Latest Posts

Two American soldiers of the 96th Infantry Division engage stubborn Japanese defenders on the island of Okinawa. One of them is seen firing his M-1 Garand rifle at a distant target, while the other is in the process of reloading his weapon. The bloody fight for Okinawa lasted 82 days.

Latest Posts

Hell on Hacksaw Ridge

By Nathan N. Prefer

It was called the Maeda Escarpment, after the nearest native village. An escarpment, according to the dictionary, is “a steep slope in front of a fortification” or “a long cliff.” Read more

Yermak’s Cossack brigade drives a wedge into Khan Kuchum’s Tatar horde in the climactic Battle of Chuvash Cape on the Irtysh River in 1582.

Latest Posts

Russia’s Conquest of Siberia

By Victor Kamenir

Russian historical documents dating back to 1095 speak of an unknown people living beyond the Ural Mountains in Siberia who spoke an incomprehensible language and traded furs for iron knives and axes. Read more

A Tiger tank of Waffen SS division Das Reich goes into action against Soviet forces in the southern part of the Kursk salient. Its 88mm gun could penetrate the armor of a Soviet T-34 at 1,800 yards.

Latest Posts

Last Lunge in the East

By Victor Kamenir

Soviet machine-gunner Mykhailo Petrik and his platoon comrades lay in their makeshift bunker on the open steppe land 30 miles northwest of Belgorod awaiting the enemy’s advance on the first day of the titanic clash at Kursk. Read more

Latest Posts

Daring Strike on Havana

By Mike Phifer

The guns of the British warships assaulting the Cuban shoreline just east of Havana on the morning of June 7, 1762, roared to life in a flash of orange flames and grey smoke. Read more

Six steward’s mates who received Bronze Stars for heroism pose aboard the USS Intrepid around the gun they manned until a Japanese kamikaze dive-bomber crashed into their position, July 28, 1945.

Latest Posts

My War On Two Fronts

By J. (Joseph) Conklin Lanier, II

How I, then a teenager of African descent, found myself thousands of miles away from my placid, rural Mississippi home and on a dangerous volcanic island known as Iwo Jima in the middle of the Pacific Ocean, where tens of thousands of men met violent deaths, is a journey at which I still marvel today, some 65 years later. Read more

Latest Posts

Edward Longshanks & William Wallace at Falkirk

By John Walker

After the disastrous Battle of Dunbar in April 1296, the Scottish revolt against England stalled for more than a year until a rebel force led by Andrew de Moray and William Wallace rekindled the flames of rebellion with a stunning victory over the English at Stirling Bridge. Read more

The tragic death of Continental Army Brig. Gen. Richard Montgomery in an assault on the south end of Quebec's Lower Town is vividly, albeit romantically, portrayed in John Trumbell’s period painting. A partial siege of the town that followed the failed assault ended when a British fleet arrived in spring 1776.

Latest Posts

Arnold’s Flawed Invasion of Quebec

By Eric Niderost

On November 9, 1775, a British resident of Quebec wrote a letter back home, a missive that he knew might not even reach England, because the Canadian fortress city would soon be under a state of siege. Read more

Latest Posts

For All The Wrong Reasons

By Edward G. Miller

Hürtgen Forest. Chilling rain, freezing fog, mud, impenetrable forest. Unremitting misery for GIs and Landsers alike. War correspondent Ernest Hemingway famously called it “Passchendaele with tree bursts.” Read more

Pompey led troops to victory in a series of battles and actions that neutralized threats to Rome’s interests in Asia Minor.

Latest Posts

Gnaeus Pompeius Magnus

By Ludwig Heinrich Dyck

Gnaeus Pompey was one of the pivotal Roman leaders during the last decades of the Republic. He was born into an old and wealthy provincial family from Picenum on September 29, 106 BC. Read more

Twenty-two members of the Nazi regime on trial at Nuremberg for their part in war crimes. This, the first of 13 tribunals, lasted 11 months—from November 1945 until October 1946. Ten men were hanged; three committed suicide in prison.

Latest Posts

Was There Justice at Nuremberg?

By Blaine Taylor

After Imperial Germany lost the Great War (1914-1918), the Treaty of Versailles punished her severely in terms of ruinous restitution payments to the victors, economic sanctions, the loss of territory and colonies, the forced abdication of Kaiser Wilhelm II, and the heavy restrictions imposed on her armed forces. Read more

Latest Posts

Bloody Repulse at Fontenoy

By Robert L. Durham

The French cavalry thundered ahead, straight for the British open square. The red-coated infantry made ready for them, the front-rank knelt with muskets planted in the ground and their fixed bayonets pointed outward. Read more

A little girl hands a flower to a lieutenant of the 110th Infantry Regiment, 28th Infantry Division, as flag-waving Luxembourgers welcome the liberating Yanks to their village, September 1944. Unfortunately, the celebration was premature; the Germans launched a counteroffensive that became known as the Battle of the Bulge three months later and nearly drove the Americans out of Luxembourg. Tom Myers was a soldier in the 110th Infantry whose unit was caught up in the chaos.

Latest Posts

The Fight for Weiler

By Allyn Vannoy

IN a house in a small, nameless Belgian village, 26-year-old Sergeant Tom Myers, a newly assigned member of the 5th Armored Division, was upstairs changing his filthy uniform for a fresh one. Read more

Latest Posts

Faces of World War I

By David DeJonge

November 11, 2008, marked the 90th anniversary of the end of World War I. Some 4,734,991 American soldiers served in the conflict, and 116,516 Americans lost their lives during the nation’s two-year participation in the war—a casualty rate far surpassing the deaths incurred in the combined wars of Korea, Vietnam, and the Persian Gulf. Read more

San Francisco residents snap up the latest editions of the city’s newspapers and try to separate fact from rumor amid a swirl of information related to enemy activity in the early days of the war. The Japanese made numerous attempts to bring the war home to the U.S. West Coast, including submarines surfacing off the coast to shell targets or attempting to launch attack aircraft.

Latest Posts

War on the West Coast

By Glenn Barnett

Throughout World War II, the Imperial Japanese Navy dreamed of taking the war to the West Coast of the United States. Read more

Croatian nobleman Nikola Zrinski leads a sortie against the Turks at the Hungarian fortress of Szigetvar in 1566. The bloody siege was Suleiman’s last battle.

Latest Posts

Ottoman Sultan Suleiman I

By William E. Welsh

Venetian military engineer Gabriel Tandini listened intently in the semi-darkness of the Knights Hospitaller counter-tunnels beneath the walls of Rhodes for sound of Turkish sappers trying to dig under the city’s walls. Read more

U.S. Navy Lieutenant Alex Vraciu holds up six fingers signifying the number of Japanese aircraft that fell to his guns during an eight-minute span on a single mission.

Latest Posts

The Setting Sun

By David H. Lippmann

Once again, the Japanese regarded an upcoming naval engagement as the “decisive battle,” but it had been two years since her aircraft carriers and battleships had emerged from their Inland Sea lairs to menace the United States Navy. Read more

Images from the 1800 edition of Baron von Steuben’s “Blue Book” illustrate part of the Manual of Arms as practiced by the Continental Army at Valley Forge in 1778.

Latest Posts

Collecting Field Manuals

By Peter Suciu

It has long been said that there is a right way to do things, a wrong way to do things—and the military way to do things. Read more