SGM Mauricio da Silva Souza examines the Brazilian Expeditionary Force (FEB), the only South American ground force to fight in Europe during the Second World War. In early 1942 a popular saying held that a snake would sooner smoke a pipe than Brazil would send troops abroad, yet Axis submarine attacks on Brazilian shipping drew the country into the war, and more than 25,000 Brazilian soldiers deployed to the Italian front under General João Baptista Mascarenhas de Moraes. Souza traces the force’s rapid modernization through American logistical channels, its integration with the U.S. Fifth Army and Major General Willis D. Crittenberger’s IV Corps, and the coordination achieved in medical support, artillery fire direction, and combat engineering. He follows the FEB through the grueling fight for Monte Castello, urban combat in Montese, and the encirclement of the German 148th Infantry Division at Fornovo di Taro. The campaign, he concludes, proved the fighting value of the Brazilian soldier and created a lasting model of coalition partnership.
CSM Benjamin L. Arold argues that the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki on August 6 and 9, 1945, were not only military measures to end the war but strategic instruments for securing American dominance in the postwar world. At the Potsdam Conference, President Harry Truman leveraged the atomic monopoly to strengthen the American negotiating position and move away from compromise with the Soviet Union. Arold contends that the bombings forced Japan’s surrender before Soviet forces could gain a significant foothold, while General Order Number 1 secured unilateral American control over occupied Japan and confined Soviet influence in the Pacific. He then traces how confidence in the atomic monopoly allowed the rapid demobilization of conventional forces and made nuclear deterrence the bedrock of U.S. national security. The bomb, he concludes, reshaped the global balance of power and ushered in a new era of strategy.
Gerald Krieger argues that Germany’s rapid conquest of France in 1940 owed much to the willingness of its armored commanders to defy cautious superiors. In the spring of 1940 the Western Allies had numerical parity, more heavy tanks, and the Maginot Line, and most senior officers on both sides expected a long war of attrition. Krieger shows how a radical minority of commanders embraced speed, combined arms, and air support while the Army High Command feared overextended supply lines. He follows Erich von Manstein’s Sickle Cut plan, which shifted the main effort to the Ardennes and the crossing of the Meuse at Sedan, and Heinz Guderian’s drive with XIX Panzer Corps, during which Guderian was so angered by halt orders that on May 17 he offered his resignation mid-campaign. Krieger concludes that although French tanks often had heavier armor, German superiority in doctrine, communications, and concentration of armor, combined with officers willing to risk their careers by exploiting opportunities, proved decisive.
John Pezzola examines Japan’s attempts to use airborne forces to recover Leyte after American forces landed there in October 1944. Regarding the Philippines as vital to its sea routes and to the resources of the Dutch East Indies and French Indochina, the Japanese 14th Army under General Tomoyuki Yamashita planned a counterattack that combined a ground offensive with airborne operations. Paratroopers were tasked with seizing American airfields, including Buri and San Pablo, while the 16th Division attacked overland. Pezzola describes three separate airborne operations, the equipment and tactics of the Japanese airborne units, including the 2nd Raiding Brigade known as the Takachiho Paratroopers, and the fighting that followed the main assault on December 6, 1944. Despite some initial gains, the effort failed. He follows the American response through the capture of Purple Heart Hill by the 187th Glider Infantry in late December, where the remains of 238 Japanese soldiers revealed that both the airborne and ground assaults had ended in disaster.
John Pezzola recounts the Canadian assault on Carpiquet, a village and airfield west of Caen that one regiment remembered as “the graveyard of the regiment.” Caen had been a D-Day objective, but stiff German resistance kept it in German hands and allowed the defenders to fortify the surrounding countryside. Carpiquet’s airfield, formerly used by the Luftwaffe, offered observation over key routes toward the Odon Valley and was held by veterans of the 12th SS Panzer Division Hitlerjugend. Pezzola follows Operation Windsor, launched on July 4, 1944, in which Canadian battalions, including the Royal Winnipeg Rifles, advanced across open ground into heavy fire to seize the village and parts of the airfield. He describes the brutal fighting for the hangars and bunkers, where Churchill Crocodile flame-throwing tanks supported the infantry, and explains why the operation did not achieve complete success. The article closes with a detailed look at the development and operation of the Crocodile, from its fuel trailer to its range of controlled bursts.
