U.S. Army 42nd Infantry Div. in Op. Nordwin

It was bitter cold with a foot of snow on the ground and no moonlight the night of January 24, 1945, as the green GIs of the 42nd ‘Rainbow Division’s 222nd Infantry Regiment strained to see the enemy. But a low ground fog covering the firebreak between their positions in the Ohlungen Forest and the Haguenau Forest before them made this an almost useless exercise. More chillingly, they could hear sounds from the woods beyond, sounds of tramping feet and loud talking. Water turned to ice in the bottoms of their foxholes. Anxiety built as they waited for the unseen enemy to come swarming out of the woods.

By January 1945, Adolf Hitler’s Ardennes offensive was faltering, and in a last-ditch effort to break through Allied lines, the Führer scraped together what forces he could to launch an offensive into Alsace. Earlier German attacks in the area had created two small salients above and below Strasbourg and had forced the U.S. Seventh Army back on an arm that pivoted on Bischwiller, not far from the Rhine River, and extended northwest along the Moder River.

Raid on Rommel's RR in Tunisia

At exactly 2230 hours on Christmas Eve 1942, two Douglas C-47s loaded with paratroopers took off from Thelepte airfield outside Algiers. Suspended under the belly of each was a drop container holding 200 pounds of explosives. On board were 32 Americans from the 509th Parachute Infantry Battalion and two French paratroopers who had been ordered to destroy the vital railroad bridge at El Djem, Tunisia.

Once an insignificant spot on the rail line from Tunis to Gabes, it now linked the brilliant German Field Marshal Erwin Rommel — battling British General Bernard L. Montgomery’s Eighth Army in the south — to vital supplies being sent by rail from northern Tunisia. During the initial stages of the North Africa campaign, the fighting had taken place primarily in Egypt and Libya, far to the east of the El Djem bridge. Since Montgomery’s autumn offensive had forced Axis armies to retreat westward from the Egyptian frontier toward Tunisia, however, the bridge at El Djem had become an important link between supply depots and Axis front lines.

Charles de Gaulle

The turmoil of World War II made heroes and household names of many in the military, most of whom were already in positions of military power and whose decisions and actions shaped their countries’ military policies and directions. Charles de Gaulle, however, held a position of relative obscurity within his military. That is, until the Germans invaded his homeland in May of 1940.

In his youth, de Gaulle was interested, above all else, in the fate of France, whether as a subject of history or as it affected his stake in public life. Born in Lille in 1890 and growing up in Paris, he was the son of a traditionalist father and a mother who, in his memoirs, de Gaulle described as having ‘uncompromising passion for her country, equal to her religious piety.’ He joined the army in 1909 and, as then required, served in the ranks for one year. In 1910 he entered the military academy at Saint-Cyr. His first assignment to the 33rd Infantry Regiment brought him in contact with a Colonel Henri Pétain. Pétain would later rise to the rank of marshal of the army and become the savior of France at Verdun during World War I. De Gaulle credited Pétain with teaching him the art of command. During World War I de Gaulle learned firsthand the harsh reality of combat. He was wounded three times and spent the last 32 months of the war as a prisoner.

Battle of Badoeng Strait

The attack on Pearl Harbor on December 7, 1941, signaled the beginning of a massive Japanese thrust into Southeast Asia, with the capture of the vast oil fields and refineries of the Netherlands East Indies (now Indonesia) as its primary goal. This oil was vital to Japan to enable it to continue its war of conquest in China, which had been dragging on since 1931.

The primary Allied powers in the region formed a joint command to coordinate the defense of their respective territories and empires. The command, called ‘ABDA’ (for American, British, Dutch and Australian), was disjointed and poorly organized, as were the Allied defenses it was formed to coordinate.

German Counterattack at Debrecken

Throughout the summer of 1944, the men of General der Artillerie Maximilian Fretter-Pico’s German Sixth Army were literally fighting for their very existence. The Red Army, pushing ever westward, was nearing the zenith of its strength. Although German soldiers were killing Russian soldiers at a rate of 4.5 to 1, conscripts from newly liberated Soviet territory made good the losses.

Tough, confident generals had long since replaced the inefficient Red Army commanders responsible for the disasters of 1941 and 1942. The commander of the 2nd Ukrainian Front, Marshal Rodion Yakovlevich Malinovsky, was one such general. Born near Odessa in 1898, he joined the Czarist army at age 15 and was wounded in World War I. In 1919, he became a machine-gun instructor in the Red Army.

William Bull Halsey

William F. Halsey was a sailor born and bred. His heart was Navy blue and gold, and it pumped salt water each of his seventy-six years. As a first to last combatant of the Pacific War, he launched aircraft into the Sunday surprise on December 7, 1941, and forty-five months later stood witness to the end of Imperial Japan on the deck of the battleship Missouri. Along the way Halsey became America’s most acclaimed fighting admiral and his own worst enemy.

Battle of the Bismark Sea

Last night I dreamed I saw a dragon rising out of the sea,” an unknown Japanese soldier wrote in his diary on February 24, 1943. He was sailing aboard Tosei Maru, a passenger-cargo ship traveling to Rabaul, on New Britain, to deliver soldiers and supplies for transport to New Guinea. The Japanese were preparing to launch a flotilla of eight transport ships and eight destroyers destined for Lae, on the eastern coast of New Guinea, to reinforce the garrisons tenuously defending Japan’s grip on the Southwest Pacific.