The unrelentingly harsh winter of 1864-1865 gave no respite to Virginia’s war-torn Shenandoah Valley. Heavy snows and frigid temperatures made travel difficult, and the two opposing armies found themselves literally frozen into place, 90 miles apart and in no particular hurry to get at each other again before the weather broke. Read more
Valkyria Chronicles is an interesting franchise.
It’s one of those series one would assume is more popular than it really is simply due to the overwhelming fan fervor, and their vocal disappointment at the fact that it didn’t catch on as blazing hot as it could have in North America. Read more
I wrote previously about my guided three D-Day tours in the summer of 2014. I repeated the tour-guiding experience in May and June this year for the Minnesota World War II History Roundtable during a tour of Fifth Army battlefields in Italy. Read more
The recollections of Virginia-born John O. Casler of the famed Confederate Stonewall Brigade offer considerable insight into the nature of the fighting, as well as the thoughts and actions of the enlisted men, at Spotsylvania Court House in mid-May 1864. Read more
For the black-skinned, blue-clad soldiers deployed on the extreme left flank of the Union Army outside Nashville, Tennessee, the order to advance announced at dawn on December 15, 1864, was a long time coming. Read more
It’s not often you get a chance to play a World War II-related game on Nintendo’s portable 3DS platform. Read more
On the morning of July 15, 1410 two heralds approached the enormous host of Poles, Bohemians, Hungarians, Czechs, Cossacks, Tartars, Livonians—any and all who felt they had a grudge against the opposing force of Teutonic Knights and their allies, also gathered from all over Europe. Read more
Despite never having gained the mythological fame of Valley Forge, the encampment of the Continental Army at Morristown, New Jersey, over the winter of 1779-80 was a horrendous trial, worse for the men than that at the Pennsylvania hollow, and dire for the revolutionary cause. Read more
Late in the evening of June 25, 1950 U.S. Secretary of State Dean Acheson was at his Maryland farmhouse reading when a call arrived to inform him of a serious situation in the Far East. Read more
In June 1861, two months after Confederate artillery fired on Fort Sumter to begin the Civil War, 44-year-old, Louisiana-born Henry H. Read more
One question has loomed over mankind for decades: What if the Nazis have been hiding out on the dark side of the Moon ever since the end of World War II? Read more
In the misty early morning of February 4, 1944. thousands of Japanese troops marched silently through the jungle in the first move of their counter-offensive against the British-Indian XV Corps attempting to advance south in the Arakan region of Burma. Read more
I can assure you that he has a military mind indeed and in adding experience to the theory he already has, he will become a person of distinction,” Maj. Read more
For Union Lieutenant Harrison Millard, it was an unsettling development. An aide on the staff of Brig. Gen. Read more
One of Franklin D. Roosevelt’s longtime interests was the hidden world of espionage. In the months before the United States entered World War II, the commander-in-chief was dabbling in the covert world of intelligence-gathering, using a number of trusted personal friends as his own private eyes and ears around the globe. Read more
The mighty invasion armada for the main thrust at Luzon in the Philippine Islands was being assembled on December 28, 1944. Read more
A series of swift victories took Japanese troops to the gates of India in 1941-1942 when British and Indian units fell back to the Assam hills northwest of Burma. Read more
In November 1941, about 150 miles off the west coast of Australia, a singular naval battle was fought that had great implications for all struggles at sea, past and future. Read more
Angelo J. “Red” Mantini was hardly an angel growing up in the small coal-mining towns of western Pennsylvania in the 1930s. Read more
There’s currently a blazing hot war taking place within the very feed of our television advertising spectrum. If you haven’t noticed or, better yet, aren’t one to waste as much time as me watching TV, this is a head-to-head battle between two larger-than-life war game franchises. Read more
