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World War II
It was born in America, it came of age in America, and, in an era when foreign competition threatens so many of our industries, it still sweetens our balance of trade.
The candy bar as we know it was born in America. So too, many centuries earlier, was chocolate itself. Mexican natives cultivated the cocoa bean for more than 2500 years before Hernán Cortés took it to Spain with him in 1528.
For a few weeks, Hitler came close to winning World War II. Then came a train of events that doomed him. An eloquent historian reminds us that,however unsatisfactory our world may be today, it almost was unimaginably worse.
In the summer of 1940, Adolf Hitler could have won the Second World War. He came close to that. Had he won, we would be living in a world so different as to be hardly imaginable. So, let us contemplate that dangerous summer.
These World War II airmen had one of the most dangerous missions of all, piloting unarmed cargo planes over the Hump - the high and treacherous Himalayas.
Cookie Byrd is punching my card. We’ve just met in the convention center at Harrah’s, in Reno.
A former Marine recalls the grim defense of Guadalcanal in 1942.
July 1942. Winter in Wellington, New Zealand, brought long, slanting sheets of rain that drenched the U.S. Navy transports looming huge and dark along the city’s docks. The men of the 1st Marine Division labored around the clock to combat-load the ships.
One of every four American homes is now said to house a video-cassette recorder. Mine became one of them last winter. A VCR takes some getting used to.
On a foggy Saturday morning in the last summer of World War II, a B-25 bomber smashed into the seventy-ninth floor of the Empire State Building, killing the crew and eleven civilians, mostly young office workers.
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.
Two letters from a Navy lieutenant to his wife tell the story of the last hours of World War II.
YOKOSUKA 9·4·45
My dear:
His job was to destroy German submarines. To do it, they gave him 12 men, three machine guns, four depth charges, and an old wooden fishing schooner with an engine that literally drove mechanics mad.
On July 6, 1942, I was standing on the fantail of the mine-sweeper Fulmar off Portland, Maine when the signal tower started blinking away. By the time I could get to the bridge, the message had already been typed up.
A veteran reporter looks back to a time when the stakes were really high, and, yet, military men actually trusted newsmen.
One week in August 1942 ,several stories on the British war effort appeared on the wires of the Associated Press, written by an AP reporter based in London named Drew Middleton.
40 years ago, a tangle of chaotic events led to the death of Hitler, the surrender of the Nazis, and the end of World War II in Europe.
The last time Grand Admiral Karl Doenitz saw his Führer was on April 20, 1945, Adolf Hitler’s 56th birthday.
The GIs came home to find that a political machine had taken over their Tennessee county. What they did about it astounded the nation.
In McMinn County, Tennessee, in the early 1940s, the question was not if you farmed, but where you farmed. Athens, the county seat, lay between Knoxville and Chattanooga along U.S. Highway 11, which wound its way through eastern Tennessee.
On the eve of the Normandy invasion, a training mission in the English Channel came apart in fire and horror. For years, the grim story was suppressed.
Ralph Greene was in the lab of the 228th Station Hospital processing some routine tests when he got the order to report immediately to the hospital’s recreation room. It was early in the afternoon of April 28, 1944, and for Greene, a captain in the U.S.
HISTORIANS GOT THEIR instructions early.
Forty years ago it was Nazis, not communists, we wanted to keep out of Latin America. A veteran of that propaganda war recalls our efforts to bring American values to a bewildered Ecuador.
BECAUSE THE Japanese bombed Pearl Harbor in December 1941, I found myself soon after flying down with a technical mission to the province of El Oro in Ecuador, a province I had never before heard of, in a land of which I knew nothing, except that it straddle
For millions of women, consciousness raising didn’t start in the 1960s. It started when they helped win World War II.
DURING THE FIRST three years of World War II, five million women covered their hair, put on “slacks,” and at the government’s urging went to work in defense plants. They did every kind of job, but the largest single need was for riveters.
