A single French airplane bombed Berlin before the fall of France
By June 7, 1940, France was fighting for its life. On May 10th of that year, Nazi Germany invaded Belgium and the Netherlands along with France and quickly overwhelmed all…
How the aerial bombing of Guernica changed the landscape of warfare forever
The now infamous Guernica raid is one of the earliest aerial bombings to garner worldwide attention and is widely considered a war crime. On June 6, 1936, 15,000 men of the…
The 5 worst modern battles to fight as a foot soldier
Let’s be clear — all battles suck for a foot soldier, even the smaller ones. But there were some in recent times that sucked more than others for the lowly grunt, with body counts piling up, bad commanders and leadership with a total lack of resp…
The first British air raid on Berlin was perfectly timed
Picture the scene. It’s a posh office of the senior Nazi official Joachim von Ribbentrop. He’s there, sipping drinks with his Soviet counterpart, Vyacheslav Molotov. It’s been one year since…
That time American and Russian tanks faced off in a divided Berlin
Continuing tensions with Russia over its annexation of Crimea, backing of separatists in Ukraine, dealing weapons to the Taliban, and the hacking of the U.S. elections have led to many
How the Rag-tag Circus begged, borrowed, and stole vehicles in its drive across Germany
The 83rd Infantry Division, nicknamed Thunderbolt, first entered combat in Normandy in late June 1944. Generally fighting as part of Pat…
5 things you didn’t know about the Berlin Wall
This week in history, East German soldiers closed the borders between East and West Berlin. What started as a makeshift wall in 1961, pieced together with barbed wire, soldiers and tanks, eventually morphed into a 15-foot high symbol of division tha…
This is how Hitler’s drug addiction may have caused him to lose the war
Throughout the final year of WWII, Adolph Hitler was reportedly on more than 70 different narcotics, including crack cocaine and other opiates, and was basically out of his consciousness. His…
France’s first WWII attack was a massive Nazi trap
Germany lacked many of the natural resources necessary to make war in the 20th Century and knew that it had to rack up victories and seize materiel early in World War II to be successful, and that’s why it was so great for its forces when France ma…
How one pilot became Santa Claus to the kids of West Berlin
After the Second World War ended, Germany was split in two. The Allies took control over Western Germany while the communists shrouded the eastern half behind the Iron Curtain. Berlin, Germany’s capital, was also famously split in two. The city is …