The Spencer Carbine

Confederate soldiers bitterly called it “that damned Yankee carbine they load on Sunday, and then fire all week.” Read more

Epic Stand at Midway

On May 2, 1942, the eve of the Battle of the Coral Sea, a Consolidated PBY-5A Catalina flying boat skimmed the water’s surface and touched down in the lagoon of Midway Atoll, 1,137 miles west of Oahu. Read more

George Washington and Lord Cornwallis at Germantown

On a gloomy Friday morning, September 26, 1777, an advance party of the British Army marched into Philadelphia to take possession of the city. Read more

Ordnance: The British Churchill Tank

­­The German town of Goch lay east of the Reichswald forest, a scene of heavy fighting for the British Army as it ground its way steadily into the heart of Germany. Read more

Confederate Cavalry Leader Turner Ashby

Even in an army not lacking for larger-than-life figures, Confederate cavalry leader Turner Ashby stood out from the crowd. Although not particularly tall—about five feet, 10 inches—there was something about Ashby that commanded attention. Read more

The Men of the Iron Brigade Faced Death in a Cornfield at Antietam

The dense formation that constituted the Army of the Potomac’s Black Hat Brigade formed up on Joseph Poffenberger’s farm at dawn on September 17, 1862. Read more

The Essex Regiment’s Frontal Assault on Monte Cassino

It was March 14, 1944, and Private Albert “Albie” Duddy of D Company, 1st/4th Battalion Essex Regiment, was staring up at the monastery on top of the hill at Monte Cassino from a location north of the town of Cassino, Italy. Read more

Gardening in Salonika: World War I in the Balkans

The Germans mocked it as their largest prisoner-of-war camp, and French Premier Georges Clemenceau was hardly less withering in his opinion of the Allied stronghold at Salonika, Greece. Read more

Sub Hunters Over the Bay of Biscay

“Am over enemy submarine in position …”

Cut off in mid-transmission, this contact report came from a U.S. Read more

Medal of Honor Recipient Daniel Butterfield

The series of battles that constituted the Confederate offensive against the Union army on the eastern outskirts of Richmond, Virginia, in summer 1862 would thrust a number of Union officers into the limelight. Read more

The ‘Good’ Göring

On March 12, 1938, German troops entered Austria, part of Adolf Hitler’s plan to incorporate that hapless country into the Third Reich. Read more

Cherbourg’s Bloody Toll

It was June 1944. Two generals, one American and one German, faced each other with diametrically opposed missions. Read more

A Murderous Order at Culp’s Hill

Although Union Colonel Silas Colgrove had previously led his men through some of the most horrific fighting in the eastern theater of the Civil War, the order he received on the morning of July 3, 1863, in the woods near Culp’s Hill at Gettysburg, was the most unnerving he had ever received. Read more

To this day, the cause of the sinking of the HMS Hood during the hunt for the Bismarck is still disputed.

The British Admiralty Board of Enquiry into the loss of the battlecruiser HMS Hood, presided over by Vice Admiral Sir Geoffrey Blake, concluded, “The sinking of Hood was due to a hit from Bismarck’s 15-inch shell in or adjacent to Hood’s 4-inch or 15-inch magazines, causing them to explode and wreck the after part of the ship.” Read more

Italian Military Adventurer

An assault on an Alan woman by an Almogavar of the Catalan Company exploded into a skirmish between the two groups of allies in the pay of the Byzantine Empire on April 9, 1303. Read more

Home Front USA: Rationing

In 1941-1942, British journalist Alistair Cooke traveled through the United States. In his description of his trip, American Home Front 1941-1942, he reported stopping for breakfast at a restaurant in West Virginia where, “the sugar was rationed at breakfast, and there was a note on the menu requesting that … in the interests of ‘national defense,’ keep to one cup of coffee.” Read more

Manhattan’s First Terror Attack: Decades Before 9/11

In the summer of 1916, America was an island of peace in an ocean of war. The guns of August 1914 had been blazing away in Europe for nearly two years now, primed by a booming American munitions industry that found itself growing rich on the long-distance suffering of others. Read more

The Story of Bill Millin, Lord Lovat’s Mad Piper of Sword Beach

It was the evening of Monday, June 5, 1944, and an armada of almost 5,000 ships stood off the southern coast of England, primed and ready for the greatest amphibious invasion in history. Read more

The 1st and 2nd Cavalry Regiments: Jefferson Davis’s Pet Project

Under a bright, high sun in a pale blue Midwestern sky, six companies of the United States Cavalry’s 1st Regiment rode into a grassy valley bordering the south fork of the Solomon River in northwestern Kansas on the afternoon of July 29, 1857. Read more

Tactical Thunder: The Ninth Air Force

As the landing craft carrying the invading Allied ground forces of Operation Overlord motored toward the Normandy beaches on June 6, 1944, they were protected and supported by the largest aerial armada the world has ever seen. Read more