Military History

Jacqueline Cochran, an American pilot, was best known as the wartime head of the Women Air Force Service Pilots (WASP) (1943-44) in which about 1000 civilian American women ferried planes from factories to port cities in non-combat roles. She also set many records and was the first woman to break the sound barrier in 1953.

When Curtis LeMay was four years old, he told himself that someday, when he was old and big enough, he would fly an airplane. And fly he did. Thirty-two years later, as Captain Curtis E. LeMay, he would lead a squadron of B-17 Flying Fortresses in the skies over Germany in some of the most vicious air battles in history.

Joseph Warren Stilwell was born on March 19, 1883, in Palatka, Florida and grew to know more about China than anyone else in the United States Army. Two decades before World War II, he spent four years studying Chinese art, literature, and language, and its military history. Years later, his two daughters gained similar interests. One was a musi...

Claire Chennault organized an ace group of volunteer American fighter pilots who risked their lives in China before the United States and Japan were at war. His Flying Tigers made military history even before the war officially started for the United States. They then struck one of the first blows against Japan after its attack on Pearl Harbor o...

On December 28, 1941, British and American leaders agreed to create a unified command for Allied forces in the Far East. After formal assent of the other governments involved, General Sir Archibald P. Wavell (Commander-in-Chief for India) became head of ABDACOM (American, British, Dutch and Australian Command).

Robert Lucas was an Austrian Jewish writer and journalist (born Robert Ehrenzweig, 8 May 1904 in Vienna) that became well known through his work at the German Service of the BBC and his intellectual “fight” against Hitler and Nazi Germany during World War II.

On the 20th of December in 1941, at an icebound airfield outside the city of Kunming in China's Yunnan province, were scattered some 50 American Curtiss P-40 Warhawk fighters, marked with the blue and white star of China and a row of vicious looking shark's teeth painted under their noses.

Campo 21 (P.G. 21) at Chieti, on the Adriatic coast near Pescara, was typical of the prison camps operated by the Italian armed forces during World War II. The camp comprised eight single-story barracks, each in a U-shape, with additional buildings serving as cookhouse, mess hall, hospital, guard barracks, and administrative office.