World War II

Lawrence Brooks served in the U.S. Army when the military was still racially segregated. But the Black soldier's deployment to Australia offered a reprieve from the racism of Jim Crow laws at home.

In 1941, Japan was on the offensive against China. So China hired a group of Americans to fight back in the skies. Eighty years ago this week, they fought in their first battle.

The decorated war veteran and retired pastor was among the first African Americans to desegregate the military and fight during World War II.

The Japanese Army systematically raped women in the Philippines. What's become of the aging survivors of this wartime atrocity in the midst of the pandemic?

Josephine Baker will be reinterred at the Panthéon in Paris 46 years after her death. The famed entertainer will be the first Black woman to receive the honor. Scott Simon reflects on her legacy.

Connie Doria Rocha contributed to the war effort even though women were barred from combat. At StoryCorps, she recalls her time as a mechanic in the military.

In 1944 an attack on a London Woolworths killed 168 people. In his new novel, Francis Spufford explores what "might have been" for five young casualties of war.

The first time Jason Burt listened to his grandfather's World War II Army Air Force Band recordings after finding them in his attic, "it was like my own private concert with my grandpa."

Cpl. Waverly Woodson Jr., a member of an African American battalion, treated scores of soldiers wounded on D-Day but was passed over for the medal. Lawmakers and relatives have tried to change that.

The Vatican has long maintained that Pope Pius XII did everything he could to save Jewish lives, but newly unearthed papers have renewed accusations of complicit silence against him.

A U.S. firebombing campaign targeted Toyama and other Japanese cities, killing 180,000 before the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, write geographer Cary Karacas and historian David Fedman.