Joyriding in a captured "Shin'yō" suicide motorboat, Okinawa, 1 May 1945. The Shin'yō ("Sea Quake") was a wooden craft designed in 1944 and deployed as a last-ditch defensive measure to Japanese-held island late in the year. It mounted a pair of anti-ship rockets, but the primary weapon was a 600-pound warhead carried in the bow, which would detonate on impact with its target. Several hundred of these boats were sent to Okinawa, where many were captured by American ground forces. In this series, Marine intelligence personnel take Boat 222 for a spin. Officially, they were performing tests on "speed, load, and handling" but clearly figured it wouldn't hurt to have a little fun in the process. All photos by Corporals Albert J. Giossi and Annunzio "Arthur" Sarno, III Amphibious Corps.

Battle of Berlin Given the shortage of troops, most defenders came from the Volkssturm "Popular Militia" and the Hitlerjügend, both structures of questionable military value. The official number of defenders was counted at 41,200, of which only about 15,000 had a certain degree of military instruction. Their armament was quite scarce, possessing only 42,000 rifles, 2,200 machine guns (less than 200 were MG 42), 140 mortars, 15 PAK 40 and eight 8.8 cm anti-tanks. The main artillery unit was the 230 8.8cm, 43 10.5 and 12.8 anti-aircraft cannons of the 1st Flak Division, but many of them could not be used against ground targets. The rest of the artillery consisted of a heterogeneous mix of cannons of multiple origin, of use when less relative. For the final battle, just over 20,000 regular soldiers (between Werhrmacht and Waffen SS) would reinforce the original garrison, coming from various units retreating towards the capital ahead of the Soviet advance. Berlin was divided into eight sectors, with numerous defenses of which only those relied on water courses, such as the Spree and the Landwehr Canal, were effective. The defenders lacked a determined and unique command, in practice. For example, of the 483 bridges in the city, only 127 were destroyed, because Speer considered that, by destroying all of them, to prevent the passage of Soviet cars, the cut of electricity, water and gas that would be produced would add greater suffering to the civilian population. Notes taken from the book: "The Battle of Berlin 1945" by Juan Vazquez Garcia. 📖 Photography: 📷 Members of the Volkssturm captured during the Battle of Berlin. Interestingly enough, the soldier in the foreground has minimal gear on. He appears to be wearing a captured French belt, hanging from which a typical British (or Soviet or civilian) mug and a German cantimpla. The coat seems to be lacking railings, he is wearing a DAF (German Labour Front) cap. Germany 1945. Photographer: 📷 Anatoly Arkhipov. (FGF Colourised)

May 1942. The fake water shortage that sank four Japanese carriers. By mid-May 1942, the US Navy had a problem. They had broken into the Japanese fleet operational code, JN-25, well enough to read fragments of it. They could see Admiral Yamamoto assembling something enormous. Four fleet carriers. A diversionary attack against the Aleutians. A landing force. The target was identified in every transmission by a single two-letter codeword: AF. Joseph Rochefort, the eccentric cryptanalyst who ran Station HYPO out of a windowless basement in Pearl Harbor known as "the Dungeon," was certain AF was Midway. He worked 20-hour shifts in a red smoking jacket and bedroom slippers because the basement was freezing. He survived on coffee and sandwiches passed in through the door. Washington disagreed. The Navy's main code-breaking section, OP-20-G, thought AF was probably the US west coast, possibly Hawaii itself, possibly even the Panama Canal. Admiral King in Washington trusted his own people. Admiral Nimitz at Pearl Harbor trusted Rochefort. One of them had to be wrong. Rochefort's deputy, Jasper Holmes, came up with the trick. Midway was instructed to broadcast a radio message in plain, uncoded English. The garrison's freshwater distillation plant, the message said, had broken down. They were running short of water and requested an emergency tanker. The message was fiction. The plant was fine. Two days later, American listening stations intercepted a Japanese intelligence transmission, encrypted in JN-25, reporting back to fleet headquarters that "AF is short of fresh water." AF was Midway. Confirmed. Nimitz now knew where, when, and with what. He positioned his three available carriers, Enterprise, Hornet, and the half-wrecked Yorktown, in ambush 325 miles northeast of the island. Yorktown had been hit at the Battle of the Coral Sea two weeks earlier and was supposed to need 90 days in dry dock. Pearl Harbor's shipyard repaired her in 72 hours. On June 4, 1942, in roughly six minutes between 10:22 and 10:28 AM, American dive bombers caught three Japanese carriers, Akagi, Kaga, and Soryu, with their decks loaded with fuel and ordnance for a strike they were about to launch. All three were burning hulks by lunchtime. Hiryu was sunk that evening. Japan lost four fleet carriers, a heavy cruiser, 248 aircraft, and over 3,000 men, including most of the irreplaceable veteran naval aviators who had attacked Pearl Harbor six months earlier. Joseph Rochefort was rewarded with reassignment. His rivals in Washington saw to it that he was pushed out of cryptanalysis entirely and given command of a floating dry dock in San Francisco. He spent the rest of the war repairing ships. He received the Distinguished Service Medal for Midway in 1986, ten years after he died.

