In June 2004, while spending a weekend in Munich away from dissertation research at the Austrian National Library, I boarded a train in the city’s Hauptbahnhof (Central Station) for a short trip.

Victory in the largest battle of the Pacific War came 82 days after it began, and the costs were high.

On August 28, 1942, the Detroit Times announced that the 2nd Marine Raider Battalion would receive its own official battle song. Newspapers across the country celebrated the battalion, informally called Carlson’s Raiders after the commander Lt. Colonel Evans Fordyce Carlson, for its successful assault against the Japanese on Makin Island in the Pacific.

At the outset of the Aleutian Islands campaign, 800 native Unangan were removed and interned in squalid camps from 1942 through 1945.

Charles de Gaulle’s June 1940 addresses called on the French nation to continue the fight against Nazi Germany.

Richard Eugene Fleming not only embodied the concept of a “gentleman and a scholar”- he expanded it to include war hero for his fearlessness in the face of serious risk in the Battle of Midway.

The British intelligence services’ bizarre deception plan created by a spy novelist, a lawyer, and an RAF officer proved successful beyond expectations, deceiving the Germans about Allied plans for the invasion of Sicily.

In an address to the Harvard graduating class on June 5, 1947, General George C. Marshall called for a European Recovery Plan for war torn Europe. Marshall’s call, and the Marshall Plan that bears his name, continues to resonate today with respect to the war in Ukraine and the need to rebuild in its aftermath.

The Long Range Desert Group (LRDG) and the Special Air Service (SAS) were the inspiration for a kitschy American TV show of the 1960’s.

Often overshadowed by the Battle of Midway, the hard-fought carrier naval battle in May 1942 in the waters of the Coral Sea north of Australia marked the end of the phase of Japanese triumphs in the Pacific War and proved to be of strategic significance.