ask us email | chat | phone

World War II

General Military History | At the Front: Campaigns and Soldiers | Holocaust | Japanese American Experience | Atomic Bomb | Japanese War Crimes | Photographs, Posters, Newspapers

General Military History Sites

• Netherlands Institute for War Documentation
  Mostly in Dutch, includes a collection of digitized photographs.
• WWW-VL Military History
  Comprehensive site covering military history from ancient times to the present.
• World War II Resources
  Collection of primary documents dealing with the war including British, German, French and American sources. Also see World War II documents at Project Avalon.

At the Front: Campaigns and Soldiers

• Battle of Britain
  Royal Air Force site that provides the complete day by day Fighter Command Operational Diaries for July through October 1940 plus supplemental information.
• Liberation of Paris
  Exhibit in commemoration of the 50th anniversary of the Liberation of Paris. Includes a chronology, biographical information and photographs.
• Kamikaze Images
  "American and Japanese images of kamikaze pilots differ greatly. This web site explores diverse portrayals and perceptions of the young men who carried out suicide attacks near the end of World War II."
• Normandy: 1944
  Encyclopaedia Britannica special feature on Normandy includes articles from the encyclopedia plus photographs, maps, and contemporary news dispatches and excerpts from memoirs. Also see Government Views of D-Day 1944 and National Geographic's Untold Stories of D-Day.
• Pearl Harbor Attack Hearings
  Collection of hearings and reports dealing with Pearl Harbor including the Knox investigation and the Navy Court of Inquiry. Part of the World War II Resources site. Also see the American Memory collection After the Day of Infamy: "Man-on-the-Street" Interviews Following the Attack on Pearl Harbor and National Geographic's Remembering Pearl Harbor.
• Private Art: WWII Letters to and from Home
  Collection of letters spanning 1943-1945 written by or to Private Arthur Prager.
• Remembering the War in New Guinea
  collection of photographs, oral histories and documents primarily from the Australian and Japanese perspective. Part of the Australia-Japan Research Project.
• Rutgers Oral History Archives
  Transcriptions of more than 180 interviews in a project "to record the personal experiences of the men and women who served on the homefront and overseas." For homefront audio clips such as radio reports see Voices of World War II: experiences from the Front and at home. Also see voices from the Second World War, Student Voices from World War II and the McCarthy Era and US Latinos & Latinas & WWII.
• U-Boat War
  Project to create a top quality reference site about the U-Boat war. Includes specifications, photographs and biographies.
• Wartime Columns of Ernie Pyle
  Collection of 40 columns by the noted WWII journalist.
• World War II Veterans with Stories
  Oral history interviews of WWII veterans, part of the Veteran's History Project. Also see From the Home Front and the Front Lines, an exhibit covering 20th century wars.

