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In the dark, humid hours before dawn on Okinawa, the American line around Kakazu Ridge was little more than a jagged string of foxholes and shattered stone. Technical Sergeant Beauford “Andy” Anderson and the men of his weapons platoon had spent the night listening to the island—distant artillery rumbled, mortars coughed, and now and then a Japanese flare turned the terraced fields silver for a heartbeat before dropp
Snow hangs heavy in the Ardennes forest, muting sound until a rifle cracks and splinters bark from a nearby tree. Private First Class Melvin Earl Biddle lies pressed into the freezing ground, the lead scout for an American parachute infantry company feeling every heartbeat echo in the stock of his rifle. Somewhere ahead, beyond the dark trunks and tangled undergrowth, German snipers have halted his company’s advance
By February 1945, much of Pearl Harbor had returned to the business of war. Battleships and carriers came and went; convoys formed up and headed west toward Iwo Jima and Okinawa. But in a side channel called West Loch, the harbor still hid a graveyard. Months earlier, a chain of explosions had torn through a cluster of tank landing ships loading ammunition for the Pacific campaign.
It is the early hours of 10 March 1945 on Luzon in the Philippine Islands. The jungle around the Villa Verde Trail is black and close, broken only by a thin ridge that juts out from a larger hill. On that ridge, just ahead of the main American perimeter, three foxholes scrape a shallow line in the earth. In one of them lies Private First Class Thomas Eugene “Gene” Atkins of Company A, 127th Infantry. His job is simpl
The B-17 was almost home when the choice arrived over the radio: bail out, or try to land a dying airplane. The long mission over Leipzig was behind them, but the bomber itself was torn open—control cables shot away, engines coughing, the fuselage peppered with holes where German fighters had raked the formation. In the cockpit, the copilot lay dead. The pilot, badly wounded, had been dragged from his seat and now dr