Battlefield Stories
Obscure accounts from the front lines — villages, battalions, and moments Google will not find.
7 articles
Battlefield Stories
The Soldier Who Brought His Enemy Home
An American GI carried a dying German soldier to his hometown in Bavaria and told his family he had tried to save them
Corporal William Hayes of the 101st Airborne was fighting in Bavaria in April 1945 when his unit was pinned down by a German machine gun nest in the village of …
Battlefield Stories
The Battle of the Bulge Christmas Truce
German and American soldiers shared food, cigarettes, and photos of their families in a frozen forest on Christmas Eve
On Christmas Eve 1944, somewhere in the frozen Ardennes Forest, a German soldier named Hans walked out into no-man land carrying a white flag and a bottle of sc…
Battlefield Stories
The Germans Who Fought for the Soviet Army
Thousands of German POWs formed the National Committee for a Free Germany and fought against Hitler
On July 12, 1943, in the Soviet town of Krasnogorsk, a group of German prisoners of war founded the National Committee for a Free Germany, an organization dedic…
Battlefield Stories
The Christmas Eve Ceasefire in the Ardennes
An American sergeant and a German private carved chess pieces from birch branches while war paused for two hours
On Christmas Eve 1944, in the frozen Ardennes, Sergeant Harry Mitchell of the 101st Airborne and German private Klaus Weber sat on a log in no-man's land and pl…
Battlefield Stories
The Man Who Saved His Enemy's Life and Paid the Price
A Welsh coal miner serving in the British Army pulled a wounded German soldier from a flooded foxhole — and was court-martialed for it
Private David Morgan was a Welsh coal miner conscripted into the British 50th Division in 1941. In October 1944, during fighting near the German border, Morgan …
Battlefield Stories
The Night Witches: Soviet Women Who Flew Plywood Biplanes Against the Luftwaffe
Flying fabric biplanes at night, they dropped 23,000 tons of bombs and terrified the enemy
The 588th Night Bomber Regiment was the only all-female combat unit in the Soviet Air Forces and the most decorated. Formed in 1941 by Marina Raskova, who perso…
Battlefield Stories
The Battle of Peleliu: The Bloodiest Battle You Have Never Heard Of
A tiny Pacific island where the U.S. suffered 6,500 casualties for objectives historians now call unnecessary
The Battle of Peleliu, September-November 1944, is one of the most controversial and least-known battles of the Pacific War. The small coral island, just six sq…