![A U.S. Navy airship patrols the Atlantic Ocean above a convoy in June 1943. Airships were serving regularly in anti-submarine patrols during the Battle of the Atlantic.](https://warfarehistorynetwork.com/wp-content/uploads/2022/05/W-Jun22-Air-Ships-6-760x615.jpg)
European Theater
U.S. Navy Airships vs. German U-boats in the Atlantic
By Eric NiderostKapitanleutnant Volker Simmermacher gazed intently through his attack periscope, sizing up the target that so far seemed oblivious to his presence. Read more
European Theater
Kapitanleutnant Volker Simmermacher gazed intently through his attack periscope, sizing up the target that so far seemed oblivious to his presence. Read more
European Theater
Corporal Thomas B. Tucker stood shivering in the bitterly cold night air as he looked down on a ribbon of water that separated his unit from the enemy’s front-line positions. Read more
European Theater
Adolf Hitler and his military commanders were feeling a new and unsettling emotion early in 1943—desperation. A year earlier, they had seemed on top of the world as their forces ruled a region that surpassed Rome at its greatest. Read more
European Theater
Lieutenant Wessling did not believe that his two 75mm assault guns could effectively deal with the German panzers. Read more
European Theater
It was a quiet dinner on a side street in Berlin the evening of June 26, 1939, but more than food would be devoured that night. Read more
European Theater
During the Allied air campaign against the Third Reich in World War II, well over a million tons of bombs were dropped on German territory, killing nearly 300,000 civilians and wounding another 780,000. Read more
European Theater
The British Air Ministry established the British Airborne forces on June 22, 1940, at the request of Prime Minister Winston Churchill. Read more
European Theater
First Lieutenant William Parks of the 101st Airborne Division left a snow-camouflaged helmet liner behind when the storied Screaming Eagles moved out following the American victory in the Battle of the Bulge in January 1945. Read more
European Theater
When the first shell hit in the dimly lit interior of the German ship, a subdued chorus came from the 29 ships’ officers held prisoner on board. Read more
European Theater
While the eyes of the world remained on Normandy during the difficult days that followed the D-Day landings of June 6, 1944, a scant nine weeks later another amphibious invasion of France took place. Read more
European Theater
Before World War II, the Belgian port city of Antwerp was one of the world’s great ports, ranking with those of Hamburg, Rotterdam, and New York. Read more
European Theater
It’s a plain, old, pale yellow, three-story building in a small town (fewer than 20,000 inhabitants) north of Salzburg, Austria. Yet this architecturally unremarkable building stands in the center of a recent political firestorm. Read more
European Theater
When an Israeli tribunal found Adolf Eichmann, the right hand of Heinrich Himmler and Reinhard Heydrich, guilty of crimes against humanity, war crimes, crimes against Poles, Gypsies, and Slovenes, and membership in the Nazi Gestapo, SS, and SD—all three deemed criminal organizations by the Free World—he remained obstinate. Read more
European Theater
Captain Odd Isaachsen Willoch knew what had to be done. The 55-year-old career Norwegian officer, commander of an aging coastal defense ship, was looking down the five-inch gun barrels and 21-inch torpedo tubes of the Wilhelm Heidkamp, a state-of-the-art German destroyer. Read more
European Theater
One of the great things about being a military historian is that you get to go places and meet people you might not ordinarily get to see and meet. Read more
European Theater
The legend of 1940, “their finest hour,” has become almost considered fact in Britain. Many felt, as they saw it at the time, the Germans merely had to turn up on her shores for Britain’s defeat. Read more
European Theater
In May 1945—70 years ago—the Supreme Headquarters Allied Expeditionary Force (SHAEF) sent out a terse, unemotional, 15-word communiqué: “The mission of this Allied force was fulfilled at 0241 local time, May 7, 1945.” Read more
European Theater
With 2014 being the 70th anniversary of the Battle of the Bulge, I wanted to share something from a close family friend our son’s age. Read more
European Theater
The sniper was perched under a craggy bluff overlooking German Führer Adolf Hitler’s alpine mountain retreat at Berchtesgaden in Bavaria. Read more
European Theater
Sixty-seven years after it sank in the depths of Lake Garda in northeastern Italy on the stormy night of April 30, 1945, an American amphibious vehicle, a 2.5-ton DUKW, has likely been located sitting upright in 905 feet of water. Read more