Curated playlist
Battles of World War II involving the United States
- Battle of Northern Burma and Western YunnanThe Battle of Northern Burma and Western Yunnan traced its origins to the 4th of May 1942. That day, fifty-four Japanese aircraft struck Baoshan, the Millennium Ancient City of Yunnan Province. Six days later, Japanese troops entered…
- Western New Guinea campaignThe Allied command set a clear goal for early 1944. They needed to bypass heavily fortified Japanese positions in the Pacific theater. This strategy aimed to cut off enemy supply lines without costly frontal assaults. Operations Reckless…
- Battle of GazalaThe Battle of Gazala lasted less than four weeks, from the 26th of May to the 21st of June 1942, yet it handed Erwin Rommel the greatest victory of his career. A port city fell in a single day. An entire garrison of 33,000 men was…
- Siege of MyitkyinaThe siege of Myitkyina began with a boast. General Joseph Stilwell predicted the coming battle for this town in Burma would be a feat which will live in military history. What made a jungle outpost worth that kind of promise? Why would a…
- Allied invasion of SicilyThe Allied invasion of Sicily, known formally as Operation Husky, began on the night of the 9th and the 10th of July 1943 with one of the largest amphibious operations in the history of World War II. More than 26 beaches stretched along…
- Gilbert and Marshall Islands campaignThe Gilbert and Marshall Islands campaign was a series of engagements fought from August 1942 to February 1944, in the Pacific theatre of World War II between the United States and Japan. On a tiny speck of coral called Betio, part of an…
- Battle of Nuremberg (1945)The Battle of Nuremberg lasted five days in April 1945, and it cost the United States four of those days just to capture a city center that was already surrounded. Karl Holz, the Reich Defense Commissioner and Gauleiter of Franconia, had…
- Operation QueenOperation Queen began on the 16th of November 1944 with one of the heaviest Allied tactical bombing raids of the entire war. More than 4,500 aircraft filled the skies over the German Siegfried Line, and yet the ground soldiers below barely…
- Mariana and Palau Islands campaignThe Mariana and Palau Islands campaign was one of the most consequential offensives the United States launched in the Pacific during World War II, and its outcome would reach all the way to the Japanese home islands. Between June and…
- 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…
- 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…
- Spring 1945 offensive in ItalyOperation Grapeshot opened on the 6th of April 1945, when the 15th Allied Army Group unleashed a rolling artillery barrage against German positions along the Senio river in northern Italy. Within 26 days, every Axis soldier in Italy would…
- 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…
- Ruhr pocketThe Ruhr pocket ended with a field marshal shooting himself in a forest rather than face Allied captivity. In April 1945, some 317,000 German soldiers were encircled in the Ruhr Area of Germany, trapped alongside millions of civilians in…
- Siegfried Line campaignThe Siegfried Line campaign, a phase of the Western European war, began in the shadow of one of history's most dramatic reversals. German forces had been routed during the Allied breakout from Normandy, and Allied armies swept across…
- Battle of OkinawaThe Battle of Okinawa began on the 1st of April 1945, when American forces launched the largest amphibious assault ever attempted in the Pacific Theater of World War II. They called it Operation Iceberg. The island they were storming lay…
- 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 Guam (1941)The Battle of Guam began at 04:44 on the 8th of December 1941, when Captain George McMillin received word of the attack on Pearl Harbor. He commanded an island of 23,394 people, defended by a force that had no artillery on land, no…
- Battle of LuzonThe Battle of Luzon was the largest land battle of the Pacific Theater in World War II, pitting Allied forces from the United States, the Philippines, Mexico, and their allies against the Empire of Japan on the biggest island in the…
- Borneo campaignOn the 1st of May 1945, Australian soldiers paddled toward a small island off the north-east coast of Borneo in handmade folboats, slipping past Japanese-held oilfields before the main assault wave arrived. That opening move on Tarakan…
- Philippines campaign (1941–1942)The Philippines campaign of 1941-1942 opened in the pre-dawn hours of the 8th of December 1941, just hours after the attack on Pearl Harbor, when Japanese bombers appeared over Clark Field near Manila and found nearly every American heavy…
- Philippines campaign (1944–1945)On the 13th of April 1945, a team of American soldiers rowed out to Fort Drum, a concrete fortress squatting in Manila Bay. They pumped three thousand gallons of diesel fuel into its walls and set it ablaze. Not one Japanese soldier inside…
- 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…
