Search & discovery
Find a person, battle, citation, tank or aircraft profile, article, book or episode. Start with a name or identifier, then explore the connections.
Showing 19–31
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
The winter sky over the Anzio beachhead was a low, gray lid, pressing the sound of guns back down onto the men below. Along a shallow drainage ditch called the Fossa Femminamorta, muddy water slid past tufts of grass and shattered reeds. Somewhere ahead, beyond the next bend, German machine guns covered the open fields that stretched away from the ditch, anchoring a strongpoint that threatened the entire attack.
The ramps drop into waist-deep surf and chaos. It is the morning of October 20, 1944, on a stretch of shoreline the maps call Red Beach. Ahead lies a narrow band of sand, beyond it a low palm grove and flooded rice paddies. Somewhere in that green fringe, Japanese guns have the approaches bracketed. As the first waves of soldiers tried to cross, the beach turned into a killing ground.
Night still clung to the sea when the submarine slid in among the enemy ships. On the open bridge, spray cold against his face, Commander Lawson “Red” Ramage watched the black shapes of freighters and tankers loom out of the darkness. Their wakes glowed faintly, white scars across a heaving Pacific, while bursts of star shell and tracer fire clawed at the sky. Somewhere off Taiwan, a Japanese convoy was trying to sli
Mikasa served as Admiral Togo flagship in the Russo-Japanese War, survived battle and a magazine explosion, and became the only preserved pre-dreadnought battleship.
A radical low-freeboard ironclad built around a steam-powered rotating turret. The single ship gave its name to an entire family of later coastal and riverine warships.
A story of a nearly lost beach, scattered initiative, and how small groups clawed back the chance to win a war.
Before dawn on Leyte, the world was reduced to shadows, muzzle flashes, and the flat crack of Japanese rifles. Company A of the 382nd Infantry had clawed its way to the edge of the enemy‑held Buri airstrip, then stalled. Out in front, less than a hundred yards away, Japanese soldiers were dug into bomb craters and a drainage ditch, their machine guns perfectly sighted on every patch of open ground. Anyone who tried t
By February 1945, much of Pearl Harbor had returned to the business of war. Battleships and carriers came and went; convoys formed up and headed west toward Iwo Jima and Okinawa. But in a side channel called West Loch, the harbor still hid a graveyard. Months earlier, a chain of explosions had torn through a cluster of tank landing ships loading ammunition for the Pacific campaign.
A two-ship American dreadnought class that concentrated twelve 14-inch guns in four triple turrets and carried the Standard-type battleship concept into a heavier, more mature form.
A story of a shrinking beachhead, exhausted troops, and how their stand kept South Korea from collapsing in 1950.
A story of exposed convoys, hidden fighters, and the soldiers and medics who kept moving through an urban kill zone.
How a 22-year-old automatic rifleman kept firing after losing both legs, and saved his platoon in the Philippine mountains of 1945.