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.

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.

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.

Contrary to Winston Churchill's belief that Italy was the "soft underbelly" of Axis-dominated Europe, the Allied campaign in Italy was a long and bloody undertaking.

Contrary to Winston Churchill's belief that Italy was the "soft underbelly" of Axis-dominated Europe, the Allied campaign in Italy was a long and bloody undertaking.

Contrary to Winston Churchill's belief that Italy was the "soft underbelly" of Axis-dominated Europe, the Allied campaign in Italy was a long and bloody undertaking.

Frank Fujita’s American citizenship and Japanese heritage made his time as a prisoner of the Japanese particularly torturous.

In April 1945, fifty nations gathered in San Francisco, California and created The United Nations.

After World War II 1.2 million Eastern European displaced persons refused to return home, creating a large-scale refugee crisis.