Nazi Germany

American Tank Destroyers at El Guettar

By Christopher Miskimon

In the early morning hours of March 23, 1943, the U.S. 1st Infantry Division was preparing to attack. Read more

Nazi Germany

Taking Out the Tirpitz

By Richard Rule

By mid-1942, the towering German battleship Tirpitz stood alone as the largest, most powerful warship in the world. Read more

Nazi Germany

Seizing the Altmark

By Joseph M. Horodyski

On Sunday, September 3, 1939, the day that Great Britain and France formally declared war on Germany after the Nazis’ invasion of Poland, the German supply ship Altmark concluded her stay at the refinery center of Port Arthur, Texas, where she had taken on a full cargo of diesel oil, and returned to sea. Read more

Nazi Germany

The S.S. Bremen: Last Voyage of a Luxury Liner

By David Luhrssen

After docking in New York on August 28, 1939, only four days before the outbreak of World War II, Captain Adolf Ahrens of Germany’s North German Lloyd shipping line was faced with a decision. Read more

Nazi Germany

The Atlantis: The Kriegsmarine’s Last Corsair

By David Lippman

In her previous life, she had been the Hansa-line freighter Goldenfels. She was launched in 1937 and displaced 7,862 tons. Read more

Nazi Germany

Martyr Village: Massacre at Oradour-sur-Glane

By Robert Mueller

Upon visiting Oradour-sur-Glane, one finds a quiet, rural French village where the populace carries on about its business much like in any commune in France. Read more

Nazi Germany

Operation Willi: The Nazi Plot to Kidnap the Duke of Windsor

By Eric Niderost

It was around noon, June 19, 1940, when a small caravan of cars set out from Antibes in southern France en route to the Spanish border. Read more

Nazi Germany

The Hossbach Memorandum

By Blaine Taylor

On June 24, 1937, German Minister of War Field Marshal Werner von Blomberg issued a directive marked Top Secret with only four copies to be made, the first for himself and the other three for the heads of the armed forces of the Third Reich. Read more

Nazi Germany

The PTRS 41 and Other and Russian Anti-Tank Rifles

By Robert Cashner

Ever since the tank appeared on the battlefield during World War I, armies the world over have sought to field man-portable infantry antitank weapons to give the infantryman a viable defense against the metal monsters. Read more

Nazi Germany

The Proximity Fuse: The Gunner’s Dream Finally Became Realized

By Kevin Allen

Early on the morning of December 16, 1944, the commander of the U.S. 406th Artillery Group, Colonel George Axelson, had a difficult decision to make. Read more

Nazi Germany

The Russo-Finnish War: Why Stalin Tried to Invade Finland

By Arnold Blumberg

Prior to the Russo-Finnish War, problems were already setting in for Russia and Germany. The hugely cynical German-Soviet nonaggression pact, concluded in August 1939, assigned the Baltic region of eastern Europe to the exclusive sphere of influence of Communist Russia. Read more

Nazi Germany

WWII Weapons: M3 37mm Antitank Gun

By Christopher Miskimon

The men of Lieutenant Edwin K. Smith’s antitank platoon, 2nd Battalion, 26th Infantry Regiment, 1st Infantry Division peered over the gun shields of their 37mm cannon at the column of Vichy French armored cars approaching their roadblock. Read more

Nazi Germany

Baghdad’s 1941 Regime

By John W. Osborn, Jr.

A dangerous outlaw regime sits in power in Baghdad; the leader of one of the world’s superpowers decides it has to be removed at all costs; an army marches across the desert to topple it.  Read more

Nazi Germany

Adolf Hitler: Rhetoric’s Overlord of Darkness

By John Perry

When Nazi architect Albert Speer surrendered in 1945, he made a strange remark: “So now the end has come. Read more

Nazi Germany

Operation Spring Awakening: Adolf Hitler’s Last WWII Offensive

By Major General Michael Reynolds

In January 12, 1945, Adolf Hitler received the news he had been dreading—the Soviet Red Army had launched its winter offensive. Read more

Nazi Germany

Romania’s Disaster at Stalingrad

By Tom W. Murrey, Jr.

World War II involved some of the most complex alliance systems in the history of warfare. Read more

Nazi Germany

The Real “Great Escape”

By Jeffrey A. Denman

In early 1942, the air war over Germany was taking its toll on the Royal Air Force. Read more

Nazi Germany

Grand Mufti al-Husseini: Britain’s Deadliest Enemy?

By Blaine Taylor

Like all Palestinians and most Arabs, Haj Amin al-Hussaini not only looked forward to an Axis Pact victory in World War II but also saw it as a means of defeating what he believed was a joint British-Jewish conspiracy to foist an Israelite homeland on the Middle East that would be to the detriment of his own people. Read more

Nazi Germany

Leclerc and Liberation

By Michael D. Hull

After the humiliating fall of France in June 1940, two impassioned patriots—a general and an infantry captain—refused to accept defeat and determined, against all odds, to exact retribution from the German invaders. Read more

Nazi Germany

“Is Paris Burning?” Liberating the City of Light

By Kelly Bell

By the late summer of 1944, the Third Reich was almost surrounded. Two years earlier Adolf Hitler had ground 10 European countries under his heel along with vast expanses of North Africa and Soviet Russia. Read more