Holocaust

• General Overviews
  • Cybrary of the Holocaust
    Project to create educational materials dealing with the holocaust. Includes survival testimony, links to online sources and images. Also see A Teacher's Guide to the Holocaust.
  • Holocaust History Project
    "The Holocaust History Project is a free archive of documents, photographs, recordings, and essays regarding the Holocaust, including direct refutation of Holocaust-denial."
  • Nizkor Project
    The Nizkor Project seeks to monitor and refute Holocaust revisionists by providing documentation.
  • Online Exhibits from the US Holocaust Museum
    Links to online exhibits at the museum including Deadly Medicine: Creating the Master Race, Nazi Persecution of Homosexuals and Hidden History of the Kovno Ghetto.
  • Web Genocide Documentation Centre
    Links to documents dealing with 20th century genocides primarily the Holocaust but also including documents dealing with Armenia, Rwanda and Kosovo.
• Oral Histories
  • Fred R. Crawford Witness to the Holocaust Project Files
    Finding guide to a collection of documents and photographs at Emory University. Digitized portions include oral histories, selected photographs and publications.
  • Holocaust Survivors
    This site provides a few oral histories, audio files, photographs and encyclopedia. Also see Voices of the Holocaust.
  • Voice Vision: Holocaust Survivor Oral History
    Collection of 11 oral history interviews (transcripts and audio files) from the collection of Dr. Sid Bolkosky of the University of Michigan--Dearborn.
• Trials
  • Adolf Eichmann
    Nizkor project site on Eichmann includes English language transcript of the 1961 trial and the German transcription of the Eichmann diary.
  • The Doctors Trial: The Medical Case of the Subsequent Nuremberg Proceedings
    U.S. Holcaust Memorial Museum exhibit features excerpts from testimony from the 1946 military tribunal proceedings against 23 German physicians and administrators.
  • Holocaust Denial on Trial: David Irving v. Penguin Books and Deborah Lipstadt
    "This site is simply a treasure trove of information for scholars, students, or anyone interested in the trial and Holocaust denial. Included are the complete trial transcripts, the full text of the judgment, and a number of the book-length works submitted on Lipstadt's behalf by prominent historians of Germany and the Holocaust (including a 700+ page examination of Irving's entire body of works by Richard Evans)."
  • Nuremberg Trials Project
    Harvard Law School Library's collection of Nuremberg documents. Also see Project Avalon's Nuremberg War Crimes Trial collection, Rutger's Nuremberg Project and the Library of Congress' digitization of the 42 volume Trial of the Major War Criminals before the International Military Tribunal.
• Organizations
  • Simon Wiesenthal Center
    Home page of the Wiesenthal center dedicated to Holocaust remembrance and the defenese of human rights and the Jewish people.
  • U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum
    General information about the museum and its resources.
  • Yad Vashem
    Home page of the Holocaust Martyrs' and Heroes' Remembrance Authority located in Jerusalem. Includes the Central Database of Shoah Victims.
• Other
  • Learning about the Holocaust through Art
    Collection of art produced during the Holocaust. Also see The Art and Politics of Arthur Szyk and Last Expression: Art and Auschwitz

Japanese American Experience

• Densho
  Project to collect oral histories, photographs and documents dealing with Japanese American history with special focus of World War II. The site currently contains narrative with selected documents, images and oral histories plus study questions and bibliographies. Registration required for full access.
• Japanese American Relocation Digital Archives (JARDA)
  JARDA brings together collections from many California respositories. Included in the collection are digitized photographs, documents, diaries, and finding aids.
• Camps
  • Amache Digital Collections
    This website displays images, paper based documents and other information about the Granada Relocation Center and includes more than a year's worth of issues of the camp paper, the Granada Pioneer.
  • Camp Harmony Exhibit
    Exhibit detailing life in the Puyallup Assembly Center, Washington state. Includes text and photographs and drawings.
  • Life Interrupted: The Japanese American Experience in World War II Arkansas
    Details the history of two camps in Arkansas, Rohwer and Jerome.
  • Suffering Under a Great Injustice: Ansel Adam's Photographs of Japanese-American Internment
    Collection of more than 200 photographs by Ansel Adams of the Manzanar interment camp. Part of American Memory.
  • War Relocation Authority Photographs of Japanese American Evacuation and Resettlement, 1942-1945
    Searchable database of thousands of photographs of WRA camps. Part of the Online Archive of California. For other photographs see Japanese American Relocation Photograph collection, Photographs from Tule Lake, Heart Mountain Digital Preservation Project and War Relocation Authority Camps in Arizona.
  Constitutional Questions
  • Conscience and the Constitution
    This site accompanies the PBS documentary on the "No No Boys" and includes narrative and a selection of primary documents including newspaper editorials and trial transcripts.
  • A More Perfect Union: Japanese Americans & the US Constitution
    Smithsonian exhibit detailing the history of the incarceration, includes more than 800 artifacts and documents.
• Other
  • Dear Miss Breed: Letters from Camp
    Japanese American National Museum collection of WWII children's letters to Clara Estelle Breed, Children's Librarian at the San Diego Public Library.
  • Internment and Evacuation of San Francisco Japanese
    Collection of articles from the San Francisco News published in 1942. Part of the Japanese collection at the Museum of the City of San Francisco.
  • Interrupted Lives: Japanese American Students at the University of Washington, 1941–1942
    Extensive narrative with digitized documents and photographs detailing the experience of Nikkei students at the University of Washington in 1941-1942.
  • War Relocation Authority & the Incarceration of Japanese-Americans During World War II
    Collection of 62 War Relocation Authority documents from the collections of the Truman Library.

