world war II

Young ideologically naive men always make the best soldiers. WW2 stole life on an unprecedented scale. Major Gangl’s heroic sacrifice was swallowed up in the carnage.

Heinrich “Hein” Severloh should have been a farmer. Born on June 23, 1923, in the town of Metzingen in Northern Germany, Heinrich was a man of the earth. However, in the Summer of 1941 his country called. Conscripted into the Wehrmacht, Severloh was trained as a dispatch rider and assigned to the 3d Battery

The winners write the history, and war is bad. Normal men forced into such abnormal circumstances are frequently driven to do things that seem unnatural from the comfort of our living rooms. The very act of combat is the most repugnant of human pursuits.

On the very first day of American involvement in World War 2, a tragic little conflict played out on an otherwise peaceful remote island in Hawaii.

Hans-Ulrich Rudel was the most highly decorated German soldier of World War 2. He remained an unrepentant Nazi to his death.

This nutjob caused the world no end of trouble. The gun that finally killed him was lost in the chaos of the end of the war.

The time Hajime Toyoshima spent in Australia during World War 2 was characterized by violence and chaos.

The Guinness Book lists the carnage in Ramree Island’s mangrove swamps as the worst example of crocodile predation on humans in history. There were 500 or so troops who remained unaccounted for that night. Theirs was an undeniably ghastly end.

The scale of destruction wrought during the Second World War was unprecedented. Such carnage is literally unimaginable today.