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Poland’s President Karol Nawrocki has said Germany could begin repaying World War II reparations by financing the development of Poland’s defense industry and military capacity. Nawrocki made the remarks on Tuesday during a press briefing following visits to Berlin and Paris. In Germany, he met with president Frank-Walter Steinmeier and chancellor Friedrich Merz, where they discussed bilateral trade, European Union policy, and the issue of reparations. “I am in favor of Germany paying reparations to Poland,” the president said. He added that he had suggested Berlin could help finance Polish defense as part of a long-term settlement. “I suggested that...

It’s no secret that German Chancellor Friedrich Merz prefers to work with that other Polish leader, centrist Prime Minister Donald Tusk. But on Tuesday he’ll be receiving Polish President Karol Nawrocki, a nationalist backed by the opposition populist right-wing Law and Justice (PiS) party, which demands that Berlin pay reparations for Nazi Germany’s World War II invasion and occupation of Poland. Relations between Poland and Germany have seesawed between close cooperation and open friction in recent years. While the two countries have strong trade relations and increasingly cooperate on defense, Nawrocki and PiS politicians have railed against the EU’s influence...

The living memory of World War II is passing away. In April, the oldest known survivor of Pearl Harbor died at 106 years old. A few weeks ago, a 102-year old veteran who stormed the beaches of Normandy on D-Day (June 6, 1944) entered his eternal reward. Sadly, less than one percent of the war’s veterans are still alive. However, more troubling and dark, the increasing deaths of witnesses — those who endured the conflict and its horrors — has been coupled with the rise of revisionist ahistorical conspiracies about the Second World War. Worse, this is increasingly a right-wing...

As Beijing rolled out its largest military parade in decades, US President Donald Trump trained his guns at Xi Jinping, accusing the Chinese President of “conspiring” with Russia and North Korea against the United States. "Please give my warmest regards to Vladimir Putin, and Kim Jong Un, as you conspire against The United States of America," Trump said in a post directed at Xi on his Truth Social platform on Wednesday. His remarks coincided with a show of force in Beijing to mark the 80th anniversary of the end of World War 2. Xi was joined by Russian President Vladimir...

On that Monday, 6 August, Americans who had survived the Battle of Okinawa were not celebrating the final rout of the Japanese defenders seven weeks earlier. They were still stunned at the carnage they had both unleashed and endured. For 82 days without letup, Okinawa—one-third the size of Rhode Island—had been shredded by a maelstrom of bombs, artillery shells, and small-arms fire. The casualties on both sides were horrific. In all, nearly 250,000 people died in the battle, including 12,520 American servicemen, 110,000 Japanese and conscripted Okinawan defenders, and more than 100,000 Okinawan civilians caught in the crossfire. The American...

The United States has always been particularly formal about how it accepts the surrender of defeated enemies. Each time it happens, the event is charged with deliberate—and sometimes inadvertent—symbolism. Such was the case on October 19, 1781, when General George Washington and his colleague, French General Jean-Baptiste Donatien de Vimeur, comte de Rochambeau, accepted the surrender of British General Charles Cornwallis’s British forces at Yorktown. The whole event was highly ritualized—although Cornwallis refused to appear, sending his subordinate Charles O’Hara out instead—with Rochambeau and Washington sternly directing O’Hara to tender his sword to American General Benjamin Lincoln, who had the...

We were told America was a mongrel nation, weak, divided, controlled by Jews, incapable of military prowess. Every day I am here, I see the opposite. This is the most organized, unified, and powerful nation on earth. We were told fairy tales by criminals.

Discover the untold story of how 371,683 German POWs experienced a psychological transformation that shattered N@zi ideology through witnessing America's overwhelming industrial might during World War II. When Afrika Korps veterans arrived in the United States in 1943, expecting to find a weak, divided nation, they instead encountered an industrial colossus producing a B-24 bomber every 63 minutes, farms larger than German provinces, and ordinary workers living better than German aristocracy. This meticulously researched documentary reveals how German prisoners of war, housed in over 500 camps across America from 1943-1946, went from hardened N@zi soldiers to advocates for democracy -...

A wildfire that broke out at Britain’s North York Moors National Park has burned for weeks, reaching a ground layer containing unexploded ordnance from World War II. The Langdale Moor fire started on Aug. 11, the North Yorkshire Fire and Rescue Service said. Crews from the North Yorkshire service and other local firefighting departments were still fighting the blaze Thursday.The fire is affecting an area of almost 10 square miles according to the BBC, and is fueled by wind, vegetation and now peat. The peat layer also contains decades-old unexploded bombs and other ordnance from World War II.“As the peat...

n his book Thirty Seconds Over Tokyo, Doolittle Raid pilot Ted Lawson recalls the moment his B-25 bomber reached the coast of Japan – the first land he had seen, he tells us, after being at sea on the USS Hornet for nearly three weeks. "It looked very pretty," he writes:"Everything seemed as well kept as a big rock garden. The little farms were fitted in with almost mathematical precision. The fresh spring grass was brilliantly green. There were fruit trees in bloom, and farmers working in their fields waved to us as we pounded just over their heads. A...

