On August 6th and 9th of 1945, the United States dropped atomic bombs over the Japanese cities of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, causing significant death and destruction in both places. To this day, the bombings remain history's only acts of nuclear warfare.

Nearly 71 years since US President Harry S. Truman's decision to unleash approximately 12,500 tons of TNT over Hiroshima, US President Barack Obama will become the first sitting president to visit the city.

The following declassified photos shed additional light on the procedures leading up to the nuclear attacks, giving a chilling glimpse into how and where the most destructive bombs ever used in warfare were prepped.

This post was originally written by Christian Storm.

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Soldiers check the casings on the "Fat Man" atomic bomb. Multiple test bombs were created on Tinian Island. All were roughly identical to an operational bomb, even though they lacked the necessary equipment to detonate.

On the left, geophysicist and Manhattan Project participant Francis Birch marks the bomb unit that would become "Little Boy" while Norman Ramsey, who would later win the Nobel Prize in Physics, looks on.

A technician applies sealant and putty to the crevices of "Fat Man," a final preparation to make sure the environment inside the bomb would be stable enough to sustain a full impact once the bomb was detonated.

The bartender at the Communist-themed pub in former East Berlin scrunches up his face and readjusts his glasses. Lenin looms on the wall beside him. “This is from Berlin?” I ask him.

“No, it’s from a little town, you’ve probably never heard of it,” he says of the bottle of doppelkorn liquor he has just poured me.

“What’s it called?” I inquire, taking a tiny sip from the clear liquid.

“Nordhausen,” the barkeep replies.

“Sure, I know it.”

“You do?” he gasps, amazed an American should know of a Podunk village in Lower Thuringia.

“Sure, my great-uncle liberated a concentration camp there,” I tell him.

Silence thicker than Berlin’s humid summer air. After a clumsy moment like so many when the Holocaust is mentioned in modern Germany, he replies: “I did not know there was a concentration camp there.”

* * *

Seventy years earlier, in April of ’45, the German army was in tatters and retreating before the Allies. American troops approached the city of Weimar in central Germany on April 11 and liberated the first Nazi concentration camp: Buchenwald. Among the skeletal prisoners famously photographed in the grim barracks was future Nobel Prize winner Elie Wiesel.

But that same day, 40 miles to the north, a US Army detachment entered another, lesser-known camp outside the town of Nordhausen. The Mittelbau-Dora facility used slave labor to build V-2 rockets and worked thousands to death. Among the men of the 104th Infantry Division was a medic from Brooklyn, New York. A 21-year-old American-born son of Jewish immigrants from Russia, Jules Helfner was fluent in German, kept a pistol in his boot, and was armed with a camera.

Together with his handwritten notes, Jules’s unique photographs, published here for the first time, bring to life a Jewish foot soldier’s personal experience in the 104th. They document four months of Helfner’s service after landing in France in late 1944, chronicling the march into Germany, liberation of a Nazi labor camp, and his eventual encounter with fellow Jewish soldiers in the Red Army at the climax of World War II.

All too often, this aspect of the Holocaust story — the Jewish liberators — is overlooked in Israel.

“He went through hell and back again,” Shirley Helfner, Jules’s younger sister, now 85, said. She was a kid when Jules enlisted and was shipped off to Europe but remembers his return to Brooklyn’s Bed-Stuy neighborhood after the war ended. Speaking with me at her home in Phoenix, she described Jules as quiet and refined, reserved but “with good humor.”

He was brilliant, she said, a polyglot fluent in English, French, German and Yiddish, the language spoken at home.

The army wanted to send him to medical school, but, pressed for time as the Allies mobilized for Operation Overlord, the epic invasion of Europe on June 6, 1944, it drafted Jules as a field medic instead, she said.

The 104th began its tour in Europe after D-Day, as the Allies pushed into the Low Countries and moved on Germany. The earliest dated photo in Helfner’s collection — which his children kept safely over the decades, and which I only saw for the first time last year — is from the Belgian city of Verviers, which served as army headquarters during the bitter winter of ’44.

As the Allies advanced into the Reich, the 104th was at the front, capturing Cologne at the beginning of March and moving east toward Berlin.

Jules posed, leaning against a truck, outside the city’s famed cathedral. (As Jules and the 104th fought through Cologne, his younger brother, Benjamin, was on the opposite side of the globe.

Serving as a sailor aboard the USS General Harry Taylor, Ben was halfway between Hawaii and Wake Island, crossing the 180th Meridian, bound for the Pacific theater. Ben was my grandfather.)

Several photos taken by Jules show him and his army friends along the way, occasionally with the rubble of ruined buildings as the backdrop.

One guy, Julian “Broncho” Nagorski from Upper Black Eddy, Pennsylvania, is named. Nagorski received the Bronze Star for valor, moved to Montana and died in 2008.

