U.S. Navy
When American air ace Major John Mitchell led 16 Lockheed P-38 Lightning fighters on the longest combat mission yet flown (420 miles) on April 18, 1943, Mitchell’s target was Isoroku Yamamoto, the Japanese admiral considered the architect of the Pearl Harbor attack. Read more
U.S. Navy
A United States naval task force bearing the U.S. 1st Marine Division arrived off Guadalcanal, in the eastern Solomon Islands, on the morning of August 7, 1942, and launched the first American offensive operation of World War II. Read more
U.S. Navy
In German it was called Operation Rösselsprung, which translates to “Long Jump.” Its goal was to kill or kidnap the Allies’ “Big Three” leaders––Soviet Premier Josef Stalin, British Prime Minister Winston S. Read more
U.S. Navy
“Am over enemy submarine in position …”
Cut off in mid-transmission, this contact report came from a U.S. Read more
U.S. Navy
British Prime Minister Winston Churchill, who rode in a cavalry charge in the Sudan in 1898, escaped from the Boers in 1899 and served for six months as a troop leader in the Western Front trenches in 1915-1916, remarked during World War II, “The only thing that ever really frightened me during the war was the U-boat peril.” Read more
U.S. Navy
The Landing Craft Mechanized (LCM) carrying Army engineers and Navy beachmasters hit a mine on its way into Omaha Beach. Read more
U.S. Navy
With such award-winning films as Stagecoach, Young Mr. Lincoln, Drums Along the Mohawk, The Grapes of Wrath, The Long Voyage Home, and How Green Was My Valley behind him, John Ford was one of Hollywood’s most respected directors by the time World War II broke out in 1939. Read more
U.S. Navy
Early in the morning of July 8, 1942, in the calm waters of Caballo Bay south of Corregidor Island in the Philippines, a casco, a 12-foot by 60-foot flat-bottomed wooden diving barge, bobbed placidly in the open water 120 feet above the ocean floor. Read more
U.S. Navy
In early 1942 things could have hardly looked bleaker for the Allies. In Europe, Hitler’s war machine had steamrolled across the entire continent and was now battling before the gates of Moscow. Read more
U.S. Navy
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
U.S. Navy
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
U.S. Navy
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
U.S. Navy
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
U.S. Navy
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
U.S. Navy
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
U.S. Navy
On the morning of June 6, 1944, the 2nd Ranger Battalion, commanded by Lt. Col. James Earl Rudder, began its ascent of a sheer 100-foot precipice called Pointe du Hoc. Read more
U.S. Navy
The pilots of Bombing Squadron 6 could not believe what they were seeing on the morning of June 4, 1942. Read more
U.S. Navy
When Nathan and Jane Olds of Stanton, ND; Ralph and Vera Endicott of Aberdeen, Wash.; and Effie Costin of Henryville, Ind., Read more
U.S. Navy
Donald R. Lobaugh was a juvenile delinquent, a kid sent to reform school when he was 16 years old. Read more
U.S. Navy
She was a sleek, efficient, deadly killer, a home to six officers and 60 enlisted men, and a holy terror to the enemy. Read more
