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On May 10th, 1969, paratroopers of the 101st Airborne Division began a series of assaults against a steep, jungle-covered height in the A Shau Valley that would become known as Hamburger Hill. The Vietnamese Army defenders were dug into bunkers and trenches woven into the slopes, forcing American units to climb under fire again and again through mud, foliage, and concealed obstacles.
The fuel gauges in Harold Bauer’s Wildcat fighter were already edging toward empty when the coastline of Guadalcanal slid beneath his wings. He had just finished leading a long, tense, overwater flight of Marine fighters up from Espiritu Santo, six hundred miles of nothing but ocean and cloud. Henderson Field, the hard-bitten airstrip the Marines called home, lay ahead as a thin strip of coral and mud, promising rest
After years as a United States territory and a key overseas outpost, Hawaii formally entered the Union as the fiftieth state on August 21st, 1959. Long before that date, the islands had already become central to American strategy in the Pacific, from the attack on Pearl Harbor to the vast network of airfields and naval bases that supported World War II operations.
At the turn of the twentieth century, American leaders viewed an isthmian canal as essential to both commerce and naval strategy.
The black volcanic sand of Iwo Jima offered no cover, only shallow shell holes and the hulks of stalled tanks. Late on February 23, 1945, Marines of the 21st Regiment lay pinned down, staring across a short stretch of open ground that felt a mile wide. Ahead of them, a maze of reinforced concrete pillboxes spat machine-gun fire in crossing patterns, every burst chewing fresh craters into the sand.
A story of a retreat turned into a deadly gauntlet, and how air power reshaped the end of the Gulf War.
Two years later, the Central Highlands again saw fierce engagements as American commanders tried to disrupt enemy concentrations near the Cambodian and Laotian borders.
On January 31st, 1865, as Union armies pressed the Confederacy on multiple fronts, the United States House of Representatives finally passed the Thirteenth Amendment to the Constitution. The Senate had approved it the previous year, but the House vote had stalled until battlefield victories and political pressure shifted the margin.
On the night of February 17th, 1864, off Charleston, South Carolina, the Confederate submarine H. L. Hunley moved slowly toward the Union sloop of war USS Housatonic. The Hunley was a dangerous experiment: a hand-cranked, cigar-shaped boat with a spar torpedo mounted on its bow. Its crew had already died in earlier test accidents, but on this sortie the submarine reached its target, detonated its explosive charge, an
Early in the Second World War’s Pacific campaign, United States and Filipino forces on Bataan and Corregidor fought a desperate defense against Japanese invasion. With the situation deteriorating and Washington determined to preserve a senior commander for future operations, General Douglas MacArthur received orders to leave the Philippines and take up a new post in Australia.
As war raged across Europe and Asia, the United States still officially stood neutral in January 1941, but the lines were beginning to blur. On January 10th, 1941, President Franklin Roosevelt’s administration saw the Lend-Lease bill introduced in Congress, proposing that the United States could lend or lease war material to nations whose defense was deemed vital to American security.
In the Central Pacific, United States forces opened a new phase of the war against Japan with the amphibious assault on Saipan in the Mariana Islands. On June 15th, 1944, Marines of the 2nd and 4th Marine Divisions, supported later by soldiers of the 27th Infantry Division, hit the beaches under fire from well-prepared Japanese defenses dug into coral, caves, and ridges.
On July 3rd, 1988, during tense operations in the Persian Gulf, the guided-missile cruiser USS Vincennes mistook a civilian Iran Air Airbus ascending along a commercial route for a hostile military aircraft. Believing the plane to be an attacking fighter and amid conflicting reports about altitude and identification, the ship fired surface-to-air missiles that destroyed the airliner, killing all passengers and crew.
On November 4th, 1979, the line between diplomatic tension and outright crisis was crossed at the United States embassy in Tehran.
The final events in this week’s window unfolded in the shifting landscape of the post–Cold War world. In the early hours of August 2nd, 1990, Iraqi armored and mechanized units crossed the border into Kuwait, quickly overwhelming the small country’s defenses and seizing its capital. The invasion stunned the region and set off a wave of diplomatic and military responses.
In the wake of the September 11th attacks and years of tense inspections and sanctions, the United States and a coalition of partners confronted Iraq over weapons of mass destruction and compliance with international demands. After issuing a final ultimatum to Saddam Hussein’s regime, American forces launched the opening strikes of what would become known as the Iraq War on March 19th, 2003.
Just two days after Pea Ridge opened, another kind of revolution unfolded in the waters off Virginia. On March 9th, 1862, the Union ironclad Monitor met the Confederate ironclad Virginia (rebuilt from the scuttled Merrimack) in the confined waters of Hampton Roads, one day after the Virginia had mauled wooden Union warships. For hours the two armored vessels circled, rammed, and fired at close range, with shots that
On February 19th, 1945, the beaches of Iwo Jima filled with landing craft as Marines of the 4th and 5th Marine Divisions came ashore under fire. The island was small but strategically important, lying between the Marianas and the Japanese home islands and hosting airfields that could threaten American bombers.