The dates written on pictures are sometimes incorrect, suggesting he annotated them sometime after the war.

Though Jules rarely spoke of his experience, his annotations offer poignant insights. “German 88 piece,” he wrote on the back of a photo taken near Cologne. “The gun we feared most.”

But the most startlingly personal reflections were written on the photos from Nordhausen.

* * *

In mid-April, about 60 miles west of Leipzig, the unit entered the Mittelbau-Dora camp. The German military had already abandoned the facility, in which prisoners were worked to death building buzz bombs. Thousands of bodies were strewn in the open air. Several hundred starving survivors remained, and despite the medics’ best efforts, some of those liberated died in the days following.

“To see photographs is one thing,” Fred Bohm, an Austrian-born Jewish corporal technician with the 104th, recounted in a 1979 interview, “but to go in and smell and be exposed to this horror you cannot really be ready for that.”

“But what really struck me is the impact it made on the other guys,” Bohm said. “They were staggered, literally. They were sick.”

Jules spoke little about his experience in the war, let alone at Nordhausen. But the one time he related it to his younger sister he said “the guys went wild,” Shirley recalled.

“They went back to the German town [Nordhausen] and they were killing the Germans left and right,” she said he told her. “Such a horrible, horrible experience.”

His dozen or so photos from Mittelbau-Dora show rows of emaciated corpses in brutal clarity (inexplicably, they’re all dated March 27). One caption distills the outrage Jules must have felt. “Nordhausen Concentration Camp,” he wrote, before switching to capital letters: “3500 JEWS WERE SLAUGHTERED HERE.”

American officers ordered German civilians from the nearby town to bury the thousands of bodies.

“I was put in charge of the burials and I insisted that the Germans from Nordhausen come for the occasion in their Sunday best,” W. Gunther Plaut, a Jewish chaplain with the unit, recounted in an interview years later. “Of course, we did not have enough space to do the work. But in my anger, now turning toward revenge, I told the burghers to use the knives, forks and spoons from their homes. I ordered the women to come out and help wash the bodies."

A handful of pictures captured the German townsfolk carrying and burying the dead. A unique image, Judith Cohen, director of the photo archive at the Holocaust Museum in Washington, DC, said, shows several burghers going underground into the subterranean factory.

“Two charred bodies of inmates of the Nordhausen concentration camp being lifted out of their faulty shelter by German civilians for burial,” reads the caption. One shot, taken below ground, shows the German “robot bomb” — the V-2 rockets — assembly line “worked by the inmates of the Nordhausen concentration camp,” he wrote.

* * *

In the weeks following the capture of Mittelbau-Dora, the 104th pressed eastward, eventually encountering the advancing Red Army. The two allied forces met on the Mulde River, just east of Leipzig. German forces were shattered, their vehicles destroyed and burning on the side of a road. Civilians fled and German soldiers surrendered in droves and were pressed into disposing of armaments.

“These Nazis chose to give up to the 104th US Inf. Div. rather than give up to the Russians,” reads a caption of a photo taken on the Mulde. It would be a familiar story, with millions of Germans fleeing the Soviets at the end of the war, desperate not to fall behind what Churchill would later call the Iron Curtain.

“German prisoners of war crossing the Mulde River on an improvised pontoon bridge. These Nazis chose to give up to the 104th US Inf. Div. rather than give up to the Russians.” April 1945, near Bitterfeld, Germany. (Jules Helfner)

Possibly the most improbable images are those in the final days of the war in Europe. The American and Soviet armies stood on opposite banks of the Mulde, and men from either side met in the city of Wurzen. In a brief moment of comradely warmth before the Cold War set in, Russian and American soldiers stood arm in arm in the conquered town square.

“Red Army soldiers names Ivan + Aleksis with a GI from the 104th,” scrawled Jules. “These Red Army soldiers were Jewish.”

On what may have been the same day in Wurzen, the beaming smiles of 16 women, the only ones in any of Jules’s photographs, radiate in the spring sun.

“A group of Jewish girls liberated by the 104th Inf. Div. at Wurzen, Germany. The entire group numbered 1000, most of them were Hungarians, Romanians, Polish, Russian + Austrian.”

Jules and the men of the 104th returned to the US and were decommissioned in the fall of 1945. He returned to New York.

His mother Ruth and and sister Shirley both would tell that Jules returned a changed man, quiet and reserved but retaining the sense of humor he shared with his brother, Ben.

“When he returned,” Shirley said, drawing on 70-year-old snippets of memories, “he gambled away all his back pay of $500.” Jules and his friends got together and got drunk, she recalled; one buddy passed out wasted, so they put him in the bathtub.

His daughter, Lisa Becker, who lives in Western Massachusetts, said he never really mentioned his wartime experience to her.