Werner L. Heider examines one of the most unusual American missions of the war’s final days: the rescue of the horses at the German-held stud farm at Hostau in western Bohemia in late April 1945. Among several hundred breeding horses were Lipizzaners from the Spanish Riding School in Vienna, regarded as part of Europe’s cultural heritage. Hostau lay between Patton’s Third Army, advancing from the west, and Soviet forces moving toward Prague, while German officers on the spot sought to influence the animals’ fate. Heider reconstructs the mission from the records of the 2nd Cavalry Group and other sources, following Captain Thomas M. Stewart and the German veterinarian Rudolf Lessing as they made first contact, the task force under Major Robert P. Andrews that secured the farm, and the slow evacuation of the horses under wartime constraints. He weighs later popular accounts, including the meeting between Alois Podhajsky and Patton, and notes that the name “Operation Cowboy” was applied only afterward, not as an official codename.
SGM Rene O. Aleman analyzes Operation Drumbeat, the German U-boat offensive against merchant shipping along the East Coast of the United States and Canada that began immediately after Pearl Harbor and Germany’s declaration of war. Using the frameworks of operational art and design, he examines how German planners struck Allied supply lines at their source. The offensive’s early success, Aleman argues, came from surprise, the exploitation of unprepared coastal defenses, and the sound application of submarine warfare principles. In the first six months of 1942 alone, U-boats sank more than three million tons of shipping and supplies. Yet the advantage proved temporary. The United States learned hard lessons and responded with an effective convoy system, long-range patrol bombers devoted to anti-submarine warfare, improved radar and sonar, and joint action by the Navy, Army Air Forces, and Coast Guard. Drumbeat, Aleman concludes, won tactical victories but failed strategically against an adversary with greater industrial capacity and the ability to adapt.
Captain Brick Billing tells the story of a remarkable piece of improvised nutrition created inside a German prison camp. For Allied prisoners of war held deep inside enemy territory, escaping was only the first problem; an escaper on the run needed concentrated, high-energy food that was light and compact enough to carry for days. At Stalag Luft III, David Lubbock of the Royal Navy Volunteer Reserve set out to solve that problem. Billing explains how Lubbock worked with scarce German rations and the contents of International Red Cross food parcels to produce a dense, calorie-rich mixture that could be cooked in secret, poured into small tins, and hidden until needed. As Paul Brickhill recorded, one four-ounce tin was reckoned to sustain a man for two days, even if it was hard to swallow. From 1943, every escaper from the camp, including the 76 men of the Great Escape in March 1944, carried at least one tin of “Escaper’s Fudge,” and several credited it with helping them succeed.
Tom Hogan investigates the legend of John Ford’s lost D-Day film. In his 1994 book on the Normandy landings, Stephen Ambrose described Ford leading cameramen on Omaha Beach to film everything, quoting the director’s claim that the government suppressed the color footage because it showed too many American casualties. Historians searched for decades, but the film was never found. Drawing on newly discovered records in the National Archives, Hogan traces Ford’s commission in the Naval Reserve, the creation of his Field Photographic Branch within the Office of Strategic Services, and the unit’s actual assignments for the invasion, including the work of Lieutenant Mark Armistead’s team. He shows that the footage Ford later described was not hidden away because it was too graphic; it never existed. Hogan identifies the documentary the unit did produce in London in June 1944, rediscovered among Army Signal Corps holdings, and argues that the surviving images deserve greater appreciation.
MSG James F. Seifert Jr. analyzes the Battle of Leyte Gulf, fought from 23 to 26 October 1944 off Leyte, Samar, and Mindanao, from the U.S. Navy’s perspective. The battle ended the Japanese navy’s capacity for conventional offensive operations and marked the end of the Japanese naval threat in the Pacific. Seifert examines the challenges the Pacific Fleet faced before and during the battle, including a fluid command structure, the interplay of land-based and carrier-based air power, and changes in the geographic alignment of forces. Applying the joint concepts of operational art and operational design, he studies how Admiral Chester Nimitz set objectives and an end state while subordinate fleet commanders, Admirals William Halsey and Thomas Kinkaid, had to cooperate and devise their own plans. Halsey’s decisions succeeded but placed the strategic objective at risk. Seifert concludes that the battle might have benefited from a more robust joint staff, and that the “ways” and “means” lie at the heart of operational art.
