BATTLES & CAMPAIGNS

A story of a wooden frigate under fire, a nickname earned in cannon smoke, and a young navy learning it could stand toe-to-toe with the world’s best.

Grant’s campaign brought a Union army across the Mississippi, isolated Vicksburg, and turned two failed assaults into a sustained siege. This overview connects the river operations, land battles, civilian experience, and recipient citations without treating every action as the same engagement.

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 drifted in and out of consciousness, strapped down behind the controls.

The morning sky over northern Luzon is deceptively calm. From the cockpit of his sleek reconnaissance Mustang, Major William Arthur Shomo scans the broken clouds, hunting for airfields and antiaircraft positions that his ground commanders need to see. His mission is straightforward on paper: an armed photographic and strafing sweep over the Aparri and Laoag airdromes, far ahead of friendly lines.

How a 22-year-old automatic rifleman kept firing after losing both legs, and saved his platoon in the Philippine mountains of 1945.

In the hills and valleys of North Korea, United Nations forces under General Douglas MacArthur pressed northward in an ambitious push toward the Yalu River.

In the tense weeks before open war in the Pacific, Japanese diplomats in Washington received a new written proposal from Secretary of State Cordell Hull.

That massive naval struggle reached its most dramatic moment off Samar.