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The ramps drop into waist-deep surf and chaos. It is the morning of October 20, 1944, on a stretch of shoreline the maps call Red Beach. Ahead lies a narrow band of sand, beyond it a low palm grove and flooded rice paddies. Somewhere in that green fringe, Japanese guns have the approaches bracketed. As the first waves of soldiers tried to cross, the beach turned into a killing ground.
The fields near Anzio were bare and unforgiving—flat, freshly plowed earth broken only by shallow furrows and a few low dikes. On a May morning in 1944, Staff Sergeant George John Hall lay pressed into that thin cover with the rest of his company, the dirt shaking under the hammering of German machine guns. Every time a man tried to crawl forward, grazing fire stitched the ground in front of him. Sniper rounds cracke
A story of a retreat turned into a deadly gauntlet, and how air power reshaped the end of the Gulf War.
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
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
Medal of Honor, U.S. Army, World War II
The October 1944 landings restored a major Allied foothold in the Philippines. Fleet battles protected that foothold, but Japanese reinforcement and the struggle for routes toward Ormoc made the ground campaign longer and more difficult than the beach assault alone suggests.
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.
By February 1945, much of Pearl Harbor had returned to the business of war. Battleships and carriers came and went; convoys formed up and headed west toward Iwo Jima and Okinawa. But in a side channel called West Loch, the harbor still hid a graveyard. Months earlier, a chain of explosions had torn through a cluster of tank landing ships loading ammunition for the Pacific campaign.
A story of heavy guns, armored decks, and crews who learned to fight an early-twentieth-century battleship through a very different kind of war.
A 22-year-old heavy machine gunner who held back a German attack in the Battle of the Bulge
A story of exposed convoys, hidden fighters, and the soldiers and medics who kept moving through an urban kill zone.
A story of block-by-block urban fighting and the hard decision to take back a city at any cost.
Port Hudson protected a difficult stretch of the Mississippi River. Farragut’s March passage preceded Banks’s land siege, whose costly assaults and prolonged investment ended with the Confederate surrender on July 9, 1863.
That massive naval struggle reached its most dramatic moment off Samar.
A story of armored columns driving straight into a capital and how a handful of tank battalions helped topple a regime in days.
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.
The B-17 was almost home when the choice arrived over the radio: bail out, or try to land a dying airplane. The long mission over Leipzig was behind them, but the bomber itself was torn open—control cables shot away, engines coughing, the fuselage peppered with holes where German fighters had raked the formation. In the cockpit, the copilot lay dead. The pilot, badly wounded, had been dragged from his seat and now dr