Curated playlist
Conflicts in 1944
- 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…
- 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…
- 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…
- 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…
- Battle of Guilin–LiuzhouThe Battle of Guilin-Liuzhou put two of southern China's most storied cities in the crosshairs of the largest Japanese land offensive of the entire Second Sino-Japanese War. On the 1st of November, when Japanese forces began their assault…
- Budapest offensiveThe Budapest offensive began on the 29th of October 1944, as Soviet and Romanian armies launched a sustained assault against Hungary and its Axis partners. By the 13th of February 1945, the Hungarian capital had fallen after four months of…
- Leningrad–Novgorod offensiveThe Leningrad-Novgorod strategic offensive began on the 14th of January 1944 with a thunderclap of artillery: 220,000 shells poured onto German lines along a stretch of the front measured not in miles but in meters of cost per life.…
- 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…
- Vyborg–Petrozavodsk offensiveSoviet propaganda listed the Vyborg-Petrozavodsk offensive as one of Stalin's ten blows, the string of major offensives that reshaped the Eastern Front in 1944. The offensive struck Finland during the Continuation War, itself fought on 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…
- First Jassy–Kishinev offensiveThe First Jassy-Kishinev offensive is one of the least-documented major operations of the entire Soviet-German War. Named after two cities in the region, Iași and Chișinău, this was a series of military engagements fought in April and May…
- Continuation WarThe Continuation War placed Finland in one of the strangest positions of the entire Second World War: a small Nordic democracy fighting alongside Nazi Germany, insisting it was not actually an ally. On the 25th of June 1941, Finland…
- 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…
- 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…
- 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…
- 1944 Romanian coup d'étatOn the 23rd of August 1944, King Michael I of Romania summoned Prime Minister Ion Antonescu to the royal palace. The meeting lasted an hour. Antonescu explained the situation at the frontlines, and Michael asked him plainly to leave the…
- Battle of Leyte GulfThe Battle of Leyte Gulf, fought from the 23rd to the 26th of October 1944, pulled more than 200,000 naval personnel into a single sprawling confrontation in the waters of the Philippines. By some criteria it was the largest naval battle…
- Warsaw UprisingThe Warsaw Uprising began at 17:00 on the 1st of August 1944, when tens of thousands of Polish fighters rose against the German occupation. At that moment, Soviet tanks sat just kilometres from the city. The Red Army, which the Polish…
- Battle of ImphalThe Battle of Imphal began in March 1944 with a Japanese army crossing the Chindwin River, convinced it could destroy the Allied forces in northeast India and reshape the entire war. The city of Imphal, capital of Manipur, sat at the heart…
- Battle of the Philippine SeaThe Battle of the Philippine Sea, fought on the 19th and the 20th of June 1944, was the largest carrier-to-carrier naval engagement in history. Twenty-four aircraft carriers and roughly 1,350 carrier-based aircraft clashed as American and…
- Battle of KohimaThe Battle of Kohima came down, at one point, to a tennis court. In April 1944, British and Japanese soldiers occupied trenches on opposite sides of a small rectangle of flat ground beside a colonial administrator's bungalow in the Naga…
- Operation U-GoOperation U-Go began on the 6th of March, 1944, when Japanese forces crossed into northeast India on one of the most audacious bets of the Second World War. The man behind it, Lieutenant-General Renya Mutaguchi, had once called this same…
- Italian Civil WarOn the night between 24 and the 25th of July 1943, the Grand Council of Fascism approved a motion of no confidence against Benito Mussolini. Dino Grandi had promoted this motion to end the prime minister's leadership. King Victor Emmanuel…
- Lapland WarThe Lapland War began not with a declaration but with a surrender demand issued at around 08:00 on the 28th of September 1944, when Finnish advance units halted a small German rearguard contingent some 20 kilometres southwest of…
- 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…
- Slovak National UprisingThe Slovak National Uprising, known in Slovak as Slovenské národné povstanie and abbreviated SNP, is remembered today as Povstanie roku 1944, the Uprising of 1944. It ranks among the largest uprisings against Nazism and its allies anywhere…
- 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…
- Siege of LeningradThe Siege of Leningrad lasted 872 days. From September 1941 to January 1944, the Soviet Union's second largest city was encircled by German and Finnish forces, cut off from food, fuel, and rescue. A prewar population of 3.2 million people…
- World War II in YugoslaviaWorld War II in Yugoslavia was not one war but several, all happening at the same time. On the 6th of April 1941, the German Luftwaffe bombed Belgrade, and within little more than ten days the Royal Yugoslav Army surrendered…
- 1944 Bulgarian coup d'étatThe 1944 Bulgarian coup d'état took shape in the early hours of the 9th of September, when Zveno-affiliated officers and War Minister General Ivan Marinov seized the Ministry of War in Sofia while most of the city slept. Within four hours,…
- Belgrade offensiveThe Belgrade offensive, fought from the 15th of September to the 24th of November 1944, was one of the most complex joint military operations of the Second World War in Europe. Three separate armies, speaking three different languages and…
- Dnieper–Carpathian offensiveThe Dnieper-Carpathian offensive, fought from late December 1943 to early May 1944, was one of the largest military operations in the history of the Second World War. It stretched across a front of 1,200 kilometers and drew nearly…
- 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…
- Second Jassy–Kishinev offensiveThe Jassy-Kishinev offensive began on the 20th of August 1944, and within two days the entire German-Romanian front line had collapsed. Named after the two major cities in the staging area, this Soviet assault on Eastern Romania would last…
- World War IIWorld War II killed between 60 and 75 million people, making it the deadliest conflict in history. Tanks and aircraft reshaped the battlefield, and aircraft carried out the strategic bombing of cities. Aircraft also delivered the only…
- Operation Ichi-GoOperation Ichi-Go was, by one historian's reckoning, the largest military operation ever carried out in the history of the Japanese army. Half a million troops, a hundred thousand horses, fifteen hundred artillery pieces, eight hundred…