Dwight D. Eisenhower Archives

Dwight D. Eisenhower

K Rations Created the World’s Best Fed Army

By Richard Beranty

K Rations remain one of the great icons of World War II. Soldiers either loved them or hated them. Read more

Dwight D. Eisenhower

Patton’s Last Command

By Alexander Lovelace

The October light was beginning to fade as the U.S. Army limousine sped along the autobahn in the American Zone of Occupied Germany. Read more

President Kennedy with Premier Khrushchev at the height of the Cold War.

Dwight D. Eisenhower

Cold War Intelligence

By John D. Gresham

Everyone who has ever read a spy novel knows the basic plot line. A scientist has developed a formula, or intelligence operative has obtained secret plans or a roll or film. Read more

Dwight D. Eisenhower

Chuck Yeager: Fighter Pilot

By Eric Niderost

Major General Charles “Chuck” Yeager, United States Air force (Ret.), was one of a handful of people who could rightly claim the title “living legend.” Read more

A column of German PzKpfw. III tanks rolls along a dirt road in North Africa. When American troops of the II Corps came up against the German veterans, the initial results were disastrous. The American commander, Maj. Gen. Lloyd Fredendall, was also found unequal to the task of leading troops in combat.

Dwight D. Eisenhower

The Battle of Kasserine Pass and the Failure of General Lloyd Fredendall

By Jerome Baldwin

He came highly recommended, praised by General George C. Marshall as “one of the best.” But ultimately from these high hopes and expectations would come disastrous failure. Read more

Dwight D. Eisenhower

The Forgotten American Airborne of Operation Market-Garden

By Major General Michael Reynolds (ret.)

“In the years to come everyone will remember Arnhem, but no one will remember that two American divisions fought their hearts out in the Dutch canal country,” wrote U.S. Read more

Dwight D. Eisenhower

General Douglas MacArthur’s Navy

By Glenn Barnett

In November 1941, the U.S. Asiatic Fleet weighed anchor in Shanghai, China, for the last time. Alarmed by the growing hostility and aggressiveness of the Japanese, Admiral Thomas Hart ordered the outnumbered and outgunned American vessels moved to the relative safety of Manila Bay in the Philippines. Read more

American tanks and armored gun carriers drive over snow-covered terrain to Samree during the Battle of the Bulge. Capture of the city opened the way to Houffallize, heart of the Bulge.

Dwight D. Eisenhower

The End of the Battle of the Bulge

By Arnold Blumberg

Wednesday, December 27, 1944, found the military situation in the Ardennes Forest of Belgium stalemated. After 12 days of unrelenting struggle, the American and German forces on this part of the Western Front found themselves locked in brutal combat, unable to drive each other back. Read more

Dwight D. Eisenhower

Operation Greif: Assassinate Eisenhower?

By Charles Whiting

On the morning of Monday, December 18, 1944, a mixed group of white MPs and black American service troops stood guard on the little bridge at Aywaille in the Ardennes Forest of Belgium. Read more

Lt. Gen. Hugh Drum is seen meeting with other senior military personnel at Grenier Field, New Hampshire.

Dwight D. Eisenhower

Wartime Politics: Generals Hugh A. Drum and Joseph W. Stillwell

By Bruce Graham

It was the worst of times for the Allies. It was the time of opportunity for senior U.S. Read more

Dwight D. Eisenhower

V-E Day: Victory at Last for World War II’s Allies

By Flint Whitlock

Within his reinforced concrete bunker, 50 feet below the garden of the New Reichs Chancellery on Berlin’s Wilhelmstrasse, German dictator Adolf Hitler, his soon-to-be bride Eva Braun, and several hundred friends, SS guards, and staff members could feel the concussion and hear the unending drumroll of thousands of Soviet artillery shells reducing the already-battered capital city of the Third Reich to unrecognizable rubble. Read more

In this romanticized painting by a German war artist, a German E-boat cuts through the waters of the English Channel on patrol against coastal raids launched from Britain.

Dwight D. Eisenhower

The Mystery of Slapton Sands: Operation Tiger

By Charles Whiting

In the early 1970s, a former British Royal Air Force policeman–turned-hairdresser, Ken Small, visited South Devon on England’s Channel coast. Read more

British soldiers put their backs into moving pieces of a Bailey Bridge built on pontoons over the Weser River in Germany, 1945.

Dwight D. Eisenhower

The British Bailey Bridge

By Mike McLaughlin

I was always fascinated by the mastery of water,” Sir Donald Coleman Bailey reflected, long after the end of World War II. Read more

Dwight D. Eisenhower

Reich Marshal Hermann Göring at the Nuremberg Trials

by Richard Rule

Stripped of the regalia and high position of Reich Marshal in the Nazi regime and tried as a war criminal, the former Luftwaffe chief was by far the most colorful and outspoken defendant during the postwar proceedings. Read more

Shortly after a surrender to U.S. forces, German officers hand out rations of bread to hungry soldiers.

Dwight D. Eisenhower

The German 11th Panzer Division: Giving Up the Ghost

By Brig. Gen. Raymond E. Bell Jr.

It was an impressive sight. Upon the reviewing stand as honored guest was General Dwight D. Read more

Donning camouflage, a team of OSS operatives lands ashore. Despite initial skepticism, the OSS more than proved its worth during numerous operations in Italy and North Africa.

Dwight D. Eisenhower

OSS Operation Ginny

By Don Smart

The three rubber dinghies struggled through the rough surf in the pitch black night toward an inhospitable stretch of rocky beach. Read more

Dwight D. Eisenhower

WWII Spies: Oreste Pinto

By Robert Whiter

Two men were seated on either side of a paper-strewn table inside an office of MI5, the British intelligence service, in the Royal Victoria Patriotic School at Clapham, London, shortly after the fall of France in the spring of 1940. Read more

On November 10, 1942, American troops occupy a machine-gun position in North Africa. The troops met sporadic resistance from Vichy French forces.

Dwight D. Eisenhower

General Mark Clark’s Secret Mission to North Africa

By Jon Mikolashek

Rain battered the shore and the seas were rough on the night of October 21, 1942. Under the surface of the water, a submarine carried the Allies’ best hope for turning the tide of war in 1942. Read more

Smoke billows from a generator employed at Ludwigshafen along the banks of the Rhine River. The ruins of the city of Mannheim, Germany, are visible in the background.

Dwight D. Eisenhower

Smokescreens: Fighting for Metz

By Jon Latimer

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

Field Marshal Erwin Rommel, commander of the German Atlantic Wall defenses, inspects the work of laborers during a tour to assess preparedness to repel an Allied invasion.

Dwight D. Eisenhower

D-Day 1943: Could the Allied Invasion of Western Europe Have Happened One Year Earlier?

By Lt. Col. John Fenzel III

On June 6, 1944, the Allies unleashed on land, air, and sea the largest invasion force in world history in an enormous effort to liberate Europe from Nazi tyranny. Read more

From Around the Network

Soldiers: General Peter Bagration

Italy’s Daredevil Torpedo Riders

A Scout in Patton’s Third Army

The Battle Of Midway: Turning the Tide in the South Pacific