Troops were fighting for democracy at home as well as abroad.
Shortly after midnight on 6 June 1944, Operation Neptune, otherwise known as D-Day, began.
Thousands upon thousands of planes and ships bombed and shelled Nazi defences in Normandy. The Allies then sent in 23,000 men in three airborne divisions and mounted, with 4,000 landing craft, what remains the world’s largest ever amphibious assault: five divisions, attacking five separate beaches.
Amateur archaeologists have unearthed five human skeletons missing their hands and feet under the former home of the Nazi war criminal Hermann Göring at Hitler’s Wolf’s Lair military headquarters in present-day Poland.
The remains, believed to be that of a family, were discovered as part of a dig at the site near the north-eastern town of Kętrzyn, where Nazi leaders spent large stretches of the second world war.
Mystery surrounds the chilling find, first reported by Der Spiegel, including the identity of the victims, the circumstances of their burial, and whether the Reichsmarschall knew the bones were there while he lived in the house.
The Great Escape wasn’t so great in the end. Almost all the Allied participants in the famous breakout from a German prisoner-of-war camp were captured and most were killed.
It has always looked as if the plan went wrong — but what if something more sinister was at work? Had the Great Escapers been betrayed?
A newly uncovered document in the National Archives has revealed that Flight Lieutenant Desmond Plunkett, the map-maker and unlucky 13th man out of the camp, believed the Great Escape had been brought down — by its own side.
Moscow is evoking German war crimes in its row over Ukraine — but it’s not the only country with demands
Berlin has rejected a demand by Moscow that it should acknowledge the 900-day siege of Leningrad as genocide and pay compensation for 1.1 million people who died at the hands of the German army.
In a response to a diplomatic note sent by Russia, the German foreign ministry said the blockade of what is now St Petersburg between September 1941 and January 1944 was a “terrible war crime that the German Wehrmacht brought on Leningrad and its population” but fell short of calling it a genocide. It said the German government had emphasised this repeatedly and was maintaining this legal opinion.
A teenage cook whose heroics onboard a warship helped shorten the Second World War has been honoured in his home town after a public vote.
The regenerated centre of North Shields, North Tyneside, has been named after Thomas Brown, who was awarded the George Medal for helping to retrieve codebooks from a sinking German U-boat in October 1942.
The books were later used to crack the Enigma code by experts at Bletchley Park, enabling the British to decipher Nazi messages.
Britain’s longest-serving World War Two spy, Christine Granville, risked her life countless times carrying out missions across Europe, yet today her contribution is barely known. Who was she and why does the nation owe her such a great debt?
On 15 June 1952, Granville returned to the west London hotel she called home, her flight to Belgium having been cancelled due to engine failure.
After making her way to her usual room on the first floor, she heard a man in the lobby shouting her name and demanding the return of some letters. Downstairs, she found herself faced by her former lover who suddenly thrust a commando knife into her chest, fatally wounding her.
Since 2009, Indian and American teams have scoured the mountains in India’s north-eastern state of Arunachal Pradesh, looking for the wreckage and remains of lost crews of hundreds of planes that crashed here over 80 years ago.
Some 600 American transport planes are estimated to have crashed in the remote region, killing at least 1,500 airmen and passengers during a remarkable and often-forgotten 42-month-long World War Two military operation in India. Among the casualties were American and Chinese pilots, radio operators and soldiers.
The operation sustained a vital air transport route from the Indian states of Assam and Bengal to support Chinese forces in Kunming and Chunking (now called Chongqing).
Descendants of British soldiers machine-gunned after leaping into sea from transport ship campaign for official acknowledgement of cover-up
Even amid the litany of horrors from the war in the Far East it still has the power to shock – hundreds of unarmed British and Allied prisoners shot in cold blood by their Japanese captors as they tried to save themselves from a sinking transport ship.
But the fate of the men – machine-gunned after leaping into the sea from the Suez Maru – was largely forgotten, other than by their grieving loved ones.
