Trusted Writing on History, Travel, and American Culture Since 1949
World War II
THE BEST OF TODAY’S ALTERNATE HISTORY ISN’T LIKELY TO CHEER YOU UP. BUT IT CERTAINLY WON’T BORE YOU.
People have been writing alternate history since at least the early nineteenth century, but for most of that time, it was a tiny sub-genre of popular fiction. Now it’s being produced in industrial quantities.
World War II is so difficult to get right on the screen. Here are some of the movies that do it best.
We Must Learn to Save Ourselves From Saviors.
Given that the full written history of man encompasses approximately 2500 years, the lesson of the century may be calculated proportionally as 4 percent of the wisdom of the ages.
Half a century after his father’s death, he struck up an extraordinary friendship with the man who shot his plane down.
My quest began sometime shortly after World War II. I was a young boy when my maternal grandfather told me the story of how my father, Lt. Col. Francis R. Stevens, had been killed in the skies over New Guinea.
Reminiscences of World War II’s European Theater add up to considerably more than a bunch of good war stories.
In the wake of Pearl Harbor, tens of thousands of American citizens were taken from their homes and locked up simply because of their Japanese ancestry. Was their internment a grim necessity or “the worst blow to civil liberty in our history”? The Chief Justice of the United States weighs the reasoning.
Have Americans slid backward since the sunny, prosperous years after World War II, as so many feel? To find out, an English-born historian compares our recent past with earlier times, and, in the process, learns something about our likely course into the next century.
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.
ONE EVENING A YEAR OR SO AGO, I FOUND myself at a party speaking with Lorenzo DuFau and James W. Graham about events that had taken place before I was born.
Donald Kagan, a historian of the ancient world believes that, in every era, people have reacted to the demands of waging war in surprisingly similar ways, and that, to protect our national interests today, Americans must understand the choices that soldiers and statesmen made hundreds and even thousands of years ago.
The war’s-end anniversaries are over now. In a sense, they were over on June 6, 1994, with the commemorative ceremonies that drew the nation’s gaze back half a century to the Normandy landings.
As a ten-year-old boy, the author had a role to play in bringing Douglas MacArthur’s vision of democracy to a shattered Japan.
On August 30, 1945, just days after Japan capitulated, ending World War II, Douglas MacArthur first set foot on the island nation, to set up temporary headquarters at the New Grand Hotel in Yokohama, and to set in motion a unique experiment that, little more than three and a ha
In an exchange of letters, a man who had an immeasurable impact on how the great struggle of our times was waged looks back on how it began.
Though it appears to have sprung up overnight, the inspiration of free-spirited hackers, it in fact was born in Defense Department Cold War projects of the 1950s.
The internet seems so now, so happening, so information age, that its Gen-X devotees might find the uncool circumstances of its birth hard to grasp.
Consigned to the Pennsylvania Railroad’s “Garbage Run,” they fought their own war on the home front, and they helped shape a victory as surely as their brothers and husbands did overseas.
All the new lady brakemen on the Pennsylvania Railroad were put to work on what was officially known as the Jersey Coast Extra List.
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 world about us is strewn with relics that are quietly eloquent of the struggle that ended half a century ago.
Flip through some old magazines from the World War II years.
The author entered the conquered capital days after the surrender to meet high officers of the Imperial Navy.
Fifty years ago, in the summer of 1945, I was a naval officer in Norfolk, Virginia contemplating my inevitable return to the Western Pacific, when two bombs were dropped, the Soviets entered the war, and the Japanese emperor prevailed on his government to thr
Truman was Commander in Chief of the American armed forces, and he had a duty to the men under his command that simply was not shared by those sitting in moral judgment decades later.
On the morning of August 6, 1945, the American B-29 Enola Gay dropped an atomic bomb on the Japanese city of Hiroshima. Three days later another B-29, Bock’s Car, released one over Nagasaki.
He spent his tour of duty bombing German cities and made it home only to discover he could never leave the war behind him. Then, a lifetime later, he found a way to make peace.
My story begins in 1925. I was the youngest of nine children born to Frank and Leata Clark, factory workers in southern Wisconsin who were hit hard by the Depression. My father died when I was 13.
They padded aboard submarines and proved themselves steadfast in boredom and in battle. During the worst of war, these canine mascots brought their shipmates some of the comfort of home.
SAILORS HAVE BEEN TAKING DOGS TO SEA SINCE A PAIR OF canines shipped out with Noah. Nevertheless, the picture of the floppy-eared poodle, looking as jaunty and confident as the young submariners who surrounded her, surprised me.
A veteran recalls the everyday courage of a threadbare generation.
My brother called me from Youngstown recently with a bright idea. Why not get up a three-piece band for a meeting of his musical club next month when I planned to be in town?
The great struggles of our century have all been followed by tides of revulsion: Americans decided we were mad to have entered World War I; Russia should have been our enemy in World War II; the United States started the Cold War. Now, another such tide has risen in Europe, and it may be on its way here.
History is revisionism. It is the frequent—nay, the ceaseless—reviewing and revising and rethinking of the past.
I am told that many people have difficulty in deciding the most exciting moment in their lives. Not I. For me, it was August 25, 1944—the day of the liberation of Paris half a century ago.
Justice served nearly 50 years ago in a wrecked German city still casts its light and shadow over much of the world.
A SENSATION OF PARALLEL TIME, of one eye fixed on the present and the other focused on the past, of one ear hearing the moment and the other distant echoes, was there from the beginning of the project. Nuremberg 1945, San Miguel de Allende 1991.
A scholar searches across two centuries to discover the main engine of our government’s growth, and reaches a controversial conclusion.
Alexis de Tocqueville observed in 1835 that America had no neighbors and hence no enemies.
Of all the Allied leaders, argues FDR's biographer, only Roosevelt saw clearly the shape of the new world they were fighting to create.
AFTER HALF A CENTURY, IT IS HARD TO APPROACH FRANKLIN D. ROOSEVELT, EXCEPT through a minefield of clichés. Theories of FDR, running the gamut from artlessness to mystification, have long paraded before our eyes.
A soldier who landed in the second wave on Omaha Beach assesses the broadest implications of what he and his comrades achieved there.
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
After every war in the nation’s history, the military has faced not only calls for demobilization, but new challenges and new opportunities. It is happening again.
Not many people appreciate a military base closing. Like the shutting of a factory, it can devastate nearby towns, throwing thousands of people out of work. Merchants face losses and even bankruptcy as sales fall off.
Featured Authors
