Austria

Waffen SS General Felix Steiner’s WWII Legacy

By Pat McTaggart

“Where is Steiner?” Adolf Hitler demanded as his Thousand Year Reich crumbled around him in April 1945. “Is he attacking yet?” Read more

Austria

The Duke of Marlborough Unleashed at the Battle of Ramillies

By Vince Hawkins

The War of Spanish Succession, fought between 1701 and 1711, witnessed the emergence of some of Europe’s greatest military commanders. Read more

Austria

Napoleon’s Italian Campaign: A Year Against the Odds

By Jeremy Green

The newly appointed 26-year-old commander-in-chief of the French Army of Italy arrived at Nice headquarters on March 27, 1796. Read more

Austria

Prince Rupert of the Rhine, Duke of Cumberland

By Arnold Blumberg

The election of the Protestant Frederick V, Elector of the Palatine, to the throne of Bohemia instead of the Catholic Hapsburg, Ferdinand of Austria, sparked what was to become the Thirty Years War. Read more

Austria

Deputy Führer Rudolf Hess: Foe or Ally?

By Sherman Gengler

Throughout the reign of the Nazi Party in Germany during the 1930s and 1940s, Adolf Hitler’s inner circle comprised a diverse group of men from many walks of life. Read more

Austria

Solferino: Birth of a Nation

By Eric Niderost

­Long columns of blue-clad French troops marched east though the sun-baked plains of northern Italy in late June 1859. Read more

Austria

The Battle of Mollwitz: Opening Move For Prussian Expansion

By Arnold Blumberg

On October 20, 1740, Charles VI, Holy Roman Emperor and ruler of Austria, died, leaving his vast holdings and titles to his 23-year-old daughter, Maria Theresa. Read more

Austria

The Short-range Shotgun

By Christopher Miskimon

Coming upon the enemy’s rear guard outside the western Kentucky village of Sacramento, four days after Christmas 1861, Confederate Colonel Nathan Bedford Forrest ordered his cavalry to advance. Read more

Austria

The Girandoni Air Rifle: The Lewis and Clark Expedition’s Secret Weapon

By Frederick J. Chiaventone

When one thinks of the guns that won the West, one naturally envisions such familiar weapons as the Winchester, Henry, and Spencer repeating rifles, the trapdoor Springfield, the Smith & Wesson revolver, and the Colt Peacemaker. Read more

Austria

Hitler’s Experience in the Trenches of the Great War

By Kirk A. Freeman

In the months before the outbreak of World War I, 25-year-old Adolf Hitler was living the starving artist’s life in the Bavarian city of Munich, selling his paintings door-to-door and in the city’s numerous beer halls. Read more

Austria

Weapons of War: the War Hammer

By William McPeak

Not to be confused with Mjollnir, the mythical Norse god Thor’s fabled hammer, the real-life war hammer was a brutal and effective weapon. Read more

Austria

Napoleon’s Last Great Victory: The Battle of Dresden

By Eric Niderost

Marshal Gouvion Saint-Cyr was in a tight spot, and he knew it. It was the morning of August 26, 1813, and Saint-Cyr and his French XIV Corps were defending Dresden, the capital of Saxony, from a large and menacing Allied army that outnumbered his own by at least four to one. Read more

Austria

Napoleon’s Stunning Debut: The Italian Campaign

By Dana Lombardy

Barthélemy Schérer, commander of the French Army, gazed at the new military orders from Paris in disbelief. The grandoise strategy, detailing an advance on three fronts with the armies uniting in Tyrol for a concentrated thrust at Vienna, were far beyond the capabilities of the starving southern army he commanded along the French Riveria against the combined forces of Austria and Sardinia. Read more

Austria

Ford’s Willow Run Factory

By Samantha L. Quigley

They said it couldn’t be done. Doubters chided Henry Ford for declaring that his Willow Run Bomber Plant could turn out a B-24 Liberator heavy bomber every hour. Read more

Austria

Ironclad Clash at Lissa

By David A. Norris

Narrrowly avoiding a fatal blow from the Italian ironclad ram Affondatore, Commodore Anton von Petz, commander of Austrian wooden-hulled ship of the line Kaiser, came under fire from the heavy rifled guns of another enemy ironclad, the Re di Portogallo, on July 20, 1866, near the Dalmatian island of Lissa in the Adriatic Sea. Read more

Austria

A Soviet Red Army Victory at Vienna

By Major General Michael Reynolds

In mid-March 1945, the Joseph Stalin’s Soviet Red Army launched a major offensive with the aim of clearing Axis forces out of Hungary and forcing them back to the very borders of Hitler’s Greater German Reich. Read more

Austria

The Irish Brigade in WWII

By Tim Newark

It was a letter in the London Times that caught the attention of British wartime Prime Minister Winston Churchill. Read more

Austria

Frederick The Great’s First Defeat

By Arnold Blumberg

Frederick the Great’s prescription for warfare was simple. The Prussian monarch wanted “short and lively wars” that relied on swift, powerful, and decisive military operations. Read more

Austria

Chevau-Légers Polonais: Napoleon’s Polish Cavalry Charge at Somosierra Pass

By Alexander Zarkzewski

On the foggy morning of November 30, 1808, Napoleon Bonaparte, Emperor of France, watched impatiently as his Grande Armée lumbered up the rocky slopes of the Sierra de Guadarrama Mountains of central Spain. Read more

Austria

A Tale of Two Famiglie: Resistance and Atrocities During the Italian Resistance

By Ed Emering

In March 1940, Benito Mussolini met with Adolf Hitler near the Brenner Pass on the border between Austria and Italy. Read more