Trusted Writing on History, Travel, and American Culture Since 1949
World War II in Italy
Nearly killed by a German bomb, Pyle faced the fear and frustration known as “Anzio anxiety” among the American soldiers trapped with him on the beach.
An American widow encountered Hitler and Mussolini during a world-wide art tour in the years before war broke out.
“Hitler looked cold and ordinary and Mussolini warm and expansive,” Mrs. Gifford later recalled.
Disconsolate and recently widowed, Marguerite Gifford penned a poem in 1937, summing up: “My thrill in life, has ceased to be... my husband will not come to me.”
Allied soldiers struggled for months to clear veteran German troops dug into the mountains of northern Italy in late 1944 and early 1945.
Seventy-five years ago, Allied soldiers made a daring amphibious landing behind German lines and were soon surrounded in what would become one of the toughest battles of World War II.
In a conflict that saw saturation-bombing, Auschwitz, and the atom bomb, poison gas was never used in the field. What prevented it?
Forty years ago, on August 6 and 9, 1945, American B-29s dropped two atomic bombs on Japan, killing at least 110,000 and possibly 250,000 Japanese, and speeding that nation’s surrender.
“For This Challenge, I Had Come Three Thousand Miles and Thirty-six Years of My Life”
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.
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 former Commander of the Allied Air Forces in the Mediterranean in 1944 repliles.
Editor's Note: Lieutenant General Ira C. Eaker was Commander in Chief of the Mediterranean Allied Air Forces in 1944; consequently the mission against the abbey of Monte Cassino was carried out by his bombers.
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.
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