The antics in postwar Nordic children’s books left propaganda and prudery behind. We need this madcap spirit more than ever.

In 1942, a volley of torpedoes sent the U.S.S. Wasp to the bottom of the Pacific. Earlier this year, a team of wreck hunters set out to find it.

How words kept the author’s grandparents connected during the Second World War.

During World War II, the indigenous Aleut people were forced into camps. 10% died.

The cold, forgotten realities of “conventional warfare.”

Madrid, 1937:

Then for a moment it stops. An old woman, with a shawl over her shoulders, holding a terrified thin little boy by the hand, runs out into the square. You know what she is thinking: she is thinking she must get the child home, you are always safer in your own place, with the things you know. Somehow you do not believe you can get killed when you are sitting in your own parlor, you never think that. She is in the middle of the square when the next one comes.

In June, 1942, a German submarine dropped four young Nazi agents off on a Florida beach. Their mission was to blow up bridges, factories, and Jewish-owned department stores. Among them was Herbert Haupt, the 22-year-old son of a German-American family in Chicago.

J.D. Salinger on the beaches on D-Day, marching through concentration camps, and in liberated Paris.

Arnold Weiss escaped Germany as a kid in 1938, leaving his family behind. He returned seven years later, now a U.S. intelligence officer tasked with tracking down fugitive Nazis. The ultimate revenge story.

The author of True Grit on growing up in Arkansas during World War II.

During WWII, a bomber crashes into the Pacific and the crewmen begin an epic battle against dehydration, exposure, and endless attacks by sharks. Adapted from Laura Hillenbrand’s Unbroken.

In “Operation Mincemeat” a vagrant’s corpse, raided from a London morgue, washed up on a beach in Spain, setting in motion an elaborate piece of espionage that fooled Nazi intelligence. Or did it?