Germans became interested in rocketry because rockets were not denied them by the Versailles Treaty. Through the 1930s they got a huge head start over the democracies in the use of rockets as weapons of war.

Europe

Germany’s Deadly V-2 Rockets

By David Alan Johnson

Sixty-four-year-old Robert Stubbs slowly walked across the playing field of the Staveley Road School in the West London suburb of Chiswick. Read more

Europe

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

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

Europe

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

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.

Europe

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

Roman legionaries clamber out of galleys and wade toward the battle on the English shore.

Europe

Julius Caesar’s Expedition to Brittania

By Ludwig Dyck

By the summer of 55 bc, 45-year-old Roman proconsul Gaius Julius Caesar was a veteran military campaigner. For the past three years, under his lead, the tramp of hobnailed sandals had resounded across the countryside of Gaul, the westernmost province of the Roman empire. Read more

Europe

The Duke of Marlborough at Malplaquet

by Herman T. Voelkner

England’s survival hung in the balance. She had only recently clashed with an imposing Continental alliance, in a futile war characterized by unprecedented slaughter on obscure fields in Flanders. Read more

Viking longboats cut through the sea while on expedition. King Harald’s nickname was “Hardradi,” meaning “the ruthless;” something his enemies could surely attest to.

Europe

Harald “Land Waster” Hardradi

by Kenneth Cline

For many history buffs, the date 1066 conjures up an image of Norman knights breaking through the shield wall of the ax-wielding Anglo-Saxons at Senlac Hill. Read more

First Lieutenant Rudolf Schutze of Wekusta 5 and his flight crew gather near a Heinkel He-111weather aircraft on the ice of Advent, Fjord.

Europe

Wekusta: Weathermen of the Wehrmacht

By William McPeak

The fundamental pillars of war—strategy and tactics— inevitably depend on an imponderable and uncontrollable factor: the weather. With the increasing sophistication of weather data gathering, analysis, and forecasting in the early 20th century, predicting the weather became an integral part of World War II. Read more

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