August 23, 2020

There are a myriad important battles littered throughout World War II, but Stalingrad stands above them as one of the most bloody and strategically important...

August 9, 2020

When it comes to one single act affecting the entire world for generations to come, people often cite the assassination of Archduke Franz Ferdinand, the biza...

July 31, 2020

World War II ended in 1945, but the Nazi story didn't end there. With the German defeat inevitable, many top-ranking Nazi officials fled Europe and hid in th...

May 29, 2020

Many riders don't give a second thought to the reflectors on their bicycles, but that's only because they don't have to. Unlike accessories like headlights, ...

May 9, 2020

On April 25, 1983, Stern magazine, Germany’s version of Life, announced to the world that they'd come into possession of Adolf Hitler's diaries. It was an as...

May 3, 2020

During the onslaught of World War II, Americans at home tightened their belts and sacrificed many of their favorite meals when they were asked to ration much...

May 2, 2020

(Wada Sanzō/Wikimedia Commons) The 1940 Olympic Games were supposed to be a coming-out party of sorts for Japan. Initially scheduled to take place from September...

April 30, 2020

Hitler's bunker just before demolition in July 1947. (Bundesarchiv, Bild 183-V04744 / CC-BY-SA 3.0) On this day in 1945, a shot rang out in a Berlin bunker th...

March 13, 2020

Throughout World War II, plenty of people tried to assassinate Hitler for obvious reasons. On a single day in March 1943, however, there were at least three diffe...

February 23, 2020

On February 23, 1945, one of the most iconic photos ever was taken. Raising the Flag on Iwo Jima, which was snapped by Associated Press battlefield reporter ...

February 19, 2020

On February 19, 1942, President Franklin Delano Roosevelt signed Executive Order 90066, A.K.A. the deeply unconstitutional order to the military to round up ...

February 18, 2020

Throughout their short run during World War II, the White Rose Resistance was a thorn in the side of the Nazi Party. If you've read our article about the group, you'll have no trouble acing this quiz. How ...

February 18, 2020

The White Rose Resistance movement was only active from 1942–1943, but in that time, the group of young Germans fought back against the Nazis with their words. Re...

November 1, 2019

The Nuremberg trials of 1946 were some of the most controversial and difficult legal proceedings of the 20th century. Over the course of five years, 13 trials we...

December 10, 2017

After World War II, the US established the National Defense Reserve Fleet (NDRF) – a fleet of vessels that serve as a reserve of ships for national defense and nationa...

November 16, 2017

Below is Toni Frissell's iconic WW2 photo, one of the most heartbreaking photos to come out of the London Blitz. The boy in the photo did in fact survive the war ...

October 13, 2017

Many people in Thanet, Kent, England have been shopping in Primark - which first opened in 2011 - with absolutely no idea that a network of secret war tunnels, po...

October 4, 2017

The firebombing of Dresden by the American-British troops happened on the 13th and 15th of February 1945, during the last months of the war. 722 heavy bombers bur...

August 31, 2017

After the Second World War, around 2.5 million East Germans fled to West Germany. This bothered East Germany as they already lost almost a sixth of their populati...

August 10, 2017

Russia in World War 2 was facing a threat to their very existence. Early in the war they could not compete with Germany in terms of technology, training, or skill...

August 3, 2017

Oskar Schindler is the German industrialist, spy, Nazi Party member who saved the lives of 1,200 Jews during the Holocaust by employing them in his ammunition and...

August 1, 2017

During the Second World War John's elite unit liberated Jewish female prisoners, among them his wife-to-be Edith, from a work unit just East from the notorious Au...

June 28, 2017

On November 27th, 1944, a seismograph in Switzerland recorded the effects of a massive explosion in far distant England. At first seismologists thought it was an ...

June 27, 2017

When Nancy Wake saw a Jewish man being beaten on the streets of Vienna, she vowed to help fight the Nazis. That's how one wealthy Australian woman became the most...

June 26, 2017

During WWII, opposing troops came up with many ideas on how to slow or disable fast-moving tanks. One of these ideas was to design obstacles to immobilize tanks...

June 23, 2017

Not far from the Hungarian Parliament building sit 60 pairs of old-fashioned shoes, the type people wore in the 1940s. These footwear make up the "Shoes on the Da...

June 22, 2017

Day after day hundreds cadets of Air Force Academy would pass janitor William Crawford in the hall oblivious to the greatness that was among them. In the mid-197...

