Trusted Writing on History, Travel, and American Culture Since 1949
World War II
An attempt at modest celebration during the longest battle on German territory during World War II ended badly.
After reading an interview with General Gavin in a newspaper, a major who had fought in the Huertgen Forest wrote the general the following letter:
In his reassessment of a tragic World War II battle, General Gavin concludes that, for the Germans, holding the Huertgen Forest was Phase One of the Battle of the Bulge. For the Americans, trying to occupy the forest was a ghastly mistake.
The Battle of the Bulge came to an end in the closing days of January, 1945.
“For This Challenge, I Had Come Three Thousand Miles and Thirty-six Years of My Life”
An infantryman remembers how it was
Victory in Europe seemed sure and near for the Western Allies in late summer, 1944, as their armies broke out of a shallow beachhead on the Channel coast of France and rolled, seemingly unstoppable, across Normandy, Brittany, Flanders, on to Paris, and up to the borders of Germ
to Joseph P. Lash for Roosevelt and Churchill, 1939–1941: The Partnership That Saved the West
If Joseph P. Lash had decided, back in 1942, to write a book on the wartime friendship between Franklin D. Roosevelt and Winston Churchill, he would have been off to a lucky start.
The Agony of J. Robert Oppenheimer
In the life of J.
An American Success Story
A dreadful prospect opened up for mankind when Napoleon’s Grande Armée won the battle of Austerlitz and swept on to conquer all of Europe.
Remembering Samuel Eliot Morrison
The great job of the historian is to enable people to understand how things were and why they happened so in a time and at a place that are gone forever. Somehow he has to reach the irrecoverable past.
IN ALL THE PACK, DAN COAKLEY DESERVED TO BE CALLED
They are all gone now—those vivid, venal characters who for a half century up to World War IIAC moved with insouciant relentlessness across the spotted field of Boston politics.
Ridgeway commanded the 82nd Airborne in World War II, became Supreme Allied Commander in Europe and Army Chief of Staff, and played important roles in the Korean and Vietnam Wars.
A soldier remembers a great battle
Three decades ago a battle was fought for St. Lô , Normandy, France, in the second of the great world wars of this century. To have been young at St.
The famed aviator recalls the dramatic bombing raid he led on Tokyo early in World War II.
“My God! What are you doing here? You’re supposed to be dead!” the Admiral told Lanikai's skipper when she finally sailed into port
On March 18, 1941, eighty-two days out of Manila, all sails set, rigging taut, a small, green, weathered schooner entered the port of Fremantle, Western Australia. Atop her afterdeck house a small-caliber, slim-barrelled cannon sat on a brass pedestal.
The making and breaking of codes and ciphers has played an exciting and often crucial part in American history
By choice, cryptographers are an unsung and anonymous lot. In war and peace they labor in their black chambers, behind barred doors, dispatching sheets of secret symbols and reading encoded messages from the innermost councils of foreign governments.
“My room mate (tent mate, rather) is Dwight Eisenhower of Abilene, Kansas.…” On JuIy 30, 1911, Paul A.
In our October, 1971, issue we published an account of the little-publicized German air raid on the port of Bari, Italy, which took place on December 2, 1943, and the tragic consequences when ships carrying highly secret supplies of mustard gas exploded.
It was the most devastating enemy surprise attack since Pearl Harbor—but what mysterious affliction were people dying of two days later?
The port of Bari, Italy, was crowded on the afternoon of December 2, 1943, when Captain Otto Heitmann returned to his ship, the John Bascom , with the two thousand dollars he had drawn from the U.S.
Operation Market-Garden promised to lay an airborne red carpet to victory, but its final objective proved to be “a bridge to far.”
It would have taken considerable effort to locate an Allied fighting man on the battle line in Western Europe on September 10, 1944, who doubted that the end of the war was just around the corner.
Army newspapers in World Wars I and II were unofficial, informal, and more than the top brass could handle
In the summer of the year 1944, in a time of world war that is already history to my children’s generation but remains vividly personal to mine as a moment of (in retrospect) astonishing simplicity and idealism, I found myself pointing a jeep in the direction
In this final installment from our series on General Joseph W. Stilwell, Barbara W. Tuchman recounts the story of the old soldier’s finest hour
“I claim we got a hall of a beating”
Roosevelt, like Lincoln and Wilson, died fighting for his ideals.
The furious speaker was Field Marshal Kesselring. The time was 1944. And the “shadow” was cast by Italian partisans and a handful of brave Americans from General Bill Donovan’s O.S.S.
The G.I.’s were far more numerous than any army that ever occupied Britain; none left so little visible trace, none so touching a legacy
The admiral who commanded "the ship that wouldn't die" recalls the hellish and heroic hours after a kamikaze turned the carrier Franklin into an inferno.
The admiral who commanded "the ship that wouldn't die" recalls the hellish and heroic hours after a kamikaze turned the carrier Franklin into an inferno.
Eisenhower dreamed of serving under Patton, but history reversed their roles. Their stormy association dramatically shaped the Allied assault on the Third Reich
Outgunned by the Nazi raider, the Stephen Hopkins could have struck her colors. Instead she elected to fight
The Allied drive toward Rome had stalled. Was the destruction of a historic monastery justified in an effort to break the German line and get the campaign moving again?
Halfway between Naples and Rome, on a mountaintop and visible for miles, stands the Benedictine abbey of Monte Cassino, serene and benign, apparently indestructible.
Japanese naval air power was wrecked at the Battle of the Philippine Sea, but, says a U. S. carrier admiral who was there, our Navy missed a chance to destroy the enemy fleet and shorten the war.
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