The morning of September 2, 1945, dawned over Tokyo Bay with a clarity that belied the devastation of the preceding years. Aboard the battleship USS Missouri, anchored proudly among a fleet of Allied warships, representatives of the major warring powers assembled to witness the…
Read More
On the evening of August 31, 1939, as summer drew to a close in Europe, a strange broadcast crackled over the airwaves of a small German radio station near the Polish border. The message, supposedly issued by Polish saboteurs, declared that the station had…
Read More
On August 25, 1945—just ten days after Japan announced its surrender and brought the Second World War to a close—an American intelligence officer named John Birch was killed in China under circumstances that soon became freighted with political meaning. To his comrades, he was…
Read More
The Hardest Day: A Defining Moment in the Battle of Britain The Battle of Britain, a pivotal confrontation during World War II, reached its most intense and harrowing moment on August 18, 1940—a day that would later be known as “The Hardest Day.” This…
Read More
On August 11, 1942, in the midst of World War II’s escalating technological arms race, Austrian-born actress Hedy Lamarr and American avant-garde composer George Antheil were awarded U.S. Patent No. 2,292,387 for an invention few in the entertainment world—or the military establishment—could have anticipated.…
Read More
Smokey Bear, commonly known as Smokey the Bear, stands as an enduring symbol of wildfire prevention in the United States. With his iconic slogan, “Only YOU Can Prevent Forest Fires,” Smokey has become a cultural figure representing the nation’s efforts to protect forests from…
Read More
On August 8, 1945 the United States, England, France and the Soviet Union joined together and signed the London Agreement, a new treaty to impose justice against the Nazis for their crimes. For two months during the summer of 1945, Robert H. Jackson and…
Read More
On the morning of August 6, 1945, a single American B-29 bomber—Enola Gay—emblazoned with the name of the pilot’s mother, took off from the island of Tinian in the western Pacific. Its mission, cloaked in secrecy and unprecedented in history, was to bring a…
Read More
On August 2, 1939, just weeks before the outbreak of World War II, physicist Albert Einstein and fellow Hungarian émigré Leo Szilard co-signed a letter to President Franklin D. Roosevelt that would become one of the most consequential pieces of correspondence in history. The…
Read More
The Trinity Test, conducted on July 16, 1945, marked a pivotal moment in history as the world’s first detonation of a nuclear weapon. This event was a culmination of intense scientific and military efforts under the Manhattan Project, which aimed to develop an atomic…
Read More
