memoir

An Army Combat Engineer’s Story of the D-Day Invasion

By Rob Morris

Nineteen-year-old army combat engineer Jay Rencher blinked the salt spray from his eyes, filled his lungs, and again plunged beneath the cold, roiling waves. Read more

memoir

From the Luftwaffe: Joachim Benz on the Eastern Front

By Joachim Benz, as told to Peter D. Fyfe and Ward Carr

Following service as a lieutenant in the U.S. Army Air Defense Artillery during the early 1970s, Ward Carr decided to remain in Germany, residing in Frankfurt. Read more

memoir

Ed Mauser: Easy Company’s Silent Brother

By Kevin M. Hymel

Paratrooper Ed Mauser never forgot the first thing he saw when he leaped from the doorway of his C-47 transport plane in the opening hours of D-Day, June 6, 1944. Read more

memoir

The Miracle of Bletchley Park

By Hervie Haufler

Great Britain’s military intelligence leaders learned from their experience in World War I that the kinds of minds capable of breaking codes are a rare commodity and are often not likely to blossom in a military atmosphere. Read more

memoir

The Memoirs of Herbert Carlton

By A.B. Feuer

Editor’s note: Noted military writer Bud Feuer especially enjoys discovering first-person accounts and diaries. He found the following in “a junk shop” written in pencil on brown wrapping paper. Read more

memoir

A Scout in Patton’s Third Army

By Kevin M. Hymel

The Messerschmitt Bf-109 fighter plane dove out of the sky with machine guns firing. The pilot’s target—a pontoon bridge being stretched across Germany’s Werra River by American engineers. Read more

memoir

My Battle Up the Boot: Paul McNelis in the Italian Campaign

By Richard A. Beranty

The U.S. 85th Infantry Division was one of the Allied workhorses in Italy during World War II. Read more

memoir

Charlie Mott: Flying Tiger Caged

By Bob Bergin

­­Charles D. Mott was a U.S. Navy dive-bomber pilot when he joined the American Volunteer Group (AVG), the small band of Americans who flew under the leadership of General Claire Lee Chennault and became known to history as the Flying Tigers. Read more

memoir

WWII Letters: Corporal James. G. Delaney

By Maura B. Delaney

Letters were a valuable commodity to the World War II soldier. They were the link to home and to all things familiar in a most unfamiliar place and time. Read more

memoir

Inside the OSS: An Interview With Elizabeth P. McIntosh

By Bob Bergin

The Office of Strategic Services (OSS) was America’s first strategic intelligence organization. President Franklin D. Roosevelt authorized its establishment on June 13, 1942, six months after World War II began, to collect and analyze strategic intelligence and to conduct special services, including subversion, sabotage, and psychological warfare. Read more

memoir

Working on the Railway of Death: A POW’s Story

By Eric Niderost

When Howard Brooks joined the United States Navy in 1939, the 20-year-old farm boy from Tennessee had no idea that he was going to experience one of the most harrowing adventures of World War II. Read more

memoir

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

memoir

Tank Destroyers in Action! Photos of the 809th on the Front

By Neal Fausset

The 809th Tank Destroyer Battalion was an independently attached unit of the U.S. Army. The battalion was activated on March 18, 1942, at Camp Forrest, Tennessee, and remained in the United States through most of the war. Read more

memoir

World Airlines Flight 253: Hostage of the Soviet Union

By Adam Griffith

Nineteen-year-old U.S. Army Specialist E5 James Griffith wasn’t particularly nervous when he boarded Seaboard World Airlines Flight 253 at McChord Air Base in Tacoma, Washington, on June 30, 1968. Read more

memoir

Vierville Civilians Recall Allied Pre-Invasion Bombings

by Kevin Hymel

The townspeople of Vierville-sur-Mer awoke around 3 am on June 6, 1944, to the sound of bombs. In the early morning of the Normandy Invasion, American Consolidated B-24 Liberator bombers were dropping their payloads, preparing the invasion beaches for the coming attack. Read more

memoir

The German and Austrian Jews of the Allied Armies

By Steven Karras Prologue:

Once they escaped from Nazi-dominated Europe, hundreds of German and Austrian Jews joined the American and British military to help bring an end to the Nazis’ reign of terror. Read more

memoir

From 747 to B-17: An Interview With Airline Pilot Robert Trammell

By William Caverlee

Delta Air Lines and former Northwest pilot Robert Trammell, 45, has made numerous 747 flights on Asian routes across the Pacific. Read more

memoir

With the “Ragtag Circus” Across Europe: The Story of Frank Fauver

By Susan Zimmerman

The 83rd U.S. Infantry Division had been mobilized for World War I in September 1917. Its unit patch was a downward-pointing black triangle with the letters O-H-I-O stitched as an abstract gold monogram in the center. Read more

memoir

“I Survived the USS Franklin Inferno”

By George F. Black, as told to Howard Dunbar

On March 19, 1945, the Essex-class carrier USS Franklin (CV-13), dubbed “Big Ben,” lay 50 miles off Honshu, one of Japan’s Home Islands. Read more

memoir

U.S. Army Heritage Museum

By Mason B. Webb

In the heart of Pennsylvania, not far from the Civil War battlefields of Gettysburg, stands the U.S. Read more