To commemorate the 80th anniversary of D-Day and to acknowledge the great sacrifices undertaken by the “greatest generation,” the East Tennessee Historical Society is holding a three-day conference on the Second World War from 8th of July until the 10th of July at the East Tennessee History Center. The conference will include talks from East […]
1942: The four-day Battle of Midway began in the Pacific Theater of World War II with over 100 Japanese aircraft attacking both Sand and Eastern islands in the Midway Atoll, a U.S. military area. The U.S. Navy turned the tide against the Japanese naval forces by sinking critical key aircraft carriers in a battle that […]
Bill Felton’s 1990 trip to the Normandy American Cemetery and Memorial in France deeply moved him, the Knoxville News Sentinel reported in 2002. “His visit was so powerful, it instilled in him a determination to come back home and create a memorial honoring fallen veterans of East Tennessee,” the article states. Felton died in 2011, […]
Both on the home front and in the combat zones of 1918, the greatest single killer of the Great War was not artillery, machine guns, or poison gas: it was far more insidious and invisible. By some estimates, half of the doughboys, Marines and sailors who died in Europe fell not to enemy fire but […]
On 1 April 1945, U.S. ground forces began the Battle of Okinawa. The objective was to secure the island, thus removing the last barrier standing between U.S. forces and Imperial Japan. With Okinawa firmly in hand, the U.S. military could finally bring its full might upon the Japanese, conducting unchecked strategic air strikes against the […]
The story of the air war in Europe during WW II is one of tremendous courage and catastrophic loss. It is the story of US-made B-17 Flying Fortresses and B-24 Liberators, shuttled across the North Atlantic from Canada into Great Britain where they were readied for perilous bombing missions into northern Europe (Occupied France and […]
U.S. Marines invaded Iwo Jima on February 19, 1945, after months of naval and air bombardment. The Japanese defenders of the island were dug into bunkers deep within the volcanic rocks. Approximately 70,000 U.S. Marines and 18,000 Japanese soldiers took part in the battle. The Battle for Iwo Jima was an epic military campaign between U.S. […]
On February 15, 1968, during some of the heaviest fighting of the Tet Offensive, James T. (Tommy) Davis of Meigs County fell to enemy fire as a result of multiple shrapnel wounds. Six other East Tennesseans died during the campaign. Their bios can be found below. On the early morning of January 30, 1968, Viet Cong […]
The Battle of Hürtgen Forest (German: Schlacht im Hürtgenwald) was a series of battles fought from 19 September to 16 December 1944, between American and German forces on the Western Front during World War II, in the Hürtgen Forest, a 140 km2 (54 sq mi) area about 5 km (3.1 mi) east of the Belgian–German border.[1] It was the longest […]
The Battle of the Bulge, also known as the Ardennes Offensive, was the last major German offensive campaign on the Western Front during World War II. The battle lasted for five weeks from 16 December 1944 to 28 January 1945, towards the end of the war in Europe. It was launched through the densely forested Ardennes region between Belgium and Luxembourg. It overlapped with the Alsace Offensive, subsequently […]