- Operation TorchOperation Torch began at dawn on the 8th of November 1942, when Allied forces waded ashore on three separate coastlines across French North Africa at the same moment. The question hanging over every planner in London and Washington was not…
- Battle of LeyteThe Battle of Leyte began not with a single shot but with a promise. General Douglas MacArthur had vowed to return to the Philippines after President Franklin D. Roosevelt ordered him to flee in 1942. That order came just a month before…
- Battle of Mount SongThe Battle of Mount Song in 1944 decided whether a vital supply road connecting Burma to China would reopen. The mountain sat immediately behind the Salween River, and whoever held it controlled whether Chinese forces could receive aid…
- 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…
- Battle of Iwo JimaThe Battle of Iwo Jima began on the 19th of February 1945, when the first wave of Marines landed on the southeastern beaches of a small volcanic island eight square miles in area. What they found was not what American intelligence had…
- Aleutian Islands campaignThe Aleutian Islands campaign holds a distinction that no other battle in World War II can claim: it was fought on North American soil. Between the 3rd of June 1942 and the 15th of August 1943, American and Japanese forces clashed across a…
- Battle of Manila (1945)The Battle of Manila began on the 3rd of February 1945, and within a month it had killed at least 100,000 civilians and reduced one of Asia's most celebrated cities to rubble. Historians would later compare it to Warsaw and Berlin as one…
- Battle of MindanaoThe Battle of Mindanao was fought on the second largest island in the Philippines, and it presented the Allied forces with their greatest challenge in the campaign to liberate the archipelago from Japanese control. Rain forests.…
- Battle of West HunanThe Battle of West Hunan began on the 6th of April 1945, just weeks before Germany's surrender in Europe, but on the other side of the world the Second Sino-Japanese War was still raging through its eighth year. Japan launched what would…
- 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…
- Operation Northwind (1944)Adolf Hitler spoke to division commanders at his Adlerhorst command complex on the 28th of December 1944. He declared that this attack had a very clear objective, namely the destruction of enemy forces. There was no matter of prestige…
- Battle of MidwayOn the morning of the 4th of June 1942, the Japanese carrier force known as the Kido Butai launched 108 aircraft toward a tiny atoll 1,300 miles northwest of Oahu. The pilots who climbed into their cockpits that day had no idea that…
- Western Allied invasion of GermanyThe Western Allied invasion of Germany reached its decisive turning point on the 22nd of March 1945, when American troops crossed the Rhine under a bright moon with almost no resistance at Nierstein. Seven startled German soldiers…
- Battle of Buna–GonaThe Battle of Buna-Gona lasted from the 16th of November 1942 to the 22nd of January 1943. It ended with evidence that starving Japanese defenders had cannibalised their own dead. Australian and United States troops had driven Japan back…
- Invasion of Lingayen GulfThe Invasion of Lingayen Gulf began on the 3rd of January 1945, and what followed over the next ten days would claim the lives of around 738 ship-based personnel and wound another 1,282. The operation was a massive Allied amphibious…
- Guadalcanal campaignThe Guadalcanal campaign began on the 7th of August 1942 with 11,000 U.S. Marines wading ashore between Koli Point and Lunga Point on a remote jungle island most Americans had never heard of. By 16:00 the following day, they had seized a…
- 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 Wake IslandThe Battle of Wake Island began within hours of Pearl Harbor, on the 8th of December 1941, when 36 Japanese bombers swept in from bases in the Marshall Islands and destroyed eight aircraft on the ground. What followed was a 15-day siege…
- Liberation of ParisOn the night of the 24th of August 1944, a half-track named "Ebro" rolled into the square in front of the Hôtel de Ville and opened fire on a group of German fusiliers. This was the Liberation of Paris, a battle that ran from the 19th of…
- Kokoda Track campaignThe Kokoda Track campaign was fought between July and November 1942 in the Australian Territory of Papua, and it nearly cost Australia the war in the Pacific. At its most desperate point, Japanese forces stood within 32 km of Port Moresby,…
- Operation KeOperation Ke was the largely successful withdrawal of Japanese forces from Guadalcanal, concluding a six-month struggle that had defined the Pacific War's first year. Between the 14th of January and the 7th of February 1943, Imperial…
- Operation CartwheelOperation Cartwheel, launched in 1943, had a single declared objective: neutralize the Japanese base at Rabaul. That base sat on the northeastern tip of New Britain. Japan had turned it into the nerve center of its entire South Pacific…
- 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,…