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Two days later, early June turned into one of the most famous dates in world history. On June 6th, 1944, Allied forces stormed the beaches of Normandy in northern France in the opening phase of Operation Overlord. United States troops landed primarily at Utah and Omaha Beaches, facing a mix of flooded terrain, beach obstacles, and entrenched German defenders.
On December 28th, 1835, a column of United States soldiers under Major Francis Dade marched through the pine woods of Florida on what officers believed was a relatively routine movement between forts.
A Medal of Honor story of courage under fire and relentless assault in the Pacific War.
The ridge ahead looked less like a battlefield and more like a shattered hillside of rock, clay, and smoke. It was early May 1945 on Okinawa, and the Marines of Company E had stalled below Hill 60. Japanese machine guns chattered from hidden bunkers. Mortar rounds crashed into the slope, showering the men with dirt and splinters of coral. Every attempt to move up the ridge drew a fresh burst of fire that pinned them
Early in the Civil War, Colonel Elmer Ellsworth led the 11th New York “Fire Zouaves,” a regiment drawn from New York City firefighters, across the Potomac River to occupy Alexandria, Virginia. On May 24th, 1861, Ellsworth personally took down a large Confederate flag flying above the Marshall House inn, a banner that could be seen from the White House and that deeply angered President Lincoln.
On December 21st, 1945, General George S.
On December 14th, 1799, George Washington died at his home at Mount Vernon, closing the life of the commander who had led the Continental Army and then served as the first president.
In the early hours of January 6th, 1919, Theodore Roosevelt died in his sleep at Sagamore Hill, closing the life of a man who had left a deep imprint on American military history. As a young politician, he had resigned his post to help raise the volunteer cavalry regiment that would be remembered as the Rough Riders in the Spanish-American War. His charge up the hills above Santiago, alongside regular Army units and
Decades after Appomattox, the nation marked the passing of the general who had borne so much of the Union’s burden in the Civil War. Ulysses S. Grant died at a mountaintop cottage in New York after a long illness, having raced the clock to complete his memoirs and provide for his family. The former lieutenant general and eighteenth president had guided the Union armies through the brutal Overland Campaign, siege of P
In the dark waters off Tripoli on February 16th, 1804, a young United States Navy officer, Stephen Decatur, led a small boarding party into one of the most celebrated raids in early naval history. The frigate USS Philadelphia had run aground and been captured months earlier, and Tripolitan forces now held her as a valuable prize in the First Barbary War.
On January 1st, 1942, representatives of the United States, Britain, the Soviet Union, China, and many other Allied nations signed a joint pledge in Washington, known as the Declaration by United Nations.
On this day in Philadelphia, delegates of the Continental Congress formally adopted the Declaration of Independence, transforming an armed rebellion into a war for national survival. Fighting had already broken out at Lexington and Concord, Bunker Hill, and along the Canadian frontier, but now the Continental Army, Navy, and Marine forces served an independent United States rather than protesting colonies.
On a July evening in New York, Continental soldiers assembled to hear the newly adopted Declaration of Independence read aloud. Many of these men had been fighting British regulars for more than a year, but this moment tied their service to a clear political break with the Crown. The words about unalienable rights and government by consent took on a sharper meaning for troops who faced invasion from the sea as Britis
In the early 1960s, as Cold War crises multiplied from Berlin to Southeast Asia, American leaders recognized that military intelligence needed more unified direction.
A story of a desperate hilltop stand, a fixed bayonet charge, and how it helped turn a Civil War invasion back.
Even before a formal declaration of war against Germany, the United States Navy was escorting convoys in the North Atlantic, confronting the realities of submarine warfare.
A Medal of Honor story of courage under fire in the Pacific war.
The jungle pressed in on both sides of the Ormoc Road, a narrow ribbon of mud and broken pavement cutting through the hills near Limon on the island of Leyte. December rain had turned the ditches into brown pools. American infantrymen crouched behind a hasty roadblock of felled trees, sandbags, and wrecked vehicles, listening to the grinding approach of steel.