Bright sunshine flooded the sedge-covered, damp ground in Sussex on the morning of October 14, 1066. Having attended mass at sunrise, Duke William of Normandy shouted commands to his senior officers outlining their positions for the coming battle with English King Harold II Godwinson’s army. Read more
Historians began writing about the Civil War even before it had become history. Battlefield accounts by traveling correspondents were a staple of Northern and Southern newspapers during the war, and a flood of memoirs, letters, official records, and unit histories followed in the decades after the war. Read more
We’ve taken off from and landed atop our fair share of aircraft carriers in the past few decades spent with war-inspired video games, but how many of us have actually had to carefully manage said vessels? Read more
The ongoing debate between German Field Marshals Erwin Rommel and Gerd von Rundstedt over how best to use the German Army’s elite panzer divisions against the coming Allied invasion ultimately reached no clear conclusion. Read more
Cap’n! She’s a-comin! She’s comin’ out!” The cry of the bosun rang out from his perch on the mizzen mast high above the deck of USS Kearsarge. Read more
Within seconds of moving into the attack at the Battle of Saint Mihiel in September 1918 Chris Emmett watched a man die. Read more
Stephen Decatur, captain of the USS Intrepid, sprang his trap under cover of darkness on the night of February 16, 1804. Read more
The Studies and Observations Group of the Military Assistance Command Vietnam ranks among the most secretive of the Vietnam War’s special operations organizations. Read more
Roman General Flavius Stilicho defended the waning Roman Empire against numerous invasions. His dedication to the restoration of the empire was complete, but he faced enemies from within and without. Read more
Captain James Lawrence climbed the rigging of the frigate USS Chesapeake in Boston Harbor on June 1, 1813, to get a better look at the unknown ship on the horizon. Read more
HMS Dreadnought was such a revolutionary design its name became the byword for an entire class of warship. Read more
Unmanned aerial vehicles are generally thought of as a modern weapon of war, a product of the digital age. Read more
The Romans found Britain to be a terrifying land. They had little information about its people and they found it difficult to invade. Read more
Toyotomi Hideyoshi, a samurai and feudal lord, unified Japan and ushered in a period of peace for the war-torn nation. Read more
The citation made it plain. U.S. Marine Corps Demolition Sergeant Hershel W. “Woody” Williams had exhibited extraordinary courage during the bloody, protracted fight for the porkchop-shaped scrap of land in the Volcano Islands known as Iwo Jima. Read more
The Boeing B-29 Superfortress bomber nicknamed Dinah Might struggled to stay in the air on the afternoon of March 4, 1945. Read more
Few festivities occurred on Christmas Eve, 1944, in the Ardennes Forest. Thousands of soldiers struggled to attack or defend positions, or to simply survive. Read more
The British frigates HMS Orpheus and Roebuck, on April 20, 1781, escorted their prize—the Continental Navy frigate USS Confederacy—with the Union Jack flying above the Stars and Stripes, to New York harbor, thus ending Confederacy’s two-year service to the American rebels. Read more
Sir Alexander Cadogan did not believe it.
He had been given a report from Admiral Sir Archibald “Quex” Sinclair, head of MI6, on October 6, 1939, that German generals were reaching out to the British Embassy in The Hague in neutral Holland, to orchestrate a coup against Adolf Hitler that would replace the Nazi regime with a military junta, which would then make peace. Read more
Before dawn on September 21, 1745, the dragoons and infantry of King George II stood in line of battle in a freshly harvested wheat field. Read more
