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Seven thousand American soldiers were ordered to hold a frozen, indefensible salient in the Ardennes Forest while the highest echelons of Allied command dismissed warnings of an impending German offensive, a catastrophic miscalculation that resulted in the largest mass surrender of United States infantry forces in the European theater and the systematic destruction of the … Read more

ERLANGEN, Germany — An SS officer captured outside Zwickau in late April 1945 was found wearing a handmade leather collar threaded with twelve American identification tags, a discovery that reached Lt. Gen. George S. Patton Jr. within two hours and triggered a response unprecedented in the history of the United States Army. The officer, a … Read more

ARLON, Belgium — A 19-year-old infantryman sat on the running board of a stalled supply truck on a frozen road outside this southern Belgian town on the afternoon of Dec. 22, 1944, his hands cracked open at the knuckles, his boots wet through, and his last hot meal three days behind him. He did not … Read more

DAYTON, Ohio — The most famous American bomber of World War II, a B-17 Flying Fortress that survived 25 combat missions over Nazi-occupied Europe without losing a single crewman, now sits fully restored inside the National Museum of the United States Air Force at Wright-Patterson Air Force Base, roughly 500 miles from the Tennessee city … Read more

American tank crews and artillerymen have shattered the largest German armored counteroffensive in the West since 1940, destroying an estimated 200 German armored fighting vehicles in eleven days of savage fighting in the fog-choked wheat fields of Lorraine, according to battlefield reports reaching Allied headquarters. The German Fifth Panzer Army’s gamble, ordered personally by Adolf … Read more

The A-7 Corsair II, the subsonic attack aircraft that Navy pilots affectionately derided as the “SLUF” — Short Little Ugly Fellow — has reemerged as a subject of intense fascination among aviation historians, who now regard the squat, big-nosed warplane as one of the most consequential and misunderstood combat aircraft of the Cold War era. … Read more

The Allied High Command in Europe has systematically erased one of its most successful battlefield commanders from the historical record, a review of wartime operational documents and post-war memoirs reveals, exposing a calculated campaign of institutional erasure that stripped General Jacob L. Devers of his rightful place among America’s greatest World War II generals. Devers … Read more