Curated playlist
Battles of World War II involving Canada
- Omaha BeachCaptain Logan Scott-Bowden stood before General Omar Bradley with a warning about Omaha Beach. He and Sergeant Bruce Ogden-Smith had swum ashore from midget submarines more than thirty times. Each trip was to collect sand samples from the…
- Operation OverlordOperation Overlord was the codename assigned to the Allied liberation of German-occupied Western Europe, beginning on the 6th of June 1944. Nearly 160,000 troops crossed the English Channel on that single day. A 1,200-plane airborne…
- Normandy landingsOn the 6th of June 1944, roughly 160,000 troops crossed the English Channel in a single day. They came ashore along a 50-mile stretch of French coastline divided into five sectors: Utah, Omaha, Gold, Juno, and Sword. By the end of that…
- Operation Market GardenOperation Market Garden launched on the 17th of September 1944, and for two days it looked like it might actually work. Around 35,000 to 40,000 airborne soldiers dropped from the sky over German-occupied Netherlands while a column of…
- Battle of FranceThe Battle of France began on the 10th of May 1940, and within six weeks an empire that had survived the carnage of the First World War had collapsed. France, the largest army on the continent, with more tanks than Germany and a defensive…
- Allied invasion of ItalyThe Allied invasion of Italy began at half past three in the morning on the 9th of September 1943. A loudspeaker on the beach at Paestum called out in English: "Come on in and give up. We have you covered." The soldiers of the U.S. 36th…
- Battle of the BulgeThe Battle of the Bulge began at 05:30 on the 16th of December 1944, when 1,600 German artillery pieces opened fire along an 80-mile front in the forested Ardennes region of eastern Belgium and northern Luxembourg. For 90 minutes the…
- Falaise pocketAt the Falaise pocket, forty-eight hours after the guns fell silent, General Dwight D. Eisenhower walked the ground on foot. He later recorded encountering scenes that could only be described by Dante. Pilots flying overhead reported…
- Operation PlunderOperation Plunder sent three Allied armies across the Rhine on the night of the 23rd of March 1945. Field Marshal Bernard Montgomery commanded the 21st Army Group behind the assault. He had planned an artillery barrage of five thousand…
- Operation DragoonOperation Dragoon began in the predawn hours of the 15th of August 1944, when 1,300 Allied bombers from Italy, Sardinia, and Corsica roared toward the sun-bleached coastline of Provence. By 06:00 that morning, the bombs were falling. By…
- Battle of BritainThe Battle of Britain earned its name before a single aircraft took to the skies in its defense. On the 18th of June 1940, Winston Churchill stood before the House of Commons and declared: "What General Weygand called the 'Battle of…
- Battle of AnzioThe Battle of Anzio began on the 22nd of January 1944, when Allied forces waded ashore at a strip of reclaimed marshland on the Italian coast, hoping to outflank an entire German defensive line and seize Rome. Thirteen Allied soldiers were…
- Battle of the AtlanticThe Battle of the Atlantic was, by Winston Churchill's own admission, the thing that frightened him most during the entire Second World War. "I was even more anxious about this battle," he later wrote, "than I had been about the glorious…
- Battle of Hong KongThe Battle of Hong Kong began on the 8th of December 1941, at almost the exact moment Japan struck Pearl Harbor. Within seventeen days, a British Crown Colony that had stood for a century fell to the Empire of Japan. The garrison defending…
- Siege of Malta (World War II)The Siege of Malta was a military campaign that ran from June 1940 to November 1942, pitting the air and naval forces of Italy and Nazi Germany against the defenders of a small British island in the heart of the Mediterranean. At its…
- Dieppe RaidThe Dieppe Raid took place on the 19th of August 1942, and within ten hours it was over. More than 6,000 men had crossed the English Channel in the night. By the time they were counted, 3,623 of the 6,086 who had landed were dead, wounded,…