“The photos were kept in my dad’s desk drawer, not under lock and key, but as kids we never had any occasion to be looking around because we simply thought only office supplies, house bills and other related info must be in there,” she told me.

Despite Jules’s aspirations to go to medical school, the GI bill would only cover four years of it. Instead he worked as an engineer for Grumman. He died in 1978, seven years before I was born, of complications of a heart attack and stroke.

“It was not until his death in 1978 when my mother was clearing out his desk that she came across the envelope that contained the pictures. By that time my siblings and I were adults,” Becker said, “and my mother finally shared them with us.”

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VIENNA — A brother of Hitler's who was thought to be older was actually younger and died within days, raising questions about how his death might have affected the future leader of Nazi Germany, a historian said in comments published on Monday.

Hitler is widely thought to have been the fourth of six siblings, but records from Braunau am Inn, the northern Austrian town where he was born, show that he was in fact the third, according to findings by the historian Florian Kotanko, reported by the newspaper Oberoesterreichische Nachrichten.

Otto Hitler, a brother of Adolf Hitler's thought to have been the last sibling born before him, was actually born three years after, on June 17, 1892. He died six days later of hydrocephalus, a swelling of the brain, according to the report.

"The conclusions of many Hitler biographers about the mental development of Adolf Hitler, who allegedly received special attention from his mother Klara as the only surviving child after the deaths of three siblings, are no longer tenable," Kotanko was quoted as saying by the newspaper.

"How was the 3-year-old Adolf Hitler confronted with the birth and death of a brother?" Kotanko said. Among other open questions, he said, is whether Hitler had been aware of his brother's condition and how it might have affected him.

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While hiding in a fortified two-level 3,000-square-foot underground bunker, one of history's most brutal tyrants promised the world that his empire would last 1,000 years.

Hitler's Third Reich lasted 12 years, officially ending on April 30, 1945, when the Führer committed suicide in his bunker with his new wife after learning that Allied forces had surrounded Berlin.

Before retreating to the Führerbunker, Hitler and top Nazi officials enjoyed lavish compounds in Berchtesgaden, a resort village in the Bavarian Alps.

These are the best surviving photographs of Allied troops reveling in the spoils of war at Hitler's private residence and at Eagle's Nest.

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Easy Company after taking the Eagle's Nest, Hitler's former residence.

A paratrooper of the 101st Airborne Division enjoys the view and a cognac while lounging on the terrace of Hitler's retreat at Berchtesgaden after the end of the war in 1945.

Maj. Dick Winters, Lewis Nixon, Harry Welsh, and two other battalion staff members, celebrate VE-Day in Berchtesgaden, Germany.

On June 4, 1942, the Battle of Midway kicked off between the US and Japan. When it was all over on June 7, it was hailed as a decisive American victory — and much of it was captured on film.

That’s all because the Navy sent director John Ford to Midway atoll just days before it was attacked by the Japanese. Ford, already famous in Hollywood for such films as “Stage Coach” and “The Grapes of Wrath,” was commissioned a Navy commander with the Office of Strategic Services (OSS) and thought he was just going to document a quaint island in the South Pacific.

“The next morning – that night we got back and evidently something was about to pop, great preparations were made,” Ford told Navy historians after the battle. “I was called into Captain Semard’s office, they were making up plans, and he said ‘Well, now Ford, you are pretty senior here, and how about you getting up top of the power house, the power station, where the phones are?’ He said, ‘Do you mind?” I said ‘No, it’s a good place to take pictures.’

He said, ‘Well, forget the pictures as much as you can, but I want a good accurate account of the bombing. We expect to be attacked tomorrow.'”

From History.com:

A thousand miles northwest of Honolulu, the strategic island of Midway became the focus of his scheme to smash US resistance to Japan’s imperial designs. Yamamoto’s plan consisted of a feint toward Alaska followed by an invasion of Midway by a Japanese strike force. When the US Pacific Fleet arrived at Midway to respond to the invasion, it would be destroyed by the superior Japanese fleet waiting unseen to the west. If successful, the plan would eliminate the U.S. Pacific Fleet and provide a forward outpost from which the Japanese could eliminate any future American threat in the Central Pacific. US intelligence broke the Japanese naval code, however, and the Americans anticipated the surprise attack.

The three-day battle resulted in the loss of two US ships and more than 300 men. The Japanese fared much worse, losing four carriers, two battleships, three destroyers, 275 planes, and nearly 5,000 men.

Ford was wounded in the initial attack, but he continued to document the battle using his handheld 16mm camera. Here’s how he described it:

“By this time the attack had started in earnest. There was some dive bombing at objectives like water towers, [they] got the hangar right away. I was close to the hangar and I was lined up on it with my camera, figuring it would be one of the first things they got. It wasn’t any of the dive bombers [that got it]. A Zero flew about 50 feet over it and dropped a bomb and hit it, the whole thing went up. I was knocked unconscious. Just knocked me goofy for a bit, and I pulled myself out of it. I did manage to get the picture. You may have seen it in [the movie] 'The Battle of Midway.' It’s where the plane flies over the hangar and everything goes up in smoke and debris, you can see one big chunk coming for the camera."

