Top Secret: Gen. Mark Clark’s Daring Operation Flagpole

The five Americans were trapped in a small, dark, empty wine cellar in an isolated French villa on the coast of Algiers. Read more

Firestorm at Hollandia

By April 1944, American and Australian troops were moving westward along the northern edge of New Guinea, reclaiming territory taken by the Japanese in early 1942. Read more

Confederate Submarine H. L. Hunley

At the start of the American Civil War in April 1861, U.S. President Abraham Lincoln proclaimed that he planned to blockade the Confederacy by stationing warships in waters off its shores. Read more

C-47 Crew Chief’s Four Flights into Hell

By Elmer Wisherd with Nan Wisherd

Elmer Wisherd was born on December 1, 1920, in North Dakota. Shortly thereafter, his family moved to a farm in Bruce, Wisconsin. Read more

Siege of Bastogne: The Battle for Noville

By Kevin M. Hymel

It was December 19, 1944, one day before the Siege of Bastogne. Shortly after 10:30 am, 26-year-old Major William Desobry picked up his field telephone, called his combat commander, Colonel William Roberts, and asked if he could withdraw from the Belgian village of Noville. Read more

Bloody Clash at the Battle of Ia Drang

Specialist 4 George McDonald leaped out of a UH-1 helicopter on November 14, 1965, into a hellish firefight. Read more

Grant’s Ordeal at the Battle of Shiloh

It was raining heavily, a deluge of almost Biblical proportions that hammered down on the exhausted men of the Union’s Army of the Tennessee. Read more

Rescue Plane Down

“Awe c’mon, Mom,” Cecil Petty told his emotional mother before leaving Homer, Illinois, in February 1941. “Who knows, I might be a hero.” Read more

Soldiers: Edward O.C. Ord

By Frank Jastrzembki

Five busts of his greatest lieutenants during the Civil War watch over the sarcophagus of Lt. Gen. Ulysses S. Read more

Weapons: WWII PT Boats

By William F. Floyd, Jr.

Late in the day on October 24, 1944, all of the available 39 patrol torpedo (PT) boats of the U.S. Read more

A stirring chapter of naval history steeped in controversy.

While American troops slugged it out with the Japanese on the Philippine island of Leyte, one of the greatest battles in the history of naval warfare raged far and wide in the surrounding waters. Read more

Race to Moscow

The troops of Germany’s Army Group Center were more than a week into a fresh offensive to capture Moscow on July 14 when they approached the historic battlefield of Borodino where the Russians delayed Napoleon’s advance on Moscow in 1812. Read more

Peter Ortiz: OSS Operative, Undercover Hero

Along with three comrades, one of the Marine Corps heroes is still remembered in the small town of Centron in southeastern France. Read more

The Red Ass Squadron Goes to War

Unlike bomber crews that went home if they survived a designated number of missions, World War II fighter pilots like Lieutenant Jim Carl, 354th Fighter Group, United States Army Air Forces (USAAF), flew until the war ended, they got shot down over enemy territory and were captured, or they died. Read more

The final battle of the Latin Crusades was a bloody siege that resulted in the downfall of the last crusader-held territories.

During the spring 1291 an enormous Muslim host moved against Acre along the Mediterranean coast. At the time it was Christendom’s last foothold in the Holy Land, a region fought over for centuries during

the religious wars known as the Crusades. Read more

Conspiracy: The Death of Stephen Decatur

To die for personal honor is a long-vanished custom of the pre-industrial age. But 200 years ago it still held great meaning for men, particularly in politics and the military. Read more

Alexander Nevsky’s Glorious Victory

The mass of heavily armored crusader knights swept across the frozen surface of Lake Peipus toward the Novgorodian troops that waited anxiously on the eastern shore. Read more

The Bridges at Nijmegen

Lieutenant Colonel Ben Vandervoort’s 2nd Battalion, 505th Parachute Infantry Regiment (2/505) was fighting its way through the Dutch town of Nijmegen on September 19, 1944. Read more

“Need reinforcements. Without them, kiss us goodbye.”

In April 1963 the U.S. Special Forces established a triangular-shaped fortified outpost at the southern end of the remote A Shau Valley in what was then the northern part of South Vietnam. Read more

Hard Road to the Rhine

January 1945—with World War II in its sixth year—found the Allied armies going on the offensive after the Battle of the Bulge, but they were still west of the Rhine and six weeks behind schedule in their advance toward Germany. Read more