HD Bedell provides an overview of the 1944 Burma Campaign, fought in the complex and often overlooked China-Burma-India Theater. With Japanese forces occupying Burma, supplies for China had to be flown over the Himalayas, an operation known as “the Hump” that cost more than 600 aircraft and crews. Bedell explains the theater’s tangled command structure, in which Lieutenant General Joseph Stilwell held several overlapping roles. He then follows two long-range penetration forces: the American 5307th Composite Unit (Provisional), known as Galahad or Merrill’s Marauders, and the British Chindits, inspired by Brigadier Orde Wingate’s earlier raid into Burma. Both forces endured months of hard jungle fighting, disease, and exhaustion, culminating in the capture of Myitkyina, while Stilwell’s demands strained them to the breaking point. Bedell concludes that Galahad and the Chindits influenced the campaign far more than their commanders acknowledged, as Japanese attacks on Imphal and Kohima engulfed the entire theater in fierce fighting.
Carson Teuscher examines the improbable campaign of Edson D. Raff’s Tunisian Task Force during the opening months of the Allied campaign in North Africa. After the Operation Torch landings of November 1942, French commanders in North Africa, disobeying Vichy, agreed to help the Anglo-Americans, and the new allies raced east to seize Tunisia before Axis forces arrived in strength. Raff, a parachute officer who had begun his career in the 501st Parachute Battalion, secured the airfield at Youks les Bains and then expanded his operations toward Tébessa and Gafsa on the Allies’ exposed southern flank. Teuscher shows how Raff’s small detachment of American paratroopers worked alongside French Zouaves, Chasseurs, Tirailleurs, Spahis, and even a Moroccan camel corps, overcoming a confusing dual command system and a language barrier. Through deception, speed, and partnership with French forces, the task force kept the enemy off balance for weeks. Eisenhower called the story “a minor epic in itself,” and Teuscher argues that it foreshadowed the greater Allied cooperation to come.
Chad Davis tells the story of Chief Yeoman Theodore Richard Brownell of Fort Smith, Arkansas, whose wartime service embodied the phrase “a yeoman’s job.” Separating fact from the legends that crept into official Navy publications, Davis traces Brownell from his hometown, where he once worked at the Boston Store, to his service as a crewman of the submarine tender USS Canopus in the Philippines. After the fall of Bataan, Brownell joined the defense of Corregidor alongside the Marines and was captured when the island fell in 1942. Davis follows him through years of captivity at Cabanatuan and other camps, the starvation, dehydration, exposure, slave labor, and death marches endured by Allied prisoners, and the voyage to Japan aboard the infamous hell ships. Throughout, fellow prisoners described Brownell as unbroken, resourceful, and humorous, with “wisdom far in excess of his rank.” Davis closes with Brownell’s postwar career and a family tradition of Navy service that spanned more than 95 years.
Russell Moore asks whether the costliest battle between American and Japanese forces could have been fought differently. The Battle of Okinawa in 1945 offered a bloody preview of an invasion of the Japanese home islands, killing thousands of American soldiers, Marines, and sailors and wounding tens of thousands more. Moore reviews the criticism of Lieutenant General Simon Bolivar Buckner Jr., commander of the Tenth Army, who rejected flanking amphibious landings and instead sent his troops into repeated frontal assaults against the Japanese defenses around Shuri in the south of the island. Buckner’s defenders argued that such landings risked an Anzio-style stalemate. Moore proposes another option: a strategy of isolation rather than annihilation, containing the Japanese in the south once the airfields and anchorages needed for the war against Japan were secure. Buckner, he concludes, followed his orders by the book, but more senior commanders should have considered isolation, which might have saved tens of thousands of lives on both sides.
