A Research-Grade WWII Archive
1,142 hours of uncut veteran testimony — recorded, transcribed, and indexed by working historians. Sixty-two percent of these accounts appear in no other public archive.
Finding Aid
The catalog is organized the way a library finding aid is — by theater of operations, military branch, year of birth, and the veteran's native language. Every entry is fully transcribed, OCR-verified, and tagged with unit history cross-references.
From the Normandy landings to the fall of Berlin — 612 hours covering D-Day veterans, airborne operations, the Ardennes offensive, and occupation duty. Includes 74 hours of Wehrmacht and 38 hours of civilian resistance testimonies.
Marine, Army, and Navy veterans of Guadalcanal, Iwo Jima, Okinawa, and the China-Burma-India theater. Includes 31 hours with Navajo code-talkers and 22 hours with Merrill's Marauders veterans recorded in the 1980s and 1990s.
Army (742 h), Navy & Coast Guard (188 h), Marine Corps (114 h), Army Air Forces (76 h), Merchant Marine (14 h), and civilian services including the WAC, WAVES, and Red Cross. Filter by rank and by MOS/afloat rating.
Veterans born between 1908 and 1931, indexed in twelve languages: English, German, Russian, French, Polish, Italian, Japanese, Mandarin, Czech, Dutch, Hungarian, and Yiddish. Cross-reference parent documents from the main archive.
Editor's Selection
Four recordings the editorial board has surfaced for filmmakers, genealogists, and researchers this season. Each is accompanied by a time-stamped transcript, chapter markers, and a unit-history dossier.
Editor's Pick · Polish Resistance
Kamińska carried messages between district command posts during the 1944 Warsaw Uprising and survived sixty-three days in the city's sewers. Her testimony describes the collapse of the Old Town position, the civilian evacuation through the Vistula, and her subsequent imprisonment in Stutthof. Unique to this archive.
Read transcript & listen →U.S. Army · Pacific
An assault-section leader's first-person account of the Iwo Jima landings, the loss of his platoon sergeant on Mount Suribachi, and his return visits to the island in 1985 and 1994.
Soviet Air Force · Eastern Front
A navigator on the P-38 "night witch" plywood bombers describes 1,028 combat missions over the Crimea and Belarus, the loss of her entire squadron, and her postwar work as a flight instructor.
Royal Navy · Atlantic
A first lieutenant's account of the disastrous 1942 Arctic convoy and the subsequent scuttling of his ship — told with the candor of a man who spent forty years refusing to discuss it.
How to Listen
Every testimony opens in a dedicated player with waveform scrub, synchronized chapter markers, side-by-side transcript, and — where the original reel survives — a downloadable archival audio file. Researchers may export time-stamped transcripts with full citation. No advertisements. No algorithmic sequencing. One veteran, one voice, one war.
“The war ended for the world in 1945. For me it ended on a Tuesday in November, 1967, when my daughter asked me what I did in the war and I opened my mouth and nothing came out.”
Begin Listening
A free WW2 Total account opens 38,000+ primary documents and 142 hours of curated veteran testimony — the largest free tier offered by any scholarly WWII archive. Subscribe for the full 1,142-hour collection, time-stamped transcript export, and citation tools used by Emmy-winning documentary teams.
No advertising. Cited by the U.S. Army Command and General Staff College, King's College London, and the Australian War Memorial.
