On all sides, shells detonated in bloody geysers, bullets churned the water, which looked as if it were agitated by a storm, and wounded Marines, some hideously disfigured and dying, shouted, even begged, for help.” Read more
Dear Sir,
Isn’t it time you told it like it really was about the breakout from the Normandy beach-head? That the Sherman tanks the Allies had were absolutely no match for the German tanks, and that the Americans had refused to countenance attempts by the British to upgrade the Sherman’s peashooter gun with the Firefly because they couldn’t accept a non-American gun on an American tank? Read more
In the spring of 1944, the Italian Campaign was one of frustration and stalemate for the Allies. General Mark Clark’s Fifth Army had been stymied at Cassino, and strong German defenses barred the gateway to the valley of the Liri River and Rome, the Eternal City and capital of fascist Italy. Read more
It seem unlikely that there is a fan of tactical ancients or medieval combat who owns a computer who hasn’t yet tried at least one of the games in Sega’s Total War franchise. Read more
For the past several years, three Hollywood studios waged war over the right to make a new movie about the Battle of Thermopylae (480 bc), in which a few hundred Spartans kept an enormous invading Persian army at bay for three days. Read more
To say that Caius Julius Caesar was one of the most influential men in world history is still something of an understatement. Read more
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
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
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
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
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
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
One of the new classics in war-themed board games is Wallenstein by German designer Dirk Henn from Queen Games. Read more
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
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 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
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
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
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
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
