On the night of November 20, 1983, Armageddon went prime time. Over 100 million Americans tuned in to the ABC television network to watch the two-hour drama The Day After. Read more
A big challenge faced Maj. Gen. Brian G. Horrocks, an infantryman, when he was cross-posted to take command of the British Army’s 9th Armored Division in March 1942. Read more
At midnight, the jumpers of 2nd Battalion, 517th Parachute Regimental Combat Team, as well as the 596th Parachute Combat Engineer Company, still dripping from the paint-spray line, shuffled across Ombrone Airfield to the waiting of Serial 6 and climbed aboard. Read more
On the morning of April 18, 1961, readers of the New York Times awoke to a startling headline: “Anti-Castro Units Land in Cuba; Report Fighting at Beachhead; Rusk Says U.S. Read more
The humiliating seizure of the American spy ship Pueblo on January 23, 1968, by North Korean gunboats proved both an enormous intelligence setback and a searing indictment of America’s Cold War policy. Read more
Five hundred Spanish musketeers filed into the dim forest on the southern edge of a wooded plain south of the border fort at Rocroi, France, at dusk on May 18, 1643. Read more
January and February 1905 were critical months for both the Russian and Japanese empires, which were locked in a war over East Asia that neither of them could sustain. Read more
It is, perhaps, not as well known as other prewar and wartime gatherings of the World War II era, but the quietly held meeting of top Nazi bureaucrats at a secluded villa on Lake Wannsee in the Berlin suburbs on January 20, 1942, was just as much a landmark event as others with higher profiles. Read more
The American jeep holding the 3rd Belorussian Front Commander, General Ivan Danilovich Chernyakhovsky, drove quickly through the city of Mehlsack, just outside Königsberg. Read more
In December 1837, 400 men armed with muskets, pitchforks, and staves marched against the city of Toronto and the British government. Read more
Although neither side was aware of it at the time, the battle for Okinawa would be the last major battle of World War II. Read more
The khaki-clad soldiers wounded in the steaming jungles of Cuba during the Spanish-American War had distinct advantages over their Civil War brethren. Read more
British Admiral Lord Richard Howe, standing on the quarterdeck of his 100-gun ship of the line Queen Charlotte, snapped his signal book shut on the morning of June 1, 1794. Read more
The Germans knew the bombers were coming, and they prepared even as the U.S. 457th Bomber Group first assembled in the early morning sunlight over faraway London. Read more
A chill breeze cut through the early morning haze, and the storm-swollen sea was rough off the coast of northern France on Tuesday, June 6, 1944. Read more
The city of Ternopil, located on the eastern bank of the Seret River, was founded in 1540 as a Polish military stronghold. Read more
In the distance, they could see the jagged flashes of lightning, an incoming squall in the dark. Just before the rain arrived, so did St. Read more
The Russo-Polish War of 1919-1920 was the most portentous event facing post-Versailles Europe. It was not just the continuation of a centuries-long contest between Russia and Poland to determine which would dominate eastern Europe, but a struggle involving a new ideology—communism—which the Bolshevik regime in Moscow had to spread throughout the Continent to survive. Read more
The strategic defeats suffered in the Battles of the Coral Sea and Midway checked Japan’s advance in the Pacific. Read more
Gene Verge was born in Pasadena, California, in 1918. As a young man in 1941 he faced the probability of being drafted. Read more
