The USS Laffey is best remembered today as the "ship that would not die" - this moniker given after the 2,200 ton destroyer survived five kamikaze and four bomb strikes that caused 103 casualties, from a crew of 336, all while the ship was on picket duty off Okinawa in the spring of 1945. However, what also must be remembered is that the USS Laffey, launched in 1943, is also the sole surviving World War era US Navy destroyer to have participated in the epic Battle for the Atlantic fought between the Allies and Nazi Germany.
Gevork Vartanian died in Moscow at age 87. Vartanian was a veritable legend in Soviet espionage circles whose father and wife also worked as Soviet agents. Vartanian made his name when as a young Soviet agent he played a key role in helping to derail a Nazi plot to assassinate Franklin Roosevelt, Josef Stalin, and Winston Churchill at their famous conference in 1943 at Tehran.
Vartanian retired in 1992 after an epic career that began in 1940 at the age of 16. Though he also played a key role in exposing a network of British secret agents, he will be most remembered for locating the six
One of the great Allied advantages over Nazi Germany during World War II was their ability to regularly intercept and read otherwise encoded German communications. Though this capability was not comprehensive, with changes to the German code settings throwing the Allies off at repeated times during the war, it proved of significant assistance to the Allied war effort. Some believe Allied code-breaking efforts were so consequential as to have decisively altered the course of the war.
The central location for Allied code breaking efforts was at Bletchley Park, northwest of London.
If in 1919 the question arose regarding which of the Great European Powers stood destined to drive Europe’s twentieth century fortunes, few candidates would have stood out as more unlikely than the Soviet Union. Russia had not only been forced into the Treaty of Brest-Litvosk, but had been occupied by a foreign power from 1917-1921, was in the throes of a Civil War that would kill between three and five million Russian citizens, and had foreign armies again fighting on its soil far beyond the First World War’s end. Then, in 1922 Josef Stalin.
The Battle of the Bulge that began on December 16, 1944 is widely remembered today as the greatest battle fought by the U.S. Army during the Second World War. For many, the focal point of this remembrance remains the Belgian town of Bastogne. Bastogne was a critical regional communications hub, ultimately encircled and besieged by German forces from December 19th to the 26th. The elite U.S.
In World War Two’s waning days, during the fall of 1944, Adolf Hitler ordered up one last role of the dice designed to stave off final defeat. This plan sought to punch through the densely forested, hilly, but lightly guarded Ardennes and reach Antwerp – thereby cutting off numerous Allied armies in a massive pocket similar to what his armies had accomplished four years prior.
German plans called for Sepp Dietrich’s Sixth SS Panzer Army to lead the assault through the Ardennes; as the northern army of the three German assault army’s.
Precisely seventy years ago, on December 11, 1941, Adolf Hitler declared war upon the United States. Today, this declaration of war is remembered as one of history’s great strategic blunders, and rightly so, nonetheless the reasons underpinning this remembrance have little to do with how and why war against the United States led to the Third Reich’s defeat. Conventional wisdom today explains German defeat during World War II as almost inevitable following Germany’s attack on the Soviet Union, and its subsequent declaration of war upon the United States.
On December 7, 1941 over 350 Japanese aircraft launched from six aircraft carriers hammered US military installations across Oahu, Hawaii. The focal point for their attack was the elements of the US Pacific Fleet then at anchor at the US Naval Base at Pearl Harbor. This attack killed over 2,400 Americans and sank or damaged eight battleships (with two total losses), three cruisers, three destroyers, some auxiliary ships, and destroyed 183 aircraft. In turn, the Japanese lost 29 aircraft and five midget submarines.
Tomorrow is the 70th Anniversary of the Soviet counterattack before Moscow that put the final nail in Barbarossa' s coffin. Though the grossly overextended German army in the Soviet Union had long since been ground down to a fraction of its strength from six months prior; this counterstroke would do tremendous damage to a Wehrmacht badly positioned for defending against a strategic level counter offensive.
A large unexploded WWII era bomb dropped by the RAF (Royal Air Force) has been discovered in the mud along the Rhine River near Koblenz, Germany. This discovery, along with two smaller bombs found nearby, is forcing the temporary evacuation of 45,000 people while the ordnance is defused and removed. As many now know Germany took a fearful pounding during WWII. However, what many don't know is that the worst of the destruction meted out from above Germany was delivered by the RAF and USAAF (United States Army Air Force) during the war's final year.
