European Theater Archives

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

European Theater

Infantry’s Armored Fist

By Brig. Gen. (ret.) Raymond E. Bell, Jr.

The 782nd Tank Battalion spent two years training stateside as part of the U.S. Read more

A long line of American soldiers are about about to begin their long journey into captivity. Most of the troops were moved by rail; Allied planes sometimes unknowingly attacked trains that carried American POWs.

European Theater

Captured in the Bulge

By Flint Whitlock

It took the HMS Queen Elizabeth, the world’s largest passenger liner, only five days to transport 15,000 men of the 106th Infantry Division from New Jersey to Glasgow, Scotland, making port on November 17, 1944. Read more

Fighting men of the 92nd Infantry Division, the famed Buffalo Soldiers, march past the wreckage of a knocked out PzKpfw. VI Tiger tank in the vicinity of Ponsacco, Italy. The African-American soldiers of the 92nd Division fought racial injustice in their own army, as well as the Germans.

European Theater

The Brave Buffalo Soldiers

By Michael D. Hull

Despite their gallant service in the Civil War, on the Western frontier, and in the Spanish-American War, black soldiers were used mostly for labor and given only a limited fighting role when the U.S. Read more

American infantrymen enter the war-ravaged French town of Argentan during the effort to trap thousands of retreating German troops in the Falaise Pocket during the final stages of the Normandy Campaign in 1944. The fighting around Argentan was the baptism of fire for the U.S. 80th Infantry Division.

European Theater

The 80th Division’s Baptism By Fire

By Patrick J. Chaisson

As a late summer sun finally dipped below the horizon, Captain William L. Koob, Jr., came to realize that his unit had been abandoned on the battlefield. Read more

A line of German soldiers marches past a burning Russian building somewhere on the Eastern Front. The vast spaces of the USSR swallowed German armies and led to mass casualties. Few German POWs lived to return home.

European Theater

Suicide or Surrender

By William Lubbeck and David Hurt

BACKSTORY: Wilhelm Lubbeck served as an enlisted man in the 58th Infantry Division on the Eastern Front during Germany’s 1941 invasion of the Soviet Union before being promoted to lieutenant. Read more

A platoon of the green U.S. 106th Infantry Division trudges through a Belgian woodland. Although they were told that they would occupy a quiet sector of the Western Front in December 1944, the Golden Lions were soon in the teeth of the Battle of the Bulge.

European Theater

Tough Stand of the Golden Lions

By Nathan N. Prefer

When the men of the newly arrived 106th Infantry “Golden Lions” Division arrived on the front lines near St. Read more

European Theater

The meatgrinder of the Hürtgen Forest bedeviled American forces in the autumn of 1944.

Seventy-eight years ago, the U.S. First Army was embroiled in the longest battle of World War II fought on German soil. Read more

European Theater

Defeat from the Jaws of Victory?

By Mark Carlson

With all it had going for it, how did Germany manage to lose World War II? There are many answers to this deceptively simple question, including the obvious one that the Allies had the technical and industrial advantage. Read more

Fw-190D-13/R11, named ‘Yellow Ten,” was flown by Franz Götz of JG-26. Götz is shown preparing to surrender at the Luftwaffe airbase at Flensburg near the Danish frontier in the spring of 1945 after the airfield was captured by advancing Allied forces. The original plane has been restored and now resides in the collection of the Champlin Fighter Museum. Painting by Jack Fellows.

European Theater

The Luftwaffe’s Sturmvogel

By David H. Lippman

An American advertising poster for one of their bombers showed a cartoon of a smiling pilot over the captioned question, “Who’s afraid of the big Focke-Wulf?” Read more

Smoke billows from distant fires and a German shell explodes on the beach at Dunkirk as Allied soldiers await evacuation from the east mole or directly into the surf in Operation Dynamo, May-June 1940.

European Theater

Captain George Tennant, Dunkirk Architect

By Jon Diamond

As aptly stated by historian Max Hastings in his book Warriors, “the leaders most readily admired by fellow-soldiers are those who seem committed to do their duty, and also to bring every possible man home alive.” Read more

This artist’s rendering depicts the proposed aircraft carrier of the Royal Navy made out of ice, and its relative size compared to the aircraft carrier HMS Indefatigable.

European Theater

Back-room Genius of World War II

By Frank Johnson

While the Battle of Britain raged and a German invasion was feared in the sunny, tense summer of 1940, Prime Minister Winston Churchill took time to create an organization that would exemplify his offensive spirit, his love of gadgets and innovations, and his use of cronies. Read more

European Theater

Monty’s Folly: The British paratroopers at Arnhem paid a heavy price in the failed operation.

American Generals privately gloated over the failure of British Field Marshal Bernard Montgomery’s Operation Market Garden in September 1944. The British had conceived the idea, although Allied units from many nations participated in the operation. Read more

Albert Kesselring visits with Luftwaffe pilots at their airfield in France in 1940. Kesselring was wary of Hitler’s decision to halt ground forces before the British lines at Dunkirk, expecting the Luftwaffe to deal the final blow to the British Expeditionary Force.

European Theater

Albert Kesselring: Hitler’s Go-To Guy

By R. Jeff Chrisman

He was seemingly everywhere—Poland, France, Holland, Italy, and the western front during the last days of the Third Reich. Read more

The battered entrance to Fort Driant after its capture.

European Theater

Patton’s Lost Battle

By Duane E. Shaffer

The road to Fort Driant began for the United States Third Army when it landed on Utah Beach at 3 pm on August 5, 1944. Read more

Newly liberated Polish prisoners of the Nazi concentration camp at Hanover-Ahlem queue up to receive rations of soup from American soldiers.

European Theater

Henry Kissinger’s World War II

By Tim Miller

In November 1944, a young American soldier wrote back to his parents in the Washington Heights neighborhood of Manhattan. Read more

The best place to be in an urban battle was next to the buildings where it was possible to find a degree of cover from enemy fire. An American machine-gun team belonging to the 26th Infantry Regiment engages the enemy in mid-October.

European Theater

Bloodbath in Aachen

By William F. Floyd Jr.

With weapons at the ready, the American squad advanced cautiously on both sides of the tree-lined boulevard toward the German strongpoint in Aachen. Read more

The Tirpitz fires her 15-inch main guns in the Baltic Sea in 1941. The British Royal Navy saw the huge battle-ship as a threat to merchant vessels and troop convoys bound for the British Isles.

European Theater

Saga of the Tirpitz

By Blaine Taylor

April 1, 1939, was a red-letter day in the history of the reborn German Kriegsmarine for two key reasons. Read more

An American officer interrogates two recently captured German soldiers somewhere in France.

European Theater

A German-American Teen With a Flair for Psychology

By Phil Zimmer

Stephan H. Lewy was young, militarily inexperienced, and A Most unlikely American soldier. Yet when he reached Utah Beach 30 days after D-Day, he was all business as a staff sergeant in U.S. Read more