June 17, 2017

In 1917, a Pit Bull puppy was roaming the streets of New Haven, Connecticut near an Army training camp at Yale University and it was there that Private J. Robert ...

June 12, 2017

In 1942, during WWII, the Japanese Imperial Army captured Ramree Island off the Burma coast, 70 miles south of Akyab, now known as Sittwe. Since Ramree was strate...

June 9, 2017

At 8:15 on the morning of August 6, 1945, a person was sitting on a flight of stone stairs of the Sumitomo Bank in Hiroshima, Japan. Seconds later, an atomic bomb detonated 800 feet away, and the ...

June 8, 2017

Czesława Kwoka was born in Wólka Złojecka, a small village in Poland, to a Catholic mother. Along with her mother (prisoner number 26946), Czesława Kwoka (priso...

June 7, 2017

"One minute in Auschwitz was like an entire day. A day was like a year. A month, an eternity." ~Roman Kent, Holocaust survivor It's been over 70 years since the d...

June 6, 2017

Artist Sara Jane Murray runs a studio called Home Front Vintage, which specializes in repurposing World War II-era silk maps into wearable, and beautiful, clothing and...

June 2, 2017

Hundreds of video clips, each lasting around 30 seconds made by 600 soldiers, were found in rusty canisters in the basement of Manchester Town Hall in England in ...

May 29, 2017

Lt. General Sir Adrian Carton de Wiart served as a British officer in the Boer War, the First World War, and the Second World War. He survived two plane crashes, was ...

May 18, 2017

High school history books always made it seem that the Second World War was exclusively won by troops and generals on the frontlines, and of national figureheads...

May 17, 2017

Decades ago, a battle was fought in Neva Bridgehead in Russia between German and Russian soldiers. Today, the battlefield – untouched for years – has become a strangely beautiful testament ...

May 13, 2017

Tank Man At Tiananmen Square History’s most iconic depiction of resistance was when an unidentified man known as “Tank Man” single-handedly stood down four Chinese tanks among...

April 26, 2017

The 20th century witnessed death and slaughter on an unprecedented scale. It was the century of the Holocaust and two World Wars; of communists, Nazis, fascists and military dictato...

April 25, 2017

Joe O’Donnell, the man who took the iconic photo below at Nagasaki, was sent by the U.S. military to chronicle the damage inflicted on Japanese soil by air raids ...

April 24, 2017

The story behind the bombers, their training, and first photos of the killer weapons above the Pacific Ocean... Credit: British Pathe

April 21, 2017

The battle at Okinawa, Japan was the last major battle of the Second World War. During the struggle, more than 545,000 U.S. troops stormed the archipelago, killin...

April 19, 2017

Just two days after the Nazi invasion of Poland and the official beginning of the Second World War, the United Kingdom was one of the first countries to declare war on Germany....

April 17, 2017

The hollow trunk of this 650-year-old oak tree was used as a hideout by two Jewish brothers during World War II. In Wisniowa, Poland, there is an English oak tre...

March 31, 2017

Albert Goring was the export manager of Skoda automotive factory when he fled to Czechoslovakia. He helped many employees under possible death to be free, by for...

March 16, 2017

Up for sale at an auction is the authentic “Schindler’s lists,” the papers used during the Holocaust by the German industrialist Oskar Schindler to save the...

March 13, 2017

In Italy, a group of treasure hunters were scanning an area in Tuscany using metal detectors when they discovered an old bullet. However, they were a bit surprise...

March 8, 2017

Born in Poland, Krystyna Skarbek managed to reach England after her beloved country fell to the Germans during World War II. She volunteered to be a spy, and even...

March 2, 2017

On the morning of December 7, 1941, the Japanese launched their surprise assault on Pearl Harbor. On the same day, they also attacked Dutch and British positions in South East Asia. About 14...

March 1, 2017

During the decade leading to World War Two, the U.S.S.R. was the only nation that trained sniper units rigidly. Although other nations trained them too, it was not to the same degree. As a...

February 26, 2017

In 1936, the British gunboat HMS Gnat's crew bought an English Pointer puppy named Judy that came from a kennel in Shanghai, China. She was supposed to serve both...

February 22, 2017

Take a look at this compilation of photos of tanks that proved too heavy for some of the bridges they were driving on. Almost all of these fascinating images were captured during World War II....

