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World War II
Last month, a curious new book appeared. Churchill: The End of Glory, by the English historian John Charmley, examines Britain’s wartime leader and finds him a disastrous failure.
The generation that fought World War II also won a housing revolution that promised and delivered a home for $7990.
After the fall of his financial empire, William Levitt remembered with some satisfaction the story of a boy in Levittown, Long Island who finished his prayers with “and God bless Mommy and Daddy and Mr. Levitt.” Levitt may well have belonged in this trinity.
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.
J. L. O. Tedder missed the battle, but his peacetime pursuits are heroic enough.
Every so often, one comes across a writer who should be awarded the literary equivalent of the Victoria Cross or the Medal of Honor—one who gazes into the jaws of a hellish assignment and goes forward, resolute paragraph after resolute paragraph, knowing that there is no light
Even paranoids have enemies, the old joke runs. And according to Driven Patriot, the elegantly crafted new biography of James V.
At a press conference in Berlin shortly after World War II, General Lucius D. Clay, director of the military government of the American sector of defeated Germany, announced, “We are not here as carpetbaggers.”
Desperate improvisations in the face of imminent disaster saw us through the early years of the fight. They also gave us the war’s greatest movie.
America’s favorite World War II movie has led a charmed life. While it was being filmed, each looming disaster turned out to be a cleverly disguised blessing, and after its completion everything that could go right did go right.
Revisiting the seas where American carriers turned the course of history, a Navy man re-creates a time of frightful odds and brilliant gambles.
Some memories are good and some bad, but the fact is that they change over the years. All of us who were part of it can recall how angry we were about the war against the Axis Powers. We were mad at all of it: Pearl Harbor, enemy atrocities, everything.
He wanted only what every journalist of the time did: an exclusive interview with the Duke of Windsor. What he got was an astonishing proposition that sent him on an urgent, top-secret visit to the White House and a once-in-a-lifetime story that was too hot to print, until now.
It was, said one of the few people who knew about it, “the greatest news story on Earth.” It belonged exclusively to my father, a prolific writer, but he knew it could not be published.
In 1941, the president understood better than many Americans the man who was running Germany, and Hitler understood Roosevelt and his country better than we knew.
In the summer of 1940, the fate of the world depended on the duel between two men: Adolf Hitler and Winston Churchill. It was a duel of nerves, and of wills. Churchill carried it off, because Hitler finally chose not to invade Britain.
It took us longer to name the war than to fight it.
Something began at 7:50 A.M. (Hawaiian time), Sunday, December 7, 1941. Most Americans seemed convinced it was World War II. But one man wasn’t so sure.
A memoir of the Second World War: Seeking the answer to a simple and terrible question: What was it like?
I was born in 1944, toward the middle of October, when a lot of people were getting killed for me, or blown up, or shot, or captured, or worse. Worse? “The shell hit him about here,” said a veteran not long ago, remembering that time and place; “he disappeared.”
In a fireside chat on December 29, 1940, Franklin Roosevelt called upon the country to become the “arsenal of democracy,” a phrase that would prove enduring.
An airman’s sketchbook
On April 6, 1942, I joined the 40th Squadron of the newly formed 35th Fighter Group then being assembled at Bankstown, New South Wales, Australia, a suburb of Sydney.
The American army that beat Hitler was thoroughly professional, but it didn’t start out that way. North Africa was where it learned the hard lessons, and none were harder than the disaster at Kasserine. This was the campaign that taught us how to fight a war.
There was no light. Most of the soldiers in the boats couldn’t see anything, but they knew they must be close because the wind offshore brought the smell of charcoal smoke and dry grass. The first assault troops landed sometime after eight bells.
Seeking the truth of an event in the memories of the people who lived it can be a maddening and exhilarating task.
The chords of memory may be mystic, as Abraham Lincoln described them, but how accurate and reliable they are as evidence is a dilemma every historian must face.
