“We shall not be content with a defensive war,” stated British Prime Minister Winston Churchill during his speech to the House of Commons immediately after the evacuation of the British Expeditionary Forces from Dunkirk on June 4, 1940. Read more
Great commanders need great subordinates. In the campaigns in the Mediterranean and European Theaters of World War II, General Dwight D. Read more
The charred remains of men and machines scattered through the Kursk salient in July 1943 signified the death knell of the last attempt by the German Wehrmacht to regain the initiative on the Eastern Front. Read more
The Battle of Dorylaeum, fought on July 1, 1097, marked the first full-scale military clash between the Christian armies of the West and the Muslim armies of the East. Read more
Adolf Hitler loved children. Before the war consumed all his energies he entertained children at his holiday home on the “mountain” all the time. Read more
From its inception, Zahal, the Israeli Army, has been forced to use ingenuity and improvisation to arm itself against its Arab enemies. Read more
The late summer of 1939 saw Great Britain teetering on the brink of war with Hitler’s Germany. The years of appeasement and vacillation, of meekly acquiescing to Hitler’s insatiable territorial demands, were over at last. Read more
From within the walled city of Nördlingen in the Upper Palatinate, a lone rocket arced slowly skyward on the night of September 3, 1634. Read more
If a single airplane has captured the public imagination more than any other, it is undoubtedly the North American P-51 Mustang fighter. Read more
For the brave soldiers of Easy Company, it must have seemed as though World War II would never end. Read more
On October 27, 1937, the Zhabei district of Shanghai began to burn, an enormous conflagration that stretched for five miles and filled the northern horizon from end to end, almost as far as the eye could see. Read more
Smoke and ash drifted across the shattered ground. Dead faces peered up with lidless eyes from pools of stagnant water. Read more
Using parachutes to insert large forces behind enemy lines quickly fostered the idea of also using decoys to sow doubt and confusion. Read more
Of all the generals who fought on the Patriot side during the American Revolution, none was more renowned than New York City native William Alexander, better known to his contemporaries as “Lord Stirling.” Read more
The dismemberment of Poland by the German and Soviet armies in September and early October 1939 saw the temporary destruction of the Polish armed forces. Read more
“To the Great Stalin, from the grateful Hungarian People,” read the inscription on a 24-foot-high bronze statue of Joseph Stalin on the grounds of Budapest City Park, erected in 1951 to honor the tyrant of the Soviet Union. Read more
Soon after the tattered British Expeditionary Force was miraculously rescued from Dunkirk in June 1940, planners at the War Office in London began dreaming of returning to the German-occupied European continent. Read more
It was a spectacle never to be forgotten by those few who were lucky enough to witness it. Read more
As Adolf Hitler’s vaunted Sixth Army lay in its death throes in the ruins of Stalingrad, German forces to the west of the city faced their own kind of hell. Read more
By the middle of July 1403, a series of seemingly inevitable events had led two armies to a field near the small and hitherto unheralded village of Shrewsbury in Shropshire, approximately 150 miles northwest of London. Read more
