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Why US Air Corps servicemen were allowed to wear such badass bomber jackets in WWII In honor of Pearl Harbor Remembrance Day, Lisa Hix of Collectors Weekly has put together a fascinating and sobering article that both commemorates and explains why members of the US Army Air Corp were allowed to customize their bomber jackets to such outlandish and extreme degrees. The Army, not known for its lax uniform standards, allowed their air-bound servicemen to decorate their jackets with pictures of scantily clad pin-up girls, favorite comic characters, lucky charms, and any other assortment of icons. The reason, says historian...

More than 2,000 people are gathering at Pearl Harbor on Friday to mark the 71st anniversary of the Japanese attack that killed thousands of people and launched the United States into World War II. Ceremonies get under way with a moment of silence at 7:55 a.m., the exact time the bombing began in 1941. The crew of a Navy guided-missile destroyer will stand on deck while the ship passes the USS Arizona, a battleship that still lies in the harbor where it sank decades ago. Hawaii Air National Guard aircraft will fly overhead in missing man formation. The Navy and...

Remains Of World War II Military Pigeon Ignites Code Mystery Back in 1982, David Martin discovered the remains of a pigeon while renovating his chimney. Upon closer inspection he noticed that the dead bird had a red capsule attached to its leg, what has now been confirmed as a top secret message that was en route to an unknown location in Britain during World War II. Ignored for three decades, code experts are now trying to decrypt the secret message. Though rarely discussed, pigeons were widely used during the war as an old-school way to transmit messages. Among the benefits,...

Lt. Floyd Fulkerson: Ultimate Wingman By John Dejanovich There are no great aces without great wingmen and young Lt. Floyd Fulkerson from Little Rock, Arkansas, was one of those wingmen. Although he had four confirmed victories, so he was nearly an ace himself, he sees his primary contribution to the war effort to have been the protection of his lead pilots, some of whom were America’s leading aces. During his time with the 475TH Fighter Group in the Pacific, Floyd flew with such notables as Major Richard Bong, Major Tommy McGuire, and even the much-celebrated “Lone Eagle,” Charles Lindbergh. Cover...

U.S. Paratroopers with Mohawks - World War II

By the late spring of 1945, Germany had lost a war, its honor and millions of dead. There was more to come. The Allies had decided that the country's east should be carved up between Poland and the Soviet Union and that its German inhabitants should be moved to the truncated Reich. There they would encounter Sudeten Germans, Czechoslovakia's second largest ethnic group, now also scheduled for deportation. In August 1945, the United Kingdom, the United States and the Soviet Union agreed at Potsdam that these transfers, which had in any case already begun, should be "orderly and humane."

Today marks the 70th anniversary of the first offensive land operation taken by the United States in World War II. On August 7, 1942, the U.S. Marines landed at Guadalcanal. The general outlines of that battle which lasted which lasted 6 months until February 9, 1943 are known by many but here are 19 things about Guadalcanal that you might not know. This is the first of my regular "20 Things You Don't Know" posts that I hope will encourage the History Channel to bring back that series. You can read my full mission statement about this in my...

This is a telephone conversation transcript between Colonel Seaman of the Manhattan Project and General Hull of Marshall's staff that took place on 13 August 1945. The subject is atomic bomb deployment and production timeline.

A Los Alamos Story Worthy of Stephen King Ever heard of The Demon Core? It was named by Los Alamos scientists — who are generally not a superstitious lot — after it claimed multiple lives, in a series of strange and horrible accidents. Discover a legend of science... that's worthy of a horror movie. When I was reading Stephen King stories, I was constantly amazed at the things he made scary. It was like reading the legend of the monkey's paw over and over again, with increasingly weird objects. His most famous evil objects are the hotel in The Shining...

In 1939, Albert Einstein sent a letter (written largely by Leó Szilárd) to President Franklin Delano Roosevelt. The pressing concern was that Nazi Germany might be conducting research to create atomic bombs, and the letter suggested that the United States should begin researching the possibility itself. This was the impetus for the Manhattan project, which culminated in the explosion of the first atomic bomb at the Trinity Site in New Mexico. Socorro, New Mexico, a little more than an hour’s drive south of Albuquerque, is one of the meeting places for those who plan to visit the Trinity Site. Socorro,...

