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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.
While soldiers bled at Stones River, sailors on the pioneering ironclad Monitor fought the sea itself.
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
A Jewish paratrooper from Berlin who met the Battle of the Bulge head-on to save his men
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.
A Medal of Honor story of relentless courage under fire in the Italian campaign of World War II.
The draw is narrow and steep, its sides scoured by months of shellfire and rain. At the bottom, the earth is churned to powder. Above it, hidden in the scrub and broken stone near Cisterna di Littoria, German machine guns wait for anything that moves. Private James Henry Mills can hear them before he sees them—the clatter of automatic fire, the sharper crack of rifles, the dull thump of grenades exploding somewhere a
A Medal of Honor story of stubborn courage and small-unit leadership in the Pacific war’s last great battle.
The ground in front of Sugar Loaf Hill is already chewed into mud and craters when Corporal James Lewis Day crawls forward to look for cover. It is May 1945 on Okinawa, and the Marines trying to cross this open killing ground are being shredded by Japanese mortar and artillery fire. The air is thick with pulverized coral dust. Fragments of shattered ammunition boxes and discarded packs lie where men dropped them runn
On this day representatives of Imperial Japan signed an instrument of surrender on the deck of the battleship Missouri, anchored in Tokyo Bay and surrounded by Allied warships.
Early June took on new meaning in 1942, as the Pacific War reached North American shores. On June 3rd, 1942, Japanese carrier aircraft struck the United States Navy and Army installations at Dutch Harbor in the Aleutian Islands of Alaska Territory. The attack damaged fuel facilities, barracks, and anti-aircraft positions, and it was followed by further strikes the next day.
Just two weeks after the attack on Pearl Harbor, Japanese forces struck another major blow by landing large invasion forces along the shores of Lingayen Gulf in northern Luzon on December 22nd, 1941.
The ridge near San Jose Hacienda rose steep and stubborn out of the jungle, a wall of earth and rock that dominated the valley floor. Somewhere up there, hidden in spider holes—small, camouflaged fighting pits—and pillboxes, Japanese soldiers waited behind interlocking bands of machine-gun fire. To reach the crest, Company I of the 160th Infantry Regiment had only one narrow approach, a trail that funneled men into a