Share this story It was a Halloween evening, and the temperature outside was nearly 60 degrees below zero Fahrenheit. At 8:34 p.m. local time on 31 October 1956, a twin-engined Navy transport with skis bolted to its wheels bounced across the hard snow of the polar...
Share this story The morning of 1 November 1911 is quiet over the oases outside Tripoli. A small monoplane drones above the palms at roughly 600 feet. In the cockpit, a young Italian second lieutenant reaches into a leather pouch, takes out something the size of a...
Share this story On 5 September 1983, a group of US Air Force F-4E Phantoms was crossing the Atlantic to Germany, refuelling from KC-135 tankers along the way. Halfway over, Major Jon “Ghost” Alexander’s Phantom began losing oil. What followed was...
Share this story On 2 July 1982, Larry Walters, a 33-year-old truck driver, sat down in an aluminium lawn chair in a backyard in San Pedro, California, cut the tether, and went straight up. He had tied 42 helium-filled weather balloons to the chair. He had planned a...
Share this story At 09:30 on 15 August 1942, a tanker that had been torpedoed, bombed and hit by a crashing dive bomber crept into Grand Harbour, Valletta. She had a broken back, her decks were almost awash, and two destroyers were lashed to her sides to hold her up....
Share this story At eight o’clock on the morning of 20 May 1941, the sky over western Crete filled with Junkers Ju 52 transports flying low and slow over the olive groves. Out of their doors tumbled the Fallschirmjäger, Germany’s elite paratroopers,...
Share this story On the afternoon of 4 December 1950, a Navy fighter pilot looked down at a burning wreck on a frozen North Korean mountainside and made a decision his own training told him not to make. His wingman was alive, trapped in the cockpit, and smoke was...
Share this story At 12:32 on 7 April 1945, a lookout on the bridge of the battleship Yamato spotted the first wave of American carrier aircraft. Less than two hours later the largest battleship ever built rolled over and blew up, sending a mushroom cloud thousands of...
Share this story Bushire, on the Persian Gulf, December 1931. An American pilot is working on his biplane when a battered Ford rolls out of the desert. In it, half-buried in dust, is a young woman looking for a mechanic. Her own aircraft is stranded up the coast with...
Share this story On the afternoon of 14 November 1965, the clearing called LZ X-Ray was the most dangerous patch of ground in South Vietnam. North Vietnamese machine guns covered it from the slopes of the Chu Pong massif. The medical evacuation helicopters would not...
Share this story On the Loire estuary in western France stands one of the largest structures the Second World War left behind: the former U-boat base of Saint-Nazaire. Built by Germany in 1941 and 1942, it sheltered submarines that attacked Allied convoys in the...
Share this story At dawn on 5 July 1943, before the first German tank rolled forward, large formations of Soviet bombers, Shturmoviks and fighters headed for the Luftwaffe airfields around Kharkov and Belgorod. The plan was simple: catch the German air fleet on the...
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