Order a copy of this issue

Features

Raid Gone Right: Crashing Cabanatuan

The idea sounded crazy: burst into a Japanese stronghold and walk off with some 500 Allied POWs. It would be the war’s most sensational rescue. By Larry Alexander

Gallery

Raid 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.

Raid Gone Wrong: Patton’s Regret

A motorized US task force raced into Germany to free POWs–including General George Patton’s son-in-law. Then came the hard part: the getaway. By Éric Grenier

A Cowboy Gets His Wings

Gene Autry, America’s favorite singing cowboy, traded his horse–but not his boots–for the pilot’s seat of an army cargo plane. By Richard Sassaman

Link

The official Gene Autry website

Find photos, film footage, recordings, biographical material, information on Autry-related historical sites, and much more.

The Souvenir-Hunters

Sure, our GIs were fighting men, liberators of the oppressed, defenders of freedom. But they were also collectors–among history’s most voracious. By Mark D. Van Ells

Departments

Kilroy Was Here

Notes from our editor: "Raid? What Raid"

V-Mail

Letters from our readers

Home Front

Roller-skating through the war

Footage

Roller skating in technicolor

The Skating Vanities and its star Gloria Nord did a routine for the 1944 Betty Grable movie Pin Up. Skaters take the stage in glorious red-white-and-blue at 2:06 in this clip, and Nord, herself a popular pinup, first peeks out at 2:54.

Pinup

Yvonne De Carlo

Footage

From GI dream girl to campy TV vampiress

It was a long, strange trip from bathing beauty posing for the camera to undead harpist performing for beatniks. Here’s the end of that trip, in an outtake from an epidosde of the 1960s sitcom The Munsters.

The Funnies

Tarzan

I Was There

A navy photographer ducks kamikazes on USS Essex

Landings

California’s Patton Memorial Museum

The General Patton Memorial Museum website

War Stories

Memories of the war

Flashbacks

Print ads from the war years

Books and Media

Reviews of the latest releases

Theater of War

Merrill’s Marauders

78 RPM

"The Star-Spangled Banner"

Footage

An operatic national anthem

If you went to the movies late in World War II, you would at some point have seen this 1944 reel with operatic singing by Brooklyn’s Merrill Miller.

WWII Events

A calendar of present-day happenings

GIs

U-Boat Slayer