As the date of D-Day approaches, GIs shave their heads. Some did it for sanitary reasons, other to look like American Indians, whom, it was rumored, terrified Adolf Hitler. The crudely drawn woman on the soldier’s jacket attests to what the GIs miss the most.

Preparing for D-Day

By Kevin M. Hymel

The American Army that stormed the beaches of Normandy was mostly green but well trained. For months men practiced climbing down rope ladders into landing craft, exiting in columns of threes, racing across a beach, assaulting pillboxes, storming bluffs, and digging foxholes. Read more

Forrest’s Finest Hour

By Mike Phifer

Confederate Maj. Gen. Nathan Bedford Forrest’s fighting blood was up. It was mid-morning on June 10, 1864, and the Tennessean cavalry commander had just hurried Colonel Hylan Lyon’s brigade of Kentuckians from along the muddy Baldwyn road toward Brice’s Crossroads in northern Mississippi. Read more

On August 11, 1943, an American soldier digs in with his heavy machine gun on a hillside near Brolo. U.S. forces attempted to outflank German troops with an amphibious landing near this site during Operation Husky.

Imbroglio at Brolo

By Eric Ethier

Fresh off a tense telephone conversation with Maj. Gen. Lucian Truscott, Lt. Gen. George S. Patton, Jr., climbed into a jeep and rumbled over to Truscott’s 3rd Infantry Division headquarters east of Terranova, on Sicily’s northeastern coast. Read more

Military Board Games

By Peter Suciu

The debate over the outcome of famous battles, or how aspects of them might have happened differently, often begins almost before the wounded have healed or the long-lasting results have been understood. Read more

The Bridges at Nijmegen

By Christopher Miskimon

Lieutenant Colonel Ben Vandervoort’s 2nd Battalion, 505th Parachute Infantry Regiment (2/505) was fighting its way through the Dutch town of Nijmegen on September 19, 1944. Read more

Mowed Down by the Fifties

By William E. Welsh

As Confederate General Robert E. Lee and his I Corps commander, Maj. Gen. James Longstreet, rode together on horseback along the dust-choked Quaker Road from Glendale to Malvern Hill on the morning of July 1, 1862,  they stopped to confer with Maj. Read more

U.S. Navy Lieutenant Alex Vraciu, who shot down six Japanese aircraft in the Battle of the Philippine Sea, takes off in his F6F Hellcat from the deck of the USS Lexington in a painting by Nicolas Trudgian. By 1944 the Japanese carrier fleet had only half the number of aircraft of the United States, making it highly unlikely they would reverse the tide of the War in the Pacific.

Carrier Clash in the Marianas

By Chuck Lyons

The Philippine Sea encompasses two million square miles of the western part of the Pacific Ocean. It is bounded by the Philippine Islands on the west, the Mariana Islands on the east, the Caroline Islands to the south, and the Japanese Islands to the north. Read more

Last-Ditch Roadblock at Hanau

By Matthew R. Lamothe

Tired, hungry, and typhoid-ridden, the French veterans in the Grand Army of Emperor Napoleon Bonaparte staggered through the Fulda Gap in central Germany on October 27, 1813. Read more

The heavily armed and highly maneuverable subsonic MiG-17 challenged U.S. strike aircraft in the skies over North Vietnam.

Weapons: The Soviet MiG-17 in Vietnam

By William F. Floyd, Jr.

The American pilots did not see the North Vietnamese Mikoyan-Gurevich MiG-17 fighter jets approaching their strike aircraft as they zeroed in on Than Hoa Bridge on April 3, 1965. Read more

German soldiers in foxholes with panzerfausts within arm’s reach for immediate use await the onslaught of Soviet armor and infantry.

Savage Fight for Seelow

By Victor Kamenir

For Soviet Premier Josef Stalin and the people of the Soviet Union, the capture of Berlin was of great political and symbolic importance. Read more

Clash of the Civil War Ironclads

By David A. Norris

Smoke swirled amid the thunderous noise that roared from powerful Dahlgren guns and Brooke rifles. Thousands of spectators along the shore watched the two most dangerous warships in the world at each other at point-blank range. Read more

A Lockheed Hudson bomber of the Royal Australian Air Force scores a hit against a Japanese freighter near Port Moresby, New Guinea.Variants of the Lockheed Electra and Lodestar designs saw service around the globe during World War II.

Lockheed’s Electra and Lodestar

By Sam Mcgowan

During its history, the Lockheed Aircraft Corporation has earned a reputation for building versatile airplanes. Its 1950s era C-130 Hercules is no doubt the most famous, but it was not the first. Read more

Bloody Repulse at Fontenoy

By Robert L. Durham

The French cavalry thundered ahead, straight for the British open square. The red-coated infantry made ready for them, the front-rank knelt with muskets planted in the ground and their fixed bayonets pointed outward. Read more

Soviet Premier Josef Stalin, U.S. President Franklin D. Roosevelt, and British Prime Minister Winston Churchill met in the Iranian capital of Tehran in late 1943. Among the topics of discussion was the opening of a second front in Western Europe.

Big Three in Tehran

By Michael D. Hull

World War II made a disparate trio of allies —British Prime Minister Winston Churchill, Soviet Marshal Josef Stalin, and American President Franklin D. Read more

Prizes of the Line

By Pedro Garcia

One evening around Christmas of 1861 Union Maj. Gen. Henry “Old Brains” Halleck, commanding the Department of Missouri, dined with his chief of staff, Brig. Read more