Everybody, of course, nearly everybody except the gun crews were under ground. The Marines did a great job. There was not much shooting but when they did it was evidently the first time these boys had been under fire but they were really well trained. Our bluejackets and our Marine gun crews seemed to me to be excellent. There was no spasmodic firing, there was no firing at nothing. They just waited until they got a shot and it usually counted.”

Now see his 1942 film “The Battle of Midway,” which won the Academy Award for best documentary:

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German military leaders expected an Allied invasion on the English Channel coast in late May 1944, when there was high tide, a full moon, good visibility, and little wind. When it did not come, and when the weather turned in June with a depression bringing storms, they felt they could relax.

“There were all the less doubts that an invasion might happen in the meantime as the tides are very unfavorable in the following days and no air reconnaissance of any kind had given any hints of an imminent landing," Field Marshall Erwin Rommel wrote on June 4, 1944, before leaving France for Germany to celebrate his wife's birthday.

But while German weather forecasters saw no possibility for invasion, Allied forecasters were frantically looking for an opening. They found one on June 6 — and on the 71st anniversary of the pivotal invasion, we're looking at how they did it.

How the Allied forecasters found the opening is a subject of controversy, and they almost screwed it up. For an authoritative account, we've sourced a 2004 article from James R. Fleming, professor of Science, Technology, and Society at Colby College.  

Looking at the weather maps shown above on June 3, two meteorologists at US base Widewing in England, Irving Krick and Ben Holzman, said the planned invasion on June 5 was possible. However, teams of meteorologists at the British Admirality and the British Meteorological office, including most notably the Norwegian Sverre Petterssen, said an attempted landing would be unsafe. Chief meteorologist James Stagg persuaded General Dwight D. Eisenhower at the last moment to cancel the June 5 invasion.

It's a good thing he listened — stormy weather would likely have made the landing a disaster.

“With some justification I could have been criticized for not being sufficiently ‘gloomy,’ for the weather and winds during the night of June 4th-5th turned out to be even more severe than Douglas and I had predicted," Petterssen wrote later.

But on June 4, the three teams recognized an opportunity on June 6 as storm 'F' was leaving and storm 'E' appeared to have stalled (at least according to Petterssen; according to Krick, Petterssen's team still refused to clear an invasion).

“A sudden and major reorganization of the atmosphere over the Atlantic sector” on June 4 “threw the forecasters into confusion” but by the end of the day the three teams “reached a state of harmony that had hardly ever been attained since February when conference discussions began,” Petterssen wrote (as contextualized by Fleming).

The Normandy landings were a go.

Around midnight on the evening of June 5, the Allies began extensive aerial and naval bombardment as well as an airborne assault. The intricately coordinated attack continued in the early morning, as minesweepers cleared the channel for an invasion fleet comprising nearly 7,000 vessels. Allied infantry and armored divisions began landing on the coast of France at 06:30.

By the end of that day, they had gained a foothold in German-occupied Western Europe that proved critical to winning the war.

SEE ALSO: Here's Eisenhower's initial report on the D-Day invasion

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The D-Day invasion, code named Operation Overlord, was the largest seaborne invasion in history.

Almost 5,000 landing and assault craft, accompanied by 289 escort vessels and 277 minesweepers, from Canada, the US, Britain, and Australia took part in the operation. The Allies suffered a total of 226,386 casualties, but it proved a decisive moment in the war. 

Suddenly, the Nazis were fighting a two-front war in Europe, leading to a division in their forces across multiple flanks. But the cost of D-Day, in both human lives and devastation of the surrounding regions of France, was immense. 

The following photos from Getty photographer Peter Macdiarmid show an amazing juxtaposition of images from the affected areas of modern France with photos of the invasion from 72 years ago overlaid on top.

SEE ALSO: Here's a Nazi propaganda video saying the D-Day invasion failed

A view of Juno Beach on May 8, 2014 in Bernieres sur Mer, France. A Canadian soldier stands at the head of a group of German prisoners of war, including two officers, on Juno Beach at Bernières-sur-Mer, Normandy, France, June 6, 1944.

A view of the old village fountain on May 7, 2014 in Sainte Marie du Mont, France. A group of American soldiers stand at the village fountain, June 12, 1944.

A view of the roadway on May 7, 2014 in Saint Lo, France. United States Army trucks and jeeps are driving through the ruins of Saint-Lo.

The invasion of Normandy, which was named Operation Overlord, launched on June 6, 1944, and was one of the largest amphibious military assaults in history.

