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Tried by Fire - Winter battles by 84th Infantry Division in Battle of the Bulge, crossing of the Roer and Rhine, and the desperate race to the Elbe. The Battle of the Bulge (16 December 1944 -- 25 January 1945) was the German offensive campaign launched through the Ardennes forested region of Wallonia in Belgium, France and Luxembourg on the Western Front toward the end of World War II in Europe. The surprise attack caught the Allied forces completely off guard and became the costliest battle in terms of casualties for the United States, whose forces bore the brunt of...

A two hour flight later I was in my beloved South, assaulted by humidity and cold. A heavy and constant rain made it difficult to drive my rented Corolla. I expected humidity and hot and I was shivering in my light clothes. The roads were deserted compared to the heavy constant traffic in D.C. Once in a while a solitary car would pass going in the opposite direction. I had the excellent road all to myself. The dense vegetation and trees displayed lovely shades of green. Hanging lavender wisteria formed nature’s intricate draperies. White, pink, and fuchsia azaleas were in...

Imagine being assigned to create a massive trompe l’oeil, and not just a painting, but a complex, 3-D, multimedia installation spread out over many kilometres. Imagine that it must convince an attentive and discerning audience to believe in and interact with something that is not really there. Further imagine that your workspace is in the middle of a war zone, and that thousands of lives depend on your success. Also, imagine that next week you will be asked to do it again. That, in a nutshell, was the mission given to the 23rd Headquarters Special Troops, also known as the...

Patton 360 - Battle of the Bulge by History Channel

The Ardennes Offensive (16 December 1944 25 January 1945) was a major German offensive launched towards the end of World War II through the forested Ardennes Mountains region of Belgium (and more specifically of Wallonia: hence its French name, Bataille des Ardennes), France and Luxembourg on the Western Front. The offensive was called Unternehmen Wacht am Rhein (translated as Operation The Guard on the Rhine or Operation "Watch on the Rhine") by the German armed forces (Wehrmacht). This German offensive was officially named the Ardennes-Alsace campaign[5] by the U.S. Army,[6] but it is known to the general public simply as...

Generals At War: Episode 06 The Battle of the Bulge The Greatest battle America ever fought was against Hitler's Army when it staged one of the last offensives of the war in Belgium against American troops who were alone and unprepared for the Nazi onslaught. Despite overwhelming odds American troops defeated the German Blitz preventing history from repeating itself as it did when Hitler first invaded Belgium in the begining of the war.

December 15, 1944. All is mostly quiet along the western front in France, Belgium, and Luxembourg. It's cold, and the nights are dark. So dark that GI Joe, sitting and waiting, can't see his hand in front of his face. Four divisions of the US army are parked at a 75-mile front along the western frontier of Germany. The American commanders believe that the German Wehrmacht is finished and not capable of offensive operations. They either haven't been talking to some of the GI Joes in the front lines, or they aren't taking GI Joe seriously. He has been hearing...

In a recent article titled “Why Hitler Wished He Was Muslim,” the Wall Street Journal draws our attention to two books that reflect the historical Nazi-Islamic supremacist axis. Given the goings-on in Europe, we thought these to be poignant titles adding necessary context to a continent that appears to be a potential powder-keg. Of Stefan Ihrig’s ”Atatürk in the Nazi Imagination,” the Journal writes: Through the 1920s and 1930s, Nazi publications lauded Turkey as a friend and forerunner. In 1922, for example, the Völkischer Beobachter, the Nazi Party’s weekly paper, praised Mustafa Kemal Atatürk, the “Father of the Turks,” as...

Franklin Delano Roosevelt loved to keep secrets. He didn't want the public to know he was bound to a wheelchair, so he went to elaborate lengths to hide his inability to walk on his own. And when he was dying, his doctors hid it from the public. Even Roosevelt himself didn't want to know. Secrets of a different sort lie at the heart of two new books about Roosevelt the candidate and Roosevelt the president, with a special guest appearance by Adolf Hitler, before he became der fuehrer. David Pietrusza's 1932: The Rise of Hitler and FDR--Two Tales of Politics,...

On December 11, 1941, several days after the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor and the United States declaration of war against the Japanese Empire, Nazi Germany declared war on the United States, in response to what was claimed to be a series of provocations by the United States government when the US was formally neutral during World War II. The decision to declare war was made almost entirely by Adolf Hitler, without consultation. Hitler had received no advance notice from the Japanese about the attack on Pearl Harbor. Although he and his Foreign Minister Ribbentrop had verbally indicated a willingness...