February 8, 2017

In the spring of 1945, photos and witness accounts from the liberation of camps like Bergen-Belsen provided the disbelieving world outside of Europe its first gli...

February 7, 2017

Despite the fact that her country — the United States — had yet to enter the war. Despite the fact that women weren't generally considered spy material by the pre...

February 6, 2017

The Axis Power was responsible for the Holocaust, the Allies, the bombing of Japan. Who really lost the war?

February 6, 2017

Starting as early as 1941, correspondents began reporting and discussing military slang in the pages of American Speech, the journal of the American Dialect Socie...

January 27, 2017

Born on February 15, 1910 in Warsaw, Poland; Irena Sendler, persevered to study medicine. She devoted her life to the service of others, whatever the cost may be....

January 5, 2017

Every battlefield troop maintains a fraction of personnel who are well-trained and proficient in conducting first aid. In a unit that is as large as an Infantry battalion, there is...

January 4, 2017

Located inside the 3rd London General Hospital, its properly known as the "Masks for Facial Disfigurement Department" but wounded tommies humorously called it "Th...

January 3, 2017

Émilie Marie Bouchau, also known as Polaire, was an Algerian lady known for her tiny, corsetted waist, the circumference of which is no greater than 16 inches (a...

January 3, 2017

This is a collection of colorized pictures showing the incredible Soviet female snipers in the Second World War. H/T Za Rodinu

January 1, 2017

When the US dropped the atomic bomb on Hiroshima on August 6, 1945, it killed about 140,000 people out of the 350,000 who lived in the city. That was the first nu...

December 29, 2016

Planted in 1625, this bonsai tree is currently 391-years-old and has survived the atomic bomb attack on Hiroshima. The tree belonged to the Yamaki family, who in...

December 19, 2016

Hotel Prora is a massive building complex built between 1936 and 1939 by the Nazis as part of their "Strength through Joy" programme. The complex stretches over three miles alo...

December 16, 2016

Lost for decades beneath the streets of Naples, Italy, the Galleria Borbonica is a time capsule of the city's history. The system of tunnels and caverns, stretching fro...

December 15, 2016

Between battles soldiers were able to bathe in makeshift showers and in rivers, lakes and streams. These personal snapshots of World War II soldiers bathing and s...

December 8, 2016

Kelly Gravell and her family went to the beach and saw what they thought was an old, barnacle encrusted buoy that had washed up on the shore near Burry Port in Wa...

December 6, 2016

As the Second World War approached its end, the Soviet army sieged Berlin until the city, and eventually all German forces, surrendered. The people of Berlin were...

November 28, 2016

French photographer Julien Knez wanted to celebrate the 71st anniversary of the liberation of Paris in August 1944 with a series of photographs. Thus, he integrated photographs of ...

November 15, 2016

Winston Churchill is famous for his role in leading Britain to victory against the Nazis. But he was also a writer and artist who painted to battle depression. Hi...

November 15, 2016

Victor A. Lundy,  sketched the drawings you'll see below between May and November 1944 when he was wounded. The sketches take us from his initial training in Fort...

November 12, 2016

In 1942, during World War II, thousands of women across the U.S. took on manufacturing jobs. They worked as mechanics, engineers, and often as test pilots. This collection of ph...

November 10, 2016

95-year-old Harold Curry of Kansas has finally received the medals he deserves. “I didn't know I had most of these, because when I came out of the Army in '45 sho...

November 9, 2016

Private John M. Steele was the American paratrooper who landed on the pinnacle of the church tower in Sainte-Mère-Église, the first village in Normandy liberated by the United...

October 29, 2016

For 267 days between September 1940 and May 1941, the German Luftwaffe bombed 16 British cities in “The Blitz”. London was hit 71 times, with one sustained campaign running for 5...

October 28, 2016

A replica of the German dictator's bunker, where he spent his final days at the end of World War Two, has opened in central Berlin inside a former Nazi air raid shelter. Hitler spent...

October 12, 2016

The Monuments, Fine Arts, and Archives (MFAA) program, whose men and women were known as "Monuments Men", established by President Franklin D. Roosevelt in 1943 to hel...

October 11, 2016

They could almost be mistaken for innocent trinkets, but these metal stamps were used to tattoo prisoners at the Auschwitz concentration camp during the early days of th...

September 28, 2016

Having lived through the depression, many housewives already knew how to make food and household supplies last longer. But during WWII rationing, there were very specific limits on...

September 27, 2016