The mysterious thing that happened to Lieutenant Colonel Brown over Bremen in 1943 sent the pilot off on a quest that lasted his entire life. Finally, he found the answer. It had been worth waiting for.
In December 1943, Captain Charles L. Brown flew his first mission over Germany as aircraft commander of a battle-weary B-17. What happened that day is an extraordinary untold story of World War II.
One of my favorite quotations from Finley Peter Dunne’s inimitable bartender “Mr. Dooley” occurs when his friend Mr. Hennessy walks into the saloon just after the 1898 liberation of Cuba from Spain. “I see where th’ war is over,” says Hennessy, beaming.
"Gosh, it would be fun to play a president of the United States," said Lieutenant Reagan.
In April of 1942, I enlisted in Psychological Research Unit 3 at the Santa Ana Army Air Base.
It is to the U.S. Air Force what Normandy is to the U.S. Army. The monuments are harder to find, but if you’re willing to leave the main roads, you will discover a countryside that resonates with one of the greatest military efforts in history.
From 1941 to 1945, the biggest aircraft carrier in the North Atlantic was England. Once the U.S. 8th Air Force arrived in 1942, a new field was started every three days.
An American soldier would never forget encountering the German with an icy smile. He would later discover that the blood of innocent millions dripped from Eichmann's manicured hands.
It was the second of May, 1945, six days before the end of the war in Europe.
Walt Whitman said, “The real war will never get in the books.” The critic and writer Paul Fussell feels that the same sanitizing of history that went on after the 1860s has erased the national memory of what World War II was really like.
The big push” is how the G-3 journal of the 103d Infantry Division described its attack against elements of the German 19th Army on November 16, 1944. At H-plus-15, American guns bombarded enemy lines, and the regiments moved forward.
In the densely printed 51-page index to Taylor Branch’s splendid new chronicle of the civil rights movement, Parting the Waters: America in the King Years, 1954-63, there are just three references to Paul Robeson, all of them inconsequen
Slam Marshall, who is regarded as one of our great military historians, looked into the heart of combat and discovered a mystery there that raised doubts about the fighting quality of U.S. troops. But one GI thought he was a liar…
When Colonel Samuel Lyman Marshall came home in 1945, he was one of millions of Americans who had served in the Second World War.
Early in the century, a young American accurately predicted Japan’s imperialism and China’s and Russia’s rise. Then, he set out to become China’s soldier-leader.
In October 1941, Clare Boothe Luce, the playwright, journalist, politician, and wife of the magazine tycoon Henry Luce, had dinner with half a dozen army officers in their quarters on top of an ancient Spanish fort beside the harbor of Manila.
So big was the leak that it might have caused us to lose World War II. So mysterious is the identity of the leaker that we can’t be sure to this day who it was…or at least not entirely sure.
Blazoned in huge black letters across page one of the December 4, 1941, issue of the Chicago Tribune was the headline: F.D.R.’S WAR PLANS! The Times Herald, the
Of the thousands of American soldiers court-martialed for desertion in World War II, Eddie Slovik was the only one put to death. One of the judges who convicted him looks back with regret.
To this day nobody will take responsibility for the orphan dead of the 741st Tank Battalion.
This June 6 many ceremonies will mark the anniversary of the most massive amphibious invasion in history. One of them will be held at the U.S. military cemetery just east of Saint-Laurent-sur-Mer, a small French village on the Normandy coast.
Within the city’s best-known landmarks and down its least-visited lanes stand surprisingly vivid mementos of our own national history
On a recent pilgrimage to Abilene—that epic little town on the Kansas plains that briefly marked the uttermost frontier of the Western world —I stepped into the old timber-frame homestead of the Eisenhowers and felt that part of my life had completed a circle
A distinguished American poet recalls one of his more unusual jobs
When I was twenty-five, I spent a year tutoring the son of the king of Siam and his friend, the son of the Siamese prime minister. Fifty-five years later I am still filled with wonder when I think about it.
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