Axis
Shortly after 8 am on June 6, 1944, a German officer overlooking the Vierville-sur-Mer Draw on Omaha Beach reported that the soldiers defending the beach were repelling the Americans: “The enemy is in search of cover behind the coastal zone obstacles. Read more
Axis
Buried in the October 24, 1944, edition of the New York times was the headline: “German Ex-Officer Held as Nazi Spy: Captain in Kaiser’s Army, 62 and Foster Daughter Accused of Sending Ship Data Before U.S. Read more
Axis
Malmédy is an attractive and prosperous town situated in eastern Belgium, 15 miles from the German border. Read more
Axis
At 12:40 PM on a hot, sultry July 20, 1944, German Führer and Reich Chancellor Adolf Hitler, 55, was seated on a wicker stool in a conference hut at his principal Eastern Front headquarters at Wolf’s Lair, Rastenburg, East Prussia, for the mid-day wartime map meeting. Read more
Axis
Early in December 1941, Operation Typhoon, the German drive on Moscow, withered in the face of tenacious Soviet resistance and one of the worst Russian winters in living memory. Read more
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When I was a young boy in Seattle, my father told me about a fake town that had been built on top of Boeing’s Plant 2 during the war. Read more
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With the defeat of the German Seventh Army and the closing of the Falaise Gap in the summer of 1944, the Allies pursued the retreating enemy across France. Read more
Axis
On the evening of May 23, 1945, in the northern German state of Schleswig-Holstein, five men in a British Army jeep were driving down a dark road. Read more
Axis
In May 1941, General Kurt Student’s elite paratrooper forces descended like an anvil on the British garrison defending Crete. Read more
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George Sterling received a teletype message from the War Department just after 5:15 am on August 15, 1945. Read more
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In 1933, before the Waffen-SS, there was a portion of the Nazi Party’s Schutzstaffel (SS), armed and trained along military lines and served as an armed force. Read more
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Early in World War II, the British War Office and the Admiralty were shocked by daring small boat attacks, some of them suicidal, on Allied shipping in the Mediterranean Sea. Read more
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In a 1921 bombing test, U.S. Army Air Corps General Billy Mitchell’s airmen sank the former German battleship Ostfriesland. Read more
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In the predawn hours of September 15, 1944, the official start of the two-month Battle of Peleliu, a powerful fleet of U.S. Read more
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As the Japanese delegation stood on the deck of the battleship USS Missouri on September 2, 1945, preparing to sign the documents that ended World War II, a large formation of Boeing B-29 Superfortress heavy bombers swooped low over Tokyo Bay as a reminder of the terrible destruction that had befallen their nation and turned Japan’s cities into ruins. Read more
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The charred remains of men and machines scattered through the Kursk salient in July 1943 signified the death knell of the last attempt by the German Wehrmacht to regain the initiative on the Eastern Front. Read more
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Great commanders need great subordinates. In the campaigns in the Mediterranean and European Theaters of World War II, General Dwight D. Read more
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Adolf Hitler loved children. Before the war consumed all his energies he entertained children at his holiday home on the “mountain” all the time. Read more
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More than 60 years ago, in April 1945, the war in Europe was winding down to its inevitable conclusion. Read more
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As Adolf Hitler’s vaunted Sixth Army lay in its death throes in the ruins of Stalingrad, German forces to the west of the city faced their own kind of hell. Read more
