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2013 Air Shows Calendar

Air Shows

See WWII Planes in Action

Check out our exclusive 2013 WWII Air Shows calendar, and take your family to see real WWII aircraft in action. View it here.
 


Ghost Army patch

Coming to PBS…

The Ghost Army

The director of a new PBS documentary tells the once-secret story of how phantom US troops, inflatable tanks, and Hollywood sound effects fooled the Wehrmacht. Read the article from our June 2013 issue, on newsstands now.


Footage

Bomb Mission No. 1

Watch B-17 Flying Fortresses go out on the first all-American bomb raid over Europe, in 1942. This time, everyone comes home…

 

Article

The Faithful Four

On a torpedoed troop ship in the icy North Atlantic, four army chaplains made a heroic choice to put other men’s survival before their own.


Footage

World War II Christmas

Travel back to the 1940s and taste the bittersweet experience of wartime Christmas at the front and on the American home front.

 

Article

Amid War,
a Thankful Nation

Nearly every family had empty chairs at its table. And many traditional foods were hard or impossible to get. But World War II couldn’t stop Thanksgiving.


Article

The Desperate Election of ’44

It was time to elect a president who could lead America through dark days of global war. If anyone could do it, it was Franklin Roosevelt. He had gotten the nation through the Depression and the war’s onset. But FDR had a secret: he was dying.


Gallery

Blimps, Bombs, and Wolf Packs

From high above Allied shipping lanes, the Battle of the Atlantic often didn’t look like much. But the airmen who snapped these photos from warplanes and blimps knew they were engaged in a deadly game of cat and mouse with unseen German U-boats.


John Garand loads his rifle

Gallery

M1

Arriving just in time for World War II, two American guns shared a name and a critical role in victory: the M1 Garand rifle and the M1 carbine.


Article

Major Dick Winters

Dick Winters Sixty-eight years after D-Day, a new Normandy leadership monument honors Major Dick Winters, American hero. Download a pdf of the article on Winters that appeared in our June 2011 issue.


Gallery

Japanese carriers at MidwayHistory’s First Carrier Battles

The mid-1942 clashes in the Coral Sea and at Midway were the world’s first fights between aircraft carriers. Plenty of photos were taken to remember them by.


Gallery

FBI secretariesSECRETARIES OF WAR

Thousands of women spent the early 1940s working in government offices in Washington, DC, getting vital information into the right hands to keep the war machine running.


Gallery

B-25 on the HornetThe Pacific Fleet Strikes Back

After surviving the Pearl Harbor raid unscathed, US aircraft carriers lead the counterattack against the Japanese. Things went well. But not everything.


Gallery

B-25 on the HornetWelcome to the Service, son

New recuits got an occasional fatherly pat on the back, but being indoctrinated into the military was hardly a family picnic at the park. There was exercise and long marches and drilling. And more exercise.


Gallery

US troops heading to CabanatuanRaid liberates American POWs in the Philippines

US Army Rangers and Filipino guerrillas free hundreds of ill and starving Allied captives from the Japanese Cabanatuan prison camp on Luzon in early 1945.


Anniversary

Sailor celebrate V-E Day in San FranciscoVE!

Rooting out pockets of Nazis one by one, American troops and tanks rolled steadily across the Rhine and on to victory in Europe. On May 8, 1945, the Germans officially surrendered and the celebration began.


Gallery

Greyhound wartime posterGreyhound: On the Road through WWII and Beyond

There was no escaping the world war, and America’s intercity bus company changed with it like everything else did–while peering through a rose-colored windshield at the promising postwar future on the horizon.


Interview

A Talk with Frank Buckles

Frank Buckles, the last surviving American veteran of World War I and a prisoner of the Japanese during World War II, died on February 27, 2011, at age 110. Read what he told us in 2009.


Gallery

September 1942 Coronet magazine coverDisney to the front

Mickey Mouse, Donald Duck, and an army of their kindred cartoons join the war effort at home and overseas.

 


Article

Ernest BorgnineErnest Borgnine Recalls WWII Navy DAYS

The Screen Actors Guild just gave Ernest Borgnine its Lifetime Achievement award. Here at America in WWII, we’re as interested in his navy service as in his acting career, so our editor asked him about it. Read the interview from our recent special issue Stars in WWII.


Article

Supper K rationChocolate!
The War’s Secret Weapon

Our GIs went to war well supplied with weapons and clothing—and chocolate!

 


Remembering Pearl harbor

Oil drops from the USS ArizonaShip That Weeps For Her Dead

For 69 years, drops of oil have seeped from the wreckage of the USS Arizona, black tears for the 1,177 US sailors killed by the Japanese planes that bombed the battleship to the bottom of Pearl Harbor on December 7, 1941.


Gallery

Bulge reenactmentBattle of the Bulge 2010

”’GI” Joe Razes and more than 1,000 other reenactors march into Pennsylvania’s Fort Indiantown Gap to re-create the winter of 1944-1945 fight in the Ardennes forest.


Article

Burning building in ParanqueJapan’s Pacific Blitz

Pearl Harbor wasn’t the only target left in flames when imperial Japan seized power in Asia and the South Pacific in December 1941.

 


Gallery

GI Bill of RightsHeading Home
At Last

Across Europe, Asia, and the Pacific, America’s victorious GIs pack up, tear down, and head home to restart their lives—and their country.

 


65 years ago

V-J Day in ParisThe End

It was the end. It was the beginning. It was hope. At home and around the world, Americans celebrated like never before.

 


65 years ago

the Bomb is born

On a test site in Alamogordo, New Mexico, on July 16, 1945, men of science and men of war watched the world change forever when they witnessed the first explosion of an atomic bomb. The blast begins about 8:50 in this cut of US government footage.

 


Photo gallery

Victory over Japan Day Mania!

Americans cut loose around the world as they learn of Japan’s surrender and start the countdown to a new life and a brighter future.