Friends of the National WWII Memorial Blog

Eighty years ago, a long and bloody campaign began in Italy.

American losses eighty years ago in the skies over Europe were staggering.

Eighty years ago, a remarkable officer began to set Europe free.

Returning to the bloody, hallowed sands of Omaha Beach.

V-E Day should still be celebrated as a victory over near-perfect evil.

The evil of Hitler’s regime was sickening to behold on 12 April 1945 when Dwight Eisenhower visited the first concentration camp to be liberated by American troops.

Six foot and four inches tall, rake thin, Daly had quit West Point and joined the First Infantry Division as a lowly private. He refused to wait until he graduated. There was a war on. He wanted to do his part...

February is the shortest month of the year but for Felix Sparks, subject of my book, The Liberator, it must have felt like the longest by far. In the more than five hundred days he spent in Europe in WWII, the Texas-born officer suffered more heart-break in the month of February than in any other...

Whenever it gets very cold in January, I think of the men who fought in the Battle of the Bulge in the same month in 1945. It was the coldest winter in living memory in Europe. Men huddled together in foxholes, sharing body warmth, afraid to fall asleep in case they froze to death...

Lyle Bouck looked up at the cuckoo clock on a wall in a caféin Lanzareth, a small village in Belgium. He was being held as prisoner with the platoon he had commanded that day, 16 December 1944. He was wounded, shot in the leg after being pulled from his foxhole. Two of his men were critically injured. His runner, a 19-year-old called Bill James, was beside him, terribly disfigured, his blood soaking Bouck’s field jacket.

I first came across the name, Ernie Pyle, a quarter century ago when researching a biography of the legendary Robert Capa. They were friends and colleagues – the most celebrated American reporter of WWII, whose columns were read by millions of Americans, and the dashing, extraordinarily brave Life photographer. 

We knew she would one day breathe no more, yet still it came as a profound shock to realize that the Queen, the monarch of our entire lives, was not immortal after all.

On June 6, 1944, the Allies launched Operation Overlord by invading German-occupied France along the coast of Normandy, the largest amphibious invasion in history more popularly known as D-Day.

As Allied forces advanced deeper into German territory, they encountered sites of unspeakable horror and human suffering: the Nazi concentration camps.

Happy Halloween from your Friends at the National World War II Memorial! In the spirit of all things spooky, it feels fitting to take a look at the so-called “Ghost Army” of World War II.

On December 7, 1941, when the Imperial Japanese Navy Air Service attacked the U.S. Naval Station Pearl Harbor in Honolulu, Hawaii, at 12:53 p.m. EST, three scheduled NFL games were underway.

On June 29, 1943, the U.S. Senate passed the first, and thus far only, national childcare program, voting $20,000,000 to provide for public care of children whose mothers were employed for the duration of World War II.

LGBTQA+ Pride started as a protest with the Stonewall Riots in 1969 and many historians posit that the roots of these LGBT activists can be found in the World War II experiences of gays men and lesbians in the American military.

WWII and its ensuing effects on society – the draft, rationing, total war mentality – had a deleterious effect on most professional sports leagues in North America, including the NHL...

American music during World War II was pervasive in a way that music had never been during a war before. By 1940, 80% of American households owned a radio, making music easier to listen to for all...

Baseball during World War II is one of the most studied sports during wartime. There are hundreds of books written on the subject, blog posts, museum exhibits, newspaper and magazine articles, movies. We’re not try to reinvent the wheel here...

One of the main characters in Marvel’s franchise is Captain America, played by Chris Evans. The first film that featured him, Captain America: The First Avenger, was indeed a World War II story, featuring Steve Rogers as a super soldier sent over to Europe to fight Nazis...

Today is Earth Day! And we here at the Friends of the National World War II Memorial are lucky enough to have some thoughts from a World War II veteran on the state of our planet and what we can do to make it better...

World War II demanded large-scale national mobilization. In the United States, this meant transformations not only to the military, but also major changes in industry, culture, and expectations of women’s role in society...