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
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 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
European Theater
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
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
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
The tragedy that engulfed the Polish town of Jedwabne during World War II continues to rear its ugly head today.
On the morning of July 10, 1941, a group of Poles in the town, allegedly under the close supervision of German policemen, assembled with the purpose of rounding up the local Jewish citizenry. Read more
European Theater
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
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
