Normandy
The very nature of war means that some participants will be killed and others will be wounded, and some estimate the deaths in WWII to be around 85 million. Read more
Normandy
With the exceptions of the Normandy invasion and the Battle of the Bulge, few other World War II battles in the European Theater have received more historical scrutiny than the Battle of the Falaise Gap. Read more
Normandy
The popular image of Hitler’s Atlantic Wall (Atlantikwall) is one of massive bunkers and huge artillery pieces recessed in concrete casemates stretching the length of the Reich’s coastline. Read more
Normandy
The Japanese superbattleship Musashi was steaming east along with a fleet of other battleships, cruisers, and destroyers on their way toward what was expected to be a climactic battle at Leyte Gulf. Read more
Normandy
The German sniper scanned the battlefield outside his bunker on the outskirts of the port city of Brest, on France’s Brittany peninsula. Read more
Normandy
“Am over enemy submarine in position …”
Cut off in mid-transmission, this contact report came from a U.S. Read more
Normandy
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
Normandy
World War II made a disparate trio of allies —British Prime Minister Winston Churchill, Soviet Marshal Joseph Stalin, and American President Franklin D. Read more
Normandy
For 33 months beginning in 1942, the U.S. Eighth Air Force and its precision daylight bombing strikes against German targets in Europe tried to pound the Third Reich into submission. Read more
Normandy
War spared no one. As modern armies clashed in France’s Normandy countryside, French civilians found themselves in the crossfire or on the receiving end of bombs and heavy weapons. Read more
Normandy
The Germans were gone. After more than four years of occupation, the soldiers of the Wehrmacht had been evicted from France’s Normandy region by the American and British armies. Read more
Normandy
American General George S. Patton, Jr., and German Field Marshal Erwin Rommel both demonstrated the masterful employment of armored forces in many World War II military campaigns. Read more
Normandy
The image of the Scottish piper standing erect under fire was commemorated in the film The Longest Day nearly two decades after the D-Day landings of June 6, 1944. Read more
Normandy
No Allied amphibious invasion in World War II left such a bitter legacy as Operation Jubilee, the ill-fated British-Canadian raid on the northern French port of Dieppe on Wednesday, August 19, 1942. Read more
Normandy
“Why the hell am I here?” Lt. Richard Winters asked himself as he pulled out of his parachute harness in the first hours of D-Day. Read more
Normandy
Many people who never knew John Hanlon personally may remember him as that paratrooper who took the sheets back to Bastogne. Read more
Normandy
Not all of the 68 infantry divisions available to the U.S. Army during World War II were made up of draftees and enlistees. Read more
Normandy
When American soldiers landed in France in June 1944 as part of the great Allied crusade to liberate Europe, they were well trained, fully equipped, and brimming with confidence. Read more
Normandy
In 1934 the British War office accepted a new aircraft design eventually designated the Hawker Hurricane Mark 1. Read more
Normandy
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
