The men and women whose stories deserve to be remembered -- the famous and the utterly obscure.
They called themselves the 'Go for Broke' regiment. More than 800 of them died fighting for America in WWII. Their parents, siblings, and children were locked behind barbed wire in US internment camps -- on American soil -- at the very moment these soldiers were defending that soil.
Mordechai Anielewicz was the 23-year-old commander of the Jewish Fighting Organization (ZOB) who led the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising in April 1943. He died in the bunker at 18 Mila Street with his girlfriend and dozens of fighters. But his story didn't end there -- at least not for everyone.
While many Germans looked away during the Holocaust, a young woman from a Protestant pastor's family in Stuttgart organized one of the most effective rescue networks in southwestern Germany -- and almost nobody knows her name today.
On March 31, 1945, Second Lieutenant John C. McKnelly's B-17 Flying Fortress was struck by a Japanese kamikaze off the coast of Okinawa. What happened next was a testament to the extraordinary skill of an 18-year-old pilot.
Captured in Britain, shipped to Canada, escaped across frozen wilderness, stowed aboard a neutral ship, and made it back to Germany -- Franz von Werra's story reads like an adventure novel, but every word is documented history.
She wore a Nazi armband to move freely through the Warsaw Ghetto. She buried suitcases containing children's identities in a garden. She was beaten so severely by the Gestapo that she could not walk. And she never revealed a single name.
She flew the de Havilland Mosquito -- one of the fastest, most dangerous aircraft in WWII -- for 850 combat missions as a reconnaissance pilot, and she did it without any official authorization from the Romanian Air Force, which didn't want women in combat roles.
He was the voice that rallied Britain. But Winston Churchill suffered from severe clinical depression throughout the war, which he called 'the Black Dog.' He never let it stop him -- but it was a battle he fought every day, privately, while projecting an image of unbreakable confidence to the world.
World War I's greatest fighter ace survived 21 days adrift in the Pacific during WWII -- but he was not a pilot this time. He was a passenger on a B-17 that went down near the Gilbert Islands, and his ordeal tested every limit of human endurance.