luftwaffe Archives

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.

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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

In a painting by Richard Eurich, British commandos drop from the night sky and scramble onto the beach during the daring raid on the Bruneval radio location station in coastal France, February 27-28, 1942.

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Operation Biting: the Bruneval Raid to Capture German Radar

By Robert Barr Smith

Through the long, lovely days of the summer of 1940, almost two years before Operation Biting or the “Bruneval Raid,” Royal Air Force Spitfire and Hurricane fighter planes turned back the might of the Luftwaffe over southern and southeastern Britain. Read more

A panther tank and panzer grenadiers of the 5th SS Panzer Division Wiking help to break the encirclement of the Russian town of Kowel in the strategically important area of the Pripet Marshes.

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Waffen SS General Felix Steiner’s WWII Legacy

By Pat McTaggart

“Where is Steiner?” Adolf Hitler demanded as his Thousand Year Reich crumbled around him in April 1945. “Is he attacking yet?” Read more

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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

Thick sulphurous smoke pours from the flaming wreckage of a B-17 bomber in a French field.

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The Hidden Freedom Trail

by Adam Lynch

A few moments after his stricken Boeing B-17 Flying Fortress bomber tore apart, co-pilot Ralph Patton hurriedly put his bail-out plan into action. Read more

Embattled Tobruk lies under a pall of smoke during Rommel’s push to capture the vital North African port city in the spring of 1941.

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The Siege of Tobruk: WWII’s Debacle in the Desert

by Michael D. Hull

Sidi Barrani, Bardia, Sollum, Sidi Rezegh, Mersa Matruh, Bir Hacheim, El Agheila, Beda Fomm, Sidi Omar, Benghazi … The names of many remote villages in North Africa were written into history in 1941-1942 as British and Axis armies battled back and forth across the scrubby desert wastelands of northern Egypt and Libya. Read more

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The Bloody Triangle along WWII’s Eastern Front

By Victor J. Kamenir

In 1941, the year of the Battle of the Bloody Triangle, the northwestern corner of the Ukraine was not what one would call tank country. Read more

Filling the skies over Germany, U.S. B-17 bombers encounter deadly flak in this WWII period painting by Floyd Davis.

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The Harrowing Return from the The Bombing of Bremen

by Lowell L. Getz

“Bombs Away” rang out over the intercom static of the 29 aircraft of the 91st Bomb Group (Heavy). Read more

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The Invention of Radar vs. The Luftwaffe

By Brooke C. Stoddard

Near the end of World War II, Hitler boasted he was about to unleash Vergeltungswaffen, or “vengeance weapons.” Read more

Explosions rock Malta during an enemy air raid. Due to Malta’s location along German and Italian supply routes, its airfields and dockyards were subject to many bombing runs.

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The Siege of Malta in WWII: Holding on to the Island Fortress

By John Brown

When World War II began in September 1939, just nine months before the Siege of Malta, its three small islands in the central Mediterranean were still considered part of the British Commonwealth. Read more

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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.

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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

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German U-Boats: Scapa Flow Shock

By Jon Latimer

World War II had been in progress for six weeks when on the evening of October 12, 1939, the German submarine U-47 surfaced off the Orkney Islands at the northern tip of Scotland. Read more

Russian women pilots originally flew the antiquated Polykarpov PO-2, which was made of wood covered with fabric.

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Red Air Force Heroines: The Night Witches

By George Tipton Wilson

Ignoring a nonaggression pact between Hitler and Stalin, Nazi Germany launched Operation Barbarossa, an invasion of the Soviet Union, on June 22, 1941. Read more

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Luftwaffe Raids: St. Paul’s Stands Proud

By David Alan Johnson

At St. Paul’s Cathedral, the rooftop lookout telephoned the cathedral control center at 6 pm to report that air raid sirens were sounding off to the southwest. Read more

Photographed after its capture by Allied troops, this modified He-111 bomber was one of those intended for use as a flying bomb carrier during the implementation of the Reichenberg Project.

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Hanna Reitsch, the Reichenberg Project & Germany’s Kamikazes

By David Alan Johnson

By early 1944, the Luftwaffe was only a shadow of what it had been at the beginning of the war. Read more

Colonel David Stirling, founder of the SAS, poses with several of his men prior to their departure for a raid. The heavily armed Jeeps usually mounted twin Vickers machine guns and carried provisions for extended forays into the desert.

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Commando Paddy Mayne: Ireland’s Wolf of the Desert

By Kelly Bell

The night of December 14, 1941, was bitterly cold in the North African desert. Midway between El Agheila and Tripoli, Libya, was the German and Italian air base outside the town of Tamet. Read more

A Junkers Ju-52 returns from Crete, bringing home wounded parachutists and Alpine patrol soldiers.

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Fliegen und Siegen: Photographs from the Luftwaffe

By A. Burke

Sixty-five years ago, Reichsmarschall Hermann Göring’s Luftwaffe showcased its aerial triumphs in a 1942 commemorative book of photographs entitled Fliegen und Siegen (“Flying and Victory”). Read more

German camp authorities and delegates of the International Red Cross discuss the disposition of packages at Luft Stalag III B.

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Steve Stupak: Surviving the German Death March

By Al Hemingway

By 1945, the war in Europe was nearing its conclusion. Having suffered a severe defeat at the hands of the Allies in the Battle of the Bulge, Adolf Hitler’s seemingly indestructible Third Reich was quickly crumbling under the Allied juggernaut. Read more

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Duel in the Desert: Operation Crusader’s Battle of Bardia

By Allyn Vannoy

The desert sky lit up like a summer lightning storm on the night of December 31, 1941. The distant thunder of hundreds of guns rolled across the sandy, stony ground. Read more

From Around the Network

Marshal Georgi Zhukov: Hero of the Soviet Union

Michael Lynch’s ‘The Chinese Civil War 1945-49’

Edwin P. Hoyt’s ‘The U-Boat Wars’

Rebel Blunder at Fredericksburg