“It’s often surprising how limited the knowledge about the Nazis’ medical crimes is in today’s medical community, maybe with the exception of Josef Mengele’s experiments in Auschwitz,” said Herwig Czech of the Medical University of Vienna in Austria.
That’s why Czech and his colleagues suggested establishing a new commission to the editor-in-chief of renowned medical journal The Lancet three years ago.
They planned to raise awareness of the Nazis’ medical crimes and enable today’s medical professionals to draw conclusions for the future.
Few questioned the morality of burning Japan’s cities. They had no sympathy for Japan, which appallingly abused captured US civilians.
Israel has declared war on Hamas. But why Hamas and not Gaza? What is Hamas if not the representative of Gaza’s Arabs? Didn’t these Arabs vote Hamas into power? Don’t they continue to support it? Don’t they celebrate when Jews are murdered? Wouldn’t they lynch you and me if they found us alone in an alley?
Is anyone aware of a less innocent population in human history?
And yet, for 40 years now – since the beginning of the First Intifada – Israel’s leaders have refused to crush these bloodthirsty Arabs in battle. They seem almost incapable of doing so at this point. So here’s an idea: Since Israel virtually worships America, why not learn from America how to win a war? The U.S. last won a decisive military victory when Japan surrendered to it on September 2, 1945, leading to 80 years of peace between the two countries. Not a bad outcome.
The Allies learned quickly that defeating Shinto fanaticism meant a fight to the death.
Another recording from Hamas’ terrorists' body cameras.
Terrorists who broke into the city of Ofakim, went from house to house and murdered civilians, including old people.Hamas is worse than ISIS. pic.twitter.com/0Noyt4K8rM
— Israel War Room (@IsraelWarRoom) October 16, 2023
In the summer of 1944, in a village in German-occupied western France, a slim young woman with dark hair and grey-green eyes sat in a building with a wireless set, tapping out messages in Morse code.
She was an agent in the Special Operations Executive (SOE), known as Churchill’s Secret Army. Her codename was Genevieve and she was sending urgent messages back to London.
The French resistance in the area was sabotaging key transport links, disrupting German forces as they fought the Allied advance. For this they needed supplies – dropped by air from Britain – and aerial support.
Neville Chamberlain’s appeasement provided only temporary relief from the agony
When Neville Chamberlain landed at Heston, the crowds so thronged the streets that the 14-mile journey back to London took him 90 minutes. The prime minister had brought them peace for their time, and they were joyous. Or were they simply delirious with relief?
New research covering letters, diaries, mass observation records and more has revealed the extent of national anxiety 85 years ago in the autumn of 1938. There was an epidemic of suicide and other mental health crises over the threat of another war, though they were likely to refer to it with the term “nerves”.
Archaeologists have found evidence of a mass execution of German prisoners who were forced to dig their own graves and then shot by the French Resistance a few days after D-Day, during World War Two.
French and German teams discovered bullets and cartridges, as well as coins, at a remote site in central France identified by the last surviving witness.
After France surrendered to Hitler’s Germany in 1940, the underground Resistance movement gathered force over years of occupation and by June 1944 was poised to help the Allied invasion in Normandy.
In the early going of this marathon film, J. Robert Oppenheimer (Cillian Murphy) tells a hostile government committee that his testimony should be understood in the context of his life and work. Context also is important for movies, but Oppenheimer keeps key back stories off the screen.
Viewers see the “Hitler Invades Poland” headline from September 1, 1939, but do not see or hear anything about Josef Stalin’s Communist forces invading Poland on September 17, 1939. This joint invasion started WWII and came about because of the Stalin-Hitler pact of August 23, 1939. Viewers see nothing about the Pact, and no headline such as “Stalin Invades Finland,” marks November 30, 1939.
The BBC has apologised after a presenter called the Second World War Dambusters raid “infamous” on its 80th anniversary in May.
Sally Nugent used the term in a BBC Breakfast segment about RAF 617 Squadron’s 1943 attack on three key dams in Germany as she reported on a flypast by Second World War bombers in May.
It prompted two viewers to complain to the corporation that the description breached accuracy and impartiality guidelines.
