against their German rivals. Read more

German Fallschirmjägers in 10 gliders crash-landed on a 6,990-foot plateau near the Hotel Campo Imperatore on Gran Sasso in the central Apennine Mountains on September 12, 1943. The mission objective of Operation Oak was to rescue deposed dictator Benito Mussolini from house arrest and bring him to Munich.

European Theater

Rescuing ‘Il Duce’

By Colonel Bernd Horn, Canadian Army (ret.)

The flimsy canvas flapped loudly as it buckled in the wind. More bothersome for the nine German commandos crammed inside the narrow fuselage was the constant motion—sinking, then sharply rising, as the DFS-230 glider ploughed and pitched through the towing aircraft’s turbulent wake. Read more

Destroyed and abandoned, these German armored vehicles offer silent testimony to the desperation of the fighting near St. Vith. Before retiring, the American defenders of the town severely hampered German efforts to exploit their Ardennes breakthrough.

European Theater

The Execution of Eddie Slovik

By Michael E. Haskew

A single prisoner was bound and blindfolded in the courtyard of a French country house near the village of Ste-Marie-aux-Mines at 10:04 a.m. Read more

European Theater

Major General John Shirley Wood

By Kelly Bell

When little John Shirley Wood was delivered on January 11, 1888, in Monticello, Arkansas, one of the Free World’s greatest defenders greeted his first dawn as eagerly as everything else he confronted and overcame in a lifetime of soldiering. Read more

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