European Theater

European Theater

What I did last summer (and fall)

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

How “The Few” Saved Britain

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

Remembering the End of the War in Europe

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

A Letter from a Bastogne Foxhole

Recently, a close family friend our son’s age gave me a copy of a letter written by his late grandfather, Sergeant David Warman, a member of Company E, 18th Infantry Regiment, 1st Infantry Division. Read more

European Theater

The details of Operation Foxley, a British attempt to assassinate Adolf Hitler, were a closely guarded secret for decades.

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

Discovery in the depths of Lake Garda.

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

European Theater

The Search for the Missing DUKW of Lake Garda

It was April 29, 1945. World War II was nearly over. Former Italian Fascist leader Benito Mussolini was dead, killed by partisans at Lake Como on April 28, and his body mutilated and strung up in a Milan gas station. Read more

European Theater

Battle Against an Ally

When the armistice between France and Germany was put into force on June 25, 1940, the fate of the powerful French Navy—the fourth largest in the world—was of critical importance to the British. Read more

European Theater

The Power Of The Cloth Part 2

If the phrase “the clothes make the man” is true, then it is equally true that the uniform makes the soldier. Read more

European Theater

World War II as a Campaign Issue?

In the recently concluded midterm elections, who could have guessed that World War II would have been a campaign issue for one of the candidates? Read more

European Theater

Hitler’s Second Bismarck

Despite being ridiculed as a vain, pompous, and glory-seeking imbecile in a spate of biographies, diaries, letters, trial transcripts, and memoirs by leaders, field marshals, generals, and diplomats from both the Allies and his own Axis partners during and after the war, Joachim von Ribbentrop nevertheless was one of the premier foreign affairs practitioners of the Nazi epoch. Read more

European Theater

The Twilight of the Gods

By the end of April 1945, two of the most feared divisions of the Waffen-SS, the 1st SS Panzer Division Leibstandarte Adolf Hitler and the 12th SS Panzer Division Hitlerjugend, had both been reduced in strength to little more than reinforced regiments. Read more

European Theater

Marek Edelman, a leader of the 1943 Warsaw Ghetto Uprising, kept alive through the years the memory of those who perished.

Marek Edelman was one of a very few Jewish patriots who fought the Nazis in the Warsaw Ghetto and lived to tell the story of the bravery of those who rose up against their oppressors during World War II. Read more

European Theater

Margaret Mitchell, author of Gone With the Wind, helped the town of Vimoutiers, France, to rebuild.

Author Margaret Mitchell is remembered as one of the “first” citizens of Atlanta. Gone With the Wind, her novel of the Old South and the perseverance of heroine Scarlett O’Hara, stands as a literary classic which spawned one of the most famous motion pictures of all time. Read more

European Theater

Anne Frank’s chestnut tree is threatened by disease and the axe.

More than 60 years after her death, Anne Frank, the young girl who was a virtual prisoner in the famous “annex” as she, her family, and others hid from the Nazi Jew hunters in Amsterdam, remains an icon of optimism and belief in the triumph of the human spirit. Read more

European Theater

More on Patton’s Dyslexia

Dear Editor,

Please allow me to express my displeasure concerning the article in the January 2008 issue, “A Life Shaped by Dyslexia” by Jeansonne et al. Read more

European Theater

On the fourth Allied attempt to capture Monte Cassino, the Polish II Corps succeeded.

In the spring of 1944, the Italian Campaign was one of frustration and stalemate for the Allies. General Mark Clark’s Fifth Army had been stymied at Cassino, and strong German defenses barred the gateway to the valley of the Liri River and Rome, the Eternal City and capital of fascist Italy. Read more

European Theater

A blunder by Hitler and the fortitude of the common soldier resulted in a miracle at Dunkirk.

The evacuation of nearly 350,000 allied officers and soldiers from the embattled beaches at Dunkirk was indeed an event of epic proportions. Read more

European Theater

The Marshall Plan

It was indeed an unprecedented effort to raise a continent from the devastation of a horrific world war, and ironically, the idea belonged to a career soldier. Read more

European Theater

Intrepid men and advancing technology defeated the U-boat menace.

The peril posed to the British Isles, and indeed the entire Allied cause, by the Nazi U-boat threat can scarcely be overstated. Read more