Japan
The Fletcher-class destroyer was one of the finest, most versatile warships of World War II. More than 170 of them were built, a figure that far exceeds the total of any other type of warship of the era. Read more
Japan
Six months after the attack on Pearl Harbor, Admiral Isoroku Yamamoto, commander of the Combined Fleet of the Imperial Japanese Navy, sought to extend Japan’s defensive perimeter in the central Pacific with the seizure of Midway atoll, about 1,300 miles west of Hawaii. Read more
Japan
He was the longest-reigning monarch and head of state in the 20th century, and the third-longest in history behind King Louis XIV of France (72 years) and England’s Queen Victoria (64 years). Read more
Japan
By Chris McGowan
Atop 550-foot Suribachi Yama, the volcano at the southwest tip of Iwo Jima, Marines of the 2nd Battalion, 28th Regiment, 5th Division, hoist the Stars and Stripes, signaling the capture of this key position. Read more
Japan
After sundown on July 17, something happened at a small port town 40 miles northeast of San Francisco that has never been fully explained…
The 7,500-ton Liberty ship SS E.A. Read more
Japan
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
Japan
On March 5, 1936, the new Supermarine Type 300 took off from Southampton, England. The plane would soon be called the Spitfire, and along with the Hawker Hurricane it would become Great Britain’s first line of defense. Read more
Japan
In the 1940s, war disrupted the lives of millions of people around the globe: fuel rationing, food rationing, shortages of all kinds, and, of course, the death and destruction that was visited on cities, nations, and whole populations. Read more
Japan
Lieutenant Colonel William Edwin Dyess, a U.S. Army Air Corps pilot and squadron commander, was considered a hero by men who served under him in the Philippines and who felt they owed their own lives to Ed’s sacrifice. Read more
Japan
U.S. involvement in WWII grew to be about 16,000,000 military personnel by the war’s end: approximately 11,200,000 in the Army, 4,200,000 in the Navy, and 660,000 in the Marine Corps. Read more
Japan
As the light of a sickly green flare shot skyward, three Marines from the 11th Machine Gun Squad, H Company, 2nd Battalion, 1st Marine Regiment crouched in the hole awaiting the Japanese onslaught on Guadalcanal. Read more
Japan
The heavy cruiser USS Houston ventured into the Sunda Strait off the coast of Java on the dark night of February 28, 1942, and was never heard from again. Read more
Japan
By Christmas 1941, Robert Hunt, torpedoman on the submarine USS Tambor, had witnessed the Japanese bombing of Wake Island, had slept in the Tambor’s forward torpedo room on the way back to Pearl with a bomb-induced leak bubbling in the corner, and had stood on his sub’s bow and seen the devastation of Battleship Row as debris in the oil-slicked harbor bumped against the hull. Read more
Japan
Stanley Johnston, a reporter for the Chicago Tribune accredited to the Navy as a correspondent, had made two forays into the South Pacific aboard the aircraft carrier Lexington. Read more
Japan
When it came to weapons production, the Imperial Japanese Army’s requirements often came in second to the needs of the Imperial Japanese Navy. Read more
Japan
In the last days of March 1945, a soldier named Carl Getzel sat on a hill outside the city of Aschaffenburg and watched as it was slowly destroyed. Read more
Japan
The 18-year-old seamen bobbed in the oily waters off the Philippine coast with other survivors of the October 25, 1944, battle. Read more
Japan
Donald R. Lobaugh was a juvenile delinquent, a kid sent to reform school when he was 16 years old. Read more
Japan
When Commodore Matthew C. Perry sailed out of Tokyo Bay after his historic visit in 1854, he left in his wake a desire among the Japanese to emulate all things Western. Read more
Japan
The Japanese empire was a fine place for young Hiro Onoda. In 1939, at age 17, he hired on with a lacquerware company that posted him to Hankow (Wuhan) in Japanese-occupied China. Read more
