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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.
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
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.
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
On February 20th, 1962, Marine Corps officer John Glenn rode the spacecraft Friendship 7 into orbit atop an Atlas rocket, becoming the first American to orbit the Earth. The mission lasted only a few hours and three circuits of the planet, but it carried enormous importance in the Cold War competition for space. Glenn’s background as a fighter and test pilot linked early spaceflight directly to the skills and culture
Three years later, on the same date of the calendar, an American naval squadron under Captain John Paul Jones fought one of the most celebrated sea battles of the war off the English coast near Flamborough Head.
In the spring of the Revolutionary War, the Continental Navy’s most famous captain carried the fight directly to Britain’s own shores. Sailing the sloop Ranger, John Paul Jones led a small landing party into the harbor at Whitehaven on England’s west coast. His men spiked coastal guns and attempted to set several ships ablaze, causing little physical damage but a great deal of alarm.
The B-24 shook as it skimmed over the Romanian countryside, treetops flashing beneath the wings and church steeples knifing up toward the formation. Ahead, the sky over Ploesti was already boiling with black bursts of antiaircraft fire and thick columns of oily smoke. Colonel John Riley Kane, commanding the third element of heavy bombers in a massive low-level strike, peered through the haze and realized something wa
In a televised address during the Vietnam War, President Lyndon B. Johnson announced a partial halt to the bombing of North Vietnam and, in a stunning closing, declared that he would not seek nor accept his party’s nomination for another term. The speech came in the wake of the Tet Offensive, a widespread enemy campaign that had shaken public confidence despite heavy Communist losses.
After the disastrous Union defeat at Fredericksburg and the swampy failure of the so-called “Mud March,” President Abraham Lincoln decided he could no longer keep Ambrose Burnside in charge of the Army of the Potomac. Orders issued in late January placed Major General Joseph Hooker, a combative and outspoken corps commander, in charge of the Union’s main eastern field army.
The black volcanic sand of Iwo Jima offered no cover, only shallow shell holes and jagged rock. On the morning of March 9, 1945, Platoon Sergeant Joseph R. Julian lay there with the rest of his company, pressed into the ash while enemy fire tore long furrows across the slope. Ahead of them, a line of Japanese trenches and pillboxes guarded a critical rise. Machine guns hammered from narrow firing slits.
On August 26th, 2021, as crowds of desperate Afghans pressed toward Kabul’s Hamid Karzai International Airport, a suicide bomber struck near Abbey Gate.
Standing before a large crowd in West Berlin on June 26th, 1963, President John F. Kennedy used a few carefully chosen phrases to encapsulate American support for a divided city. The Berlin Wall, erected nearly two years earlier, loomed as a concrete symbol of Cold War confrontation, and residents of the Western sectors lived each day with the knowledge that Soviet and East German forces stood just across the barrier
On the Korean peninsula, three years of brutal fighting ended with signatures on a document at Panmunjom, not with a victory parade. Delegates representing the United Nations Command, North Korea, and China agreed to a cease-fire that froze front lines near where they had started, around the Thirty-Eighth Parallel. The agreement established the Demilitarized Zone, a fortified strip of land that remains one of the mos
In the turbulence of the Mexican Revolution, the United States undertook a controversial intervention that highlighted both its naval reach and the risks of limited operations ashore. A diplomatic clash known as the Tampico Affair, combined with concerns over an incoming arms shipment to the regime of Victoriano Huerta, led Washington to order a seizure of the port of Veracruz.
On August 7th, 1942, United States forces launched their first major offensive of the Pacific War with amphibious landings in the Solomon Islands. Elements of the First Marine Division came ashore on Guadalcanal, Tulagi, and nearby islets to seize an airfield that Japanese engineers were building, one that threatened the sea lanes linking the United States and Australia.