Jefferson Davis in Mexico

On September 20, 1846, Colonel Jefferson Davis and a regiment of untested Mississippi volunteers stood before the fortress of La Teneria at Monterrey in northern Mexico. Read more

Japan’s Hellish Unit 731

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

Military Postcards

Many famous photos of military uniforms and personalities are actually taken from vintage postcards. And while today many vintage baseball or football cards can fetch thousands of dollars, military postcards essentially have been forgotten. Read more

Patton’s Dual Drives

This article is excerpted from Kevin Hymel’s latest book, Patton’s War: An American General’s Combat Leadership, Volume 2: August—December 1944, published by University of Missouri Press. Read more

Long Shadows at Ball’s Bluff

For all his great political skills, Abraham Lincoln was a man who made few close personal friends. He was both too private and too ambitious to court a large number of intimate acquaintances. Read more

Flight Out of Hell: The Harrowing Bombing Mission to Kavieng

In the predawn darkness of Dobodura, New Guinea, 2nd Lt. William J. Smith of the U.S. Army Air Corps was roughly awakened by a noncom announcing that it was time to get dressed and get to the mess tent for breakfast. Read more

Duel in the Backwoods

Richard Hovenden of His Majesty’s British Legion Dragoons cautiously urged his tired horse through a parklike expanse of tall trees that marked the entrance to a South Carolina country crossroads junction called locally “Hannah’s Cowpens.” Read more

The Vermehren Betrayal

After the long journey from Germany to Istanbul, their escape to North Africa and finally to England, the two defectors ended up in an apartment in South Kensington, one of the more wealthy neighborhoods of London. Read more

The Four-Sided Peak Lancer Cap

While lightly armed cavalry already seemed anachronistic by the time of the Napoleonic Wars, the success of the Polish lancers in that conflict convinced many nations to adopt a similar fighting force. Read more

The Crater: Explosion of Death

It was just after 3 am on Saturday, July 30, 1864. A month of relative quiet along a two-mile stretch of Union and Confederate trench lines immediately east of Petersburg, Virginia, was about to come to an explosive end. Read more

The Japanese Blitz on Bataan

Following their impressive string of victories in Malaya, Hong Kong, Burma, the Dutch East Indies, and the Philippines, it appeared that the Japanese were invincible in the early days of World War II. Read more

Hannibal’s Cunning Ambush

When still a young boy, Hannibal once came upon his father, the Carthaginian general Hamilcar Barca, who at the time was preparing to go to Iberia where Carthage was campaigning to expand its power. Read more

Disaster In A Bright Blue Sky

Lieutenant Robert Sabel struggled to get his Fortress, the Rusty Lode, home. Eight B-17s of his bomb group, the 390th, had already been shot from the sky. Read more

The Secret World of Richard Nixon

In the spring of 1974—at the height of the political Watergate crisis in Washington, D.C.—Joseph Laitin, a spokesman at the Office of Management and Budget whose office was in the Eisenhower Executive Office Building, next door to the White House, was on his way over to the west wing of the White House to meet with Treasury Secretary George Schultz. Read more

Detention In Wartime

After the surprise bombing of Pearl Harbor on December 7, 1941, many Americans in authority began to fear the large number of people of Japanese ancestry living along the West Coast of the United States, thinking that some of them might have sympathies for Japan and might assist in a possible invasion or sabotage American efforts to resist such an invasion. Read more

Desperate Venture at Avellino

The Fifth U.S. Army was in trouble and dropping 600 paratroops at Avellino to disrupt the communications of the 16th Panzer Division seemed like a sound solution. Read more

A Second Sumter: The Struggle for Pensacola

By Eric Niderost

The election of Abraham Lincoln as president in November 1860 caused a national crisis of unprecedented scope. For years, Southern firebrands had defended slavery and exalted the principle of states’ rights. Read more

The Battle of Leyte Gulf: Oldendorf’s Textbook “Crossing the T”

In 1944, following the American victories in the South Pacific of operational commanders General Douglas MacArthur in western New Guinea and Admiral Chester Nimitz in the Marianas, American planners considered the next offensive against Japan’s empire. Read more

Revenge Of The Flemish Lion

The Flemish infantry fidgeted under the sweltering sun as they stood shoulder to shoulder in a field east of the town of Courtrai on July 11, 1302. Read more

Kurt “Panzer” Meyer was known as the fighting general of the Waffen SS.

Kurt Meyer was without doubt one of the most outstanding and highly decorated Waffen SS officers of World War II. Read more