Saturday, June 6, marks the 72nd anniversary of Operation Overlord, commonly referred to as D-Day. A major operation during World War II, and the largest seaborne invasion in history, it marked the turning point in the fight against Axis powers in Europe.

Gen. Dwight D. Eisenhower, the supreme commander of Allied forces in Europe, gave this speech just prior to giving the order to begin the operation.

You are about to embark upon the Great Crusade, toward which we have striven these many months. The eyes of the world are upon you. The hopes and prayers of liberty-loving people everywhere march with you. In company with our brave Allies and brothers-in-arms on other Fronts, you will bring about the destruction of the German war machine, the elimination of Nazi tyranny over the oppressed peoples of Europe, and security for ourselves in a free world.

156,000 allied troops landed on five beaches, code named Gold, Juno, Sword, Utah and Omaha. British and Canadian troops overcame light opposition at Gold, Juno and Sword, as did U.S. troops at Utah. American forces landing on Omaha beach faced the fiercest resistance, suffering 2,400 casualties. In total, the beach landings claimed the lives of 4,313 Allied troops, 2,499 Americans, and 1,914 others from Allied nations.

In conjunction with the beach landings, 13,000 paratroopers landed behind German lines and secured key towns, bridges, and crossroads in order to break German supply lines and limit reinforcements.

Today, Eisenhower’s words still ring true for the men who fought and died on the beaches, fields, and among the hedgerows of Normandy: “The eyes of the world are upon you.”

Below are eight historic photos from the days leading up to, during, and after one of the most brutal battles in contemporary history.

SEE ALSO: These haunting photo overlays capture the horrors of D-Day

Gen. Dwight D. Eisenhower speaks with paratroopers who jumped behind enemy lines, June 5, 1944.

US soldiers assigned to the 101st Airborne Division, apply war paint to each other’s face in England in preparation for the invasion of Normandy, France, June 5, 1944.

American assault troops in a landing craft huddle behind the protective front of the craft as it nears a beachhead on the northern coast of France, June 6, 1944.

Several hours into the D-Day invasion, General Eisenhower sent a cable about the apparent success of the operation back to the War Department in Washington. 

At the time, Eisenhower had scant details of how well the beach head invasions had actually went. But based on reports he was receiving, the legendary general and future president was fairly certain that the invasion was proceeding well and would result in an Allied victory. 

Eisenhower's message begins: 

Local time is now eight in the morning. I have as yet no information concerning the actual landing nor our progress through beach obstacles ... All preliminary reports are satisfactory. Airborne formations apparently landed in good order with losses out of approximately 1250 airplanes participating about 30.

The last paragraph from the classified message reveals that June 5 was actually Eisenhower’s original planned date for D-Day. However, stormy weather moving over the Channel from England made a landing on the target beaches 'impossible.'

The weather considerably improved by the morning of June 6th. Allied infantry began landing on the coast of France at 06:30. By the end of the day, the Allies had gained a foothold in German-occupied Western Europe that was critical to winning the war.

Eisenhower wrote that the preliminary reports of the invasion were satisfactory: "The enthusiasm, toughness, and obvious fitness of every single man were high and the light of battle was in their eyes." 

Here is the full classified message from Eisenhower on D-Day, made available from the FDR Presidential Library: 

SEE ALSO: D-DAY: Here's how the Allies began to win the Second World War 70 years ago [PHOTOS]

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The success of the Allied D-Day Invasion caught the Nazis off guard and threw their war strategy to the dogs. Suddenly, Nazi Germany found itself fighting a two front war against foes that were making increasingly fast strides towards Berlin. 

Of course, the Nazis could not admit to as strategic defeat as what had occurred in Normandy. Within eight days of the invasion, Germany had put out Der Deutsche Wochenschau.  This propaganda video highlighted the bravery and skill of the Nazi forces, as well as insisting that the Allied invasions had failed. 

We have highlighted some of the most interesting scenes of the video below:

Below is an edited version of Der Deutsche Wochenschau. 

SEE ALSO: CBC is tweeting a blow-by-blow account of D-Day, and it's incredible

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The Allied invasion of Normandy was a challenge on a grand scale. Every single aspect of the plan drew new challenges for commanders. Luckily, the greatest military minds of the day were leading the Allied forces.

They came up with some ingenious solutions. For example, in the absence of securing a usable harbor, they created the Mulberry, a harbor that could be shipped and built on site to keep the flow of supplies going.

To confuse the Germans as to where the D-Day attacks would come, Operation Fortitude created an entire fake army aimed at the Pas-de-Calais. The soldiers on the invasion beaches still faced the many natural and man-made obstacles that would hinder their ability to effectively storm the beaches. One man was tasked to create overcome these obstacles and protect the assault forces.

