Nearly 20 years ago, I met a fellow in Germany (we’ll call him “Hans”) who was on his life’s quest to find one of mankind’s greatest treasures and solve one of WWII’s greatest mysteries—the fabulous Amber Room. Read more
In November 1177, Saladin launched his first significant military campaign against a crusader state. With 26,000 men, siege engines, a huge baggage train, and his own personal force of elite Mamluk bodyguards, Saladin marched his Ayyubid army across the Sinai Desert from Egypt into southern Palestine. Read more
Most of the action during the Battle of Britain in the late summer of 1940 took place over southern England where Royal Air Force Spitfires and Hurricanes began to dominate dogfights against their German rivals. Read more
On Saturday, September 26, 1863, six days after the Battle of Chickamauga, Lt. Gen. James Longstreet wrote Confederate Secretary of War James A. Read more
In the early evening of September 12, 1683, the citizens of Vienna watched from the ramparts of their beleaguered city as 3,500 winged horsemen poured down the slopes of the Kahlenberg Heights and into the heart of the besieging Turkish army. Read more
By Jean René Champion (with Marc and David Champion)
Jean René Champion (or René, as he preferred to be called) was born in 1921 in Neuilly-sur-Seine, a commune on the west side of Paris. Read more
Admiral Ernest J. King wanted the battle for Guadalcanal to be over. There were additional objectives for the United States to pursue in the South Pacific and by the middle of January 1943 he was becoming impatient. Read more
When Stalin and Hitler signed a non-aggression pact in August 1939, they secretly created spheres of influence. Besides dividing up Poland, they agreed to allow each other free reign over nations and territories they deemed important. Read more
A rocky, jumbled mass of boulders known as Mount Harriet just west of the city of Stanley in the Falkland Islands had no claim to fame before the night of June 11-12, 1982, but it achieved renown after a harrowing engagement that occurred between British and Argentine forces that night. Read more
Major General John Brown Gordon guided his horse past fields where stalks of waist-high corn glistened in the sun. Read more
The 782nd Tank Battalion spent two years training stateside as part of the U.S. Read more
Things have been moving along nicely for Wargaming.net’s hugely successful massively-multiplayer online game World of Tanks. It was already doing plenty well on PC, but its recent arrival on Xbox 360 finally brought it to a hungry console audience. Read more
In normal times 18th-century Cambridge, Massachusetts, was a small farming community of about 800 souls clustered around a common. Read more
Everyone in Washington, D.C., knew the reason Maj. Gen. Ulysses Grant was in town. He had a hard time moving around without people applauding him everywhere he went. Read more
It took the HMS Queen Elizabeth, the world’s largest passenger liner, only five days to transport 15,000 men of the 106th Infantry Division from New Jersey to Glasgow, Scotland, making port on November 17, 1944. Read more
In the fall of 1941, as relations worsened between the United States and Japan and war became imminent, the presence of 110,000 Japanese Americans living on the West Coast pushed the issue of internment to the forefront. Read more
Snipers played an important a role in World War II, just as much as any tank, airplane, or artillery piece. Read more
Men of War: Assault Squad first arrived in 2011 as an expansion to Men of War, which was itself a sequel to Faces of War, which had its roots in Soldiers: Heroes of World War II. Read more
Despite their gallant service in the Civil War, on the Western frontier, and in the Spanish-American War, black soldiers were used mostly for labor and given only a limited fighting role when the U.S. Read more
As a late summer sun finally dipped below the horizon, Captain William L. Koob, Jr., came to realize that his unit had been abandoned on the battlefield. Read more
