Before dawn on June 22, 1941, German bombers began to rain destruction down on a swath of Soviet cities from Leningrad to Sevastopol. It was the beginning of Operation Barbarossa, the largest military operation in the history of the world. By the end of the day, three million German soldiers and their allies crossed the…
Category: World War II History
On This Day in History: Remembering D-Day
Today take a moment to Remember the Military Men and Women who participated and gave their Lives in D-Day. And let General Patton’s words ring true: “It is foolish and wrong to mourn the men who died. Rather we should thank God that such men lived.” Seventy-two years ago, on June 6, 1944, Allied troops…
Obscure World War II History: The Failed Japanese Coup of 1945
A last-ditch attempt to overthrow the Japanese government at the end of World War II was a bloody embarrassment Open Road Media sponsored this post. By August 1945 more than two million Japanese soldiers, sailors and aviators had died in eight years of war stretching from China and Southeast Asia to halfway across the Pacific….
World War II Movies Worth A Damn: Fortress of War
This movie is also called “The Brest Fortress”. -SF The film is a flawed depiction of the Brest Fortress siege, but rightly celebrates the defenders’ enormous courage. The 2010 Russian-Belarusian film Fortress of War tells the tale of the Soviet men and women defending an exposed, antiquated fortress. As the first to be hit…
Military History: The Four Worst War Crimes Imaginable
These horrific war crimes reveal a humanity that isn’t good or bad, but absolutely sadistic. Human nature is an amorphous thing: Optimists and pessimists can look at the same human history and present diametrically opposed assessments of the human spirit. The optimist will point to acts of selflessness and historical displays of a collective will…
Military Intelligence History: The Battle of Midway, The Complete Intelligence Story
The Battle of Midway in June of 1942 was one of the most important naval battles in world history and a turning point in the Second World War. Between June 4 and 7, aircraft from aircraft carriers Enterprise, Yorktown, and Hornet of the U.S. Navy’s Task Forces 16 and 17 ambushed and sank the Imperial…
World War II History: One of The Most Devastating Bombing’s of WW2 You Most Likely Never Heard About
“It was a lovely winter morning with a clear sky overhead. At 11:10 a.m., the earth shuddered violently.” So reads an official’s account of an otherwise unremarkable day in 1944. But what was very remarkable was the source of the shuddering: an explosion so fierce it left a crater 80 feet deep and a…
World War Two History: How the “Miracle at Dunkirk” Saved WW2 for the Allies
From May 26 to Jun. 4, 1940, one of the largest evacuations in human history saved approximately 338,000 Allied troops and gave the Allies the strength to continue resisting Adolph Hitler’s Third Reich. The operation was more successful than the planners’ wildest dreams, partially because of the skill and bravery of boat crews and troops…
World War Two History: The Secret War Before Pearl Harbor
FDR ordered American military forces to ‘shoot on sight’ months before Pearl Harbor, just as Charles Lindbergh, the original America Firster, was about to address an anti-war rally. In 1941: Fighting the Shadow War: A Divided America in a World at War, historian Marc Wortman depicts how President Franklin Roosevelt led America into war long…
Know Your Weapons: The CIA Probably Still Uses Some of the High Standard Spy Pistols It Bought During World War II
A suppressed .22-caliber “Wetwork” weapon that never needed replacing When the United States entered World War II, the Pentagon quickly bought up all the stocks it could find of .22LR target pistols — a .22-caliber handgun that fires a rifle-style cartridge—for training purposes. But the British Special Operations Executive was already using suppressed versions of similar weapons in combat….