Allies

The Big Three in Tehran: The Meeting That Shaped WWII

By Michael D. Hull

World War II made a disparate trio of allies —British Prime Minister Winston Churchill, Soviet Marshal Joseph Stalin, and American President Franklin D. Read more

Allies

Silver Screen Surprise: Norvald Flaaten Recalls His Wartime Careers

By Jason Antonio

Norvald Flaaten never expected he would appear in a movie when he signed up with the Canadian Army during World War II, but the subject of the movie and what he had to do was too good to pass up. Read more

Allies

Mission to Madagascar: British Assault on Diego Suarez Port

By Cleve C. Barkley

In early 1942 things could have hardly looked bleaker for the Allies. In Europe, Hitler’s war machine had steamrolled across the entire continent and was now battling before the gates of Moscow. Read more

Allies

Guns for Victory: The Watervliet Arsenal in World War II

By Patrick J. Chaisson

President Franklin D. Roosevelt electrified the world when on December 29, 1940, he called on America to become “the great arsenal of democracy.” Read more

Allies

Japan’s Underwater Aircraft Carriers

By Phil Zimmer

Lieutenant Commander Stephen L. Johnson had a problem on his hands; a very large problem. His Balao-class submarine, the Segundo, had just picked up a large radar contact on the surface about 100 miles off Honshu, one of Japan’s home islands, heading south toward Tokyo.  Read more

Allies

“Flak Was Our Worst Enemy”: Wilbur Bowers’ Air War Over Europe

By Richard A. Beranty

For 33 months beginning in 1942, the U.S. Eighth Air Force and its precision daylight bombing strikes against German targets in Europe tried to pound the Third Reich into submission. Read more

Allies

Sir John Dill and Winston Churchill: A Clash in Strategy

By Jon Diamond

In describing the relationship between British General Sir John Dill and his political superior, Prime Minister Winston Churchill, Dill’s biographer, Alex Danchev, noted, “It was … an association strikingly lacking in empathy or understanding, etched in fundamental disagreement, and scarred by a mutual disaffection welling up at times into personal distaste.” Read more

Allies

Operation Drumbeat’s Devastating Toll on Allied Shipping

By Michael D. Hull

After refueling in the mid-Atlantic and suffering bow damage from being rammed by a tanker, a 769-ton German submarine reached its destination, the American East Coast, early on Monday, May 4, 1942. Read more

Allies

Melee for the Manhay-Grandmenil Sector in the Bulge

By Kirk A. Freeman

The young men of Companies H and I of 3rd Battalion, 517th Parachute Regiment (PIR) were about to move out for their assault on the crossroad town of Manhay, Belgium. Read more

Allies

Wingate’s Operation Thursday: Genius or Ineffectual?

By Jon Diamond

The interest in Brigadier Orde Wingate, founder and leader of the Commonwealth Chindits or Special Force, persists to this day, more than 75 years after his fiery death after his B-25 Mitchell bomber crashed in the hills of India. Read more

Allies

Normandy’s Little Victims

By Kevin Hymel

War spared no one. As modern armies clashed in France’s Normandy countryside, French civilians found themselves in the crossfire or on the receiving end of bombs and heavy weapons. Read more

Allies

Greeting the Liberators: The Civilians of Normandy

By Kevin M. Hymel

The Germans were gone. After more than four years of occupation, the soldiers of the Wehrmacht had been evicted from France’s Normandy region by the American and British armies. Read more

Allies

The Battle of the Bulge and Roads to Bastogne

By Edward P. Beck

An eternal grayness created a sense of constant gloom. The short, wintry days ended quickly, giving way to endless hours of dark, monotonous cold, and ever-present clouds of ghostlike fog crept slowly over the landscape, blocking all sight. Read more

Allies

Piper Bill on the D-Day Beach

By Michael E. Haskew

The image of the Scottish piper standing erect under fire was commemorated in the film The Longest Day nearly two decades after the D-Day landings of June 6, 1944. Read more

Allies

D-Day’s Concrete Fleet: Making the Mulberry Harbors

By Michael D. Hull

No Allied amphibious invasion in World War II left such a bitter legacy as Operation Jubilee, the ill-fated British-Canadian raid on the northern French port of Dieppe on Wednesday, August 19, 1942. Read more

Allies

Bastogne’s Bedsheets: The Story of Lieutenant Colonel John Hanlon

By Ken Parker

Many people who never knew John Hanlon personally may remember him as that paratrooper who took the sheets back to Bastogne. Read more

Allies

Benito Mussolini & The Fascist March on Rome

By Blaine Taylor

On March 23, 1919, but four months after the armistice that ended the Great War—100 young toughs, ex-Italian Army war veterans, former socialist politicians, and newspapermen met in Milan’s Piazza San Sepolchro in industrial northern Italy to form a new political party. Read more

Allies

Portugal during WW2: Covering the Azores Gap

By Norman Herz

The year 1944 dawned with America already at war for over two years. In an event not marked by history books, the 96th Navy Construction Battalion, Seabees, crossed the Atlantic from Davisville, Rhode Island, on the Abraham Lincoln, a converted banana boat escorted by two destroyers, the USS Ellis and USS Biddle. Read more

Allies

The Lee-Enfield Rifle and its Effectiveness in World War II

By Arnold Blumberg

By 1901, the Small Arms Committee—the body within the War Office tasked with arming the British Army with weapons—sought to replace their then-standard issue rifle: the Magazine Lee-Metford Rifle Mark II. Read more

Allies

Prelude to Iwo Jima: The Japanese Assault On B-29 Base On Marianas

By Michael P. Slater

From an altitude of 30,000 feet, the swift Japanese reconnaissance aircraft flew high over Saipan and Tinian, photographing the brisk and extensive engineering effort under way on the American airfields far below. Read more