Civil War Intelligence

The Union officer saw it quite clearly across the Rappahannock River: a hand-painted sign held up by a Rebel soldier that read, “Burnside and his pontoons stuck in the mud. Read more

Battle Beyond The Horizon in the Coral Sea

In March and early April 1942, American and British codebreakers uncovered indications of a Japanese offensive being prepared in the Pacific against Australia. Read more

The Wheel Lock: Birth of the Combat Pistol

By the late 15th Century, early firearm designers were already looking at ideas for semi-automatic weapons. The matchlock had been the first mechanism to make a shoulder-aimed firearm, the arquebus, possible. Read more

The OSS: Assisting French Resistance in the Haute Savoie Region

On a moonless night in January 1944, in the Haute Savoie region of southeast France, the drone from the engine of a RAF bomber could be heard in the distance. Read more

Captured Weapons of the Reich: A Photo Essay

Johnston Goes After Ulysses S. Grant at Shiloh

By the end of the winter campaign of 1861-1862, Union Maj. Gen. Ulysses S. Grant had shattered the Confederate defenses in northwest Tennessee with a combined land and water attack on Forts Henry and Donelson, forcing General Albert Sidney Johnston to abandon his bastion at Nashville and retreat southward. Read more

The Grumman F4F Wildcat was a Rugged, Lethal Tool for the U.S. Navy

From the time of the Wright brothers, the vast majority of aircraft were biplanes with two wings stacked one above the other. Read more

Roncesvalles and the Birth of Chivalry

The Age of Chivalry brings to mind knights in shining armor and damsels in distress, along with traveling troubadours and minstrels singing chansons de geste, “songs of deeds,” telling of feats of arms and labors of love. Read more

Operation Torch and The Assassination of Admiral Jean Darlan

Less than a year after the sudden and devastating Japanese attack against the United States at Pearl Harbor on December 7, 1941, the American military was about to embark on a large-scale offensive operation against German and Italian forces in North Africa. Read more

Military Weapons: The Davy Crockett Mobile Missile Launcher

Design work for a minimum-size atomic warhead called the XW-51 began at the University of California Radiation Laboratory in the mid 1950s. Read more

Bloody Fiasco at the Crater

In the summer of 1864, after six weeks of virtually constant combat in the Wilderness area of northern Virginia, the Union and Confederate armies of Ulysses S. Read more

Frank McDonough’s ‘The Hitler Years’

The apologue of the “boiling frog,” which postulates that an amphibian placed in a pot of tepid water that is gradually heated to the point of boiling won’t notice the increase and jump out. Read more

David Lyle Williams’ ‘The Road to Cisterna’

The Battle of Anzio (January 22-May 25, 1944) was aimed at bypassing the German’s daunting Gustav Line in an effort to capture Rome. Read more

Richard J. Evans’ ‘Hitler’s People’

Much has been written on the politics and institutions of Germany during the rise of the Nationalsozialistische Deutsche Arbeiterpartei (NSDAP) from 1933 to 1945. Read more

Jeffrey Cox’s ‘Devil’s Fire’

The first major Allied offensive in the Pacific during World War II, the brutal six-month struggle that was the Guadalcanal-Solomons Campaign (August 1942-February 1943) marked a turning point in the war as U.S. Read more

Cheryl W. Thompson’s ‘Forgotten Souls’

An investigative journalist for NPR and the daughter of one of the Tuskegee Airmen—the Black pilots who mostly flew as fighter escorts for America during WWII—the author follows the legacy of the 27 men who never came back. Read more

Sinclair McKay’s ‘Saint Petersburg’

Within the expansive history of Russia’s iconic second largest city, from Peter the Great to Vladimir Putin, McKay details the nearly 900 days of the Siege of Leningrad (as the city was then known), considered to be one of the worst sieges in history, causing an estimated 1.5 million deaths out of city population of about 3.2 million. Read more

Alan Allport’s ‘Advance Britannia’

Professor Allport’s Advance Britannia picks up where Britain at Bay: The Epic Story of the Second World War 1938-1941, described by The Wall Street Journal as “the single best examination of British politics, society, and strategy [from 1938 to 1941] that has ever been written,” left off. Read more

Ian Buruma’s ‘Stay Alive’

Already a struggle, life in Berlin grew worse in 1943, with the German defeat at Stalingrad, and then nightmarish as the Allied bombs began to fall, before the terror of the approaching Red Army gripped the city. Read more

David vs Goliath

When Stalin and Hitler signed a non-aggression pact in August 1939, they secretly created spheres of influence. Besides dividing up Poland, they agreed to allow each other free reign over nations and territories they deemed important. Read more