Trusted Writing on History, Travel, and American Culture Since 1949
Battle of Normandy
The famous journalist was arrested for stowing away on a hospital ship to cover the action on Normandy, writing a more compelling article than did her husband, Ernest Hemingway.
J.D. Salinger carried a draft of his subsequently classic novel with him when he landed on the beach at Normandy.
I don't think I could stand it if I had to go to war. It wouldn't be so bad if they'd just take you out and shoot you, but you have to stay in the army so goddamn long.
Seventy-five years ago this June, the celebrated writer for The New Yorker was one of the first journalists to witness the carnage on Omaha Beach.
Eisenhower's call to proceed with D-Day was anything but inevitable.
It has been 65 years since D-Day—the early June day when the United States and its allies launched a massive attack on the shores of Normandy in a bid to liberate western Europe from the Nazis.
World War II is so difficult to get right on the screen. Here are some of the movies that do it best.
Reminiscences of World War II’s European Theater add up to considerably more than a bunch of good war stories.
Not so very long ago, the whole embattled world waited for one man to say three words.
June 6, 1944, was the pivot of the 20th century. What had gone before that day led up to the invasion of France, and what followed was the consequence. At stake was the future of democracy.
In a hard war, theirs may have been the hardest job of all. Along with Army doctors and nurses, they worked something very close to a miracle in the European theater.
It wasn’t any different getting killed in World War II than in the Civil War, but if the shrapnel, bullet, or tree limb wounded a GI without killing him, his experience as a casualty was infinitely better.
A moving calm fills places that had been shattered by war.
This magazine’s publication of wrenching wartime letters between the author’s parents brought her to international attention. At the same time, it initiated some very heartfelt conversations with our readers.
I have always had a sense that a war claims many more casualties than those who perish on the battlefields. Each statistic, each white cross or star of David in a military cemetery suggests a mother, a father, a wife, a lover, a child left to grieve.
The same qualities that make Alvin Smith a good father-in-law evidently make him a good friend, too. When he turned 70 last year, his wife, Blanche, planned a small party, but it didn’t stay small for long.
This is a story of the months prior to June 6,1944, and a few of the days following, told through some of the letters my 23-year-old father, Frank Elliott, wrote my mother, Pauline, while he was with Company A of the 741st Tank Battalion, and some that she sent him at the time of the Normandy landings.
It begins with three telegrams to my mother, one sent on the day of my birth from Camp Young, near Indio, California, where he was in desert training, although, as it turned out, the unit never went to North Africa.
I was excited. I looked at Flight Officer Bill Meisburger, my chosen partner in this coming operation and my fast friend. He was pale, but his eyes were bright.
A D-DAY VETERAN’S GRANDSON ATTEMPTS TO FIND THE ANSWER TO THAT MOST IMPENETRABLE QUESTION: WHAT WAS IT LIKE?
The Reverend Maurice Kidder used to wake at 5:00 to write sermons in his dark study where the beagle slept; that early hour seemed to give him the clarity to compose his lectures, which he delivered in an unaffected but commanding baritone voice each Sunday a
A soldier who landed in the second wave on Omaha Beach assesses the broadest implications of what he and his comrades achieved there.
It has been a disquieting presence on my bookshelf for 26 years now, in four houses and four apartments, a large, handsome volume, bound in white leather and stamped in gold.
Along this narrow stretch of sand, all the painstaking plans for the Normandy invasion fell apart. One of the men who was lucky enough to make it past the beachhead recalls a day of fear, chaos, grief—and triumph.
I WAS A CAPTAIN in the Stonewall Brigade when I first went into battle at Omaha Beach on June 6, 1944. Our outfit was directly descended from the famed command of Gen. Thomas J.
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
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.
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