Nick's WWII Archive

"She is getting worse." That is what the British government's last two survey reports agree on, eighty years after an American Liberty ship called the SS Richard Montgomery broke apart on a sandbank off Sheerness with...

Molotov stood before the Supreme Soviet and read out the cost of the war with Finland — forty-eight thousand seven hundred and forty-five dead — and every part of it was a forgery. When the Soviet archives opened half a...

In the winter of 1944, a fully equipped American rifleman carried eighty-two pounds of equipment. The Army's own combat analyst concluded a man could actually fight with about forty. This episode is the story of how...

For nearly 28 years after the Second World War ended, a Japanese sergeant went on fighting it, alone, in a hole in the jungle of Guam. His name was Shoichi Yokoi. Before the war he was an apprentice tailor near Nagoya...

"Tora, Tora, Tora." Three words, sent at 7:53 on the morning of December 7, 1941, that pulled the United States into the Second World War. The man who ordered them sent was Commander Mitsuo Fuchida, flight leader of the...

The Navy told Doris Miller his place was in the kitchen. On the morning of December 7, 1941, he manned a fifty-caliber anti-aircraft gun the Navy had never trained him to fire. Miller was a mess attendant aboard the...

He is not supposed to be here. It's May 1941, and a thirty-year-old sheep farmer from New Zealand is advancing across open ground on Crete with nothing but grenades and a pistol — wounded, sick, and crawling straight...

His own side thought he was dead — they laid him on a pile of frozen corpses and moved on to find the living. On March 6th, 1940, an explosive round tore away half the face of Simo Häyhä, the Finnish farmer the world...

How do you make an army surrender to a man with nothing? In September 1944, a German major general handed over more than 20,000 men to a single Scotsman in a tartan kilt who carried no weapon at all. Major Tommy...

Three feet. That is the distance between the most famous photograph of the Second World War and the man history forgot was standing next to it. On February 23, 1945, atop Mount Suribachi, photographer Joe Rosenthal took...

Half a million Soviet soldiers, and Finland answered with a drink. In the winter of 1939, the Soviet Union invaded Finland with thousands of tanks. Finland had about sixty, almost no anti-tank guns, and a glass bottle...

December 19th, 1944. The 101st Airborne is surrounded at Bastogne, the German line is pushing deeper by the hour, and Eisenhower has one question for his generals: how fast can you turn your tanks north? Patton's answer...

What happens when the ground you are standing on ceases to exist? On July 25, 1944, south of Saint-Lô, the horizon vanished. For Colonel Fritz Ziegelmann, the war didn't end with a heroic last stand; it ended with the...