Jeffrey Cox investigates the loss of four American submarines, Argonaut, Amberjack, Grampus, and Triton, within a few weeks between January and March 1943. Drawing an analogy with the claustrophobic world of the film Alien, he evokes the cramped, dangerous life aboard a submarine, where a boat could vanish without a sound and leave no survivors to explain what happened. Cox finds a common denominator in Captain James Fife Jr., who took command of the submarine force operating from Brisbane in December 1942. He examines Fife’s tight control of his boats, his frequent radio transmissions, and the aggressive patrol assignments he gave them in the Solomons campaign, then reconstructs what is known of each boat’s final patrol. Cox also follows the informal investigation conducted by Captain Allan McCann, whose report never saw the light of day. McCann exonerated Fife but added a troubling possibility: some of the boats may have been sunk by American aircraft.
David W. Tschanz examines how defective torpedoes undermined the American submarine campaign against Japan. Submarines eventually strangled Japanese shipping, cutting imports of oil and iron ore by nearly 90 percent, but for the first two years of the war American skippers fired the Mark XIV torpedo, which ran about eleven feet deeper than set, carried a magnetic detonator that exploded prematurely, and used a contact pin that failed on direct hits. Tschanz shows how submarine captains’ reports of failures ran into the resistance of a Bureau of Ordnance that defended its weapon. He follows Rear Admiral Charles Lockwood’s determination to test the torpedoes himself, the objections of Rear Admiral Ralph Waldo Christie, who had helped develop the magnetic exploder, and the order in November 1943 that finally deactivated it. A fix for the faulty firing pin followed the same month. Tschanz asks how many months these failures and hidebound bureaucrats added to the war.
Bruce Oliver Newsome reexamines the British intelligence reports on Tiger 131, the most famous tank in the world. The first Tiger brought to Britain, it became the most studied and photographed tank in Allied intelligence and is today the only running Tiger anywhere. Its British reports have long puzzled researchers: their numbering and dating suggest that some were never completed, some contradict others, some are undated, and fine drawings and paintings survive without captions. After surveying every surviving report in Britain and North America, Newsome reconstructs their original state. He also explains the Tiger program itself, which produced two different tanks bearing the name: the Henschel design that entered service and Ferdinand Porsche’s losing design, whose hulls were converted into self-propelled guns. The findings are unflattering to Allied intelligence. Much of the analysis arrived too late, mobility trials ended when the engine and suspension broke in 1944, and there is no evidence Allied designers were influenced, so Western tanks changed little in response.
Richard Anderson provides a detailed reference history of the organization of the United States Army in the Second World War, first written in 1993 as an appendix to Hitler’s Last Gamble, his book on the Battle of the Bulge with Trevor N. Dupuy and David Bongard, and substantially revised since. In June 1939 the Regular Army numbered fewer than 190,000 officers and men, with a National Guard of similar size. Within three years it had been transformed into a force that peaked at more than 8.2 million men in 89 divisions. Anderson explains how the old “square” infantry divisions gave way to the leaner “triangular” organization and describes the structure and evolution of infantry, armored, airborne, and cavalry divisions, as well as separate tank, tank destroyer, artillery, and support units. He also covers specialized formations and experiments, from rocket launcher battalions to units equipped with captured German artillery during ammunition shortages, offering a valuable guide to how the wartime Army was built and fought.
Walter F. Giersbach recounts the strange story of Japan’s balloon bomb campaign and the only civilians killed by enemy action on the American mainland during the Second World War. On May 5, 1945, near Bly, Oregon, Elsye Mitchell, a pregnant young wife, and five children from a Sunday school group came upon a strange object in the forest while her husband, the Rev. Archie Mitchell, parked their car. It exploded, killing all six. Giersbach explains that between November 1944 and April 1945 Japan launched more than 9,000 paper balloons carrying incendiary and anti-personnel bombs in an operation called Fu-Go, using the jet stream to carry them across the Pacific. Most fell harmlessly into the ocean, but many reached North America, landing from Alaska to California, and one was found buried in British Columbia as late as 2014. He also follows the later life of Archie Mitchell, who remarried and became a missionary in South Vietnam, where he was kidnapped by the Viet Cong in 1962 and never seen again.
