In World War II, Seydlitz was a skilled field commander, rising through division and corps command, distinguishing himself at Demyansk and Stalingrad.

Grant Ichikawa volunteered for US Army service while incarcerated in the Gila River camp. His service as a Japanese translator and interpreter was just the beginning of a long military career.

Alexander A. Vandegrift’s accomplishments during World War II came near the end of almost four decades of service in the United States Marine Corps.

At Delta Shipbuilding Company, welder Mildred Aupied was part of an army of American civilians working to build the “Arsenal of Democracy.”

As General Douglas MacArthur’s campaign on Luzon was underway, news of the Palawan massacre produced a call to action to save thousands of Allied POWs and civilian internees from a similar fate. With the extraordinary assistance of Filipino guerrillas, four daring raids were launched behind Japanese lines to liberate those camps.

Incredibly, a handful of American POWs managed to survive the Palawan massacre and with the aid of Filipino guerrillas reached safety.

As the Allied liberation of the Philippines was underway, Japanese commanders acted on orders to annihilate American POWs rather than allow them to assist enemy efforts, and in December 1944 cruelly executed 139 American POWs on Palawan.

The Big three met at Potsdam, Germany, in the summer of 1945 to discuss the fate of the world after World War II.

For the last several days of its existence, before soldiers of the United States Seventh Army arrived, Dachau was a small, self-enclosed universe of decay and death.

Wartime reshaped life and death in the Dachau concentration camp in fundamental ways.

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.