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That same global war saw another crucial August fight half a world away on the island of Guadalcanal. United States Marines of the 1st Marine Division had seized a vital airstrip earlier in the month and were entrenching around it when a Japanese force under Colonel Kiyonao Ichiki was ordered to sweep them away.
During the War of 1812, control of the Great Lakes and the Old Northwest hinged on both naval power and fast-moving land campaigns.
Almost twenty years later, the United States tore itself apart in civil war, and May 5th, 1864 marked the beginning of a grim new phase. That day, Lieutenant General Ulysses S. Grant pushed the Army of the Potomac south across the Rapidan River into a tangle of underbrush and second-growth forest known simply as the Wilderness. In that terrain, visibility collapsed, lines broke apart, and musket flashes set the woods
Two decades later, another fight in the Old Northwest underscored the stakes of American expansion.
A story of a winter river crossing, a worn-out army on the edge of defeat, and how one night’s gamble kept the Revolution alive.
On a cold October morning, a makeshift American flotilla under Benedict Arnold waited behind Valcour Island on Lake Champlain for a much larger British squadron sailing south from Canada.
By late 1864, Confederate General Sterling Price launched a sweeping mounted raid into Missouri, hoping to capture cities, inspire recruits, and shift attention from collapsing fronts elsewhere.
The shock delivered at Front Royal set the stage for a larger clash two days later. On May 25th, 1862, Union General Nathaniel Banks tried to hold the town of Winchester against Jackson’s advancing Confederates, whose columns converged on the Valley Pike from multiple directions. Through the morning, Union infantry and artillery contested ridges south of the town, but Confederate attacks pressed steadily against thei
The failed December 1864 expedition and successful January 1865 assault were separate attempts to close Wilmington’s protected sea approach. This overview distinguishes bombardment, amphibious landings, naval and army assaults, and the later advance on Wilmington.
The next morning, the first shots of the Revolutionary War rang out on Lexington Green as British regulars confronted a small band of armed colonists. The exact origin of the “shot heard round the world” is still debated, but the result was clear: several colonial militiamen lay dead, and the British column pressed on toward Concord. At Concord’s North Bridge, larger militia forces confronted detachments of the regul
In the early 1960s, United States leaders sought to topple the new Cuban government through covert means rather than open war. On April 17th, 1961, a force of Cuban exiles, trained and supported by American agencies, landed along Cuba’s southern coast at the Bay of Pigs. The plan called for air strikes, a beachhead, and hoped-for uprisings inside the country, but execution problems and rapid government response under
On January 29th, 1863, amid deep winter cold near the Bear River in what is now southeastern Idaho, a column of California Volunteers attacked a camp of Northwestern Shoshone people. The expedition had been ordered after years of tension along overland routes, where emigrant traffic and military patrols collided with Native communities trying to survive.
In the dark, humid hours before dawn on Okinawa, the American line around Kakazu Ridge was little more than a jagged string of foxholes and shattered stone. Technical Sergeant Beauford “Andy” Anderson and the men of his weapons platoon had spent the night listening to the island—distant artillery rumbled, mortars coughed, and now and then a Japanese flare turned the terraced fields silver for a heartbeat before dropp
Two decades later, American troops faced a different kind of threat while on peacekeeping duty in Lebanon.
Three years after Saratoga, one of its heroes met secretly with a British officer to betray the very cause he once championed.
Two days after André’s capture, events reached a crisis on September 25th, 1780, when General Washington traveled to inspect West Point and discovered that Benedict Arnold had fled.
In the final spring of the Civil War, Major General William Tecumseh Sherman’s armies marched north from Georgia into the Carolinas, aiming to link up with Union forces advancing from Virginia. Confederate General Joseph E. Johnston gathered what troops he could to strike a concentrated blow against one wing of Sherman’s column near Bentonville, North Carolina.
In the early Cold War, the contest for Berlin became a test of whether the Western Allies could sustain a free city deep inside the Soviet occupation zone without surrendering to pressure.