Edward J. Langer asks whether the U.S. Navy possessed a battlecruiser after all, despite never officially completing one. The battlecruiser was meant to be the ship that could do everything: scout, defeat cruisers and destroyers, protect shipping lanes, and join the battle line against enemy capital ships. Britain and Germany built them, while the U.S. Navy debated the idea for years. Langer traces that debate from the 1903 Summer Conference at the Naval War College, through the lessons of the Battle of Tsushima and the rise of the all-big-gun battleship, to the American battlecruisers that were begun but never finished, with several under construction converted into the aircraft carriers USS Lexington and USS Saratoga. He then examines two later classes of large cruisers that came close to filling the battlecruiser’s roles: the Alaska class and the Des Moines class. Langer weighs their design, armament, and service, and reflects on the battlecruiser’s mixed record, from its success at the Falkland Islands to its weakness in the battle line.
LtCol Richard Beil argues that the Pacific island-hopping campaign of the Second World War repeated some of the costliest mistakes of the First. He begins with the Schlieffen Plan and the way rigid planning, rooted in Clausewitz’s emphasis on the decisive battle, shaped the opening of the Great War and its descent into trench warfare. Beil then turns to the Central Pacific, where American planners advanced along a line of islands toward Japan. Some heavily defended bases, such as Rabaul and Truk, were bypassed, but others of limited value were attacked frontally. What the campaign needed, he contends, was an island suitable for airfields and anchorages, not any particular island, yet battles such as Tarawa, Peleliu, and Iwo Jima were fought at a cost of thousands of Marine lives when alternatives were available. Reflecting on the saying that generals always fight the last war, Beil warns that history is a reconstruction of the past, and that drawing the wrong lessons from it can be fatal.
Roger Daene examines Operation Compass, the British offensive in North Africa that in 1940–41 turned a local counterattack into a crushing victory over the Italian army. After Italy declared war on France and Britain in June 1940, Italian forces crossed into Egypt, advanced about fifty miles, and halted near Sidi Barrani in a chain of fortified camps. Generals Archibald Wavell and Richard O’Connor, with some 30,000 British, Indian, and Australian troops, struck those camps and then refused to let the enemy rest, driving deep into Libya. Daene follows the campaign through the capture of successive Italian strongholds to the final encirclement at Beda Fomm, where mobility proved decisive. By the end, nearly all of Libya had been taken and fewer than 20,000 of some 150,000 Italian soldiers escaped. Daene then analyzes why the Italian military collapsed, pointing to poor higher command, outdated equipment, and weak cooperation between the services, while recognizing the bravery of Italian soldiers and artillerymen who fought to the end.
John Harris investigates the wartime role of Tancred Borenius, a London scholar who had once served as an envoy for Finland, and asks whether he was a forgotten intelligence hero or a messenger in a plot against Winston Churchill. In the spring of 1941 Britain stood battered and alone after Dunkirk and the Blitz, and some influential figures favored a negotiated peace with Germany. Borenius, secretary of the Polish Relief Fund, traveled to Geneva, where he met the diplomat Carl Burckhardt. According to German sources, he conveyed the impression that powerful circles in Britain were ready to make peace and might move against Churchill. Harris examines who stood behind the mission, including the intelligence officer Claude Dansey, why Borenius received no recognition while others involved were heavily decorated, and Churchill’s decision to call a confidence vote days before Rudolf Hess flew to Scotland in May 1941. He concludes that the Borenius mission may have unintentionally given Hess a reason to believe a coup against Churchill was imminent.
Bill Wilson examines the Soviet rifle corps of 1945, an echelon of the Red Army that remains little understood. German intelligence never fully grasped the structure of Soviet forces, and wartime misconceptions about “red hordes” and overwhelming numbers have lingered in popular memory. The sheer number of Soviet fronts, armies, and corps also makes them difficult to study. Wilson corrects a common misconception that the Red Army abolished the rifle corps in late 1941 for the rest of the war. The echelon nearly disappeared, but it was rebuilt from late 1942 as the wartime Soviet force structure matured. He explains the differences between regular rifle corps, guards rifle corps, and the short-lived light rifle corps, the official establishments that governed their organization, and the artillery, rocket, self-propelled gun, and anti-aircraft units that supported them. Wilson compares these establishments with the forces actually available in January 1945, when 112 regular and 40 guards rifle corps faced the Germans or stood in reserve.
