World War II

IN COLLEGE, I wanted a solid, practical education, so I majored in…cinema history and criticism. In truth, I guess what I really wanted was a way to watch movies in class. One thing my teachers stressed in scriptwriting class was that every scene in a screenplay needed some kind of conflict. It could be as simple as two characters disagreeing about something, or it could be British bombers attacking German infrastructure in The Dam Busters. Conflict is essential. So, it’s no wonder that war movies have become such a film staple. In fact, the first movie to win the Academy Award for best picture was Wings, a World War I film. The Second World War has inspired a slew of feature films, and every issue of World War II takes…

AS SOON AS I saw the headline “Rescuing Norway’s Gold” in the Spring 2023 issue, I remembered a book I read as a kid, called Snow Treasure. In the story, four Norwegian children help to get gold bars out of Norway by taking them a few at a time on their sleds down a mountain and past German guards to a hiding place, and from there Norwegian volunteers pick up the gold bars and get them to the ship that will take them to safety. An Internet search identified the author as Marie McSwigan; the book was first published by E.P. Dutton in 1942. The author claimed her book was based on a true story, although most people disagree. As a child I didn’t know whether it was true or…

THEY DID NOT GET OFF to a dazzling start. Disembarking at Glasgow, Scotland, on February 14, 1945, after nearly two weeks at sea, many of the more than 800 women—nearly all of them Black— were seasick or covered in salt spray. Then a German V-1 buzz bomb hit near the dock and they had to scramble for cover. They were, their commander Major Charity Adams later wrote, “a very unhappy looking lot.” And that was before they began their daunting task: sorting through a backlog of mail—eventually 17 million pieces of it, includ- ing airplane hangars full of undelivered Christmas presents. The letters and packages were stuck in England, far from American G.I.s fighting their way through Nazi-occupied Europe and longing to hear from their families and friends back home.…

TONY VACCARO, an American infantryman who took stunning but forbidden battlefield photos on a small camera he’d bought as a teenager, died December 28, 2022, at age 100.Vaccaro (center, above) requested assignment as a combat photographer in Europe but was told that at 21 he was too young and should stick to fighting. Army regulations limited photography to the Signal Corps, but Vaccaro kept snapping pictures on his 35-millimeter Argus C3 as the 83rd Infantry Division battled from Normandy to Germany. His photographs provided an up-close view of war unavailable to Signal Corps photographers who carried heavier equipment. After the war,Vaccaro became known for his magazine fashion shoots and celebrity photos.…

THE USS ALBACORE was one the deadliest American submarines in the Pacific—and one of the unluckiest. In the fall of 1943 it was hit twice by friendly fire, once sustaining heavy damage from American bombs. A year later, the 312-foot,Gato-class submarine went missing in the heavily mined Tsugaru Strait off Japan’s Hokkaido island. All 85 men aboard were lost. Nearly eight decades later, a retired University of Tokyo engineering professor located the wreck of the Albacore 800 feet underwater. Tamaki Ura, who has developed unmanned mini-submarines to scour Japanese water for the wrecks of wartime submarines, raised $15,000 via crowdfunding sources to search for the Albacore. Using documents from the Japan Center for Asian Historical Records, Ura zeroed in on the lost sub’s possible location. A survey by one of…

THE SHOOTING STOPPED nearly 80 years ago, but the dying continues in the South Pacific’s Solomon Islands, scene of some of the bloodiest fighting of World War II. Every year at least 20 islanders are killed or maimed by the detonation of leftover bombs, artillery shells, or other munitions. In January, the United States stepped up efforts to solve the problem, providing $1 million to the demining nonprofit HALO Trust to locate and document unexploded ordnance left behind by American and Japanese forces. A survey is considered long overdue. There are no reliable records on where the bombs are most likely to be buried, just anecdotes and old war stories. The munitions are often discovered in the worst way possible—when someone disturbs them and sets them off. In May 2021,…