World War II

George H.W. Bush and the legacy of the Greatest Generation

What it was like to work for the man.

The wartime prime minister as leader, painter, friend.

How de Gaulle turned himself into a symbol.

Michael M. Rosen reviews Michael Best’s ‘How Growth Really Happens’ and asks what we can learn from past economic booms.

The National Park Service’s skewed teaching on Japanese internment.

Two new books give him credit where it isn't due.

What today’s navalists can learn from the Allied success at sea in WWII.

The daring exploits and beguiling charm of the 20th century’s greatest travel writer

The strategic savvy of an underestimated leader.

The key to reading history of Nazi Germany, a wise professor once explained to me, is to attempt to understand the logic and mentality of those who embraced the Nazi movement without ever losing sight of what an ultimately absurd and fundamentally evil project theirs was. This is the approach…

On November 2, 1917—a hundred years ago this week—the British government sent a letter to Lord Walter Rothschild, declaring its “sympathy with Jewish Zionist aspirations” and promising Britain’s support in “the establishment in Palestine of a national home for the Jewish people.”

On November 2, 1917—a hundred years ago this week—the British government sent a letter to Lord Walter Rothschild, declaring its “sympathy with Jewish Zionist aspirations” and promising Britain’s support in “the establishment in Palestine of a national home for the Jewish people.”

Until his death on October 14, Richard Wilbur had spent nearly half a century as America’s greatest living poet. A writer of opulent forms and playful wit, whose rhymed and measured stanzas combined the intellectual complexities of modernist verse with the familiar pleasures of an older tradition,…

 I spent a dreary half-week in Helsinki a few years ago. It was mid-March. Short days, empty streets, damp snow blowing off the harbor. The Finns I met said: “Come back in July. There’s nothing like a Scandinavian summer.”

There are few events in the history of war comparable to the evacuation of the British Expeditionary Force from the French beach at Dunkirk in the late spring of 1940. It is an episode that repays close attention to its every aspect—the terrifying Nazi triumphs in combat that led to it, the halting…

There are few events in the history of war comparable to the evacuation of the British Expeditionary Force from the French beach at Dunkirk in the late spring of 1940. It is an episode that repays close attention to its every aspect—the terrifying Nazi triumphs in combat that led to it, the halting…

I saw Dunkirk over the weekend. What a lousy movie!

The architect of the attack on Pearl Harbor, Adm. Isoroku Yamamoto, once warned his superiors, "In the first six to twelve months of a war with the United States and Great Britain I will run wild and win victory upon victory. But then, if the war continues after that, I have no expectation of…

The April 6 missile strike on the Shayrat Airbase in Homs, Syria, has provoked a week of debate on everything from its legality to its political significance. The only thing about which everyone agrees is that as a tactical matter, it did very little. The 59 Tomahawk missiles were dropped on the…

After World War II, the United States created an international system aimed at preventing the kinds of catastrophic conflicts that consumed the first half of the 20th century. This system was underwritten by hard power such as the American nuclear arsenal and the NATO alliance. Yet, underneath…

In late December 2015, Japan and South Korea reached an agreement regarding Korean sex slaves taken during World War II—the thousands upon thousands of rape victims whom the Japanese imperial forces euphemistically referred to as "comfort women." After decades of denial, obfuscation, and…

Some endnotes and digressions from the latest show:

The last German offensive of World War II began at 5:30 a.m. on December 16, 1944. The rank-and-file German soldier thought he was giving Paris back to the Führer for a "Christmas present." The more experienced Wehrmacht commanders knew that, even should they reach the Meuse or—more…

The world, and especially the nation, remembered Pearl Harbor last Wednesday. December 7 is, indeed, a day that has lived "in infamy." So the president and the man who will follow him into the White House both issued appropriate statements. A moving ceremony took place at the scene of the attack,…

The world, and especially the nation, remembered Pearl Harbor last Wednesday. December 7 is, indeed, a day that has lived “in infamy." So the president and the man who will follow him into the White House both issued appropriate statements. A moving ceremony took place at the scene of the attack,…

Andrzej Wajda, the Polish film and theatre producer and director who restored his country's consciousness of its torment at the hands of its Russian and Nazi German enemies, died on October 9 in Warsaw at the age of 90. His body of work made him an outstanding personality in the past 60 years of…

This past weekend, Wall Street Journal books editor and WEEKLY STANDARD contributing editor Robert Messenger reviewed MacArthur at War in the pages of WSJ. This latest history by Walter R. Borneman focuses strictly on the Pacific theater during the Second World War and reappraises the actions of…

There is something hard, cold, and brutal about the structure. It looks like a concrete airplane hangar and rising above it is what is called the “Lantern of the Dead." The shape suggests, appropriately, an artillery shell.

