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The most famous D-Day of the war was June 6, 1944, marking the invasion of France and breaking into Festung Europa by the Western Allies. The term was permanently attached to that extraordinary day after the Western Allies disembarked five infantry divisions and three British armoured brigades onto five beaches in Normandy: “SWORD,” “GOLD,” “JUNO,” […]

After the Japanese attack on the U.S. naval facility at Pearl Harbor, Hawaii, in December 1941, the United States and its allies found themselves in a desperate strategic situation in the Pacific. In May 1942, elements of the U.S. Pacific Fleet turned back the Japanese threat to Australia in a strategic victory at the Battle […]

As 1943 drew to a close, deployment of Essex-class aircraft carriers irreversibly tipped the scales of air power in favor of the United States and enabled Admiral Nimitz’s central Pacific offensive, code-named Granite, to progress in earnest. Carrier-based air superiority conveyed two fringe benefits: strategic mobility and relative naval supremacy. With carrier-based aircraft, Nimitz therefore […]

By December 1943, the war in Europe had been grinding on for four years. The armies of the Third Reich had gobbled up most of the continent, in a war that “was claiming 10 million people a year.” Despite some setbacks in Russia, Italy, and North Africa, the Nazis were still a formidable foe. Nearly […]