LtCol Richard Beil applies the doctrine of just war to the decision to invade Okinawa in 1945. He begins by setting out the just war tradition, which occupies the ground between pacifism and the realist view that anything is permitted in war, tracing it from Thucydides and Saint Augustine to modern Christian teaching. Beil explains the tradition’s criteria, including just cause, proportionality, the protection of noncombatants, and the requirement that all other means of ending a conflict be shown to be impractical or ineffective. He then examines the strategic debates that led to the Okinawa campaign, the presence of a large civilian population on the island, and the immense human cost of the battle. Beil gives particular attention to Admiral Chester Nimitz, questioning whether rivalry with MacArthur or a need to appear active drove an operation of doubtful necessity. Since Operation Starvation, the aerial mining campaign against Japanese shipping, was already underway, he argues the invasion should at least have been postponed.
Bruce Malone examines Operation Dragoon, originally called Anvil, the Allied invasion of southern France on 15 August 1944, often called France’s forgotten D-Day. Although one of the least celebrated Allied operations of the war, it was among the most controversial strategic decisions, launched by the United States over strenuous British objections. Malone traces the long debate over its merits, with American supporters emphasizing its help to the campaign in northern France and British critics arguing that it weakened the Italian front. He follows the planning that weighed landings near Toulon and Marseille, the friction between American and French commanders such as Lieutenant General Alexander Patch and General Jean de Lattre de Tassigny, and the rapid advance up the Rhône Valley. Malone concludes that the operation was a stunning success: it demolished the German Nineteenth Army, forced Army Group G to retreat, opened major ports to supply Allied forces in France, did no harm to the Italian campaign, and confirmed the United States as the senior partner in the alliance.
Paul S. Teague examines the Soviet invasion of Manchuria in August 1945 and the collapse of Japan’s Kwangtung Army. He traces the Japanese garrison in Manchuria from its origins after the Russo-Japanese War through the creation of the Kwangtung Army in 1919, whose officers saw themselves as guardians of Japan’s frontier against Russia. Led by figures such as Ishiwara Kanji, they engineered the Manchurian Incident of 1931 and created the puppet state of Manchukuo, bringing Japan face to face with the Soviet Union in a series of border clashes that culminated at Nomonhan in 1939. As the Pacific War drained the Kwangtung Army of its best units, it became a hollow force. When the Soviet Union declared war on 9 August 1945, Marshal A. M. Vasilevsky’s three fronts overwhelmed its poorly trained and equipped defenders. Teague shows how Tokyo’s leaders came to realize the army was hopeless and concludes that the invasion and the Kwangtung Army’s defeat at least contributed to Japan’s decision to surrender.
Paul S. Teague examines the Battle of Buna-Gona on the north coast of New Guinea in 1942–43, an early and bitter test for American troops in the Pacific. Japan sought to cut the lines of communication between the United States and Australia by seizing Port Moresby. After the Battle of the Coral Sea prevented a seaborne landing, Japanese forces landed on the north coast and attacked across the Owen Stanley Mountains along the Kokoda Trail. Australian troops drove them back to fortified positions at Buna, Gona, and Sanananda, and General Douglas MacArthur committed the U.S. 32nd Infantry Division to capture Buna. After the division struggled against jungle, disease, and strong defenses, MacArthur sent Lieutenant General Robert Eichelberger, who relieved the division commander, Major General Edwin Harding, and two regimental commanders. Teague argues that Harding’s difficulties stemmed from faulty intelligence, poor logistics, and inadequate training originating in MacArthur’s headquarters, and that with Eichelberger’s tanks and artillery Harding might have won.