I have always admired Franklin Delano Roosevelt as an inspiring patriot. But I've also never moved past my first impression of him as an authoritarian. I still hold this general opinion after reading this splendid book; the difference is that Man of Destiny has amplified the intensity of it. I now…

I rarely read new books about the Holocaust. Spiking European antisemitism, campus harassment of Jewish students in America, and the stabbings in Israel more than fill my quota for bad Jewish news.

On December 2, George T. "Joe" Sakato died at the age of 94. Enlisting in the Army after the attack on Pearl Harbor, Sakato was assigned to the segregated 442nd Regimental Combat Team, a fighting force consisting of second-generation Japanese Americans that saw heavy action in Europe. The 442nd…

A lame duck President Obama, released next year from any lingering political constraints, will make a likely final official visit to Asia to attend the 42nd G-7 summit of leaders of the world’s leading economies. The summit is scheduled to be held in May 2016 in central Japan, not far from…

Many of my friends think Hiroshima was an unjustifiable atrocity. My usual course in atom-bomb disputes is to refer the belligerent to Donald Kagan’s brilliant 1995 piece in Commentary, “Why America Dropped the Bomb.” The reaction is consistent, and surprising: My friends do not challenge any of…

Many years ago, I struck up a conversation with a Dutch businessman in a hotel in China. In the course of our discussion, I learned that he had been born in Asia, in the Dutch East Indies, today known as Indonesia. I quickly calculated that he was old enough to have been alive during World War II,…

The boss marks the D-Day anniversary with Ronald Reagan's words (and more!):

Friday marks the seventieth anniversary of Victory in Europe, or V-E, Day, when the Allies accepted Nazi Germany’s unconditional surrender after six long years of war. No one should have savored that day in 1945 more than Winston Churchill, the wartime British prime minister. Yet he was to a…

Japanese prime minister Shinzo Abe will "express remorse" for World War II, the Associated Press reports.

Franklin D. Roosevelt, meeting with his son Elliott at the beginning of the Casablanca conference in January 1943, went out of his way to voice his revulsion at the ugliness of British imperialism by referring to his transit through the tiny British colony of Gambia:  

The World War II memorial was barricaded earlier today. So was a World War I memorial. And, it turns out, so is the Martin Luther King Jr. memorial, which is right near those others on the Mall in Washington, D.C. 

At least four National Park Service workers are erecting a barricade around the World War II memorial, John McCormack reports:

Seventy years ago today, Winston Churchill received an honorary degree from Harvard University and addressed its faculty and students in the university’s largest room, Sanders Theater.

From December 1941 to August 1945, the United States of America joined the other Allied powers and fought against the Axis powers in Europe and the Pacific, during the greatest and most destructive war in all of human history.  Victory required the complete dedication of the American citizenry, as…

“Joan Miró: The Ladder of Escape” is at the National Gallery of Art through August 12. The conceit of the exhibit is that Miró was no sequestered surrealist but an artist readily engaged with politics and society—“an artist of his times,” as a wall caption puts it. Visitors reading that caption…

The great tragedy of Yiddish literature is that, at the very moment when it was blossoming into modernity in all genres, its writers, audience, and cultural matrix were completely destroyed by the double knockout punch of German and Soviet anti-Semitism.

Geert Wilders, the big-gesture Dutch politician who has made a career out of outspoken enthusiasms and denunciations in a country which is careful of its speech, has begun to take on water. In the June 2010 election, the Freedom party, which Wilders created five years earlier, was the third-biggest…

Harry Butcher, an aide to General Eisenhower throughout his time as supreme commander in Europe, and gossipy diarist par excellence, reports the following remarks made by the mild-mannered Kansan on July 10, 1944:

How refreshing it is to see the actual lawmaking process finally proceeding — in the light of day — as the secretive closed-door meetings favored by this White House finally recede! This is how things are supposed to work in our republic.

Unbroken

And the Show Went On Cultural Life in Nazi-Occupied Paris by Alan Riding Knopf, 416 pp., $28.95

In recent months, THE WEEKLY STANDARD discussed the military service of Hank Greenberg and Bob Feller during World War II. The latter piece addressed an important issue germane to Feller and other major league players who lost playing time during that conflict: “He might have put up even better…

On June 6th, 1944, 1st Lt Dick Winters parachuted behind German lines, assembled a small strike team, and neutralized four enemy artillery pieces that were wreaking havoc on nearby Utah Beach. The Brecourt Manor Assault, as it was later dubbed, represented one of the most brilliant examples of…

Since last year, Hezbollah has been rounding up Lebanese who are believed to be spying for the state of Israel. Just yesterday, a senior official at a Lebanese telecommunications firm was arrested, making it the fourth this year. The arrest is part of broader campaign that has led to some 50…