Military History

Military History

Holly Springs was Van Dorn’s ticket to fame.

The horsemen charged into the town from the northeast guns blazing and screaming the hair-raising Rebel yell. Yankees wearing their sleepwear struggled to get out of their tents in the dawn attack and then ran for their lives. Read more

Military History

Douglas MacArthur’s Plan to Win The Korean War

By Blaine Taylor

In his 1964 book Gen. Douglas MacArthur (Gold Medal Books, Greenwich, Conn.), Bob Considine writes, “MacArthur’s final plan for winning the Korean War was outlined to this reporter in the course of an interview in 1954 on his 74th birthday. Read more

Military History

Alexander the Great in India

By Martin Leavitt

It was raining, raining with a force and intensity few had ever experienced. The Macedonian army was marching upstream near the northern banks of the Hydaspes River in India (now Pakistan), trying to reach a ford under the cloak of darkness. Read more

Military History

Stirring Accounts of the Albigensian Crusade

The three contemporary narrative accounts of the 13th-century Albigensian Crusade are gripping, chilling, and enlightening. They offer rich insight into the period when the Languedoc region of modern-day southwestern France was tied more closely to the Kingdom of Aragon than the fledgling Kingdom of France. Read more

A line of American troops crosses a bridge and marches through one of the many small villages that dot the Hürtgen region. The difficult hilly and forested terrain is very obvious in this photo, taken November 16, 1944.

Military History

Forest of Horrors

The woods were close-planted fir trees, and the shell-bursts tore and smashed them, and the splinters from the tree bursts were like javelins in the half-light of the forest,” wrote war correspondent Ernest Hemingway of the experience of Lt. Read more

Military History

Twilight of the Teutonic Order

In one of those ironies with which history abounds Polish Duke Conrad of Mazovia in 1226 invited the German Roman Catholic military order known as the Teutonic Knights to assist him in subjugating the unruly, pagan Prussians who were raiding his lands. Read more

In June 1757, ever-victorious Prussian monarch Frederick the Great advanced confident on Austrian forces at Kolin.

Military History

Frederick The Great’s First Defeat

By Arnold Blumberg

Frederick the Great’s prescription for warfare was simple. The Prussian monarch wanted “short and lively wars” that relied on swift, powerful, and decisive military operations. Read more

Future U.S. President Harry S. Truman led a National Guard field artillery battery on the Western Front during the Great War.

Military History

Harry Truman on the Western Front

By Robert F. Dorr

In the darkness and driving rain on August 29, 1918, German artillery shells smashed down on American artillerymen fighting on a fir-clad slope in the Vosges Mountains in Alsace. Read more

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