In November 1943, a C-53 transport plane loaded with 13 medics, 13 flight nurses, and four aircrew members left Sicily headed for Bari, Italy. Their mission was to transport wounded soldiers to hospitals farther away from the front lines. A storm, combined with a run-in with German fighter planes, forced them off course. The airplane…
On February 9, 1945, the State Department sent an urgent telegram to the Secretary of State. The message informed him that thousands of American soldiers, captured during the Battle of the Bulge, were being held at a notorious German POW camp. It stated that Stalag IX-B was “previously not (repeat not) known to be a…
We’ve added a new collection of WWII records from Germany. The Germany, Military Killed in Action 1939-1948 collection contains index cards for about 2 million German soldiers killed during WWII. Researching German WWII soldiers can be tricky because many service records were destroyed during the war. 1939, the High Command of the German Wehrmacht began…
The First Battle of Ypres was a bloody WWI Battle fought October 19 – November 22, 1914, around the city of Ypres in West Flanders, Belgium. It was the climactic fight of the “Race to the Sea,” an attempt by the German army to break through Allied lines and capture French ports on the English…
The morning of August 15, 1945, dawned with the realization that after a long war resulting in some 60 million deaths worldwide, WWII was finally over and Victory in Japan (V-J Day) had arrived. Hours earlier, Emperor Hirohito announced Japan’s unconditional surrender, bringing WWII hostilities around the world to an end. President Harry S. Truman…
On April 29, 1945, James W. Garner from Murfreesboro, Tennessee, stepped through a freshly blasted hole in the wall of Dachau Concentration Camp. Garner, a provost marshal with the 42nd Infantry Rainbow Division, emotionally recalled it as, “the most searing moment of my life … you can’t imagine what humans can do to humans,” he…
On January 27, 1945, 75-years ago this month, the Soviet Army pried open the gates of Auschwitz concentration camp in German-occupied Poland and liberated some 7,000 emaciated prisoners. About 58,000 others had been hurriedly marched westward before the Soviet Army approached. Auschwitz, the German word for the Polish town of Oswiecim, was the site of…
