The old axiom that “forewarned is forearmed” is as true nowadays as it was millenia ago. Since 1989 America’s B-2 Spirit flying wing has been assailing the Free World’s foes, and consistently taking them unawares. Read more
It’s called Mein Skizzenbuch (My Sketchbook)—a 72-page booklet of pencil drawings and watercolors by noted German war artist Ernst Eigener, a soldier with Propaganda Co. Read more
The U.S. military employed an organized system for the treatment of soldiers severely wounded while fighting in the Pacific, including their evacuation stateside if needed. Read more
A few miles southeast of the Little Bighorn River, known as the “Greasy Grass” to the various Lakota nations camped along its west bank, a number of women dug wild turnips. Read more
Manfred Albrecht Freiherr von Richthofen was born May 2, 1892, as the second of four children to Baron Albrecht and Kunigunde von Richthofen. Read more
“Passchendaele with tree bursts” was how war correspondent Ernest Hemingway described it. The three-month slugfest that became known as the Battle the Hürtgen Forest was that and much more. Read more
Letters home provide us with a glimpse into the daily lives of soldiers during the best and worst times. Read more
On April 5, 1862, the Fourth Corps under Brig. Gen. Erasmus Keyes pushed forward along the road by the James River. Read more
In the dead of winter at the base of a hill just 20 kilometers south of Seoul, Korea, Easy Company’s 1st platoon found themselves pinned down by a continuous stream of small arms, automatic, and antitank fire coming from above. Read more
They weren’t originally supposed to be there. In the early planning for the invasion of the island of Okinawa, the 27th Infantry Division was to be held in reserve as the eventual garrison force after the defeat of the Japanese 32nd Army. Read more
On the evening of September 26, 1940, American radio announcer and journalist William L. Shirer noted in his later famous Berlin Diary that the next day Italian Foreign Minister Count Galeazzo Ciano would arrive there from Rome, adding that most people thought it was for the announcement that Francisco Franco’s Spain was entering the war on the side of the Axis. Read more
Deposed Catholic King James II had come to Ireland with hopes of regaining the throne of England, and after a year of minor successes and setbacks, the time had come for him to make a stand. Read more
Lieutenant Jimmie Monteith, Company L, 16th Infantry Regiment, arrived off Omaha Beach with the first assault wave, on D-Day, June 6, 1944. Read more
The final months of World War II saw the liberation of hundreds of ghastly concentration camps and the awful reality of Nazi racism. Read more
It crossed silently on a chilly winter evening over the southern Oregon coast, descending slowly, its ballast spent. Read more
On the evening of June 21, 1941, foreboding hung like a heavy blanket over the Soviet Union’s western border as indicators of the imminent German invasion increased every day. Read more
At the Gates of Rome: The Battle for a Dying Empire (Don Holloway, Osprey Publishing, 2024, 367 pp., Read more
Vice Admiral Norman Denning said of Ian Fleming, the “ideas man” who worked at British Naval Intelligence, that a lot of his proposals “were just plain crazy.” Read more
A man who was close to Adolf Hitler and hardly impartial later saidthat the Führer had “a mood of merriment” for a brief period that day. Read more
Benumbed by months of cold and boredom, bleary-eyed British sentries stared over the ramparts of Fort Sackville in the Illinois Country as thick fog rolled in from the Wabash River. Read more
