Bloody Tarawa: Betio’s Lagoon

By John Wukovits

Colonel Merritt A. Edson, the 2nd Marine Division’s chief of staff, and Colonel David M. Shoup designed a simple plan to seize Betio—land along its northern beaches, drive straight across the narrow island, and kill the defenders. Read more

In June 1757, ever-victorious Prussian monarch Frederick the Great advanced confident on Austrian forces at Kolin.

Frederick The Great’s First Defeat

By Arnold Blumberg

Frederick the Great’s prescription for warfare was simple. The Prussian monarch wanted “short and lively wars” that relied on swift, powerful, and decisive military operations. Read more

Future U.S. President Harry S. Truman led a National Guard field artillery battery on the Western Front during the Great War.

Harry Truman on the Western Front

By Robert F. Dorr

In the darkness and driving rain on August 29, 1918, German artillery shells smashed down on American artillerymen fighting on a fir-clad slope in the Vosges Mountains in Alsace. Read more

Aubrey Cosens of the Queen’s Own Rifles

by Angus Scully

Aubrey Cosens was the first soldier of the Third Canadian Division to earn the Victoria Cross in World War II—and this was a division that had landed on D-Day, taken 76 percent casualties in Normandy, and used its amphibious warfare experience to defeat the Germans in Holland. Read more

In December 1943, the First Canadian Infantry Division was ordered to capture the Italian port  town of Ortona.

Little Stalingrad: The Struggle for Ortona

By Jerome Baldwin

By the autumn of 1943, the Allied armies fighting in Italy had discovered that Winston Churchill’s description of Italy as the “soft underbelly of Europe” had been a falsehood of monumental proportions. Read more

Major General Eric Dorman-Smith was an architect of the strategy that won the first battle of El Alamein in June 1942.

Eric Dorman-Smith: Churchill’s Scapegoat in North Africa

By Jon Diamond

When one gazes upon the bookshelves in the Military History section of a well-endowed library, one cannot help but notice the number of volumes dedicated to the battles for North Africa during World War II and particularly to the Battle of El Alamein in October 1942. Read more