CIA

Brandy Station: The Largest American Civil War Cavalry Battle

Major Henry B. McClellan should have had a quiet afternoon. At dawn on June 9, 1863, Union cavalry had launched a surprise attack on Maj. Read more

CIA

Against the Odds: Jeanette Rankin

An Associated Press report described “a chorus of hisses and boos” that echoed through the chamber when the Congresswoman from Montana cast her vote. Read more

CIA

Rampage on the Riviera: Operation Dragoon

Early in 1944, German Field Marshal Erwin Rommel, the defeated hero of North Africa and now head of Army Group B in France, was tasked with strengthening the Atlantic Wall defenses against Allied invasion. Read more

CIA

Battle of Chickamauga: Death in the Deep Woods

It was nearly 11 on the morning of September 20, 1863, and the woods around slow-moving Chickamauga Creek in northwest Georgia were ominously quiet. Read more

CIA

Attack on the USS Panay

For some Americans, World War II started early. In December 1937, four years before the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor propelled the United States into the war, Japanese planes attacked an American gunboat, the USS Panay, on China’s Yangtze River, strafing and bombing the boat, sinking it, killing three American crew members, and the wounding 45 others. Read more

CIA

Infantryman’s War atop Pork Chop Hill

The tennis-shoed soldiers emerged from the darkness on July 6, 1953, like a “moving carpet of yelling, howling men [with] whistles and bugles blowing, their officers screaming, driving their men” against the Americans as they swept up Pork Chop Hill (Hill 255), recalled Private Angelo Palermo. Read more

CIA

HBO Working on “Band of Brothers In The Sky”

Thirteen years after completing “Band of Brothers” and four years after its companion series, “The Pacific,” Tom Hanks and Steven Spielberg are teaming up again for a new World War II HBO series: “Masters of the Air.” Read more

CIA

Moe Berg: Baseball Player in the OSS

In 1920, a young, handsome Jewish boy from New Jersey took the train from Grand Central Station to Princeton, New Jersey, where he would enroll that fall. Read more

CIA

Was Rudolf Hess Murdered?

In 1979, Dr. Hugh Thomas, a British physician, came out with a highly controversial book that made the startling claim that Nazi Germany’s Deputy Führer, Rudolf Hess, did not commit suicide in Berlin’s Spandau Prison in 1987, but actually died in 1941, and that the man who died in prison was, in reality, Hess’s double! Read more

CIA

Opening the Venona Files

On February 1, 1943, a group called the U.S. Army Signal Intelligence Service, the forerunner of the modern-day National Security Agency (NSA), began a project to intercept and analyze diplomatic signal traffic sent by an ally of the United States: the Soviet Union. Read more

CIA

Operation Gold: The CIA’s Berlin Tunnel

No sooner had the last shot of World War II been fired than a new, different kind of conflict began. Read more

CIA

The FCC’s RID and Japan’s Surrender

George Sterling received a teletype message from the War Department just after 5:15 am on August 15, 1945. Read more

CIA

World War I Weapons: Germany’s Big Guns

World War I’s stalemate on the Western Front ushered up varied solutions. The Allies developed tanks for traversing no man’s land to get at the enemy. Read more

CIA

The Lee-Enfield Rifle and its Effectiveness in World War II

By 1901, the Small Arms Committee—the body within the War Office tasked with arming the British Army with weapons—sought to replace their then-standard issue rifle: the Magazine Lee-Metford Rifle Mark II. Read more

CIA

The Port Chicago Disaster: The Largest Mutiny Trial in U.S. History

After sundown on July 17, something happened at a small port town 40 miles northeast of San Francisco that has never been fully explained…

The 7,500-ton Liberty ship SS E.A. Read more