For thousands of Allied airmen the most terrifying sight they ever beheld was a Mitsubishi A6M Zero bearing down on them—burnished black cowling over a snarling Sakae engine, staccato bursts flashing from two machine guns and two cannon—often the last thing they ever saw. Read more
Air Chief Marshal Sir Arthur Travers Harris, the burly, red-haired chief of Royal Air Force Bomber Command, was an anxious man on the evening of Saturday, May 30, 1942. Read more
The afternoon of May 30, 1942, found Clyde Sarah waiting for his girlfriend Ida on Estudillo Avenue, one of the main thoroughfares in San Leandro, a small town just across the bay from San Francisco. Read more
It was 7 o’clock Israeli time, three hours after dawn on Monday, June 5, 1967. The summer season’s daily thick morning mist was just lifting from the coastal areas, across the breadth of the humid Nile Delta, and along the Suez Canal. Read more
Gnaeus Domitius Corbulo was probably born between 4 bc and ad 1. His younger half-sister was first the mistress and then the consort of Gaius Caesar Germanicus, better known as the Emperor Caligula. Read more
Major Robert B. Yates arrived at the 1111th Engineers’ headquarters in Trois-Ponts, Belgium, around 13:30 on Monday, December 18, 1944, expecting to sit in on an ordinary staff meeting. Read more
On October 15, 1942, a total of 22 men, all British subjects and all prisoners of war captured by Japanese military forces in the Gilbert Islands in the Central Pacific, were executed on Betio islet at Tarawa Atoll.. Read more
For nearly two long months, from July 14 to early September 1683, Vienna endured the siege from the Ottoman Empire. Read more
Patton’s Prayer: A True Story of Courage, Faith and Victory in World War II (Alex Kershaw, Dutton Press, New York NY, 2024, 348 pp., Read more
It was the custom for King Alfred of Wessex to celebrate the Twelve Days of Christmas at his royal palace at Dorchester, in the county of Dorset. Read more
Movies and novels about spies and espionage usually portray brave and sexy secret agents going deep behind enemy lines to grab some invaluable and potentially destabilizing piece of information. Read more
On September 3, 1939, when Great Britain and France declared war on Germany, the Kriegsmarine only had 46 operational U-boats, the majority of which were used for training. Read more
From games exiting Early Access to games entering Microsoft’s Game Pass subscription service, we now come to another look at Hell Let Loose. Read more
Publisher 2tainment and the indie game devs at Linked Dimensions launched their turn-based tactical war game Tank Operations: European Campaign in Steam Early Access back in August 2019, but the time has finally come to unleash the full game. Read more
Vice-Admiral Sir John Pennington’s jolly-boat nudged against the accommodation ladder that had been rigged aboard the Santiago, flagship of Admiral Don Rafael d’Oquendo’s Spanish fleet. Read more
“It is with artillery that one makes war.” So declared Napoleon Bonaparte, one of the Great Captains of military history and a born gunner himself. Read more
Belgian Fort Eben Emael was as close to impregnable as modern defense works could be—or so it seemed. Read more
On May 26, 1940, as the armies of Nazi Germany roared across prostrate France and the British Expeditionary Force was in the midst of its evacuation by sea from the European continent, Italian Army Marshal Pietro Badoglio, 69, was in the waiting room of the Palazzo Venezia in Rome. Read more
By the end of the second day visibility was reduced to almost zero. Burning hulks of everything from ME-109s to M3 “Honey” tanks, Panzer IIIHs, and trucks of all descriptions littered the battleground that was once an airfield. Read more
On the night of August 4, 1864, in the cabin of his flagship the USS Hartford, Admiral Farragut read his Bible, arriving at ultimate assurance that God was on his side. Read more