Donald McPherson, believed to be America’s last surviving “ace” from World War II, passed away on August 14, 2025. He was 103 years old. McPherson earned the Congressional Gold Medal and three Distinguished Flying Crosses during his service as a US Navy pilot aboard the aircraft carrier USS Essex in the final battles of World War II. McPherson enlisted on January 5, 1943, after the Navy waived a two-year college requirement for its aviation cadet training program. He earned his commission and wings at Corpus Christi, Texas, on August 12, 1944. He was assigned to fly a Grumman F6F Hellcat...

The battleship’s contract with the Navy, Spevak said, says two things: They are “not allowed to touch the engine systems,’ which is one reason why tug boats were used to move it from the dry dock. And the other is that “the Navy reserves the right to recall the ship back into service in the event of a national emergency.” However, Spevak stated “we have no feeling that that will ever happen again,” and that none of the refurbishments were done with the idea that the ship would ever return to service. The Navy does, however, issue guidelines about how...

In May of this year the world was shocked by the Moscow City government decision to unveil a grand bas-relief of Stalin at the Taganskaya metro station in the heart of Moscow. Widely seen as a murderous dictator on a par with Hitler by westerners, Stalin is a much more complicated figure for Russians. He is responsible for the Red Terror of the 30s where millions were shot or sent to the GULAG as well as the mass deportations that still fuel hatred of Russians today in countries like Estonia that were worst affected. But for the average Russian he...

An abandoned wreck of a Rolls Royce car which once belonged to US army legend Dwight Eisenhower during World War Two has been found and restored. Now the magnificent vehicle has been painstakingly put back together. Pat Jeater has spent 11 years lovingly restoring the the car used by Eisenhower back in 1944. After the 1940s it ended up being used as a wedding car and a taxi in Amsterdam. The letter: "I also found a copy of the Italian paper La Stampa - it was dated 12th April 1944." Pat found that the letter had been written by a...

The submarine that sank a train: the U.S.S. Barb | 8:28 The History Guy: History Deserves to Be Remembered | 1.57M subscribers | 663,144 views | May 18, 2017

The U-Boat campaign off the United States' coast is pretty well known. Complacency on the American side, and daring on the German side. Combining in a perfect storm that saw many, many losses in the early days after the United States joined the war. That said, not all those losses were American. Some U-Boats were lost too, including one particularly noteworthy one. U-166. A submarine sunk close off the Gulf Coast. This sinking became something of a controversy, in how the captain responsible was treated by the Navy. But the boat, herself, is interesting all her own. After all, this...

There are not many people who have survived a nuclear attack. There is only one person who officially survived two. On this day, 80 years ago, young engineer Tsutomu Yamaguchi was telling his boss about the horrors he had seen in the Japanese city of Hiroshima when the room went blindingly white. "I thought the mushroom cloud had followed me from Hiroshima," he told UK Newspaper, The Independent. Yamaguchi was an engineer with Mitsubishi Heavy Industries when the United States dropped atomic bombs on the cities of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Yamaguchi, then 29, was in Hiroshima for a business trip...

Eighty years ago this week, the United States dropped two atomic bombs on Japan, forcing the end of World War II. On August 6, 1945, the B-29 Enola Gay dropped the “Little Boy” uranium bomb on Hiroshima, killing up to 166,000 people. Three days later, on August 9, the B-29 Bockscar was diverted from its primary target of Kokura due to bad weather and instead dropped the more powerful “Fat Man” plutonium bomb on the secondary target of Nagasaki, killing up to 80,000 and compelling Japan’s surrender.

Eighty years after the atomic bombing of Hiroshima, this analysis explores Operation Downfall, the massive Allied invasion of Japan that was averted by Tokyo’s surrender. The two-stage plan, Operations Olympic and Coronet, would have involved more than twice the forces of the Normandy landings and was expected to be unimaginably costly.

nker was found under a home in Torteval, Guernsey - Shaun Tullier A couple have discovered a Nazi bunker underneath their house. Shaun and Carrie Tullier bought their home in Torteval, Guernsey, four years ago and were tipped off by someone who used to live in the house about a wartime building being underneath it. After digging up their driveway, they eventually managed to unearth the bunker and now have plans to turn it into a games room and gym, although they will keep the original features. The bunker dates back to when Hitler’s forces occupied the Channel Islands from...