By mid-January, MacArthur had more than 30,000 Australian and American troops committed to overrunning 12,000 Japanese in the “Buna Pocket.” At the end of the month, just before Guadalcanal was finally secured, the last surviving Japanese defender was killed or captured—at a cost of more than 3,0...
By New Year’s Day 1945, American, British, and Red Army offensives were closing in on Germany’s industrial heartland and Berlin from the east, south, and west. At the Argonaut Conference in Yalta—4–11 February—Churchill, Stalin, and an ailing Roosevelt met to map out final strategy for how the Fü...