Major General Percy Hobart, an unconventional yet very successful armored and engineering officer, created specialized vehicles designed to help amphibious forces overcome the natural and man-made obstacles common during a landing. These vehicles helped the British and Canadians during their assaults on Gold, Juneau, and Sword beaches. Collectively these vehicles were known as “Hobart’s Funnies.”

SEE ALSO: These haunting photo overlays capture the horrors of D-Day

Sherman DD Tank

The most well-known of Hobart’s Funnies was the Duplex Drive Sherman Tank — or Sherman DD. This tank had a large canvas floatation screen that was erected to make the tank seaworthy and included a secondary drive mechanism that powered a propeller to drive the tank through the water.

The idea was to launch these tanks a few miles from shore and have them come ashore with the infantry without the need to bring a large landing craft too close to shore. Their use on D-Day saw mixed results.

Churchill Crocodile

The Crocodile was a British Churchill tank that replaced the hull mounted machine gun with a flamethrower. An armored trailer behind the Croc carried fuel for the weapon. This weapon was adept at clearing German fortifications and later inspired American versions used in the Pacific.

Crab Tank

The Crab was a Sherman tank fitted with a cylindrical flail with weighted chains. When activated, the flail cleared a tank-width path by detonating any mines in its way with the weighted chains.

This tank was an improvement over previous versions as the Sherman’s engine drove the flail, rather than needing to fit a separate engine on the tank. It was also equipped with numerous ways to mark the cleared path for the following infantry or tanks.

On November 10, 1943, when Lt. Walter L. Chewning Jr., the catapult officer of the USS Enterprise, saw a 9,000-pound F6F Hellcat crash-land on the flight deck and erupt in a ball of flames as it barreled toward the gun gallery, he did not run away.

Instead, Chewning deliberately ran toward the wreck, stepped on the burning external fuel tank, which was hemorrhaging and fueling the flames, forced the plane's jammed canopy open, and saved the stunned young pilot's life.

The USS Enterprise would go down in history as an exemplary ship and crew in the Pacific theater of World War II, and the first carrier to respond after the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor.

Selfless acts of bravery, like the one captured in this image, typify the kind of spirit that helped the Allied powers win the war when things looked most bleak. Chewning would receive the Navy and Marine Corps Medal for his actions on that day.

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The 1965 movie “The Battle of the Bulge” is generally considered by war movie buffs to be the most inaccurate war movie ever made. It stars Henry Fonda leading a large cast of fictional characters (though Fonda’s Lt. Col. Kiley was based on a real US troop). The film was made to be viewed on a curved Cinerama screen using three projectors. Watching it on DVD doesn’t give the viewer the intended look, which especially hurts the tank battle scenes, according to the film rating website Rotten Tomatoes.

There are so many inaccuracies in the film that it comes off as interpretive instead of dramatic. In the film’s opening, a precursor to the errors to come, the narrator describes how Montgomery’s 8th Army was in the north of Europe; they were actually in Italy. The inaccuracies don’t stop there.

The weather was so bad at the launch of the German offensive that it completely negated Allied air superiority and allowed the Nazi armies to move much further, much fast than they would have had the weather been clear. In the 1965 film, the weather is always clear. When the film does use aircraft, the first one they show is a Cessna L-19 Bird Dog, a 1950s-era plane.

Despite the time frame of the real battle, December 1944- January 1945, and the well-documented struggles with ice and snow in the Ardennes at the time, there is no snow in the movie’s tank battle scenes. Also, there are few trees in the movie’s Ardennes Forest.

In an affront to the men who fought and won the battle, the film uses the M47 Patton tank as the German King Tiger tanks. The filmmakers show US tanks being sacrificed to make the Tiger tank use their fuel so the Germans will run out. The US didn’t need to use this tactic in the actual battle, as the Germans didn’t have the fuel to reach their objectives anyway.

Speaking of tactics, a German general in the film orders infantry to protect tanks by walking ahead of them after a Tiger hits a mine, which ignores the fact that a man’s weight is not enough to trigger an anti-tank mine and therefore none of them would have exploded until tanks hit them anyway.

Other inaccuracies include:

• The uniforms are all wrong.
• Jeeps in the film are models that were not yet developed in WWII.
• Salutes are fast, terrible and often indoors.
• The bazookas used in the films are 1950s Spanish rocket launchers (the film was shot in Spain)
• American engineers use C-4, which wasn’t invented until 11 years after the war’s end.
• Soldiers read Playboy Magazine from 1964.

The technical advisor on the film was Col. Meinrad von Lauchert, who commanded tanks at the Bulge — for the Nazis. He commanded the 2nd Panzer Division, penetrating deeper into the American lines than any other German commander. Like the rest of the Nazis, he too ran out of fuel and drove his unit back to the Rhine. He swam over then went home, giving up on a hopeless situation.

