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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.
It is the early hours of 10 March 1945 on Luzon in the Philippine Islands. The jungle around the Villa Verde Trail is black and close, broken only by a thin ridge that juts out from a larger hill. On that ridge, just ahead of the main American perimeter, three foxholes scrape a shallow line in the earth. In one of them lies Private First Class Thomas Eugene “Gene” Atkins of Company A, 127th Infantry. His job is simpl
A single-ship Japanese pre-dreadnought built in Britain for the Six-Six Fleet program and designed around the balanced heavy and secondary batteries of the late pre-dreadnought era.
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.
The Illinois division’s wartime service led through Hawaii, New Guinea and Morotai to northern Luzon, where difficult terrain, combined operations and widely separated small-unit actions defined its contribution.
The jungle pressed in on both sides of the Ormoc Road, a narrow ribbon of mud and broken pavement cutting through the hills near Limon on the island of Leyte. December rain had turned the ditches into brown pools. American infantrymen crouched behind a hasty roadblock of felled trees, sandbags, and wrecked vehicles, listening to the grinding approach of steel.
The rain-soaked hills of Leyte were already torn open by days of fighting when Company A of the 306th Infantry pushed forward against a Japanese strongpoint that refused to break. Machine guns were dug into the slopes, firing down narrow approaches that funneled every American movement into sheets of bullets. A light tank inched ahead, meant to crack the defenses, but the infantry platoon walking behind it stalled un
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
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
Medal of Honor, U.S. Army, World War II
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
A story of a shrinking beachhead, exhausted troops, and how their stand kept South Korea from collapsing in 1950.
A surviving Type VIIC/41 submarine with German wartime service, a second career as the Norwegian Kaura, and preservation at Laboe.
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.
Lead ship of the Iowa class, with service in World War II, Korea, and the renewed battleship program of the 1980s.
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.
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.
How a 22-year-old automatic rifleman kept firing after losing both legs, and saved his platoon in the Philippine mountains of 1945.