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In the Texas Revolution, a short, violent clash on the Gulf Coast plains decided the fate of a breakaway republic and, eventually, much of the American Southwest. On April 21st, 1836, General Sam Houston’s Texian army surprised the larger Mexican force of General Antonio López de Santa Anna near the San Jacinto River. Many of the Texian fighters were recent immigrants from the United States, bringing frontier militia
The Spanish-American War brought United States forces into Cuba, and on July 1st, 1898, American troops attacked fortified Spanish positions at El Caney and along the San Juan Heights outside Santiago. At El Caney, infantry fought for hours to take a stone blockhouse and surrounding works, while other regiments prepared to advance on Kettle Hill and San Juan Hill.
As the spring campaigns of the American Civil War unfolded in 1862, Union forces pressed down the Virginia Peninsula toward Richmond. On May 31st, 1862, Confederate troops struck back near the crossroads of Seven Pines and Fair Oaks, launching a fierce assault against elements of the Union Army of the Potomac. Confusion in the swampy terrain and miscoordination among Confederate commanders blunted what might have bee
At Pittsburg Landing along the Tennessee River, Confederate forces struck the encamped Union Army of the Tennessee in a surprise attack that opened one of the Civil War’s first truly massive battles. General Ulysses S. Grant’s troops had been gathering for an advance deeper into the Confederate heartland when General Albert Sidney Johnston launched a dawn assault.
In the Second World War, the Aleutian Islands campaign unfolded in harsh seas and fog, far from the better-known fronts of Europe and the central Pacific. On March 26th, 1943, an American cruiser-destroyer force under Rear Admiral Charles McMorris intercepted a Japanese convoy near the Komandorski Islands, northwest of the Aleutians. The enemy escort included heavier cruisers, giving the Japanese an advantage in guns
On the northern Plains, the date June 25th, 1876 is inseparable from the shock that followed the destruction of Lieutenant Colonel George Armstrong Custer’s battalion along the Little Bighorn River. Part of a larger campaign to push Lakota and Northern Cheyenne bands onto reservations, Custer’s Seventh Cavalry column advanced aggressively toward a large village whose size and fighting strength he underestimated.
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.
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
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
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
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.
On February 12th, 1809, Abraham Lincoln was born in a Kentucky log cabin, long before he would become the wartime president who guided the Union through the Civil War. For military history, Lincoln’s significance lies in the way he grew into the role of commander in chief of an enormous citizen army. During four years of brutal fighting, he wrestled with strategy, replaced generals, and learned to balance political p
In the gray dawn of May 12th, 1864, Union soldiers surge through fog and rain toward a bulging section of Confederate works near Spotsylvania Court House known as the Mule Shoe. What follows is one of the most brutal episodes of the Civil War, later remembered as the Bloody Angle. For nearly twenty hours, men on both sides fire from opposite sides of the same log parapets, stab with bayonets, and club with musket sto
In the early morning hours, Confederate batteries around Charleston harbor opened fire on Fort Sumter, a brick fortification held by a small United States Army garrison. The standoff over supplies and sovereignty that had simmered through the winter suddenly turned into open combat. For more than a day, shells and heated shot crashed into the fort’s walls and buildings, setting fires and forcing the defenders to husb
During the opening weeks of the Iraq War, United States Army armored units pushed toward Baghdad in a series of rapid thrusts designed to shock and disorganize Iraqi defenses. One of the most important objectives was Baghdad International Airport, whose capture would provide a major logistical hub and symbolic foothold on the edge of the capital.
Off the North Carolina coast, the earthworks of Fort Fisher guarded the entrance to the Cape Fear River and the vital port of Wilmington, the last major Confederate gateway on the Atlantic. After an earlier Union attempt failed, a massive second expedition began on January 13th, 1865, with warships pounding the defenses while soldiers under Major General Alfred Terry prepared to storm the works.
During the War of 1812, the Niagara frontier became a key line where American and British forces tested each other’s strength. On May 27th, 1813, United States troops supported by naval gunfire came ashore near Fort George in Upper Canada and pushed inland under heavy resistance. The combined land and naval operation forced the British garrison to abandon the fort, giving American forces control of an important posit
In the dead of winter during the Revolutionary War, Virginia officer George Rogers Clark led a small force of frontiersmen and French militia through flooded Illinois country to strike the British post at Vincennes, in what is now Indiana. After a grueling march through icy water and mud, his men surrounded Fort Sackville and convinced the British commander, Lieutenant Governor Henry Hamilton, that he faced a much la