By Michael E. Haskew
For three centuries, feudal Japan remained comfortably isolated from the rest of the world. By order of the Tokugawa Shogunate, foreigners landing on Japanese shores risked immediate execution. Read more
The psychological and military shock that the Allies experienced when they first encountered Mitsubishi’s legendary A6M2 Zero fighter plane at the beginning of the Pacific War may be difficult to understand today. Read more
On October 28, ad 312, a Roman emperor was drowning. The sight must have amazed his soldiers. All summer Rome had been filled with rumors of the western emperor, Constantine, and the ease with which he and his army had crossed the Alps and, once on Italian soil, strung together a handful of victories in the north. Read more
On July 14, 1940, William Donovan stood on the pier fronting New York harbor and waited to board the Pan Am flying boat named the Lisbon Clipper for a flight that would take him to Portugal and then to London, his ultimate destination. Read more
Shortly after 8 am on June 6, 1944, a German officer overlooking the Vierville-sur-Mer Draw on Omaha Beach reported that the soldiers defending the beach were repelling the Americans: “The enemy is in search of cover behind the coastal zone obstacles. Read more
In the late afternoon of April 6, 1945, five days after American GIs and leathernecks scrambled onto an Okinawa beach a scant 500 miles from Japan, two U.S. Read more
Almost from the beginning, the short, violent reign of Paraguayan strongman Francisco Solano Lopez devolved into a nightmare from which his unfortunate people could not awake. Read more
“We had been assured by our officers before we invaded France in 1944,” recorded Bill Harris, “that our Sherman tanks could take care of any Nazi armor we met there.” Read more
In the 1780s the Founding Fathers of the United States didn’t so much revise the old Articles of Confederation as devise an entirely new government as set forth in the Constitution. Read more
The story of the Luftwaffe’s Reichsverteidigung (Defence of the Reich) is the story of the U.S. Army Air Force (USAAF)—the Mighty Eighth based in England and the 15th Air Force, which included the Tuskegee Airmen, based in Tunisia and Italy. Read more
Seventy-five years after that deadly winter in Korea in 1950, a former Washington Post military correspondent and historian sets out to uncover what really happened at the Battle of Chosin Reservoir and the fate of the U.S. Read more
Author Mark Stille bemoans the “continuing flood of Pearl Harbor books [that] focus on the failure to avoid conflict in the months before the attack or on the deeply flawed concept that ‘Washington’ conspired to let the Japanese take the first shots of the war while not informing the commanders at Pearl Harbor what was coming.” Read more
A highly readable and engaging narrative of a University of Virginia English major who quit his teaching job in Brooklyn and found himself drafted into the Army in 1969. Read more
A ground-level view of island warfare by a U.S. Marine Corps rifleman who spent 27 months in the Pacific. Read more
Hart, the oral historian for the Imperial War Museum in London, constructs a highly engaging narrative of the British Egyptian and Sudanese campaigns (Egypt in 1882, Sudan in 1883-85 and 1896-98) by alternating his own prose with first-hand accounts from soldiers and journalists who were there in the desert. Read more
Though now more nuanced, for many years historians have written about the “spirit” that surrounded the buildup to the Great War. Read more
The world of first-person shooter Hell Let Loose, which originally debuted as a World War II game in 2021, is getting ready to expand into new territory. Read more
For more than a year and a half, 120 British sailors and Marines led a successful blockade of the French “Sugar Island” of Martinique, birthplace of Gen. Read more
From the deck of a quinquereme, one of 60 in his invasion fleet, Roman Consul Marcus Claudius Marcellus surveyed Syracuse’s Little Harbor on the coast of Sicily. Read more
For the men of the U.S. 9th Infantry Regiment, the evening of November 25, 1950, began routinely enough. Read more
