WW II

EIGHTY years ago tonight, the silent darkness of the Egyptian desert erupted in flame and hellish noise as the Second Battle of El Alamein began.

A four-hour artillery and aerial bombardment starting at 9.40pm opened the massive assault by the Eighth Army against their German and Italian foes.

Although the bulk of the troops going forward were British, their comrades in arms included divisions from Australia, New Zealand, South Africa and India, as well as soldiers from Greece, Poland and the Free French.

A row has erupted in France over plans for a new D-day attraction near the landing beaches, which critics have likened to a Disney-style theme park.

The multimillion-euro project to retell the story of le débarquement of 6 June 1944 and the subsequent Battle of Normandy in a hi-tech 45-minute “immersive show” has sparked a furious war of words, with opponents describing it as disrespectful to those who died and their families.

An anniversary that reminds us of what greatness required.

Eighty years ago, on Aug. 7, 1942, American Marines went ashore on the tropical islands of Guadalcanal and its tiny neighbors Tulagi, Gavutu, and Tanambogo. This marked the first sustained offensive action by American land forces in the Pacific. After the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor on Dec. 7, 1941, America and its allies had been chased out of the Philippines, Wake Island, Hong Kong, Malaysia, Singapore, and Indonesia. It was as Adm. Isoroku Yamamoto said, the time of “running wild” for six months, with no “expectation of success” thereafter. The Japanese had awoken a sleeping giant by attacking Pearl Harbor.

Hundreds of artefacts from submarine U534 have been unearthed, offering clues into the Germans’ activities in the Second World War

Historians in Birkenhead are hoping to uncover the mystery of why the U-boat U534 disobeyed orders to flee Germany in the dying days of the Second World War after unsealing hundreds of objects from the boat for the first time in 80 years.

They have opened dozens of boxes of artefacts found aboard the submarine, which is believed to have been scuttled by its crew after coming under attack from British aircraft off the coast of Denmark.

There are various theories as to what U534 was doing, including that it may have been carrying top-secret torpedo technology to Japan or even the US as part of a defection plan.

The photograph shows devastation in Nagasaki after the atomic bomb: a scorched wilderness where there was once a city. At its centre stands a lone man with a camera.

It was 9 September 1945 and Lt Daniel McGovern, a US Army Air Force cameraman, was documenting ground zero, the point directly below the bomb’s detonation four weeks earlier. Few would recognise McGovern, but the vision of apocalypse is familiar from documentary footage of Hiroshima and Nagasaki at the end of the second world war.

This engaging history picks apart the heroic myth of Stalingrad’s defence — which the Kremlin still obsessively cultivates today

In the centre of the city of Volgograd, at 39 Sovetskaya Street, stands a yellow-painted four-storey apartment building. At first glance it seems a typical Russian residential block, built before the Second World War. Yet when you turn the corner towards the River Volga you see the tall red-brick memorial clinging to the building’s eastern side. Carved into the brickwork is a message in Russian: “In this building fused together heroic feats of warfare and of labour. We will defend/rebuild you, dear Stalingrad!”

More than 22,600 feet below the surface of the Pacific Ocean lies a WWII US Navy destroyer that has been named the world’s deepest shipwreck.

The USS Destroyer Escort Samuel B. Roberts (DE-413), known as the Sammy B, was located on Wednesday in the Philippine Sea.

The vessel went down during the Battle Off Samar in the Philippine Sea in October 1944 after it was hit by Japanese fire.

Regardless of what the critics say, aircraft carriers will continue to be indispensable to our national security.

Midway Airport. Some think its name comes from being “midway” between New York and the West Coast. Others mistakenly think it is named for the “Monsters of the Midway,” Alonzo Stagg’s legendary University of Chicago Maroon football teams, the name later adopted by the Super Bowl champion 1985 Chicago Bears.

Actually, it is named for the decisive blue water naval engagement that turned the tide of World War II in the Pacific. Eighty years ago this month, June 4-6, 1942, a combined Japanese fleet that included four aircraft carriers, one light carrier, and 11 battleships prepared to destroy U.S. naval airpower in another surprise attack near Midway Island, a lonely Pacific outpost 1,500 miles from Pearl Harbor.

A US spymaster inadvertently helped the Nazis develop one of the most effective disinformation campaigns of the second world war by spreading rumours about Hitler’s plans for a Where Eagles Dare-style Alpine redoubt, a historian with access to classified US military records has found.

The myth that the Nazis were amassing weapons and crack units of 100,000 fanatical soldiers in the spring of 1945 for a last stand in the Austro-Bavarian Alps was without any basis in fact but had a powerful hold on the imagination of American and British military leaders, who feared it could prolong the war for years.

Gwen Strauss was enjoying a leisurely lunch with her 83-year-old great-aunt, Hélène Podliasky.

Hélène was French and Gwen, an American author, lives in France.

It was 2002 and the conversation turned to Hélène’s past. Gwen knew her great-aunt had worked in the Resistance in France during World War Two, but didn’t know anything about that time in her life.

Hélène told the story of how she was captured by the Gestapo, tortured and deported to Germany to a concentration camp. As the allies drew near, the camp was evacuated and she was forced to walk for miles on a Nazi death march.

“Then I escaped with a group of women,” she said briefly.

December 7 will mark the 80th anniversary of the Japanese surprise attack that killed 2,403 American service members, dealt a grievous blow to our fleet, and forced the United States into World War II. As we mark this anniversary, our inadequate response to China’s military build-up shows that we are not taking the lessons of that infamous day seriously.

Nine years ago, while stationed at Joint Base Pearl Harbor-Hickam, I put on my whites and took part in the annual Pearl Harbor Remembrance Day commemoration. Watching the ceremony, I must admit that the horrors of that attack seemed quite distant. More than the beautiful tropical setting, I knew that I was a part of the most dominant naval force in human history. With the Cold War long past, no other country could threaten America’s fleet.

The forgotten history of Pearl Harbor – Why Japan’s attack on the US 80 years ago was not a surprise.

In a straight line between the US and Japan, Hawaii is the first piece of land due west of San Francisco. In 1941 its shallow-water port, Pearl Harbor, provided the best place to anchor in the whole Pacific. There, at 7.49am (local time) on 7 December of that year, a first wave of torpedo bombers began to destroy the US Pacific Fleet.

The Second World War revolved around not just Europe and the Atlantic, nor even the Pacific, but the whole of Asia, too. Japan occupied Korea from 1905 to 1945, and in 1931 it used Korean troops when invading Manchuria, a vast territory of China north-east of Beijing. By 1937, in the then capital of China, Nanjing, Japan had killed 300,000 inhabitants in six weeks. By 1939, it had taken over the large island of Hainan, off China. By the next year, it had invaded French Indochina (now Vietnam, Laos and Cambodia).