The reaction to the movie was swift: That same year, President Eisenhower came out of retirement to hold a press conference just to denounce the movie for its historical inaccuracies.

Here's a trailer for the movie in question:

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On July 16, 1945, the US conducted the world's first test of a nuclear weapon. Less than a month later, two bombs were dropped on the Japanese cities of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, bringing about the end of World War II.

No nuclear bombs have been used as weapons since the attacks on Japan, but thousands of tests have been conducted — primarily by the US and USSR throughout the Cold War.

Produced by Alex Kuzoian

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"That was the greatest and finest moment of my life," one of the world's most brutal tyrants reportedly said after touring the newly Nazi-occupied French capital.

The day after Germany signed an armistice with France, Hitler and his cronies toured Napoleon's tomb, the Paris opera house, Champs-Elysees, Arc de Triomphe, Sacre Coeur, and the Eiffel Tower on June 23, 1940.

Hitler's friend and architect Albert Speer was instructed to take note of the city's design to recreate similar yet superior German buildings.

"Wasn't Paris beautiful?" Hitler reportedly asked Speer.

"But Berlin must be far more beautiful. When we are finished in Berlin, Paris will only be a shadow."

While sightseeing, Hitler also ordered the destruction of two French World War I monuments that reminded him of Germany's bitter defeat.

The Führer's first official visit to the "City of Light" was also his last.

In all, Hitler spent three hours in Paris but spent four years occupying northern France.

SEE ALSO: This is the last known photo of Hitler

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With so many photos of the latest high-tech airplanes in various air forces, it's sometimes refreshing to step back and see images of the pioneering aircraft that led the way.

The following pictures from Donald Nijboer andDan Patterson, "Fighting Cockpits: In the Pilot's Seat of Great Military Aircraft from World War I to Today" does just that by placing the reader inside the cockpit of these incredible machines.

The following images beautifully demonstrate how aircraft cockpits have changed from World War I biplanes to the super advanced F-22 Raptor.

All photos are published with permission.

SEE ALSO: Amazing colorized photos show a unique side of World War II

Here's a British de Havilland DH.4 two-seat daylight bomber.

Source: "Fighting Cockpits: In the Pilot's Seat of Great Military Aircraft from World War I to Today"

This Royal Aircraft Factory S.E.5a Scout is housed at the French Musée de l’Air et de l’Espace. It was a biplane used for maintaining air superiority.

Source: "Fighting Cockpits: In the Pilot's Seat of Great Military Aircraft from World War I to Today"

The Canada Aviation and Space Museum is home to the impeccably preserved Bristol F.2B, a two-seater biplane used as a fighter and for reconnaissance.

Source: "Fighting Cockpits: In the Pilot's Seat of Great Military Aircraft from World War I to Today"

Distinguishing between friendly and enemy forces can be difficult in war, and World War II posed its own basic battlefield challenges. US soldiers — most of whom were conscripted men who might not have had extensive military experience — needed to be able to quickly recognize their forces' aircraft. This could be a matter of life and death for both soldiers and pilots, as noted by a joint manual from the US War and US Navy Departments issued during the war. 

"The existence of these problems was soon apparent when," the manual notes, "after two months, the casualties of the British Advanced Air Striking Force in France amounted to:— Shot down by the Germans, eight: Shot down by the French, nine." 

To help rectify the problem of friendly fire, US soldiers were given the Recognition Pictorial Manuel to help build their knowledge of enemy and friendly aircraft. 

Below are the graphical depictions of Allied and Axis planes that US servicemen had to study, in hopes of achieving "the highest general level of proficiency in recognition." 

The pictorial depictions of aircraft were separated into two pages labeled as 'Friend' and 'Foe.' 

Each section was then further subdivided to account for the aircraft's countries of origin. Axis aircraft were categorized by aircraft belonging to the Reich, Japan, and Italy while Allied aircraft were divided between the USA and the UK. 

Aside from the pictorial representation of the aircraft and their countries of origin, the manual also gives an approximation of the size of each plane. Each box within the charts designates a 100-foot-by-100-foot area. This information allowed US military personnel to be able to better spot and recognize both friendly and enemy aircraft at a time when radar technology was still new and not fully deployed. 

SEE ALSO: This chart shows the astounding devastation of World War II

SEE ALSO: Amazing colorized photos show a unique side of World War II

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During my last vacation, I watched an insane documentary about the Nazis' extensive amphetamine use and Adolf Hitler's drug addiction.

The film made an incredible claim: that Hitler killed himself because his doctor cut off his amphetamine supply.

This theory sounded crazy — I had to look into it — but when I got back to work, I couldn't find the documentary.

I wondered if I had entered some type of twilight zone (cruise ships have pretty strange channels). But my parents saw it too — we couldn't have all imagined the same thing.