James Hinton challenges the popular memory of the Battle of the Philippine Sea in June 1944, celebrated as the “Great Marianas Turkey Shoot,” the greatest carrier battle of the war. American pilots from fifteen carriers destroyed most of the Japanese aircraft sent against them, and naval aviators were credited with ending the Japanese carrier threat. Hinton argues that the truth is more complicated. The planes were relatively cheap and their pilots inexperienced; the irreplaceable losses were Japan’s fleet carriers, and those were sunk mainly by American submarines. He traces the roots of the Marianas campaign and follows the boats that shaped the battle, from USS Flying Fish, which spotted the Japanese fleet, to Albacore, which torpedoed the new carrier Taiho, and Cavalla, which sank Shokaku. Hinton shows how contemporary news reports, postwar documentaries, and modern television have given submarines little more than a footnote, leaving the quiet professionals of the “Silent Service” as the unsung heroes of the day.
Michael F. Dilley provides a concise history of the American airborne units of the Second World War, from groups and squadrons to battalions, regiments, divisions, and the single airborne corps. He traces the idea back to October 1918, when Brigadier General Billy Mitchell proposed dropping an American division by parachute near Metz, a plan worked out by Major Lewis H. Brereton, who later commanded the First Allied Airborne Army. Dilley follows the creation of the Parachute Test Platoon at Fort Benning in June 1940, the expansion into parachute battalions such as the 501st through 504th, and the activation of the 11th, 13th, 17th, 82nd, and 101st Airborne Divisions and the XVIII Airborne Corps, along with glider units. He summarizes the combat jumps and glider operations of these formations in Europe and the Pacific. The article also traces the development of airborne insignia, including the parachutist and glider badges, and later additions such as the Senior and Master Parachutist badges and the Navy and Marine Corps jump wings.
Kai Isaksen tells the story of the Czechoslovak soldiers and airmen who continued to fight after their country was dismembered. In 1938 the Czechoslovak Army was among the largest and best-equipped in Europe, with modern tanks and aircraft and strong border fortifications, yet the Munich agreement handed the Sudetenland to Germany without a fight, and the rest of the country soon fell under German control or was divided among its neighbors. Isaksen follows the thousands who escaped to Poland, France, the Middle East, Britain, and the Soviet Union. He describes the infantry units that fought in France in 1940, the battalion besieged with Allied forces at Tobruk, and the four Czechoslovak squadrons of the Royal Air Force, including No. 310 Squadron in the Battle of Britain and No. 311 Squadron in Bomber Command. In the east, the 1st Czechoslovak Army Corps fought at the Dukla Pass and in support of the Slovak uprising. Their reward was a return to a free Czechoslovakia in 1945, though within the Soviet bloc.
Bill Wilson offers a guide to the most important published orders of battle for the land forces of the Second World War. Orders of battle identify which units fought in particular battles and campaigns and how they were organized and subordinated, information made vital by the hundreds of divisions mobilized for total war, especially on the Eastern Front. Wilson evaluates selected works for Germany, the Soviet Union, Great Britain, France, and the United States, setting aside archival sources. He describes Georg Tessin’s monumental multi-volume study of the German armed forces, the Soviet Boevoi sostav volumes, Lieutenant Colonel H. F. Joslen’s Orders of Battle, Second World War for the British Army, the French official history Les Grandes Unités Françaises, Shelby Stanton’s World War II Order of Battle for the U.S. Army, and Gordon Rottman’s order of battle for the U.S. Marine Corps. For each, he explains its scope, organization, strengths, and limitations, and he closes with a table comparing their language, the echelons covered, the nature of their data, and their treatment of non-divisional units.
Christopher Lyon examines the American Volunteer Group, the famous Flying Tigers, within the larger story of how the United States moved toward war with Japan. As early as December 1939, he argues, the Roosevelt administration was preparing for conflict, and by mid-1940 it was planning to support hard-pressed China with modern fighters, bombers, and hundreds of millions of dollars in aid. China had faced Japan’s technological might with aging aircraft and outdated weapons while also fighting a civil war. Lyon follows Claire Chennault, an adviser to the Chinese military since 1937, who oversaw the creation of a unit of American servicemen and pilots who volunteered to fight for China. He explores the propaganda, diplomacy, and realpolitik behind the venture, and the idealized vision of China promoted by figures such as the publisher Henry Luce. The Flying Tigers won no major battles, Lyon concludes, but for a few months in 1941 and 1942 they gave hope to two nations, one near surrender and one about to awaken.
