Some of the war’s most savage fighting occurred on the Eastern Front, where the Axis powers had set out to conquer the Balkan Peninsula and the immense reaches of the Soviet Union.

In the late 1930s, the U.S. military began developing small boats that could carry troops from ships to open beaches. Andrew Jackson Higgins of New Orleans, who had been manufacturing shallow-water work boats to support oil and gas exploration in the Louisiana bayous, adapted his Eureka Boat to meet the military’s specifications for a landing craft. Designated the Landing Craft Personnel (Large), or LCP(L), it was used in the invasions of Guadalcanal and North Africa in 1942. He was, according to Dwight D. Eisenhower, "the man who won the war for us."

Far away from public sight, the most consequential scientific innovation during World War II was the creation of the atomic bomb through the top-secret Manhattan Project. Inspired by refugee scientists from Europe including Albert Einstein and Leo Szilard, supervised by the US Army Corps of Engineers under General Leslie Groves, and with Dr. Robert Oppenheimer leading the scientific team, the United States engaged in a secret race to produce an atomic weapon before the Nazis. Under the Manhattan Project, the US military operated secret plants in Oak Ridge, Tennessee, and Hanford, Washington, to produce the needed uranium and plutonium elements necessary for a bomb. Isolated in remote Los Alamos, New Mexico, a tremendous team of physicists worked to create a viable detonation system. The $2 billion project employed over 125,000 people across America, most of whom had no idea what they were working on, and eventually led to the dramatic Trinity test in the New Mexico desert in July 1945, leaving the United States to face the question: was the atomic bomb a sufficient enough weapon to bring World War II to an end?

Asian Americans and Pacific Islanders, most notably Japanese Americans, faced discrimination and forced relocation during World War II. Despite the racial prejudice that led to one of the darkest chapters of American history, many served in the US Armed Forces to fight for their country.