Life of a Colossus

To say that Caius Julius Caesar was one of the most influential men in world history is still something of an understatement. Read more

The famous painting, Washington Crossing the Delaware, has had its share of historical detractors.

Almost from the time it was completed in 1850, Emanuel Leutze’s famous painting, Washington Crossing the Delaware, has attracted more than its share of artistic detractors. Read more

The specter of Nazi war crimes continues to cast a shadow in the 21st century.

A recent news story serves as a reminder that more than 60 years after the end of World War II, the pursuit and punishment of Nazi war criminals remains relentless. Read more

Realistic versus Cinematic Game Play

New for the PC is Battlefront Games’ real-time squad-level strategy game, Theatre of War. Four years in the making and vetted by three historians, ToW is one of the most accurate portrayals of squad-level combat ever done in a fully 3-D computer game. Read more

The Mystery of the Bulge’s Lost Soldiers

He dug down to a half-rotted overshoe and tugged it free from the black soil at the bottom of the old foxhole. Read more

Three fine books document the horror and heroism of the fight for Iwo Jima.

Iwo Jima was one of the toughest battles of World War II, and three new books provide perhaps the definitive word on that epic, month-long struggle in February and March 1945. Read more

Hooray for Hollywood!

Dear Editor,

I enjoyed Flint Whitlock’s article on the film stars in WWII, but I think you forgot one. Lew Ayres (All Quiet on the Western Front and others) served as a medic in the Philippines in 1944-1945. Read more

Shogun has cool, innovative mechanics.

One of the new classics in war-themed board games is Wallenstein by German designer Dirk Henn from Queen Games. Read more

Heroism and Horror in the First World War

Just before 7:30 on the morning of July 1, 1916, an ear-shattering explosion shook the earth near the village of Beaumont-Hamel in France. Read more

En route to Gallipoli, poet Rupert Brooke met a less romantic death than the one he had imagined.

Fellow poet William Butler Yeats once called Rupert Brooke “the handsomest man in England,” and few people who ever met Brooke—male or female—would have disagreed. Read more

Battlefront, Silent Heroes, and The Burning Blue

Battlefront is a new battalion-level strategy game for the PC from SSG and Matrix Games. The game engine owes a lot to SSG’s Decisive Battles engine, and Battlefront has the look of a frame that a series of games will be built on. Read more

The late AP photographer Joe Rosenthal captured the spirit of the Marine Corps.

When U.S. Marines stormed ashore on the island of Iwo Jima on February 19, 1945, American involvement in World War II was in its fourth year. Read more

Civilization IV: Warlords adds spice to combat.

Sid Meier’s Civilization IV is the preeminent strategy video game in the world. It optimizes all of the best features of the previous incarnations of the game and weds them to gameplay that was designed from the beginning to include multiplayer options. Read more

Benedict Arnold’s Navy

Whenever the name of Benedict Arnold is mentioned, people immediately think in terms of the traitorous act he attempted to perpetrate against the fledging United States of America in 1780 by surrendering West Point, New York, to the British. Read more

Island of Death, World War II Combat: Iwo Jima, and First Battalion

This month starts with a “What if?” board game. Island of Death: the Invasion of Malta, 1942 from Avalanche Press is only $20.00 and takes four hours at most to model one of the great “never happened” battles of World War II. Read more

The Battle of the Atlantic

Between 1939 and 1945, over 72,000 Allied sailors, Navy airmen, and merchant seamen lost their lives in the Atlantic Ocean while attempting to deliver the food, weapons, and other supplies desperately needed by Britain and the Soviet Union in their titanic struggle against Nazi Germany. Read more

Battle Off Samar

Dear Editor,

In the September 2006 issue of your magazine there is, on page 42, an article about the Battle off Samar. Read more

In the 1940s, the American film industry rallied like never before or since to support the war effort.

After Japan’s attack on Pearl Harbor and America’s formal entry into World War II, isolationist sentiments in the United States were swept away and millions of men and women of all backgrounds rushed to recruiting centers to volunteer for military duty. Read more

Rise and Fall, Cossacks II, The Star and Crescent

Ancients is a terrific wargame genre, but it is hard to hold it to the same standards of historical accuracy as genres set in more recent historical times. Read more

No Better Friend, No Worse Enemy

On April15, 2004 in the Sunni triangle of Al Anbar Province in Iraq, a known haven for terrorists, elements of the 2nd Battalion, 2nd Marines (code-named Warlord) were conducting search and clear operations. Read more