An artillery battery stationed in the Korean hills provides support fire for forward-positioned infantry units.

United Nations

The Korean War’s Counterfire Platoons

By Richard E. Ecker

In March 1953, a battle-scarred United Nations outpost called “Old Baldy” was attacked by elements of the Chinese Army and captured from the Colombian soldiers occupying it. Read more

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Freedom or Death: The Hungarian Uprising of 1956

By Todd Avery Raffensperger

“To the Great Stalin, from the grateful Hungarian People,” read the inscription on a 24-foot-high bronze statue of Joseph Stalin on the grounds of Budapest City Park, erected in 1951 to honor the tyrant of the Soviet Union. Read more

A pitiful Buchenwald inmate lifts a food bowl to his frail mouth, hardly seeming to comprehend that freedom has come at last. For many, the end of the nightmare had come too late.

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WWII Concentration Camps: The Horrific Discovery at Buchenwald

By Flint Whitlock

When Adolf Hitler became chancellor of Germany on January 30, 1933, the world changed forever.

Not only was Hitler determined to pay back Germany’s enemies for his country’s defeat during the Great War, but he was also determined to rid Germany and the rest of Europe of persons whom his twisted Aryan ideology believed were “inferior” or “subhuman.” Read more

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Delaying Action at Kapyong

By Marc D. Bernstein

The Chinese always attacked at night. It was April 22, 1951, and the Communists had just launched the largest offensive of the Korean War. Read more

An American soldier cautiously approaches two burning vehicles that had been destroyed by a German ambush. As a scout, Private Sevel never wore equipment or heavy clothing in order to stay mobile on the battlefield.

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A Scout in Patton’s Third Army

By Kevin M. Hymel

The Messerschmitt Bf-109 fighter plane dove out of the sky with machine guns firing. The pilot’s target—a pontoon bridge being stretched across Germany’s Werra River by American engineers. Read more

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Infantryman’s War atop Pork Chop Hill

By Phil Zimmer

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

Lieutenant General Omar Bradley greets Marshall in Normandy in June 1944.

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George C. Marshall: The Indispensable Man

By Eric Hammel

George Catlett Marshall was the greatest American military man of his age. If the United States Army had kicked off the 20th century with the specific intent of constructing a chief of staff to lead it to victory in World War II, it could not have done a better job than what chance provided in the triumphs and travails over the 40 years that molded George Marshall. Read more

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Vyacheslav M. Molotov: Steel’s Hammer

By Blaine Taylor

The arrival of Vyacheslav M. Molotov, the People’s Commissar for Foreign Affairs of the Soviet Union, in Berlin on a rainy November 12, 1940, was a solemn, strained occasion. Read more

United Nations

Red Eclipse: Halting the Communist Drive on Seoul

By Marc D. Bernstein

By mid-April 1951, the war in Korea was nearly 10 months old. United Nations forces had suffered a reversal of fortunes in late 1950 with the entry of Communist China into the war, losing the South Korean capital of Seoul but later regaining it. Read more

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Grand Mufti al-Husseini: Britain’s Deadliest Enemy?

By Blaine Taylor

Like all Palestinians and most Arabs, Haj Amin al-Hussaini not only looked forward to an Axis Pact victory in World War II but also saw it as a means of defeating what he believed was a joint British-Jewish conspiracy to foist an Israelite homeland on the Middle East that would be to the detriment of his own people. Read more

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Street Fight in Seoul

By Marc D. Bernstein

On September 15, 1950, the United Nations X Corps, spearheaded by two regiments of the U.S. 1st Marine Division, landed at Inchon, on South Korea’s west coast, 25 miles from the capital of Seoul. Read more

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The Tokyo War Crimes Trials

By Roy Morris Jr.

When the Tokyo War Crimes Trials opened in the former hilltop headquarters of the Japanese military at Ichigaya on May 3, 1946, American-born chief prosecutor Joseph Keenan faced a difficult task. Read more