On 26 June 1948, the Berlin Airlift began in earnest after the Soviet Union cut off land and water routes to the isolated western sector of Berlin. Germany’s capital, Berlin, was deep within the area controlled after WWII by the Soviet Union...
22 June 1941 – Operation Barbarossa, the German attack on the Soviet Union, began. Despite the massive preparations spread over many months and the numerous indications Stalin received from many sources, the Soviet forces were taken almost...
On 16 Sep 1945, Lt. Gen. Jonathan Wainwright, (captured by the Japanese on the island of Corregidor, in the Philippines), was freed by Russian forces from a POW camp in Manchuria. When President Franklin Roosevelt transferred Gen. Douglas MacArthur...
On 6 Jun 1944, now known as D-Day, General Dwight Eisenhower, then supreme commander of Allied Expeditionary Forces in WW II gave the go-ahead for the massive invasion of Europe called Operation Overlord. Nazi Germany controlled most of Western...
On 10 April 1942, the day after the surrender of the main Philippine island of Luzon to the Japanese, the 75,000 Filipino and American troops captured on the Bataan Peninsula begin a forced march to a prison camp near Cabanatuan. Our forces had held...
On 1 Apr 1945 during World War II, after suffering the loss of 116 planes and damage to three aircraft carriers, 50,000 combat troops of the 10th US Army, under the command of General Simon Buckner, landed on the southwest coast of the Japanese...
On 15 Feb1942, in one of the greatest defeats in British military history, Britain’s supposedly impregnable Singapore fortress fell to the Japanese after a week-long siege. More than 60,000 British, Australian, and Indian troops became POW, joining...
On 30 Jan 1943 the British Royal Air Force began a bombing campaign on the German capital that coincided with the 10th anniversary of Hitler’s accession to power. To celebrate the anniversary of Hitler’s 1933 becoming the head of the...
Have you ever wondered if anyone in Europe remembers America’s sacrifice in World War II? There is an answer in a small town in the Czech Republic. The town called Pilsen (Plzen). Every five years Plzen conducts the Liberation Celebration of...
Like most families, the Gillem family has multiple branches. I seem to be the first in my direct branch of the family to serve in the military. I have a great, great, great uncle who commanded Gillem’s Cavalry for the Union in the Civil War. There’s...