Admiral Sir Victor Alfred Trumper Smith
(9 May 1913–10 July 1998).Graduating from RAN College Jervis Bay (see Creswell, HMAS) as a midshipman in May 1931, Smith served first in HMAS Canberra. He specialised in the ...
Air Warfare
Despite having given birth to the airplane in 1903, the United States was slow to explore the military applications of aviation and had effectively no air arm when war broke ...
airborne warfare
The first concept for the use of American airborne troops occurred during World War I in 1918, when Gen. Billy Mitchell proposed a mass drop of paratroopers against German trenches ...
Alan Brooke Alanbrooke, 1st Viscount
(1883–1963).Soldier. Chief of the imperial general staff for much of the Second World War, Brooke was the son of an Irish baronet and a member of the protestant ascendancy. After the Royal Military ...
Battle of St. Lô
An important battle following the D-Day Landing and leading up to the liberation of France, on July 25, 1944. Unable to make progress across the German lines, the Allies coordinated ...
Bernard Law Montgomery
(1887–1976) British field marshal and Allied commander during World War II, known as Monty. Montgomery first gained fame in 1942 with his defeat of the forces of Erwin Rommel at ...
Changing Experience of Combat
The English settlers of North America twice made principled attempts to detach themselves from the world of war altogether. Many of the Puritans who arrived in the early seventeenth century ...
Chester Wilmot
(21 June 1911–10 January 1954).Wilmot was born in Brighton, Victoria, and was educated at Melbourne Grammar and the University of Melbourne (where he was influenced by Sir Ernest Scott). ...
Dwight D. Eisenhower
(1890–1969)US general and Republican statesman; thirty-fourth president of the USA (1953–60).Born in Denison, Texas, Eisenhower graduated from West Point military academy in 1915 and held senior ...
Edward Slovik
(1920–45) private. Slovik, the son of immigrants who settled in Michigan, spent time as a youth in reform school for petty crimes. Despite his criminal record, Slovik was drafted in ...
Ernie Pyle
(1900–1945),journalist and war correspondent in North Africa, Europe, and the Pacific, whose syndicated articles formed the basis of Ernie Pyle in England (1941), Here Is Your War (1943), Brave ...
Erwin Rommel
(1891–1944)German Field Marshal. Rommel was posted to North Africa in 1941 after the collapse of the Italian offensive, and, as commander of the Afrika Korps, he deployed a series of surprise ...
Fortitude, Operation
The elaborate and highly successful deception plan that kept the German attention centered on Calais rather than Normandy, where, on June 5–6, 1944, the Allied forces launched Operation Overlord ...
Free French
A World War II organization of Frenchmen and women in exile. Led by General de Gaulle, it continued the war against the Axis Powers after the surrender of Vichy France in 1940. Its headquarters were ...
French Riviera
The section of France's southern coastline that borders the Mediterranean Sea. During World War II, it came under Axis control in 1940. In 1944, the Allies began planning to attack ...
George Catlett Marshall
(1880–1959)US general, administrator, and diplomat, who organized the massive expansion in US armed forces during World War II and implemented the programme of economic aid to postwar Europe known as ...
George Smith Patton
(1885–1945)US general. In World War II Patton commanded a corps in North Africa and then the 7th Army in Sicily. He lost his command in 1944 after a publicized incident in which he hit a soldier ...
Gerd von Rundstedt
(1875–1953)German field-marshal who commanded his country's forces against the Allied invasion of northwest Europe in 1944.From an aristocratic Prussian family, von Rundstedt rose through the ranks ...
Gold Beach
One of the five beaches targeted for the D-Day Landing at Normandy, and one of the two under British control. It is east of Omaha Beach, near Arromanches. See also Sword Beach.[...]
Harold Raynsford Stark
(1888–1972) Chief of Naval Operations. Born in Pennsylvania to a military family, Stark successfully commanded several cruisers early in his naval career. In World War I he led his fleet ...
