The past, present, and future of The National WWII Museum's collection of oral histories. 

“It was too much death to contemplate, too much savagery and suffering; and in August 1945 no one was counting. For those who had seen the face of battle and been in the camps and under the bombs—and had lived—there was a sense of immense relief.”

In a global conflict of exploding bombs and shells—tens of millions of them on land, sea, and in the air—setting one off in Hitler's headquarters might seem like the simplest thing in the world. 

A US Navy sailor survives off of Guadalcanal thanks to a life belt with a remarkable connection to home. 

The idea of using American Indians who were fluent in both their traditional tribal language and in English to send secret messages in battle was first put to the test in World War I with the Choctaw Telephone Squad and other Native communications experts and messengers. However, it wasn’t until World War II that the US military developed a specific policy to recruit and train American Indian speakers to become code talkers.

Richard Tregaskis’s account of the first seven weeks of fighting is a classic of war literature. 

Richard B. Frank, author of Guadalcanal: The Definitive Account of the Landmark Battle (1990); Downfall: The End of the Imperial Japanese Empire (1999); and MacArthur (2007); lectures on the decisive battles of the Pacific war.  

The August 1942 landing on Guadalcanal was a colossal improvisation, concocted on the fly to take advantage of a recent dramatic turn in the Pacific war. 
 

While military maneuvers train and test a force’s capabilities, they can also seem like an “alternate history” at times. Consider these fascinating front pages from September 1941, reprinted here courtesy of The Shreveport Times, describing the US Army’s big Louisiana Maneuvers. 

"By the war’s conclusion, nearly 16 million men and a half million women would provide military service for their country. Where would the opportunities to create better lives for themselves come from for these men and women who had seen, experienced, and sacrificed so much during the war years?"