Operation Husky: Allied Power Struggle

By the summer of 1943, American forces felt that they had proven that they were as good as anything the enemy could throw at them. Read more

Photo Essay: Camping With the Union Army of the Potomac

Before the fighting even began, before the first impassioned chorus of “On to Richmond!” was raised by the men in blue, the soldiers comprising the Union Army of the Potomac during the Civil War had to create their own precarious living quarters in the forested wilderness of the Eastern Seaboard. Read more

The Red Army’s T-34 Tank: The Eastern Front and Beyond

In 1942, careworn Nazi Führer Adolf Hitler lamented to his military intimates at his Wolf’s Lair headquarters near Rastenburg in East Prussia, “If I had known that there were so many of them, I would have had second thoughts about invading!” Read more

Samurai Kusunoki Masashige

Fourteenth-century Japan was ruled by an emperor who traced his descent back to the sun goddess Amateratsu. However, the emperor took his orders from the retired or cloistered emperor (usually the father of the emperor), who in turn took his orders from the Sei-I Tai Shogun, who took his orders from the kampaku, or regent. Read more

The RAF’s Dambusting Lancaster Bomber

In the summer of 2018 a British father and son who were catching crabs along Reculver Beach in Kent stumbled upon a historical item of intense value. Read more

Sam Houston’s Stunning Victory at San Jacinto

On March 11, 1836, General Sam Houston rode into Gonzales, a small town near the Guadalupe River in Texas. Read more

D-Day Airborne Stand at La Fière

Unlike many of the paratroopers in the U.S. 82nd Airborne Division, 1st Lieutenant John J. Dolan knew exactly where he was when he landed on June 6, 1944. Read more

Blood on the Lake

As the first streaks of dawn painted the horizon, all was quiet in the American squadron anchored at Put-in-Bay. Read more

Civil War Stories: Libby Prison’s ‘Lottery of Death’

One of the primary reasons given for the Union defeat at the First Battle of Bull Run was the lack of adequate cavalry. Read more

The First Victory

Both sides needed reinforcements.For the Japanese and the Americans in October 1942, the battle for Guadalcanal was turning into a bottomless pit, demanding more and more scarce resources—in the air and at sea  and, most importantly, on the ground. Read more

Battle of Omdurman: The Last British Cavalry Charge

It was the morning of September 1, 1898, the day before the Battle of Omdurman. Lieutenant Winston Churchill of the Queen’s 4th Hussars rode out with four squadrons of the 21st Lancers to scout the approaches to Omdurman, a Sudanese village on the west bank of the Nile opposite Khartoum, epicenter of a revolt that had rocked the very foundations of the British Empire. Read more

9 World War II Book Reviews for Winter 2026

Fighting Fifteen: The Navy’s Top Ace and the Deadliest Hellcat Squadron of the Pacific War (Stephen L. Moore, Dutton Caliber (PenguinRandomHouse), New York, NY, 432 pp., Read more

Stephen L. Moore’s ‘Fighting Fifteen’

Many of the men in the new VF-15 Fighter Squadron had three things in common: a love of flying and the desperate desire to fly fighters in combat. Read more

Flint Whitlock’s ‘Patton and the Battle for Sicily’

Launched on the night of July 9-10, 1943, the amphibious assault of Operation Husky was the largest the world had ever seen—more than 3,200 vessels and half a million Allied soldiers, sailors, and airmen attacked the island of Sicily, Adolf Hitler’s “Fortress Europe.” Read more

David Lyle Williams ‘The Road to Cisterna’

By Kevin Seabrooke

The Battle of Anzio (January 22-May 25, 1944) was aimed at bypassing the German’s daunting Gustav Line in an effort to capture Rome. Read more

Raquel Ramsey’s ‘Reflections’

During the Japanese invasion of the islands in December 1941, 2nd Lt. Edwin Ramsey commanded the U.S. Army’s 26th Cavalry Regiment (Philippine Scouts) in rearguard action that allowed Allied forces to fall back to the Bataan Peninsula. Read more

Mark Stille’s ‘Pearl Harbor: Japan’s Greatest Disaster’

By Kevin Seabrooke

Author Mark Stille bemoans the “continuing flood of Pearl Harbor books [that] focus on the failure to avoid conflict in the months before the attack or on the deeply flawed concept that ‘Washington’ conspired to let the Japanese take the first shots of the war while not informing the commanders at Pearl Harbor what was coming.” Read more

Christine Kuehn’s ‘Family of Spies’

A screenwriter’s letter asking what her father, 70-year-old Eberhard Kuehn, remembered about his own father’s life as a spy in WWII turned journalist Christine Kuehn’s world upside down. Read more

Donald Nijboer’s ‘World War II Aerial Combat 1937-1945’

Beginning with the Battle of Britain and going forward, it was clear that military aviation would become a critical component of modern warfare. Read more

Elizabeth R. Hyman’s ‘The Girl Bandits of the Warsaw Ghetto’

Led by the Żydowska Organizacja Bojowa (ŻOB) (Jewish Combat Organization), the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising of April/May 1943 against the German SS remains one of the most famous struggles in the annals of the Holocaust. Read more