Today is the anniversary of the Japanese surprise attack on Pearl Harbor on 7 December 1941, which brought the United States into World War II. The meticulously planned and devastatingly successful operation was launched from six aircraft carriers and their escorts, which had managed to penetrate to within 200 miles of Oahu without being discovered. Of the eight American battleships in port that day, four were sunk or destroyed, and nine other warships were sunk or severely damaged. Over 2,400 U.S. servicemen lost their lives, including 2.000 sailors, most of whom perished on the USS Arizona (BB-39). The only bright...

Hundreds of strangers paid tribute at a Kentucky funeral home to a “humble” survivor of World War II’s Normandy Invasion whose caregiver had worried that no one would come to his funeral. Vet Warren McDonough was 91 when he died Saturday. He never married and his only known survivor was a nephew in Florida. The big crowd who attended his wake Thursday night at Ratterman’s Funeral Home in St. Matthews showed up in response to a call from Lena Lyons, who runs a boarding home where McDonough spent his final days. Lyons told WHAS-TV McDonough deserved to be remembered because...

A special holiday musical presentation from Union Station in Washington, DC celebrating the service and sacrifices of our nation's World War II veterans and commemorating the 70th anniversary of the end of the war.

45 MINUTES

It sounds like a familiar story: on a bright Sunday in December, nearly 70 years ago, Japanese planes blazed out of the sky to strafe and bomb an American warship while it lay at anchor. The surprise attack caught the crew off-guard, and despite valiant action, the ship was critically damaged, had to be abandoned, and soon sank. If you said December 7th, 1941, Pearl Harbor, you’d be wrong. The date was December 12, 1937, and the place was the Yangtze River in war-torn China. The vessel? The gunboat USS Panay. It was a sudden and deliberate attack that might...

Leftists will do anything to stop Christian conscience, even harm Veterans. Judge Vance Day, a friend of many Veterans, is under attack because of his religious beliefs. Vance Day, former chairman of the Oregon Republican Party, is a sitting Circuit Court Judge in his home state. Vance and I first met in 2009, where he was a guest speaker at Regent University. His calm, caring demeanor as well as his intellectual and spiritual depth were plainly evident. Vance shared, at the end of his talk, how he was a Christian and that one of the more well-known members of the...

The attack on Pearl Harbor was a surprise military strike conducted by the Imperial Japanese Navy against the United States naval base at Pearl Harbor, Hawaii, on the morning of December 7, 1941 (December 8 in Japan). The attack led to the United States' entry into World War II. The attack was intended as a preventive action in order to keep the U.S. Pacific Fleet from interfering with military actions the Empire of Japan was planning in Southeast Asia against overseas territories of the United Kingdom, the Netherlands, and the United States. There were simultaneous Japanese attacks on the U.S.-held...

In my youth, Dec. 7 was always a big deal, as we remembered Japan's sneak attack on Pearl Harbor. Today, most of those alive on that fateful day in 1941 are no longer with us, and the collective memory of the event has faded. Subsequent generations have other powerful dates to remember. Nov. 22, the day President Kennedy was assassinated, loomed large in the lives of Baby Boomers. More recently, Sept. 11 has become the day we must never forget. This is the natural course of history moving on. In a generation or two, even Sept. 11 will become just...

The presidency has changed Barack Obama. His hair has gone gray, which is to be expected, and he looks older, which is also to be expected, but his eloquence has been replaced by petulance and he has lost the power to persuade, which is something of a surprise. You can speculate that if the Obama of today and not Winston Churchill had led Britain in World War II, the Old Vic theater would now be doing “Hamlet” in German. The president has lost his voice, that is certain. The numbers say so. Obama has the approval of only 44 percent of...

The folks who run the Yorktown say a lot of kids love the ship, but no kid has ever fallen for a sailor who served on the vessel like these two boys have fallen for Mr. Harding. Which is why, for this trip, the Yorktown made special arrangements for a surprise visitor: Mr. Harding. The boys ran to embrace him; hugging an old salt never felt so sweet. It was hard to tell who enjoyed it more, or who needed it more. Over the years Mr. Harding says he'd kept most of his war stories to himself. "I guess I...