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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.

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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.

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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

Robert Capa’s famous blurry image of the 1st Infantry Division’s amphibious landings at the Easy Red/Fox Green sectors of Omaha Beach indelibly captures the fear and chaos of the D-Day invasion. Four rolls of Capa’s film were rushed back to LIFE magazine’s London office, where a darkroom mistake ruined all but 11 images.

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“A Hell of a Good Place to Die”

By Christopher Miskimon

Corporal Michael Kurtz stood on the deck of an attack transport ship sitting off the Normandy coast. Gazing out over the ship’s railing in the pre-dawn hours, he could see the ship’s crew working the davits and ropes for the landing craft. Read more

The Gettysburg cyclorama shows a badly wounded Alonzo Cushing commanding one of his guns in The Angle.

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Union Lieutenant Alonzo Cushing

By William E. Welsh

One of the smoothbore cannons in Captain Merritt B. Miller’s Third Company of the Washington Artillery deployed west of Emmitsburg Road just south of the town of Gettysburg fired a single round at 1:07 p.m. Read more

U.S. troops fire on Chinese during Battle of Chipyong-Ni, which marked the high tide of the Chinese counteroffensive in the Korean War. The Chinese attacked at night to take full advantage of their superb infiltration tactics.

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Matthew Ridgway’s Eighth Army at Seoul

By John Walker

As Lt. Gen. Matthew Ridgway boarded a flight to Tokyo, Japan, on December 23, 1950, on his way to a meeting with General of the Army Douglas MacArthur, he was not fully aware of the depth of the crisis still unfolding on the frozen Korean peninsula, where American-led United Nations forces and their South Korean allies, who were seemingly on the verge of complete victory in North Korea, were now suddenly on the brink of collapse and perhaps outright defeat. Read more

Pope Eugenius III presents his pilgrim staff to King Louis VII at the Church of St. Denis. A high-ranking knight holds the Oriflamme, which was the battle standard of French kings.

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Crusader Calamity at Damascus

By William E. Welsh

The hot sun beat down on the mud-brick and wooden buildings, the lush orchards, and the patchwork of pastoral fields around the oval-shaped, walled city of Damascus in southern Syria on the morning of July 24, 1148. Read more

Arthur Beaumont’s depiction of the Japanese first wave attack that destroyed several VMF-211 aircraft and killed 23 Marines. A total of 52 U.S. military personnel died during the 16-day battle and over 400 were taken prisoner.

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Wake Island: Japan’s First Setback

By Nathan N. Prefer

It didn’t look like much—just a speck in the vast ocean. Most travelers spent only a night in the Pan American Hotel and never ventured far from the small adjoining airfield. Read more

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Reckoning at Horseshoe Bend

By Christopher G. Marquis

In the late summer of 1813, some 550 men, women, and children took refuge within a small wilderness outpost and waited for the worst. Read more

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Michael Lynch’s ‘The Chinese Civil War 1945-49’

By Christopher Miskimon

The years between the end of World War II and the start of the Korean War were relatively quiet years for the United States, but across the Pacific Ocean one of the most significant conflicts in modern history took place, setting the stage for events right up to the present day. Read more

Kwajalein Atoll, January 1944.

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Faces of War

A Photo Essay By Eric Hammel

Noted chronicler of the Pacific Theater Eric Hammel recently spent three years sorting, scanning, cleaning, selecting, and captioning United States Marine Corps World War II photos for six pictorial books. Read more

Napoleon Bonaparte changes to a fresh horse as his Army of Italy engages the Austrians at the town of Rivoli Veronese above the Adige River.

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Austrian Debacle at Rivoli

By Robert L. Durham

Twenty-six year-old Napoleon Bonaparte took command of France’s 23,000-strong Army of Italy in Nice, France, in late March 1796. Read more

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