At first glance, I thought it was the 2014 BBC documentary"Hitler's Hidden Drug Habit: Secret History". But I watched the whole thing, and the filmmakers made no mention of this wild can't-get-drugs suicide theory.

To be clear, though: Yes, Hitler was very, very into drugs.

Variousscholarshaveoutlinedhisextensivesubstance use. His personal physician, Dr. Theodor Morell, pumped him full of all sorts of treatments, from nerve tonics to Pervitin, a type of amphetamine common in Germany at the time.

Morell's personal journals list 74 medications that he gave the fuehrer, according to the BBC documentary, sometimes administering up to 20 injections a day. The floor of Hitler's bunker where he spent his last days was also allegedly littered with medications when researchers entered it years later.

There was apparently a rift between Hitler and his doctor in the days before he killed himself. Morell fled the country, and then, on April 30, 1945, Hitler committed suicide.

But would a lack of access to Morell's cache of drugs explain why Hitler did it?

There are simpler explanations for Hitler taking his own life — the fact that he was rapidly losing the war, for one.

I tried to find other people who had seen the same documentary I had, and came across just one person on Twitter:

But "America's Greatest Monuments" didn't pan out. I ultimately contacted a few researchers who were involved in the BBC documentary to see if they had heard of the suicide theory.

Sarah Bailey, a pharmacologist at the University of Bath, expressed strong doubts to Tech Insider:

"It is clear from the documents of the time that Hitler’s medicines were numerous and wide ranging. However, it is not clear how much or how frequently these medicines were given. As a pharmacologist, we have to be careful that the dose of any medicine determines whether it may have a medicinal effect rather than a toxic effect.

"It is documented that Hitler took amphetamine (not meth-amphetamine which is chemically slightly different, more addictive and faster acting). However this did not appear to be routinely in use and we do not know how frequently or how much he was given. Many other medicines appeared to have been given more routinely.

"From the information we had in preparation for making this film, it is too limited to make any conclusions. My personal feeling is that Hitler was not a meth addict but was an experimental subject for many of Dr Morrell’s ideas about medicines."

The clearest condemnation of this crazy theory came from Sir Richard J. Evans, a historian who has extensively studied World War II and the Third Reich.

Evans directed me toward an essay he wrote in a recent book of his entitled, "Was Hitler Ill?" In it, he outlines how considering whether Hitler was insane or sick is a futile endeavor:

"Hitler was not insane or deranged, or suffering from drug-induced delusions," he writes, "or laboring under the effects of some chronic disease such as syphilis, or acting in an unresolved hypnotic trance: on the contrary, he was sane according to any reasonable definition of the term, and fully responsible for his actions."

In response to the idea that Hitler committed suicide because cut off his amphetamine injections, Evans was unwavering: "I'm afraid this is complete rubbish," he told Tech Insider in an email.

But the most convincing argument came from Roland Jones, a colleague of Bailey's at University of Bath. Jones said he agreed with Bailey's assessment, and added that if Hitler wanted to get amphetamine, "he could easily have obtained it elsewhere."

After all, he was Hitler.

So while we'll label this theory debunked for now, questions about that enigmatic documentary remain. Why would someone make a documentary about it? And where did the filmmakers' evidence come from?

If you have any credible information about who made it, or have seen the documentary, too, email us at science@techninsider.io.

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NOW WATCH: Hitler's 3-mile-long abandoned Nazi resort is transforming into a luxury getaway

Hidden 10 stories below Grand Central Terminal, a secret basement can be found. This basement was a prime New York City target during World War II, as it provided electricity for trains in the Northeast dedicated to troop and equipment transport. The location remains confidential, and the facility continues to provide electricity to Metro-North trains. 

Produced by Justin Gmoser. Additional camera by Sam Rega. 

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Writer and avid cyclist Max Leonard made a rare discovery as he rode his bike around the remote French Alpes-Maritimes; startled, he stumbled upon to a number of discrete buildings fully hidden within the mountainous landscape, far from the civilized world.

Driven by a rabid curiosity – what were these military bunkers and why were they here? – Leonard partnered with photographer Camille McMillan to document his finding as best he could.

Over the course of 8 months, the two hunted the nearby countryside for any and all shelter they could find, which would eventually result in their printed study: “Bunker Research.”

One hundred photos, maps, and diagrams fill the pages of this bound beauty by Isola Press; inside, the construction method and rationale for these unusual structures is explained. Concrete walls were built and strategically placed throughout the French Alps during WWII to shield occupants from even the most powerful bomb blast, a function which is clearly reflected in the brutalist aesthetic.

Despite the imposition of man which brought them to life, the bunkers have succumbed to the forces of nature over the course of mere decades, gradually becoming one with the organic world surrounding. Both the architecture itself as well as Leonard and McMillan’s exhaustive documentation qualify as works of art, conscious design thinking, and the result of purposeful creation.

Buy here.