THE BOOK reached me in Argentia, Newfoundland, where my squadron, VP-84, was on antisubmarine patrol. The inscription, “To Ev—this incontestable evidence of performance,” had a special impact, as my brother knew it would.
A thousand miles behind enemy lines, Liberator bombers struck Hitler’s Rumanian oil refineries, then headed home flying so low that some came back with cornstalks in their bomb bays
Benghazi, Libya, July 23,1943. Something new is in the air! This morning we were introduced to a Major Blank, an expert in low-level bombing, who lectured us on a new bombsight, which was a converted gunsight. He explained how A-20s had been making low-level attacks and that experiments were being made with B-24s. He said that he didn’t know if the new sights would ever be used, but we assumed the Air Force wouldn’t be running experiments that far out in the desert for nothing, so we decided to get interested in low-level bombing.
The great man’s daughter-in-law draws a portrait of the statesman at the top of his career and at the bottom
FOR A SHORT, fierce time during the war, I knew Winston Churchill very well. After the war and until his death, I saw him less often. But my memories of him at the height of his power have never left me.
After two false starts, the B-17s got through. A pilot relives the 8th Air Force’s first successful daylight raid on the German capital .
IN MARCH THE NIGHTS were long and black over the airfield at Bassingbourn, which lies just north of London.
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 Interview With Gen. Albert C. Wedemeyer
Years after one of the bloodiest and most intense battles of the war in the Pacific, a Marine Corps veteran returns to Tarawa
WAR IS A COUNTRY no traveler ever forgets. It haunts those who survive the journey as no other experience.
One of the most ingenious and least known rescue missions of World War II was engineered by a young American dandy, Varian Fry, who shepherded to safety hundreds of European intellectuals wanted by the Nazis
ALL WARS , great and small, can be counted on to produce four things: misery, death, destruction, and refugees. As far as the first three are concerned, the Second World War differed from its predecessors only in scale.
If he’d been the closest companion of the president of IBM, you might happen across his name in a privately printed memoir. But LeMoyne Billings was John Fitzgerald Kennedy’s best friend from Choate to the White House—and that makes him part of history.
CROATE, 1935
THE BIRTH OF THE RAND CORPORATION During World War II, America discovered that scientists were needed to win it—and to win any future war. That’s why RAND came into being, the first think tank and the model for all the rest.
ALONG THE jagged coastline of Southern California, past the hills and forests of Malibu, five miles down from the Santa Monica Mountains, just short of Muscle Beach and the town of Venice, there sits some of the most quaintly de
Fifty years ago this March, Roosevelt took the oath of office and inaugurated this century’s most profound national changes. One who was there recalls the President’s unique blend of ebullience and toughness.
THAT FRANKLIN D. ROOSEVELT was, and preeminently so, the dominant political figure of this century—that he stood astride its first half like the Colossus itself—will not be in doubt. Nor are the reasons subject to serious dispute.
The Normandie has been gone since World War II, but many people still remember her as the most beautiful passenger liner ever built. It is the saddest of ironies that she fled her native France to seek safety in New York Harbor.
SHE WAS THE largest moving object that mankind had ever built. She was the first liner to cross the Atlantic at better than 30 knots, the first to exceed 1,000 feet in length, the first truly modern ship.
Fifty years after FDR first took office, a British statesman and historian evaluates the President’s role in the twentieth century’s most important partnership
Franklin Roosevelt was, and remains, a hero to the British. During his rise to power we were detached from and ignorant of American internal politics to an extent that is not easily imaginable today. The Atlantic in the twenties and thirties was still very wide.
She was the last major American warship sunk during World War II, and her sinking was the single worst open-sea disaster in our naval history. How could it have happened?
On July 16, 1945, the heavy cruiser Indianapolis departed the California coast for the Pacific island of Tinian. On board was a heavily guarded top-secret cargo destined to end the war.
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