Curated playlist
Campaigns of World War II
- 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…
- 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…
- 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…
- North African campaignThe North African campaign of World War II began on the 11th of June 1940 and did not end until the 13th of May 1943 - nearly three years of brutal fighting across some of the most inhospitable terrain on earth. Desert, heat, and vast…
- 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…
- Second Sino-Japanese WarThe Second Sino-Japanese War cost around 20 million lives, the vast majority of them Chinese civilians. It was the largest Asian war of the 20th century, and it reshaped the political map of the entire region in ways that still hold today.…
- Burma campaignThe Burma campaign began in January 1942 with a two-division Japanese force crossing jungle-clad mountain ranges into southern Burma, and it did not end until Japan surrendered more than three years later. No other land campaign fought by…
- 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…
- Dutch East Indies campaignThe Dutch East Indies campaign of 1941-1942 is the reason Pearl Harbor happened. Japan needed oil. Its armed forces and economy together could not produce even 10% of their domestic oil needs. The islands of what is now Indonesia were the…
- Operation BagrationOperation Bagration began on the 22nd of June 1944, exactly three years to the day after Germany launched its invasion of the Soviet Union. That symmetry was no accident. What followed across the forests and marshes of Soviet Byelorussia…
- Crimean campaignThe Crimean campaign began on the 26th of September 1941, when German and Romanian forces swept onto the Crimean Peninsula as part of Operation Barbarossa. What followed was not a swift conquest. It was a grinding, multi-year struggle that…
- East African campaign (World War II)On the 9th of May 1936, the Italian dictator Benito Mussolini proclaimed the formation of Italian East Africa from Ethiopia after the Second Italo-Abyssinian War. This new colony combined the colonies of Italian Eritrea and Italian…
- Winter campaign of 1941–1942The winter campaign of 1941-1942 began on the 5th of December 1941, and the Soviet Union was fighting for its life. Nazi Germany had launched Operation Barbarossa months earlier, driving deep into Soviet territory. Now, as temperatures…