It was the perilous 18-hour flight which saw Britain's wartime Prime Minister fly back from America while being hunted by the German Luftwaffe. Winston Churchill had flown back across the Atlantic in 1942 after lobbying President Roosevelt over the Allied Forces' strategy against Hitler. And given the flight risks and importance of the discussions, the long-haul voyage back to Britain was one of the most significant of the Second World War. Now a rare family archive has captured the intimate moments of Churchill's flight, including pictures of the wartime leader at the controls of the Boeing Clipper flying boat RAM...

Anti-Prostitution Posters, World War II Emphasizing the relationship between patriotism, morality, health preservation, and disease prevention, images of the infected soldier and disease-carrying prostitute in posters during the First and Second World Wars came to symbolize both moral failure and social decay. The following posters use images of "loose" women, patriotic iconography, and frightening symbols to grab the attention of the viewer and inspire behavior modification. These images not only reflected attitudes, values, and beliefs about the causes and consequences of venereal disease but also affected responses to the problem. (Note: Most these photos link back to Retronaut; added are...

BERLIN (AP) — German military divers are working to hoist the wreck of a Stuka dive bomber from the floor of the Baltic Sea, a rare example of the plane that once wreaked havoc over Europe as part of the Nazis' war machine. The single-engine monoplane carried sirens that produced a distinctive and terrifying screaming sound as it dove vertically to release its bombs or strafe targets with its machine guns. There are only two complete Stukas still around. The Stuka wreck, first discovered in the 1990s when a fisherman's nets snagged on it, lies about 10 kilometers (6 miles)...

Graves of British soldiers of the Royal Horse Artillery at the Commonwealth Benghazi War Cemetery Commonwealth War Cemetery in Benghazi targeted again Headstone damaged, markers removed Digger graves among 198 damaged in February THERE has been another war graves attack at a cemetery in Libya which contains the remains of Australian soldiers. Authorities say a headstone has been damaged and temporary markers removed from some graves at the Commonwealth War Cemetery in Benghazi. "The nationality of the individual buried beneath the headstone that was damaged is not yet known,'' the Department of Veterans' Affairs (DVA) said today. The Commonwealth War...

On June 4, 1942, a battle off Midway Island marked the dawn of the United States Navy as the most powerful sea force in the world. Seventy years later, a civilian “battle” may doom its reach and power for good. Then the enemy was imperial Japan. Today, it’s the administration and Congress, who seem unable or unwilling to stop defense cuts that will leave America vulnerable and the world more dangerous. We’re fast approaching the point where the US Navy can no longer guarantee the safety of the world’s sea lanes, on which our economic future depends.

Before and After D-Day: Rare Color Photos It’s no mystery why images of unremitting violence spring to mind when one hears the deceptively simple term, “D-Day.” We’ve all seen — in photos, movies, old news reels — what happened on the beaches of Normandy (codenamed Omaha, Utah, Juno, Gold and Sword) as the Allies unleashed an historic assault against German defenses on June 6, 1944. But in color photos taken before and after the invasion, LIFE’s Frank Scherschel captured countless other, lesser-known scenes from the run-up to the onslaught and the heady weeks after: American troops training in small English...

How it was 1945, on VJ Day. Kodachrome 16mm film. Honolulu.

Behold, an X-ray of Hitler’s head You're looking at one of five known X-rays of Hitler's head. The radiograph is just one of 17-million rare, intriguing, and often-bizarre items housed in the the U.S. National Library of Medicine, the largest medical library on Earth. We've got a gallery. This particular image is part of a larger medical dossier on Hitler that was assembled by U.S. military intelligence following World War II, and one of the 450 images featured in Hidden Treasure — a book published yesterday in observance of the National Library of Medicine's 175th anniversary. Hitler as Seen by...

Within days of the defeat of Germany in World War II, Winston Churchill ordered his war cabinet to draw up contingency plans for an offensive against Stalin that would lead to ``the elimination of Russia'', according to top secret British documents. The resulting battle plan included the use of up to 100,000 German troops to back up half a million British and American soldiers attacking through northern Germany. It assumed that Stalin would invade Turkey, Greece, Norway and the oilfields of Iraq and Iran in retaliation and launch extensive sabotage operations in France and the Low Countries. A 29-page report, ...

<p>BRUSSELS (AP) -- A Belgian nurse who saved the lives of hundreds of American soldiers during the Battle of the Bulge at the end of World War II was given a U.S. award for valor Monday - 67 years late.</p>