Later this month will mark the 75th anniversary of the biggest air battle — actually week of air battles — of World War II. Operation Argument, informally known to the flyers who had to execute it and the journalists who wrote about it as Big Week, is not as well-known as other turning point engagements in the war. But it should be.
It’s appropriate that I started writing this on Thanksgiving morning. We all have every reason to be thankful for the courageous Americans who stood up and did their duty during WWII, including the flyers military historian Bruce Gamble brings us in the very readable Kangaroo Squadron.
World War II is probably the biggest and most horrific event in the history of the world. It led to probably more than 65 million deaths, untold suffering on the part of millions more across the globe, and changed the direction of history for the remainder of a very bloody century. It’s only sometimes called “the good war” because it had more moral clarity than most. No mistake, it was awful.
The week of May 8 to 15 closed a chapter in my life whose first pages were written in France before I made my 1947 debut, in New York City. My father’s first cousin, William Friedman, authored those pages by…
On the morning of July 10, 1941, the Jewish inhabitants of Jedwabne, a modest town nestled in the marshy Podlaskie Voivodeship of northeastern Poland, found themselves forced from their homes and into the Market Square, where they were set to…
It is now impossible for us to watch a movie like Darkest Hour, or to contemplate the colossal historic presence of Winston Churchill, without the benefit of hindsight. He was right when almost everyone else was wrong. He led his country through…
Yes, Virginia, after thousands of books, lectures, debates, veteran memoirs, and documentaries, there is still something to say about World War II that advances our knowledge of that tragic, deadly and totally unnecessary world conflagration that claimed 65 million lives and changed the shape of the world. Military historian and Hoover Institution fellow Victor Davis Hanson says it in his huge, dense, and important new book.
Franklin D. Roosevelt called it “a date which will live in infamy.” Today, more than three quarters of a century later, there is another reason for remembering Pearl Harbor: It evoked a response that kept much of the civilized world…
There’s never a bad day to remember and salute those who’ve fought to protect America. But there are special days when this is particularly appropriate. December 7 is one of those days. It was 76 years ago tomorrow that the…