The unpainted Messerschmitt Me 262 A‑1a, Werknummer 111711, delivered into American hands by Hans Fay on 30 March 1945, remains one of the most remarkable individual defections of the final weeks of the war. Fay, a veteran Messerschmitt test pilot, technical inspector, and instructor, had accumulated an extraordinary 11,000 starts, including around 80 jet flights, making him one of the most experienced jet pilots in Germany. His decision to surrender an intact Me 262 was shaped by two converging circumstances: his parents’ home near Lachen‑Speyerdorf had fallen into American hands, removing the threat of reprisals, and he had been ordered to help ferry 22 newly built jets from Schwäbisch Hall to Neuburg an der Donau before they could be captured. Taking off as the fourth aircraft in the ferry group, Fay immediately encountered a mechanical fault: the landing gear failed to lock after retraction. For a moment he hesitated, but the opportunity was too rare to abandon. Flying at low altitude with wheels down, slowed and off course, he realised he could not safely reach Lachen‑Speyerdorf. Instead, he diverted to Rhein‑Main Airfield near Frankfurt, already in American hands. At 1345 hours, U.S. troops saw the unfamiliar aircraft circling with gear extended. Fay selected the only usable strip among the bomb craters and executed a flawless landing, rolling to a stop in roughly 400–500 yards before climbing out and surrendering. The aircraft, photographed on 2 April 1945, was later shipped to the United States for evaluation at Wright Field, Ohio. Its career ended on 20 August 1946, when an engine fire during a test flight forced Lt. Walter J. McAuley Jr. to bail out. The Me 262 crashed near Lumberton, Ohio, and was completely destroyed. Photo source - US Army Signals Corp #131687# Colourised by RJM

May 1943. The month Germany lost the Atlantic in 22 days. In the first three weeks of May 1943, German U-boats sank 34 Allied merchant ships in the North Atlantic. In the same three weeks, they lost 41 submarines of their own. For four years, Karl Dönitz had been winning the war at sea. His wolfpack tactics had nearly starved Britain into surrender. In March 1943, U-boats sank 120 ships, and the British Admiralty privately concluded that the convoy system itself might no longer be viable. Then everything turned at once. Centimetric radar arrived on escort ships and patrol aircraft. Submarines that surfaced at night to recharge their batteries, the standard wolfpack tactic, were now visible from 30 miles away through fog and darkness. American escort carriers closed the "mid-Atlantic gap," the patch of ocean previously beyond land-based air cover. Very long range B-24 Liberators flew patrols from Iceland. HF/DF radio direction finders, nicknamed "Huff-Duff," triangulated a U-boat's position the moment it radioed home. Bletchley Park read those messages in near real time. Convoy SC 130 sailed in mid-May. Not a single merchant ship was lost. Six U-boats were sunk. On May 19, 1943, U-954 was depth-charged in the North Atlantic by the British escorts HMS Jed and HMS Sennen. All 47 crew died. Among them was Oberleutnant zur See Peter Dönitz, age 21. Karl Dönitz's son. Five days later, on May 24, Admiral Dönitz signaled every U-boat in the North Atlantic to withdraw. He wrote in his war diary, "We have lost the Battle of the Atlantic." He would lose his second son, Klaus, exactly one year later, in May 1944. Klaus was not supposed to be aboard the torpedo boat that night. He had volunteered, against orders, to celebrate his 24th birthday with the crew. The boat was sunk by British destroyers off Selsey Bill. By the end of the war, three out of every four men who ever sailed in a U-boat were dead. It was the highest casualty rate of any service arm of any nation in the Second World War.

General Dwight Eisenhower making an inspection visit aboard the cruiser USS Quincy (Baltimore-class) at Belfast Lough, Belfast, Northern Ireland, United Kingdom, 19 May 1944. Rear Admiral Alan Kirk is behind him.

B-17G Fortress 'Miss Donna Mae II' drifted under another bomber on a bomb run over Berlin, 19 May 1944. A 1,000 lb bomb from above tore off the left stabilizer and sent the plane into an uncontrollable spin. All 11 were killed.

