BATTLES & CAMPAIGNS

During the early Civil War struggle for control of the South’s key ports, Union commanders targeted Charleston, South Carolina, both for its symbolic role in secession and its practical value as a harbor. On June 16th, 1862, Union forces launched a dawn assault on fortified Confederate positions at Secessionville, on James Island just outside the city. The terrain of marshes, creeks, and narrow causeways forced attacking troops into tight channels under concentrated artillery and musket fire.

In the spring of 1918, the American Expeditionary Forces were still gaining experience on the Western Front when German troops launched a major raid near the village of Seicheprey. On April 20th, 1918, storm troops attacked positions held by the 26th “Yankee” Division, made up largely of New England National Guard units. The German assault used heavy artillery preparation, infiltration tactics, and gas shells to knock out forward trenches and disrupt communications.

As the spring campaigns of the American Civil War unfolded in 1862, Union forces pressed down the Virginia Peninsula toward Richmond. On May 31st, 1862, Confederate troops struck back near the crossroads of Seven Pines and Fair Oaks, launching a fierce assault against elements of the Union Army of the Potomac. Confusion in the swampy terrain and miscoordination among Confederate commanders blunted what might have been a more decisive blow. During the fighting, Confederate commander Joseph E.

At Pittsburg Landing along the Tennessee River, Confederate forces struck the encamped Union Army of the Tennessee in a surprise attack that opened one of the Civil War’s first truly massive battles. General Ulysses S. Grant’s troops had been gathering for an advance deeper into the Confederate heartland when General Albert Sidney Johnston launched a dawn assault.

After the Wilderness, the armies fought for roads, salients and supply routes around Spotsylvania. The Bloody Angle was the most remembered episode, but the battle also included Laurel Hill, Heth’s Salient and later attempts to turn or break the defenses.

As the year 1862 closed, Union fortunes looked dim after setbacks in Virginia, but in central Tennessee a different story was beginning.

A story of a brutal island landing, a coral reef turned killing ground, and how one short battle rewrote amphibious warfare.

One year later to the week, the balance of power in the air over the Southwest Pacific had begun to shift. On March 2nd, 1943, United States Army Air Forces and Royal Australian Air Force units spotted a Japanese convoy attempting to move troops and supplies to the key base at Lae in New Guinea. Over the next two days, Allied medium bombers and attack aircraft used new low-level “skip bombing” techniques, roaring in just above the waves and tossing bombs that bounced into ships’ hulls.

A story of a winter surprise offensive and exhausted American units holding the line under crushing odds.

In the fall of the War of 1812, American planners hoped to capture Montreal by sending a column up the Châteauguay River in Lower Canada.

As the wider front buckled, the crisis in Korea intensified around the frozen Chosin Reservoir, where United States Marines and attached Army units held positions along mountain roads and ridges.

An unfolding story of carrier decks, radio reports, and long-range strikes that reshaped the Pacific war before the fleets ever met face to face.

Two days later on the Eastern Front, another desperate attempt to break a stalemate unfolded outside Petersburg, Virginia. Union engineers and coal miners had spent weeks digging a tunnel beneath the Confederate lines, packing a massive mine with explosives under a salient in the defenses. At dawn on July 30th, the blast tore a huge crater in the earth, killing hundreds of Confederate soldiers instantly and opening a gap in the line. But what should have been an opportunity became a disaster.

Just three days later, another phase of the Guadalcanal campaign played out at sea. In the Battle of the Eastern Solomons, American carriers, including Enterprise and Saratoga, maneuvered against a Japanese task force seeking to reinforce and resupply their troops on the island. Aviators from both sides flew long-range searches and strikes in a complex pattern of blows and counterblows over the open ocean.

Just two days after the Los Angeles scare, a very real crisis unfolded far across the Pacific. On February 27th, 1942, a mixed Allied naval force under Dutch command, including the United States heavy cruiser Houston, engaged a Japanese invasion convoy in the waters of the Java Sea.

In the Second World War, the Aleutian Islands campaign unfolded in harsh seas and fog, far from the better-known fronts of Europe and the central Pacific. On March 26th, 1943, an American cruiser-destroyer force under Rear Admiral Charles McMorris intercepted a Japanese convoy near the Komandorski Islands, northwest of the Aleutians. The enemy escort included heavier cruisers, giving the Japanese an advantage in guns and armor.

On the northern Plains, the date June 25th, 1876 is inseparable from the shock that followed the destruction of Lieutenant Colonel George Armstrong Custer’s battalion along the Little Bighorn River. Part of a larger campaign to push Lakota and Northern Cheyenne bands onto reservations, Custer’s Seventh Cavalry column advanced aggressively toward a large village whose size and fighting strength he underestimated.

By mid-1918, German armies in France had driven a dangerous salient across the Marne River, threatening Paris and hoping to win the war before American troops could arrive in strength. In the early hours of July 18th, French and American forces launched a coordinated counteroffensive, striking the exposed flanks of the German position near Soissons and along the Marne.

An air-sea clash where radar, training, and discipline turned a desperate carrier defense into a one-sided hammer blow that reshaped the Pacific war.

That same global war saw another crucial August fight half a world away on the island of Guadalcanal. United States Marines of the 1st Marine Division had seized a vital airstrip earlier in the month and were entrenching around it when a Japanese force under Colonel Kiyonao Ichiki was ordered to sweep them away.

During the War of 1812, control of the Great Lakes and the Old Northwest hinged on both naval power and fast-moving land campaigns.

Almost twenty years later, the United States tore itself apart in civil war, and May 5th, 1864 marked the beginning of a grim new phase. That day, Lieutenant General Ulysses S. Grant pushed the Army of the Potomac south across the Rapidan River into a tangle of underbrush and second-growth forest known simply as the Wilderness. In that terrain, visibility collapsed, lines broke apart, and musket flashes set the woods on fire, trapping wounded soldiers in flames.

Two decades later, another fight in the Old Northwest underscored the stakes of American expansion.

A story of a winter river crossing, a worn-out army on the edge of defeat, and how one night’s gamble kept the Revolution alive.