POW

The Hawker Typhoon 1A & 1B: Worst RAF Fighters in WWII?

In 1934 the British War office accepted a new aircraft design eventually designated the Hawker Hurricane Mark 1. Read more

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What Made the Dreaded Type 89 Knee Mortar So Damaging

When it came to weapons production, the Imperial Japanese Army’s requirements often came in second to the needs of the Imperial Japanese Navy. Read more

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The M2 4.2-Inch Chemical Mortar

In the last days of March 1945, a soldier named Carl Getzel sat on a hill outside the city of Aschaffenburg and watched as it was slowly destroyed. Read more

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Engineering Excellence, Political Dysfunction: Mercedes-Benz in WWII

Few would argue that Daimler-Benz is one of the most prominent and highly regarded motor vehicle manufacturers in automotive history. Read more

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The Chance-Vought F4U Corsair: Whistling Death in the South Pacific

Thanks to the rather far-fetched mid-1970s TV series Black Sheep Squadron, the bent-wing image of the Chance-Vought F4U Corsair is no doubt one of the most vivid of the World War II fighters in the minds of most Americans. Read more

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Surviving the German Death March: Hazards of the 600 Mile March

On February 6, 1945, the 10,000 POWs of Stalag Luft IV received their marching orders to move out. Read more

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Rommel’s Failed Gamble: The “Six Days’ Race”

An old cliché admonishes, “Bad things always come in threes.” Whether it was thought of as a law of nature or merely coincidence, a rapid succession of events in North Africa during the summer of 1942 seemed to confirm this widely held notion among the officers and men of the British Eighth Army. Read more

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P-47 Thunderbolts at the Battle of the Bulge

The captured German pilot was cocky and boastful. He had just parachuted into the American airfield, now lit up by the fires of burning Republic P-47 Thunderbolts, a sprinkling of bright torches amid the gray January gloom and the dirty white snow. Read more

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No Deserts for Il Duce: The Italian Rout in East Africa

“I am not a collector of deserts,” Mussolini declared regarding his imperial ambitions. Instead, he would be a loser of them, most publicly in North Africa and, in one of World War II’s least-known campaigns, in East Africa. Read more

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Escape From Bataan

Most Americans were surprised by the Japanese attack on pearl Harbor, but the military had known that war with Japan was inevitable. Read more

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Commando Kidnapping: Capturing General Kreipe on Crete

Several Allied operations targeted a single enemy commander: the unsuccessful raid on General Erwin Rommel’s headquarters in North Africa to kill the Desert Fox; the assassination of the Butcher of Prague, SS Reichsprotektor of Bohemia and Moravia Reinhard Heydrich; and the shooting down of Admiral Isoroku Yamamoto’s plane in the sky above Rabaul in 1943. Read more

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Submarine Special Missions in the Pacific

Sunsets over Manila Bay are nothing less than spectacular. Once  the sun dips below the horizon there is a lingering illumination known as “blue hour” as the sky gradually shifts from pale azure to deep indigo before fading completely into the black tropical night. Read more

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OSS in Germany

By the autumn of 1944, most of Nazi-occupied Europe had been liberated by Allied forces. The conquering armies now faced the invasion of the German homeland. Read more

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Seizing the Altmark

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

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Three Times’ a Charm: A POW’s Journey From the Philippines to Nagasaki

The Great Depression greatly affected millions of Americans during the 1930s, and my father, Chad Hanna, was no exception. Read more

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The Real “Great Escape”

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

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The “Pueblo Incident”: The U.S. Navy’s Grave Miscalculation

The humiliating seizure of the American spy ship Pueblo on January 23, 1968, by North Korean gunboats proved both an enormous intelligence setback and a searing indictment of America’s Cold War policy. Read more

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The Korean War: The MiG 15 & MiG Alley

The Korean War was not only a landmark conflict under the guidance of the United Nations, but it was also the first serious testing ground for jet-to-jet combat. Read more

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Protecting & Repatriating American Remains at the Battle of Saipan

Many vestiges of World War II in the Pacific linger, denying the ravages of time.

The battleship USS Missouri, where the war ended nearly 70 years ago, remains as a floating monument and museum at Pearl Harbor in Hawaii. Read more

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Daring POW Escapes: Allied Officers at Austria’s Oflag XVIIA

Spring had finally arrived in the mountainous area of the Austrian Waldviertel, land of long winters and short summers. Read more