Nick's WWII Archive

An anti-tank gun on an island with no tanks. Guadalcanal, the night of 24 October 1942: a Marine crew on Puller's thin southern line holds a grassy corridor against a Japanese regiment, firing a shell packed with 122 steel balls at men crossing open ground fifty yards away. Told from the loader — the second man on the gun, whose back is to the enemy all night and who tracks the battle by one n...

A train slows into a small Texas town carrying hundreds of captured German soldiers. Townspeople who had never seen a foreign soldier stand along the tracks and watch. Between 1942 and 1946 the United States shipped roughly 425,000 Axis prisoners across the Atlantic — the great majority German, some 372,000 men — and spread them through about seven hundred camps in nearly every state. It wasn'...

A German general was playing cards when the invasion of Europe landed on his lawn. Just after midnight on June 6, 1944, British paratroopers came down on a German divisional headquarters, and for the next ten hours the most disciplined army in the world did something almost impossible to believe: it watched the largest invasion fleet in history arrive — warning by warning, phone call by phone call...

"There's a difference between what a man says when he thinks he's being heard, and what he says when he's sure he's not." In the winter of 1944, British intelligence stopped interrogating captured German generals and simply listened. Inside an English country house called Trent Park — wired with hidden microphones in the plaster, the light fittings, even the billiard tabl...

The file that traveled with her said she had killed three hundred and nine men — and the first question American reporters asked her was whether Soviet women were allowed to wear makeup at the front. This is the story of Lyudmila Pavlichenko: a history student from Kiev who walked into a recruiting office in 1941, refused to be made a nurse, and became the most credited female sniper of the Second...

"She is getting worse." That is what the British government's last two survey reports agree on, eighty years after an American Liberty ship called the SS Richard Montgomery broke apart on a sandbank off Sheerness with six thousand tons of munitions aboard. Around fourteen thousand bombs — about 1,400 tonnes of net explosive — still sit in her drowned forward holds, a mile and a half...

Molotov stood before the Supreme Soviet and read out the cost of the war with Finland — forty-eight thousand seven hundred and forty-five dead — and every part of it was a forgery. When the Soviet archives opened half a century later, the real count began at 126,000 and rose toward 168,000. This episode tells the story of the 1939–40 Winter War entirely through the words of the Soviet soldiers and...

In the winter of 1944, a fully equipped American rifleman carried eighty-two pounds of equipment. The Army's own combat analyst concluded a man could actually fight with about forty. This episode is the story of how soldiers closed that gap themselves — and what it cost them. Every man in Europe ran the same brutal audit, usually within his first week of combat, and left the answer in the ditc...

For nearly 28 years after the Second World War ended, a Japanese sergeant went on fighting it, alone, in a hole in the jungle of Guam. His name was Shoichi Yokoi. Before the war he was an apprentice tailor near Nagoya; the draft carried him to Guam, where the American invasion of 1944 tore his regiment apart. Rather than surrender, he vanished into the interior, dug a cave near the Talofofo River,...

"Tora, Tora, Tora." Three words, sent at 7:53 on the morning of December 7, 1941, that pulled the United States into the Second World War. The man who ordered them sent was Commander Mitsuo Fuchida, flight leader of the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor — and his story only gets stranger from there. This episode follows Fuchida through three catastrophes that should have ended his life and...

The Navy told Doris Miller his place was in the kitchen. On the morning of December 7, 1941, he manned a fifty-caliber anti-aircraft gun the Navy had never trained him to fire. Miller was a mess attendant aboard the battleship USS West Virginia, a sharecropper's son from Waco, Texas, and the ship's heavyweight boxing champion. The same Navy that put him in a ring barred Black sailors from...

He is not supposed to be here. It's May 1941, and a thirty-year-old sheep farmer from New Zealand is advancing across open ground on Crete with nothing but grenades and a pistol — wounded, sick, and crawling straight toward the German machine guns. This is the true story of Charles Upham, the only combat soldier in history to win the Victoria Cross twice. We follow him from the Canterbury high...

His own side thought he was dead — they laid him on a pile of frozen corpses and moved on to find the living. On March 6th, 1940, an explosive round tore away half the face of Simo Häyhä, the Finnish farmer the world remembers as the White Death and generally regarded as the deadliest sniper of the Winter War. He had survived months under relentless artillery at Kollaa, firing without a scope, pac...

How do you make an army surrender to a man with nothing? In September 1944, a German major general handed over more than 20,000 men to a single Scotsman in a tartan kilt who carried no weapon at all. Major Tommy Macpherson had no tanks, no artillery, and no aircraft — only a radio that couldn't call for help in time, and a story he needed a desperate general to believe. This episode follows Ma...

Three feet. That is the distance between the most famous photograph of the Second World War and the man history forgot was standing next to it. On February 23, 1945, atop Mount Suribachi, photographer Joe Rosenthal took a single still of six Marines raising a flag — an image that won a Pulitzer and became a bronze memorial. Three feet away, Marine Sergeant Bill Genaust filmed the same moment in co...

Half a million Soviet soldiers, and Finland answered with a drink. In the winter of 1939, the Soviet Union invaded Finland with thousands of tanks. Finland had about sixty, almost no anti-tank guns, and a glass bottle of petrol named after the enemy's foreign minister. As Soviet bombers burned Helsinki, Vyacheslav Molotov told the world his planes were dropping food, not bombs — bread for star...

December 19th, 1944. The 101st Airborne is surrounded at Bastogne, the German line is pushing deeper by the hour, and Eisenhower has one question for his generals: how fast can you turn your tanks north? Patton's answer sounds like a fantasy — three divisions, attacking in 48 hours, across a hundred miles of frozen road. The unit he puts at the tip of that spear is the 4th Armored Division: sh...

What happens when the ground you are standing on ceases to exist? On July 25, 1944, south of Saint-Lô, the horizon vanished. For Colonel Fritz Ziegelmann, the war didn't end with a heroic last stand; it ended with the sound of 1,495 heavy bombers turning the sky black. As the 'Ia' of the 352nd Infantry Division, Ziegelmann was the man who held the full picture of the front — and by 093...