Military History

Military History

Sabers, Scimitars, and Swords

On the coat of arms of Finland, a crowned lion tramples upon a curved sword with his hind paws while brandishing a straight sword in his right forepaw. Read more

Military History

A Bloody Sport Indeed

One of the most enduring images of the Middle Ages is the tournament, with its knights in shining armor, heraldic devices on shields, fair damsels watching from the stands, and brightly colored banners flying in the breeze. Read more

Military History

Australia’s Venerable Albert Jacka

He had the distinction of being the first Commonwealth soldier to receive the Victoria Cross for valor in World War I, and many observers felt that Australian-born Albert Jacka should have earned at least three of Great Britain’s highest award. Read more

Military History

Sergeant Amos Humiston at Gettysburg

Two brigades of Confederate soldiers crested a slight hill above a wheat field and looked down on the blue clad soldiers waiting for them in the brickyard below. Read more

Military History

Grand Alliance Triumph At Ramillies

Late in the day on May 23, 1706, the troops of the Colonel William Borthwick’s regiment of Argyll’s Scots Brigade formed up for an unenviable assignment. Read more

Military History

Desperate Stand at Beecher Island

“Indians! Indians!” The staple warning from countless cliché-ridden dime novels was all too real at dawn of a Colorado morning in 1868. Read more

Military History

The First Edged Weapon: The Knife

While the sword usually comes to mind first when one thinks of edged weapons, it was not actually the first such weapon—the knife was. Read more

Military History

Navy Captain E. Royce Williams Now Eligible for Medal of Honor

By Kevin Seabrooke

Buried deep inside the 3,000 pages of the $901-billion National Defense Authorization Act signed by President Trump on December 18 is a change in the law for the Congressional Medal of Honor that would allow it to be awarded to retired Navy Capt. Read more

Military History

The Wheel Lock: Birth of the Combat Pistol

By the late 15th Century, early firearm designers were already looking at ideas for semi-automatic weapons. The matchlock had been the first mechanism to make a shoulder-aimed firearm, the arquebus, possible. Read more

Military History

Roncesvalles and the Birth of Chivalry

The Age of Chivalry brings to mind knights in shining armor and damsels in distress, along with traveling troubadours and minstrels singing chansons de geste, “songs of deeds,” telling of feats of arms and labors of love. Read more

Military History

Military Weapons: The Davy Crockett Mobile Missile Launcher

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

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

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

Military History

War of the Triple Alliance: Bloodbath in Paraguay

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

Military History

Northwest Indian War: Marching Against Little Turtle

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

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

Military History

The Siege of Syracuse

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

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

Military History

The SMS Sea Eagle

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

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