Military History Archives

An M-29 Davy Crockett mobile missile launcher on display. The M-29 was capable of delivering either conventional or nuclear warheads.

Military History

Military Weapons: The Davy Crockett Mobile Missile Launcher

By Peter A. Goetz

Design work for a minimum-size atomic warhead called the XW-51 began at the University of California Radiation Laboratory in the mid 1950s. Read more

Sporting the blood-red “Rising Sun” flag of Imperial Japan, a Japanese torpedo boat scores a direct hit on a Russian battleship at the height of the Battle of Tsushima Strait.

Military History

Rising Sun and Russian Bear

By Michael E. Haskew

For three centuries, feudal Japan remained comfortably isolated from the rest of the world. By order of the Tokugawa Shogunate, foreigners landing on Japanese shores risked immediate execution. Read more

Military History

Bloody Clash on the Tiber

By Tim Miller

On October 28, ad 312, a Roman emperor was drowning. The sight must have amazed his soldiers. All summer Rome had been filled with rumors of the western emperor, Constantine, and the ease with which he and his army had crossed the Alps and, once on Italian soil, strung together a handful of victories in the north. Read more

The Battle of Tuyuti, on May 24, 1866, was the largest battle of the grueling five-year War of the Triple Alliance.

Military History

War of the Triple Alliance: Bloodbath in Paraguay

By Robert Heege

Almost from the beginning, the short, violent reign of Paraguayan strongman Francisco Solano Lopez devolved into a nightmare from which his unfortunate people could not awake. Read more

Indians make their way through the woods. Familiar with the forest, they stealthily tracked U.S. Army movements and staged devastating ambushes.

Military History

Northwest Indian War: Marching Against Little Turtle

By Robert A. Lynn

In the 1780s the Founding Fathers of the United States didn’t so much revise the old Articles of Confederation as devise an entirely new government as set forth in the Constitution. Read more

Military History

Caribbean Gibraltar

By Mark Carlson

For more than a year and a half, 120 British sailors and Marines led a successful blockade of the French “Sugar Island” of Martinique, birthplace of Gen. Read more

The white-bearded Archimedes (bottom, right), Greek mathematician, physicist, engineer, astronomer, and inventor, directs the defense of his home city of Syracuse against the Roman attack.

Military History

The Siege of Syracuse

By John E. Spindler

From the deck of a quinquereme, one of 60 in his invasion fleet, Roman Consul Marcus Claudius Marcellus surveyed Syracuse’s Little Harbor on the coast of Sicily. Read more

Military History

China Strikes Back

By Joshua Shepherd

For the men of the U.S. 9th Infantry Regiment, the evening of November 25, 1950, began routinely enough. Read more

At left, the Imperial German Navy’s sailing commerce raider SMS Seeadler (Sea Eagle) moves to capture the French bark Cambronne off the coast of Brazil on March 20, 1917.

Military History

The SMS Sea Eagle

By Mark Carlson

For more than three centuries, from 1520 in the reign of King Henry the Eighth up until the advent of steam-powered ironclads in the American Civil War, ships under sail ruled the world’s oceans. Read more

In this scroll painting, imperial troops of the Qing dynasty finally recapture the city of Nanjing (Nanking) in 1864. The city had been held by T'ien Wang (“Heavenly King”) and the followers of the Taiping Heavenly Kingdom since 1853. In 1860, American Frederick Townsend Ward trained and led an imperial army against the Taiping rebels, but was killed in battle in September 1862.

Military History

The state of Chinese armies in the 19th century.

The Chinese Army of the mid-19th century was in serious decline, its decay a reflection of the Qing Dynasty that produced it. Read more

French troops in the foreground counterattack Prussian infantry in a vain effort to stabilize their right flank at the elevated village of Saint-Privat seen in the background. Infantry of both sides fought valiantly throughout the day, but both the French and Prussian high commands performed poorly.

Military History

Victory At A Dreadful Cost

By William E. Welsh

King William I of Prussia stood resplendent in the uniform of a Prussian Guard officer on a hill in eastern France on a sunny day in late summer 1870. Read more

A tongue-in-cheek British cartoon from 1819 lampoons the idea of adapting the newly invented bicycle for military use.

Military History

Military Bicycles

By Peter Suciu

Anyone who has ever visited Europe—particularly France, Italy, and the Netherlands—knows that the people in those countries love their bicycles. Read more

Military History

Death Penalty for Desertion

By John W. Osborn, Jr.

British Army privates Thomas Highgate, Ernest Jackson, and Louis Harris shared a distinction in World War I that they undoubtedly would rather not have had. Read more

Military History

Hussite Jan Zizka

By John E. Spindler

Jan Zizka belongs to the elite group of leaders who never lost a battle. He was born on or around 1360 in the village of Trocnov in the Kingdom of Bohemia. Read more

Military History

British Disaster at Saratoga

By David A. Norris

Four months earlier Major General John Burgoyne had left Canada with a large army. He intended to deliver a fatal blow to the colonial revolt that had begun on April 19, 1775. Read more

Military History

Emelian Pugachev: Master Imposter of a Russian Czar

By Blaine Taylor

On August 12, 1772, a wandering Don Cossack named Emelian Pugachev crossed the Polish frontier into Imperial Russia on an official passport that entitled him, after spending six weeks in quarantine, to resettle as a free citizen on the Irgiz River in southeast Russia. Read more

A soldier from the 172nd Stryker Brigade fires an illumination flare over Mosul, Iraq, from the vehicle’s 120mm mortar. Flares are used to spot terrorists emplacing roadside bombs.

Military History

Famous Military Weapons: Mortars

By William McPeak

The mortar is perhaps the oldest surviving ordnance piece developed during the Middle Ages. The earliest known forerunner to the mortar, introduced by Spanish Muslims about ad 1250, was essentially an iron-reinforced bucket that hurled stones with gunpowder. Read more

Military History

Nuclear Submarine Disaster

By Mark Carlson

Even in the age of ultra-sophisticated nuclear submarines, with their advanced computers, sonar, navigation, and communication systems, the hard truth is inescapable: the sea is the most hostile environment on Earth. Read more

A British soldier searches for a dead comrade’s identity disc after the disastrous attack at the Somme. Painting by Frank Crozier, who also took part in a similar British rout at Gallipoli.

Military History

A Hobbit on the Somme

By O’Brien Browne

Smoke and ash drifted across the shattered ground. Dead faces peered up with lidless eyes from pools of stagnant water. Read more

Russian model builder Alex Shlakhter poses with his 1/16 scale Panther tank.

Military History

Mobile Models

By Peter Suciu

Almost as long as there have been history buffs there have been scale models. Toy soldiers have been popular among children for hundreds of years, but it was the introduction of specialized military vehicles that really gave birth to scale models after World War I. Read more

Military History

From Around the Network

The Italian Army in Russia: from Barbarossa to Stalingrad

Disaster At Dieppe

The Invention of Radar vs. The Luftwaffe

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