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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
In the dark waters off Tripoli on February 16th, 1804, a young United States Navy officer, Stephen Decatur, led a small boarding party into one of the most celebrated raids in early naval history. The frigate USS Philadelphia had run aground and been captured months earlier, and Tripolitan forces now held her as a valuable prize in the First Barbary War.
How a quiet engineering officer led hundreds from the dark below decks during one of World War II’s worst carrier disasters.
Barely four months after the attack on Pearl Harbor, the United States planned a strike to carry the war to the Japanese home islands. On April 18th, 1942, sixteen B-25 medium bombers led by Lieutenant Colonel James Doolittle took off from the carrier USS Hornet in the Pacific, a feat never attempted before with aircraft of that size. Spotted early by enemy patrol vessels, the task force launched the bombers farther
On November 14th, 1910, civilian pilot Eugene Ely coaxed his fragile Curtiss pusher airplane down a narrow wooden platform built over the bow of the cruiser USS Birmingham off Hampton Roads, Virginia.
Just eight years after the Wright brothers’ first powered flight, naval officers were already asking what airplanes might do for fleets at sea. On January 18th, 1911, civilian pilot Eugene Ely approached the armored cruiser USS Pennsylvania in San Francisco Bay, aiming at a temporary wooden deck built over the ship’s stern.
How a 22-year-old Naval Reserve officer on USS Oklahoma chose his shipmates’ lives over his own at Pearl Harbor
Just three days after Pearl Harbor, Adolf Hitler and Benito Mussolini chose to broaden the conflict by declaring war on the United States on December 11th, 1941.
On July 3rd, 1988, during tense operations in the Persian Gulf, the guided-missile cruiser USS Vincennes mistook a civilian Iran Air Airbus ascending along a commercial route for a hostile military aircraft. Believing the plane to be an attacking fighter and amid conflicting reports about altitude and identification, the ship fired surface-to-air missiles that destroyed the airliner, killing all passengers and crew.
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.
Mikasa served as Admiral Togo flagship in the Russo-Japanese War, survived battle and a magazine explosion, and became the only preserved pre-dreadnought battleship.
Two years later to the day, early June marked a turning point in another long and bitter conflict. On June 8th, 1969, President Richard Nixon met South Vietnamese President Nguyen Van Thieu on Midway Island in the Pacific to discuss the future of the Vietnam War. There he announced that the United States would begin withdrawing combat troops from South Vietnam, starting with a contingent of thousands of soldiers, as
Less than a year after USS Cole, the attacks of September 11th, 2001 brought the war on terror fully into view.
In a small Virginia village, General Robert E. Lee met General Ulysses S. Grant to discuss terms, bringing the main Confederate field army in Virginia to surrender. Lee’s forces had been worn down by siege, shortages, and constant pressure, and the attempt to slip westward had been cut off by Union pursuit.
By the summer of the Second World War, Allied forces were fighting their way up the Italian boot while strategic air forces targeted the infrastructure that kept Axis armies supplied. On July 19th, 1943, hundreds of bombers from the United States Army Air Forces and the Royal Air Force attacked rail yards and communications nodes in and around Rome. The strikes aimed to disrupt German logistics and pressure Italy’s l
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
2S25 Sprut-SD / Sprut-SDM1 — Russia. Open the vehicle profile in the Trackpads Armor Archive.
A Russian reusable MALE UAS family developed for long-endurance reconnaissance with later operational precision-strike capability.