In the spring of 1940, France had the largest army in Western Europe. More tanks than Germany. More artillery. A defensive line that had cost two and a half percent of national GDP to build. Nine days into the German invasion, the Allied supreme commander, Maurice Gamelin, was running the entire war from the Château de Vincennes outside Paris. The chateau had no radio. Not "limited radio." No radio at all. Orders to the front were carried by motorcycle courier. Gamelin learned about the German breakthrough at Sedan hours after it happened, by telephone, after his staff had already heard about it from the BBC. On May 16, Churchill flew to Paris and asked one question: "Where is the strategic reserve?" Gamelin replied, "Aucune." There is none. Churchill later wrote that it was one of the most stunning moments of his life. He had assumed every army in Europe kept a reserve. The French had committed everything to a single line and had nothing behind it. On May 19, Prime Minister Paul Reynaud fired Gamelin and summoned his replacement: Maxime Weygand, age 73, born during the American Civil War, currently commanding French forces in Syria. Weygand flew over 4,000 miles back to a country he barely recognized. He landed on the 19th and took command on the 20th. His first official act was to cancel Gamelin's planned counterattack and announce that he required 48 hours to "study the situation." Those 48 hours were the war. While Weygand studied, German panzers reached the English Channel at Abbeville, cutting the Allied armies in half. The British Expeditionary Force was now trapped. Within ten days they would be evacuating from Dunkirk. Within five weeks, Paris would fall. The plan Weygand eventually unveiled was, in substance, the same one Gamelin had drafted before being fired. Gamelin spent the rest of the war as a prisoner. The Vichy regime put him on trial at Riom in 1942 to blame him for the defeat. He defended himself so effectively that Pétain shut the trial down, handed him to the Germans, and had him sent to Buchenwald, then to Itter Castle in the Austrian Alps, where American troops liberated him in May 1945. He never spoke publicly about the chateau with no radio.

On May 19, 1943, Adolf Hitler awarded Fanni Luukkonen the Grand Cross of the Order of the German Eagle (Verdienstorden vom Deutschen Adler), one of Nazi Germany's highest decorations for foreign nationals. She was among the very few women ever to receive it. Luukkonen (1882–1947) was the long-serving leader of Lotta Svärd, Finland's voluntary women's auxiliary organization. Founded in 1921 and named after a character in Johan Ludvig Runeberg's poem cycle "The Tales of Ensign Stål," Lotta Svärd grew during the 1930s and the war years into one of the largest women's organizations in the world relative to national population. By the time of the award, it had around 240,000 members who worked in nursing, air-raid warning, anti-aircraft spotting, canteen and supply services, communications, and other support roles for the Finnish armed forces. Luukkonen had led the organization since 1929 and was its public face throughout the Winter War (1939–40) and the Continuation War (1941–44). The award reflected the political situation at the time. Finland was a co-belligerent (not formally an ally) with Germany against the Soviet Union during the Continuation War, and German leadership used decorations to acknowledge prominent Finns who contributed to the war effort. Carl Gustaf Emil Mannerheim, Risto Ryti, and several Finnish generals received German honors during the same period; Luukkonen's decoration recognized the scale of the logistical and home-front work organized through Lotta Svärd. The decoration became a problem after the war. Under the terms of the Moscow Armistice of September 1944, Finland was required to dissolve "fascist-type" organizations, and Lotta Svärd was disbanded in November 1944 at Soviet insistence, despite its non-political and largely humanitarian character. Luukkonen's wartime ties to Germany, including the Order of the German Eagle, were cited in Soviet criticism of the organization. She lived quietly after the war and died in 1947. The Lotta Svärd Foundation, which continues charitable work today, was established in 1946 to preserve the organization's legacy in a permissible form.

TDN-1 attack drone on its first (piloted) test flight from Traverse City, Michigan, United States, 19 May 1943. The pilot was Navy Lieutenant C.C. Corley. The TDN-1 was a World War II era American assault drone developed by the Naval Aircraft Factory for the US Navy. It was one of the earliest operational attack drones and a precursor to the better known TDR-1 built by Interstate Aircraft. The program grew out of the Navy's "Project Option," an effort led by Rear Admiral Delmar Fahrney to develop television guided unmanned aircraft that could deliver torpedoes or bombs against heavily defended targets without risking a pilot. The TDN-1 was designed in 1942 and first flew in 1943. It was a twin engine, mid wing monoplane built largely of non strategic materials such as wood, with fixed tricycle landing gear to simplify mass production and keep critical aluminum free for combat aircraft. It was powered by two Lycoming O-435-2 air cooled engines of about 220 horsepower each. The drone could carry a 2,000 pound bomb or a Mark 13 aerial torpedo slung beneath the fuselage. A small cockpit allowed a pilot to ferry the aircraft manually, but in combat configuration it was meant to fly unmanned. Control came from a "mother" aircraft, typically a TBM Avenger fitted with an RCA Block television receiver and a radio command link. A small TV camera in the drone's nose transmitted a live picture back to the controller, who steered it onto the target with a joystick. Maximum speed was roughly 140 miles per hour, with a range of about 425 miles. It was slow and not especially robust, which limited its tactical usefulness. Around 100 airframes were built, mostly at the Naval Aircraft Factory in Philadelphia and at a Navy run plant in Clearwater, Florida. The TDN-1 was used mainly for training drone controllers and developing tactics. Operational combat missions were carried out by the improved TDR-1 with Special Task Air Group One (STAG-1) in the Solomon Islands in 1944, where assault drones struck Japanese ships and shore positions before the program was cancelled later that year as conventional air power proved sufficient. Although it never saw front line combat itself, the TDN-1 helped prove that television guided, radio controlled strike aircraft were technically feasible, foreshadowing later cruise missiles and modern attack drones.