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 1–18
As the naval war closed in on Japan, United States fast carrier task forces struck airfields, shipyards, and industrial targets across the home islands. On March 19th, 1945, the carrier USS Franklin was operating relatively close to the enemy coast, her flight deck crowded with fueled and armed aircraft being readied for another strike. A lone Japanese dive bomber slipped through the defenses and dropped bombs that p
Early American submarines were experimental craft, operating at the edge of the technology of their day. On March 25th, 1915, the USS F-4, a small submarine of the F-class, sank during a routine dive near Honolulu, taking her crew with her to the bottom in relatively deep water. Investigators concluded that corrosion and battery problems contributed to hull failure, allowing seawater to flood the boat.
USS Monitor served for only ten months, but her rotating turret, battle with CSS Virginia, loss at sea, and continuing archaeological conservation made her one of the most consequential warships of the nineteenth century.
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.
Two years after the Civil War, Americans still debated how far their nation should extend and where strategic interests lay. On March 30th, 1867, Secretary of State William Seward signed a treaty with Russia to purchase Alaska, a vast, sparsely populated territory stretching from the Pacific into the Arctic. Critics mocked the deal as “Seward’s Folly,” seeing only ice and distance in exchange for seven point two mill
USS Arizona served in the U.S. battle fleet for twenty-five years before her destruction at Pearl Harbor. Her wreck and memorial now connect an individual ship, its crew, and the national memory of 7 December 1941.
A boiler explosion aboard the gunboat Bennington on July 21, 1905 turned routine naval service into a mass-casualty emergency. Rescue, medical care, investigation and public mourning followed.
Lead ship of the Iowa class, with service in World War II, Korea, and the renewed battleship program of the 1980s.
USS Texas served from the Veracruz crisis through two world wars, fired in support of major amphibious operations, and survived as one of the most important preserved dreadnoughts.
A story of secret overflights, Cold War nerves, and the moment a “untouchable” spy plane finally fell from the sky.
The air over Balete Pass crackled with small-arms fire and the flat explosions of grenades. On the steep slope of Hill B, a narrow finger of ground jutting out above the zigzag road that threaded the Caraballo Mountains, five exhausted American infantrymen hugged the earth around a captured Japanese trench. It was 8 May 1945, deep in the Battle of Luzon, and Private First Class Anton L.
A story of high-tech American armor meeting Soviet-designed tanks in the desert and how it reshaped modern ground warfare.
A story of a jungle airstrip, thin lines of Marines and soldiers, and how local air power reshaped the Pacific war.
The first explosions rolled across Pearl Harbor like distant thunder, then slammed into the harbor with terrifying clarity. On the repair ship USS Vestal, moored outboard of the battleship USS Arizona, Commander Cassin Young felt his ship shudder as bombs found their mark up and down the fleet. Men sprinted for their battle stations, the air already thick with smoke, the rising whine of diving aircraft cutting throug
The crisis in north China produced several connected operations: defense of the foreign legations, the unsuccessful Seymour expedition, fighting around Tientsin, and the August advance on Peking. Their recipients did not all fight at the same place or on the same day.
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.
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