European Theater Archives

Erwin Wickert (center), with, from left, Shinzaku Hogen, a future Japanese ambassador to Vienna, according to Wickert, and Adam Vollhard, who wrote for the German News Agency in Tokyo.

European Theater

Decades of Diplomacy

By Sherri Kimmel

I am riding a borrowed bike along the Rhine, passing the Schaum-Hof, where last night I dined on a deck overlooking the river with a stately Dutch lady friend of a friend. Read more

European Theater

As French resistance to the Nazis collapsed following the lightning invasion of May 10, 1940, General Charles de Gaulle chose exile in Great Britain, cloaking himself in the mantle of guardian of his nation’s honor. Read more

European Theater

Tyler Perry’s new film, The Six Triple Eight, is based on a WWII History magazine article

After years of obscurity, the untold story of the 6888th Postal Directory Battalion will captivate audiences worldwide with the release of the feature film The Six Triple Eight. Read more

European Theater

Bloody Aachen

By Richard Rule

By the time of the waning of the summer of 1944 in western Europe, General Dwight D. Eisenhower’s victorious Allied armies had forged a battle line from the Dutch province of Maastricht in the north to Belfort near the Swiss border in the south. Read more

European Theater

Hollywood Delivers the Story of the 6888th Battalion

By D.C. Montana

When Hollywood’s Tyler Perry heard a story about the 6888th Central Postal Directory Battalion, the U.S. Army’s only all-female, all-Black unit of the Women’s Army Corps (WAC) to go overseas in World War II, he knew he had to make a movie about it. Read more

A group of medics around a seriously wounded soldier perform an emergency foot amputation. Medics saved many lives on and near the battlefield during World War II.

European Theater

Medics: Battlefield Mercy

By Allyn Vannoy

Men of the Medical Detachment of the 2nd Battalion, 274th Infantry Regiment, 70th Infantry Division, arrived in France in December 1944, and within days found themselves in action in Alsace-Lorraine as the unit was sent to help blunt the German offensive—Operation Nordwind. Read more

European Theater

Operation Olive: Autumn Assault in Italy

By Allyn Vannoy

Allied forces had been fighting their way up the Italian peninsula since landing at Salerno on September 9, 1943. Read more

European Theater

Hell at 21,000 Feet

By Patrick J. Chaisson

Four miles above the snow-covered city of Steyr, Captain Jack Horner peered down through his Norden bombsight in a desperate attempt to identify the target. Read more

European Theater

The Iron Cross

By Stephen Thomas Previtera

In most people’s mind the Iron Cross is inescapably linked to the Third Reich. Indeed, Adolf Hitler was responsible for adding a “marching swastika” front and center, to the decoration’s black core in 1939. Read more

Members of the U.S. 1st Infantry Division march ashore at Gela, Sicily, while an LST burns off shore on the first day of Operation Husky in this 1943 painting by Navy war artist Mitchell Jamieson. Soldiers injured during the fighting can be seen being evacuated to hospital ships. Sicily became the stepping stone for the invasion of the Italian mainland.

European Theater

Sicilian Slugfest

By Flint Whitlock

The island of Sicily, lying in the Mediterranean Sea between Tunisia and the toe of the Italian peninsula, is no stranger to war and conquest. Read more

Using black ink and crayon, Eigener drew German tanks advancing across a stark landscape during a Wehrmacht advance. He titled this sketch “Panzer Angriff,” or “Tank Attack.”

European Theater

German Soldier’s Sketchbook

By Flint Whitlock

It’s called Mein Skizzenbuch (My Sketchbook)—a 72-page booklet of pencil drawings and watercolors by noted German war artist Ernst Eigener, a soldier with Propaganda Co. Read more

European Theater

Lt. Jimmie Montieth, 1st Infantry Division, D-Day

Artwork: Keith Rocco

Lieutenant Jimmie Monteith, Company L, 16th Infantry Regiment, arrived off Omaha Beach with the first assault wave, on D-Day, June 6, 1944. Read more

Follow-on troops of the Royal Marine Commandos, lugging their equipment, come ashore at Juno Beach, Normandy.

European Theater

A “Light-Hearted War”

By Mark Simmons

Vice Admiral Norman Denning said of Ian Fleming, the “ideas man” who worked at British Naval Intelligence, that a lot of his proposals “were just plain crazy.” 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

European Theater

From Around the Network

Prague Spring, 1968: “The Whole World is Watching”

The Soviets carried the heavy end of the stick

George Washington’s Counterpunch at Germantown

Aerial Observers of the 82nd: The “Flying Eyes” of the Artillery