Atomic Bomb

• Decision to Drop
  • The Atomic Bomb and the End of World War II
    National Security Archive collection of documents dealing with the decision to drop the bomb and the immediate aftermath.
  • Atomic Bomb Decision
    Collection of documents dealing with the decision to drop the bomb. Part of the Leo Szilard Home Page.
  • Decision to Drop the Atomic Bomb
    Collection of approximately 50 digitized documents provided by the Truman Library and Museum.
  • Final Months of the War with Japan: Signals Intelligence, U.S. Invasion Planning, and the A-Bomb Decision
    Monograph by Douglas J. MacEachin published by the CIA includes a "collection of 118 annotated declassified original documents."
• Hiroshima & Nagasaki
  • A-Bomb WWW Museum
    Extensive exhibit with photographs and oral histories developed by Mitsuru Ohba and John Benson of the A-Bomb WWW Project of Hiroshima.
  • Hiroshima Archive
    This site created by student at Lewis & Clark College and includes an archive of photographs by Hiromi Tsuchida.
  • Remembering Nagasaki
    Exhibit of photographs by Yosuke Yamagata sponsored by the Exploratorium of San Francisco.
  • Voice of Hibakusha
    Oral histories of Hiroshima survivors. Based on the NHK program, Hiroshima Witness.
• Science
  • Atomic Archive
    Collection of documents, images and other material dealing with history of the invention of the atomic bomb.
  • Trinity Atomic Web Site
    "The purpose of this site is to tell the story of nuclear weapons, with the Trinity Atomic Test as the lens that focuses all that came before and after it. In the spirit of Project Gutenberg, the intent is to create an online archive from the large body of U.S. government information about nuclear weapons."

Japanese War Crimes

• 1200 Days
  Autobiography of an American POW and survivor of the Bataan death march.
• Korean Council for Women Drafted for Military Sexual Slavery by Japan
  Collection of current news articles on the subject plus photographs and witness testimony.
• The Nanking Atrocities: Online Documentary
  Masters thesis by Masato Kajimoto of the University of Missouri - Columbia. The thesis includes an extensive narrative and transcriptions of newspapers and other primary sources. Also see Nanjing Massacre and WWW Memorial Hall of the Victims in the Nanjing Massacre.

Photographs, Posters & Newspapers

• Democracy at War: Canadian Newspapers and the Second World War
  Digitized collection of more than 144,000 newspaper clippings dealing with World War II primarily from Canadian newspapers.
• Dr. Seuss Goes to War
  University of California at San Diego collection of more than 400 political cartoons created by Theodore Geisel between 1941 and 1943 for the New York newspaper, PM.
• Federal Newsmaps
  Collection of newsmaps, Army publications that depict key events in the war with maps and photographs.
• German Propaganda Archive
  The archive at Calvin College is a "growing collection of English translations of propaganda material from Nazi Germany and the German Democratic Republic." Included are posters and other visual works.
• Historic Publications from World War II
  Collection of US government documents published during WWI dealing with the war effort at home including agricultural documents, civilian defense and labor.
• "A Summons to Comradeship" World War I and II Posters
  Project by the University of Minnesota to digitized 6,000 posters from the world wars and interwar period. As of the beginning of 2003 approximately 2,000 posters are available. For other poster collections see Northwestern's Poster Art from World War II, UNT's World War Poster Collection,July 1942: United We Stand, Imperial War Museum: Posters of Conflict (both WWII and WWI) and War Posters 1940-1945.
• Women Come to the Front: Journalists, Photographers, and Broadcasters during World War II
  Exhibit produced by the Library of Congress focusing on eight journalists including Clare Booth Luce and Dorothea Lange. Also see the Dorothea Lange Collection.

Images: World War II posters. Poster courtesy of National Archives and War Poster Collection at the UW Libraries.