La Gleize Battle of the Bulge Museum
By Michel De TrezThere is no shortage of museums in the Belgian Ardennes to record the region’s dark winter of World War II. Read more
Remembering a Day of Remembrance
By Flint WhitlockThis year, as I have done almost every year for the past 30 years, I took part in the Memorial Day ceremony at the 10th Mountain Division War Memorial near the division’s former training area high up in the Colorado Rockies. Read more
75th Anniversary of the Battle of Midway
By Michael E. HaskewSeventy-five years ago this month, the pivotal battle of World War II in the Pacific occurred in the waters surrounding an otherwise obscure atoll, Midway, roughly 1,300 miles from Pearl Harbor, where American involvement in the conflict had begun so suddenly just six months earlier. Read more
Weighing the Odds of Crusader Success
The christian crusaders that marched south into Ottoman Rumelia in 1444 bet heavily that the combined power of Poland, Hungary, and Wallachia would prove sufficient to break the iron grip the Ottoman Porte had on the southern Balkans. Read more
The Lions of Carentan Part III: Operation Cobra
By Volker GriesserBackground: In this, the third and final installment of a three-part series excerpted from The Lions of Carentan, the 2011 book by a respected German military historian, Fallschirmjäger Regiment 6 (FJR 6) has been pushed out of Ste.-Mère-église, Read more
The Lions of Carentan Part II: Defending Carentan
By Volker GriesserBackground: Fallschirmjäger Regiment 6, under the command of Major Friedrich August Freiherr von der Heydte, had the fortune (or misfortune) to be stationed in Normandy at the time of the Allied invasion of France on June 6, 1944. Read more
The Lions of Carentan Part I: Paratrooper vs Paratrooper on D-Day
By Volker GriesserBackground: Fallschirmjäger Regiment 6 was organized in February 1943, under the command of Major Egon Liebach. It was part of the 2nd Fallschirmjäger Division and was stationed in France, where it trained in parachute and glider operations. Read more
Michael Wittmann: How the Legendary Panzer Ace Died in World War II
By Christopher MiskimonDuring the late morning of August 8, 1944, the day famed tank commander Michael Wittmann would meet his end in combat, German SS-Oberführer (Colonel) Kurt “Panzer” Meyer sat in his staff car as his driver made his way toward the town of Cintheaux, France, near the front lines. Read more
Book Review: Thunder at the Gates: The Black Civil War Regiments That Redeemed America
By Christopher MiskimonThe men of the 54th Massachusetts Infantry Regiment began a hard march at 8:30 am on February 20, 1864. Read more
Book Reviews: Nine Literary Picks For May 2017
By Christopher Miskimon Pax Romana: War, Peace and Conquest in the Roman World(Adrian Goldsworthy, Yale University Press, New Haven, CT, 2016, 513 pp., Read more
“Put the Boys In”: Confederate Cadets at the Battle of New Market
By Pedro GarciaAs the Civil War continued in the spring of 1864, a Shenandoah Valley resident lamented, “Our prospects look gloomy, very gloomy.” Read more
The Men Against the Bomb
By Andrew J. RotterThe men and women who imagined and then built the atomic bomb thought they were doing something different from what makers of “conventional” weapons did. Read more
LIFE Photographer Ralph Morse’s War
By Susan ZimmermanIn an age before television and instant communications, Americans wanted to see what was going on in the world’s “deadliest conflict in human history,” and LIFE magazine was making a name for itself as THE war magazine during World War II. Read more
Battle of Graignes: An HQ Company’s Heroic Last Stand in Normandy
By Martin K.A. MorganSome 16 million Americans served during World War II, and tens of thousands of sons of the State of Louisiana served in every branch of the U.S. Read more
The Amazing Voyages of the USS O’Brien
By Eric NiderostAt exactly three o’clock in the afternoon on February 25, 1944, a crowd gathered at the Boston Navy Yard for the commissioning ceremony of the USS O’Brien (DD725), a destroyer of the Sumner class. Read more
Shootout in Kula Gulf
By John DamagalskiThe island of Guadalcanal loomed in the distance as the warships of Task Force 36.1 approached the waters of Iron Bottom Sound on July 5, 1943. Read more
The First and Last Flight of the Spruce Goose
By Allyn VannoyThe Time magazine article was titled “It Flies!” It was a note of triumph and vindication, but also an epitaph, of an aircraft that was five years in the making—the “Spruce Goose,” a plane that should not have existed. Read more
How Many Japanese Planes Were Shot Down During Pearl Harbor?
By Tom YarboroughOn a serene Sunday morning the residents of Oahu enjoyed the dawning of another gorgeous day in paradise. Read more
Hiroshima’s Ground Zero Museum
By Flint WhitlockAlthough located 420 miles west of Tokyo, the city of Hiroshima is today a tourist mecca, drawing tens of thousands of visitors from around the world for one single reason: to stand at the epicenter of history’s first nuclear explosion used against an enemy population. Read more
Sherman’s March to the Sea
By William StroockOn September 3, 1864, a triumphant Maj. Gen. William Tecumseh Sherman telegraphed Washington, “Atlanta is ours and fairly won.” Read more
