Latest Posts
Wednesday, December 27, 1944, found the military situation in the Ardennes Forest of Belgium stalemated. After 12 days of unrelenting struggle, the American and German forces on this part of the Western Front found themselves locked in brutal combat, unable to drive each other back. Read more
Latest Posts
Confederate soldiers bitterly called it “that damned Yankee carbine they load on Sunday, and then fire all week.” Read more
Latest Posts
On May 2, 1942, the eve of the Battle of the Coral Sea, a Consolidated PBY-5A Catalina flying boat skimmed the water’s surface and touched down in the lagoon of Midway Atoll, 1,137 miles west of Oahu. Read more
Latest Posts
On a gloomy Friday morning, September 26, 1777, an advance party of the British Army marched into Philadelphia to take possession of the city. Read more
Latest Posts
The German town of Goch lay east of the Reichswald forest, a scene of heavy fighting for the British Army as it ground its way steadily into the heart of Germany. Read more
Latest Posts
Even in an army not lacking for larger-than-life figures, Confederate cavalry leader Turner Ashby stood out from the crowd. Although not particularly tall—about five feet, 10 inches—there was something about Ashby that commanded attention. Read more
Latest Posts
The dense formation that constituted the Army of the Potomac’s Black Hat Brigade formed up on Joseph Poffenberger’s farm at dawn on September 17, 1862. Read more
Latest Posts
It was March 14, 1944, and Private Albert “Albie” Duddy of D Company, 1st/4th Battalion Essex Regiment, was staring up at the monastery on top of the hill at Monte Cassino from a location north of the town of Cassino, Italy. Read more
Latest Posts
The Germans mocked it as their largest prisoner-of-war camp, and French Premier Georges Clemenceau was hardly less withering in his opinion of the Allied stronghold at Salonika, Greece. Read more
Latest Posts
“Am over enemy submarine in position …”
Cut off in mid-transmission, this contact report came from a U.S. Read more
Latest Posts
The series of battles that constituted the Confederate offensive against the Union army on the eastern outskirts of Richmond, Virginia, in summer 1862 would thrust a number of Union officers into the limelight. Read more
Latest Posts
On March 12, 1938, German troops entered Austria, part of Adolf Hitler’s plan to incorporate that hapless country into the Third Reich. Read more
Latest Posts
Latest Posts
Although Union Colonel Silas Colgrove had previously led his men through some of the most horrific fighting in the eastern theater of the Civil War, the order he received on the morning of July 3, 1863, in the woods near Culp’s Hill at Gettysburg, was the most unnerving he had ever received. Read more
Latest Posts
The British Admiralty Board of Enquiry into the loss of the battlecruiser HMS Hood, presided over by Vice Admiral Sir Geoffrey Blake, concluded, “The sinking of Hood was due to a hit from Bismarck’s 15-inch shell in or adjacent to Hood’s 4-inch or 15-inch magazines, causing them to explode and wreck the after part of the ship.” Read more
Latest Posts
An assault on an Alan woman by an Almogavar of the Catalan Company exploded into a skirmish between the two groups of allies in the pay of the Byzantine Empire on April 9, 1303. Read more
Latest Posts
In 1941-1942, British journalist Alistair Cooke traveled through the United States. In his description of his trip, American Home Front 1941-1942, he reported stopping for breakfast at a restaurant in West Virginia where, “the sugar was rationed at breakfast, and there was a note on the menu requesting that … in the interests of ‘national defense,’ keep to one cup of coffee.” Read more
Latest Posts
In the summer of 1916, America was an island of peace in an ocean of war. The guns of August 1914 had been blazing away in Europe for nearly two years now, primed by a booming American munitions industry that found itself growing rich on the long-distance suffering of others. Read more
Latest Posts
It was the evening of Monday, June 5, 1944, and an armada of almost 5,000 ships stood off the southern coast of England, primed and ready for the greatest amphibious invasion in history. Read more
Latest Posts
Under a bright, high sun in a pale blue Midwestern sky, six companies of the United States Cavalry’s 1st Regiment rode into a grassy valley bordering the south fork of the Solomon River in northwestern Kansas on the afternoon of July 29, 1857. Read more
