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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 failed December 1864 expedition and successful January 1865 assault were separate attempts to close Wilmington’s protected sea approach. This overview distinguishes bombardment, amphibious landings, naval and army assaults, and the later advance on Wilmington.
The next morning, the first shots of the Revolutionary War rang out on Lexington Green as British regulars confronted a small band of armed colonists. The exact origin of the “shot heard round the world” is still debated, but the result was clear: several colonial militiamen lay dead, and the British column pressed on toward Concord. At Concord’s North Bridge, larger militia forces confronted detachments of the regul
In the early 1960s, United States leaders sought to topple the new Cuban government through covert means rather than open war. On April 17th, 1961, a force of Cuban exiles, trained and supported by American agencies, landed along Cuba’s southern coast at the Bay of Pigs. The plan called for air strikes, a beachhead, and hoped-for uprisings inside the country, but execution problems and rapid government response under
On January 29th, 1863, amid deep winter cold near the Bear River in what is now southeastern Idaho, a column of California Volunteers attacked a camp of Northwestern Shoshone people. The expedition had been ordered after years of tension along overland routes, where emigrant traffic and military patrols collided with Native communities trying to survive.
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
Three years after Saratoga, one of its heroes met secretly with a British officer to betray the very cause he once championed.
Two days after André’s capture, events reached a crisis on September 25th, 1780, when General Washington traveled to inspect West Point and discovered that Benedict Arnold had fled.
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.
Two days after the blockade began, American and British planners put into motion a response that few had imagined on such a scale: they would feed and fuel an entire city by air. On June 26th, 1948, transport aircraft began flying regular supply missions into Berlin, using narrow air corridors agreed upon at the end of World War II.
Three years after the end of World War II in Europe, the uneasy coalition that had defeated Nazi Germany fractured sharply over the future of occupied territories. On June 24th, 1948, Soviet authorities cut road, rail, and canal traffic into the Western sectors of Berlin, effectively trying to starve out the American, British, and French presence deep inside their occupation zone.
In the early hours of May 12th, 1949, Soviet authorities lift the land and water blockade that has cut West Berlin off from surrounding territory for nearly a year. Since the previous summer, American and British aircrews have flown round-the-clock missions to deliver food, coal, and other essentials to the isolated city. The airlift becomes a massive logistical effort, with aircraft landing and taking off every few
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
Strategic bombing over Europe reached a grim milestone on October 14th, 1943, when the United States Eighth Air Force sent hundreds of B-17 bombers against ball-bearing plants around Schweinfurt, Germany.
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
As the Vietnam War dragged on, the sustained air campaign against North Vietnam weighed heavily on pilots, ground crews, and the civilians beneath the bombs.
That same date, three years and an ocean away from Hampton Roads and decades after Veracruz, marked one of the most destructive air raids in history. On the night of March 9th, 1945, United States Army Air Forces B-29 bombers carried out a low-level incendiary attack against Tokyo, dropping a mix of bombs designed to ignite the city’s tightly packed, largely wooden neighborhoods.