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It is often assumed that the world’s first inter-continental weapon system was the Convair B-36 Peacemaker, a US strategic bomber which was the first plane of its kind capable of flying between continents without refueling. Designed to hold a nuclear bomb it gave the United States the ability to launch nuclear strikes against Russia or […]

Operation Jubilee: August 19th, 1942 Sometimes victory can be rescued from the jaws of defeat. This is certainly a maxim which applies to the Dieppe Raid by the Western Allies against the German-occupied French town of Dieppe in mid-August 1942. Viewed from a purely statistical perspective the Dieppe Raid, or Operation Jubilee, as it was […]

On the 23rd of October 1940 Adolf Hitler and General Francisco Franco, the leader of Fascist Spain, met at a railway station in the town of Hendaye in the Pyrenees region, right next to the border between Spain and Vichy France. At issue was whether Franco would enter the Second World War on the side […]

The Allied Arctic Convoys (1941 – 1945) On Sunday the 22nd of June 1941 Operation Barbarossa, Nazi Germany’s invasion of Soviet Russia, was initiated. This was the largest ever invasion campaign undertaken by a nation state against another country and involved three million Axis troops, 600,000 motorized vehicles, 3,500 tanks and over 4,000 aircraft. In […]

The Outbreak of the Italian Civil War and the Gran Sasso Raid (September 12th, 1943) Most histories of the Second World War include details of the rise of Fascism in Italy under Benito Mussolini, the latter’s alliance with Nazi Germany in the 1930s and Italy’s subsequent role in the war in Africa and the Balkans. […]

There are many theatres of the Second World War which remain comparatively obscure by comparison with the main fronts in Europe. Everyone knows about D-Day and the Battle of Stalingrad, but there is understandably less public awareness of, for instance, the Japanese bombing of northern Australia in 1942. Similarly, the course of events in the […]

The Sinking of U-869 off New Jersey (February 11th, 1945) We are all familiar with the Battle of the North Atlantic and the ubiquity of the German submarines, the U-boats to the same. From 1939 all the way through to 1945 hundreds of German U-boats patrolled the waters of the North Atlantic and the Western […]

There are many amazing survival stories associated with the Second World War. For instance, in 1942 a Japanese fighter pilot called Saburo Sakai was shot through the head. He was blinded in his right eye and the damage of other bullet wounds which he sustained left him paralyzed in the entire left-hand side of his […]