In June 1944, Captain Benjamin Salomon was a 29-year-old US Army dentist attached to US forces invading the Pacific island of Saipan in the Mariana Islands. When assault troops stormed the beaches…

Commander Ernest E. Evans, whose mother was a full-blooded Cherokee Indian,  was a 1932 graduate of the US Naval Academy. His early life in Oklahoma and later naval career were marked by achievement after achievement…

Often unheralded during campaigns in every theater of war were the medical personnel manning the aid stations and field hospitals in combat zones, as well as the unarmed Army medics and Navy…

During the campaign on Guadalcanal, a motley collection of Marine Corps pilots and downed Naval aviators unable to return to their ships were instrumental in defending the Marines’…

Lyle J. Bouck, Jr. was born in Fenton, Missouri in 1923 and joined the Missouri National Guard at the age of 14. Late in the war, he was a 20-year-old second lieutenant with the US 99th Infantry Division…

Virginia Hall was a native of Baltimore, Maryland. She had an adventurous spirit, and after attending several prestigious colleges, began working overseas as a State Department clerk…

Born in Tacoma, Washington, Robert E. Bush was an 18-year-old US Naval medical corpsman when US forces invaded the island of Okinawa in April 1945. Bush was forward deployed, and when a Marine office leading the attack fell, Bush ran…

Assigned to the 320th Barrage Balloon Battalion of the US First Army, Corporal Waverly B. Woodson, Jr. was a medic attached to the only all-Black unit to land…

Josef Frantisek was a native of Czechoslovakia who joined the Royal Air Force in 1940 after fleeing the Nazis on the European continent. He also piloted fighter planes for Poland and France in their early battles against German invaders…

The Allied campaign in Italy stretched for nineteen months between 1943 and 1945, and near the end of it, Hawaiian-born Daniel Inouye was serving as a junior officer with the US Army’s 442^nd Regimental Combat Team…

Genevieve Grotjan was a mathematician and cryptanalyst just prior to the war, and part of a secretive effort within the US Army Signal Intelligence…

Doris “Dorie” Miller, the grandson of former slaves, was a crewmen aboard the battleship USS West Virginia when the Japanese raided Pearl Harbor. Just 22 years old, Miller was a mess steward in the ship’s galley…

In December 1941, Captain Henry Elrod was a newly arrived Marine Corps fighter pilot on Wake Island. When the Japanese attacked the isolated Pacific atoll just hours after the raid on Pearl Harbor…

John Basilone is one of the most legendary figures in the history of the United States Marine Corps. He was born in Buffalo, New York and enlisted in the US Army in 1934. After his three year enlistment ended…

A native of Hawaii, Thomas White was a medical doctor and first lieutenant in the US Army Air Forces when he volunteered to serve as flight surgeon (and gunner) during the famed Doolittle Raid in April 1942.