World Battlefronts: To Fetch a Grunt

On a Dutch airfield 150 Nazis in full flying kit were drawn up as though for pay-day parade, unmindful that July 4 was a special day in the non-Nazi world, a day when something extraordinary might happen. It did. The Nazis were caught flat-footed on their airfield by a tight-flying contingent of twelve Douglas twin-motored bombers, half of them manned by Americans, half by Britons, which sent the Germans scuttling for cover amid bomb bursts and the firecracker chatter of machine guns.

By more than coincidence, on the 166th anniversary of Independence the...

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