David Heffernan

From America and Canada to Alaska, Italy and France: The First Special Service Force During the Second World War When the United States was dragged unceremoniously into the Second World War following the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor and the Philippines in December 1941, it was way behind in terms of its special operatives’ capabilities. […]

One of the classic films based during the Second World War is Where Eagles Dare. Released in 1968 and starring Richard Burton and Clint Eastwood, the film tells the story of British and American special operatives disguised as German soldiers sneaking into a Nazi stronghold high up in the Bavarian Alps. Their goal is to […]

There are few wars that have ended as strangely as the Second World War in the Pacific Theatre. For instance, the Russian Federation and Japan are theoretically still at war with each other, as certain territorial disputes concerning lands along the north-west of the Pacific Ocean were never fully resolved in 1945. More curious still […]

The Black Sea Island of Conflict: A History of Snake Island Throughout history there have been islands across the world which have become centres of conflict that far outweigh the geopolitical or economic importance of the islands themselves. For instance, in ancient times the city states of Athens and Megara went to war several times […]

The great majority of attention generated by the Second World War is usually focused on Europe and the Allies’ efforts to first combat German expansion and then begin rolling back their earlier conquests from 1942 onwards. This is understandable to a certain extent. After all the other great theatre of the war, the Pacific front, […]

Few ships have gained as much notoriety over the years as has the Bismarck, the enormous German battleship which was constructed in the mid-1930s by the Nazis and which ended up at the bottom of the Atlantic Ocean after just one active mission in the early summer of 1941. But mention of the Bismarck usually […]

No other place has entered into the collective consciousness of humanity as being a symbol of the crimes of Nazi Germany and the Holocaust of the Jewish people which it perpetrated as has Auschwitz, the enormous concentration camp in western Poland where approximately 1.3 million people were killed between 1940 and early 1945. Most were […]

The winter of 1944 saw Nazi Germany undertake its last offensive campaign of the Second World War. The Battle of the Bulge was undertaken in the heavily forested Ardennes region straddling Belgium and Luxembourg in December 1944. The goal here was to launch a surprise counter-attack against the advancing US 12th Army Group and the […]

The Second World War witnessed many great escapes of resistance fighters from occupied countries and Allied prisoners of war from German controlled territory across Europe. The most famous was surely the ‘Great Escape’ from the Stalag Luft III POW camp. Others were carried out, attempted or just planned and there was an entire department in […]

The Allied invasion of northern France with the D-Day landings of the 6th of June 1944 has understandably been focused on as a major episode in the Second World War, as the long-awaited Western Front was opened in Europe. But the campaign in Normandy often completely overshadows events elsewhere, notably the fact that the Western […]