Trusted Writing on History, Travel, and American Culture Since 1949
World War II
The victors divided the Germans into three groups: black (Nazi), white (innocent), and gray—that vast, vast area in between
I was one of these moralists in khaki.
A British schoolboy sees the quiet English countryside come alive with excitement toward the end of 1943 when …
It is early 1945. An American bomber crew is anxiously nearing the now familiar islands of the Japanese Empire. Flak begins to burst around the plane as the target comes into view.
A bomb-laden balloon from Japan reached North America, resulting in the only death from enemy action during the war.
On August 3, 1976, a retired Japanese scientist made a pilgrimage to a World War II battlefield shrine.
The Combat Art of Albert K. Murray
The camera is a marvelous instrument,” says the portrait artist Albert K. Murray, “but when it comes to covering a war, it has its limitations.
Here is the federal government’s own picture history of our times—and it tells us more than you might think
FEW ARE AWARE of a major publishing project that has been sponsored by the federal government and some of our leading citizens over the past eight decades.
How a Whole Nation Said Thank You
They arrived in America chocked and chained, deep in the hold of a French merchant ship early in February of 1949.
As three recent films show—one on the atomic bomb, one on women defense workers during the Second World War, one on the government arts projects of the thirties —this history of our times offers film makers arresting opportunities.
A veteran news correspondent recalls his days as a spotter plane pilot
The idea is simple and sound and goes back at least to the American Civil War: to direct artillery fire intelligently, the higher you are above the target, the better. At ground level it’s difficult to tell just how far short or long your shells are falling.
A marine correspondent recalls the deadliest battle of the Pacific war
EDITOR’S NOTE: In October, 1944, the U.S.
An insider’s account of a startling— and still controversial—investigation of the Allied bombing of Germany
After a varied career as a soldier, statesman, diplomat, and presidential adviser, Taylor wants to known as someone who “always did his damndest.”
Chronicler of “The Men Who Do the Dying”
During a driving rain, the American infantry company worked its way toward a German strong point rmi the outskirts of Cherbourg. Rifle and machinegun fire echoed through the deserted streets, and shells passed overhead with rustling noises before exploding.
The Japanese planes that came screaming down on Pearl Harbor on December 7, 1941, changed the whole course of history. The United States was plunged into a long, grueling war.
His newly discovered diary reveals how the President saw the conference that ushered in the Cold War
For the past year and a half, Robert H. Ferrell, a diplomatic historian at Indiana University, has been at work among President Harry S. Truman’s newly opened private papers at the Truman Library in Independence, Missouri. Early last year, working with Erwin J.
A SUBMARINE COMMANDER TELLS WHY WE ALMOST LOST THE PACIFIC WAR
LIFE ABOARD
How Americans Met the First Great Gasoline Crisis—Nearly Forty Years Ago
According to the members of the blueribbon committee, the situation was desperate. Their report, released to the Washington press corps, had been blunt, unsparing, and apocalyptic.
The Queen Mary in Peace and War
The first commercial transatlantic flight still lay three years in the future when the Queen Mary began her maiden voyage in May, 1936, but Sir Percy Bates, chairman of the Cunard Line, made the sailing the occasion for an extraordinary forecast.
During three harrowing years as a prisoner of the Japanese, an American woman secretly kept an extraordinary journal of suffering, hope, ingenuity, and human endurance
An attempt at modest celebration during the longest battle on German territory during World War II ended badly.
After reading an interview with General Gavin in a newspaper, a major who had fought in the Huertgen Forest wrote the general the following letter:
In his reassessment of a tragic World War II battle, General Gavin concludes that, for the Germans, holding the Huertgen Forest was Phase One of the Battle of the Bulge. For the Americans, trying to occupy the forest was a ghastly mistake.
The Battle of the Bulge came to an end in the closing days of January, 1945.
“For This Challenge, I Had Come Three Thousand Miles and Thirty-six Years of My Life”
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
to Joseph P. Lash for Roosevelt and Churchill, 1939–1941: The Partnership That Saved the West
If Joseph P. Lash had decided, back in 1942, to write a book on the wartime friendship between Franklin D. Roosevelt and Winston Churchill, he would have been off to a lucky start.
The Agony of J. Robert Oppenheimer
In the life of J.
An American Success Story
A dreadful prospect opened up for mankind when Napoleon’s Grande Armée won the battle of Austerlitz and swept on to conquer all of Europe.
Remembering Samuel Eliot Morrison
The great job of the historian is to enable people to understand how things were and why they happened so in a time and at a place that are gone forever. Somehow he has to reach the irrecoverable past.
IN ALL THE PACK, DAN COAKLEY DESERVED TO BE CALLED
They are all gone now—those vivid, venal characters who for a half century up to World War IIAC moved with insouciant relentlessness across the spotted field of Boston politics.
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