Allies

My Battle Up the Boot: Paul McNelis in the Italian Campaign

The U.S. 85th Infantry Division was one of the Allied workhorses in Italy during World War II. Read more

Allies

On a Wing and Several Prayers: The Story of a B-17 Tailgunner

On August 25, 1944, Larry Stevens and the rest of his Boeing B-17 Flying Fortress bomber crew completed their 35th mission over Nazi-occupied Europe. Read more

Allies

Cold War Spies: General Reinhard Gehlen

By 1944, many top generals in Adolf Hitler’s army understood the war was lost and that they had better make arrangements to ensure their safety. Read more

Allies

Joe Rosenthal: Flag-Raising Photographer

The “Raising of the Flag” photo taken by 33-year-old Associated Press photographer Joe Rosenthal on the fifth day of the Iwo Jima battle provided the world with a much-needed uplifting symbol in February 1945. Read more

Allies

General Percy Hobart: Britain’s Genius Tanker

An army that will be poised for victory requires élan, military intellect, a penchant for tactical and strategic innovation, and the zeal to use the most qualified individuals for training and leadership. Read more

Allies

Nick “Cooky” Kukich: Covert Operative in Albania

On the morning of April 7, 1939, Albania, the smallest of the Balkan countries, was invaded by Benito Mussolini’s Italian Fascist Army. Read more

Allies

Battle of the Bulge: Heroic Stand at Lausdell

Three German soldiers crept through the snow. They had infiltrated the American front line during a counterattack. Major William F. Read more

Allies

British Paratrooper at Arnhem: An Interview With James Sims

Q: Could you give us a little personal background before we talk about your war experiences?

SIMS: I was born on April 29, 1925, at Sheffield in Yorkshire. Read more

Allies

The Battle of Kursk: Showdown at Prokhorovka and Oboian

With the German Sixth Army destroyed at Stalingrad, the Soviet juggernaut lunged west and southwest across the River Donets. Read more

Allies

Night of the Bloody Tiger: German Raid on a D-Day Exercise

Operation Bolero, the marshaling of Allied forces for the planned 1944 invasion of Normandy, was in full swing by late 1943, and much of England had been turned into a great armed camp. Read more

Allies

Operation Jupiter: The Fight for the Key to Normandy

The Allied landings in Normandy on June 6, 1944, produced a bitter struggle for control of the invasion beachhead. Read more

Allies

The Imperial War Museum

Although Britain has a number of war museums, the Imperial War Museum (IWM) is acknowledged as the Holy Grail of them all—the one you must visit when in London. Read more

Allies

RMS Queen Mary’s War Service: Voyages to Victory

The late summer of 1939 saw Great Britain teetering on the brink of war with Hitler’s Germany. The years of appeasement and vacillation, of meekly acquiescing to Hitler’s insatiable territorial demands, were over at last. Read more

Allies

National Museum of the Pacific War

The small (population 12,000), central-Texas town of Fredericksburg, about an hour’s drive west of Austin and a little more than that northwest of San Antonio, may seem an odd location for the National Museum of the Pacific War until one realizes that Fredericksburg is the hometown of Fleet Admiral Chester Nimitz––the Eisenhower of the Pacific Theater. Read more

Allies

Famous Military Spies: Ralph Van Deman

In the long history of American military intelligence, the names that come to mind most often are those of Nathan Hale, Benedict Arnold, Herbert Yardley, and William Donovan. Read more

Allies

Silver Salvage in Caballo Bay: Japan’s Sabotaged Treasure Hunt

Early in the morning of July 8, 1942, in the calm waters of Caballo Bay south of Corregidor Island in the Philippines, a casco, a 12-foot by 60-foot flat-bottomed wooden diving barge, bobbed placidly in the open water 120 feet above the ocean floor. Read more

Allies

Famous Navy Ships: The USS Tang

During World War II, the United States employed 288 submarines, the vast majority of which raided Japanese shipping in the Pacific, thus preventing the enemy’s vital supplies and reinforcements from reaching the far-flung island battlefields. Read more

Allies

Grand Mufti al-Husseini: Britain’s Deadliest Enemy?

Like all Palestinians and most Arabs, Haj Amin al-Hussaini not only looked forward to an Axis Pact victory in World War II but also saw it as a means of defeating what he believed was a joint British-Jewish conspiracy to foist an Israelite homeland on the Middle East that would be to the detriment of his own people. Read more

Allies

Hiroshima’s Ground Zero Museum

Although located 420 miles west of Tokyo, the city of Hiroshima is today a tourist mecca, drawing tens of thousands of visitors from around the world for one single reason: to stand at the epicenter of history’s first nuclear explosion used against an enemy population. Read more

Allies

The USCGC Taney: Pearl Harbor and Beyond

Built in the mid-1930s as one of the famed Treasury class of large U.S. Coast Guard cutters, USCGC Taney had a distinguished career spanning five decades of continuous service. Read more