PEOPLE & COMMANDERS

A story of secret overflights, Cold War nerves, and the moment a “untouchable” spy plane finally fell from the sky.

On February 22nd, 1819, American and Spanish negotiators signed the Adams–Onís Treaty, transferring Spanish Florida to the United States and settling a long-troublesome frontier. For years, the border had been a patchwork where runaway enslaved people, Native communities, smugglers, and raiding parties moved in and out of reach of American authorities.

A Medal of Honor story of courage under fire in the Pacific war.

The valley offered almost no cover. Shallow folds of earth and shattered shrubs were all that shielded the Marines of 1st Battalion, 5th Marines as they tried to push forward on Okinawa Shima on May 7, 1945. Ahead of them, on a high ridge at the valley’s mouth, a Japanese machine gun hammered the slopes, stitching bullets across every patch of ground where a helmet or sleeve dared to move. The air vibrated with the clatter of automatic fire and the flat crack of rounds striking rock.

A generation after New Providence, the United States undertook a much larger and more complex amphibious operation on March 9th, 1847, when General Winfield Scott’s army came ashore near the Mexican port of Veracruz. Supported by a strong naval flotilla, thousands of soldiers landed by surfboat in carefully planned waves along an open beach, establishing a ring around the city with remarkably few casualties in the initial assault.

The air over Balete Pass crackled with small-arms fire and the flat explosions of grenades. On the steep slope of Hill B, a narrow finger of ground jutting out above the zigzag road that threaded the Caraballo Mountains, five exhausted American infantrymen hugged the earth around a captured Japanese trench. It was 8 May 1945, deep in the Battle of Luzon, and Private First Class Anton L.

A Medal of Honor story of sacrifice and battlefield leadership in the Normandy campaign of World War II.

The January sky over eastern Belgium is the color of steel, low clouds pressing down on snow-covered fields. An American armored task force eases forward along a narrow road when the world ahead of it suddenly erupts. Antitank rounds smash into the frozen earth, machine guns rake the ditches, and rifle fire lashes out from a ridgeline roughly two hundred yards in front of the column. Inside one of the lead tank destroyers, Corporal Arthur O.

Just a year later in war-time June, Union and Confederate armies were locked in the Overland Campaign, a grinding series of battles as Ulysses S. Grant tried to force Robert E. Lee’s Army of Northern Virginia back toward Richmond. On June 3rd, 1864, Grant launched a massive frontal assault at Cold Harbor, where entrenched Confederate troops held strong positions behind earthworks and rifle pits.

In the summer of the Revolutionary War, British forces held a fortified outpost at Stony Point on the Hudson River, threatening American communications and morale. General George Washington approved a bold plan for a nighttime assault led by General Anthony Wayne and a specially selected light infantry corps. With unloaded muskets and fixed bayonets, Wayne’s men advanced in silence, relying on discipline and surprise to overwhelm the British defenses.

On February 16th, 1945, United States forces launched a daring combined airborne and amphibious assault to retake Corregidor, the rocky island guarding the entrance to Manila Bay in the Philippines. Corregidor had become a symbol of resistance when United States and Filipino defenders held out there in 1942 before surrendering to Japanese forces. Three years later, with the liberation of the Philippines well underway, recapturing the “Rock” carried both strategic and symbolic weight.

A story of a blood-soaked cornfield, a shallow creek, and a battle that reshaped the Union’s war.

Three years later and hundreds of miles to the west, another July battle marked a turning point in the struggle to save the Union. Outside Atlanta, Confederate General John Bell Hood launched a bold, flanking assault against Major General William T. Sherman’s forces, hoping to catch Union troops off balance and drive them away from the city.

On August 16th, 1777, American militia under Brigadier General John Stark struck a British foraging column near Bennington in what is now Vermont. The British force, made up of German auxiliaries and Loyalists, had been sent out from General Burgoyne’s main army to gather supplies and horses for the invasion toward Albany.

Just two years later, cavalrymen of the Union and Confederacy collided near Brandy Station, Virginia in what became the largest mounted battle ever fought in North America. On June 9th, 1863, Union cavalry crossed the Rappahannock River in a surprise attack aimed at probing Confederate movements as Robert E. Lee’s army shifted north toward Pennsylvania. Throughout the day, sabers and carbines flashed across fields and ridges as Union troopers challenged the reputation of J. E. B.

By February 23rd, 1847, the Battle of Buena Vista in northern Mexico had reached its decisive phase. General Zachary Taylor’s outnumbered American force, including U.S. regulars and state volunteer regiments, faced a much larger army led by Santa Anna along a series of ridges and arroyos near Saltillo. The terrain allowed the Americans to anchor their line, but Santa Anna probed for weak points all day, at times driving back portions of the U.S. front.

Just outside Manassas, Virginia, the first major land battle of the Civil War tore away any illusion of a quick, clean victory. Union forces under Brigadier General Irvin McDowell marched out from Washington hoping to strike inexperienced Confederate troops and end the rebellion in a single blow. Instead they found determined opposition and a battlefield that quickly grew chaotic, with brigades feeding in piecemeal and terrain that broke up neat formations.

Three years later to the day, August 16th, 1780, the Continental Army suffered one of its worst defeats at Camden, South Carolina. Major General Horatio Gates led a hastily assembled army of Continentals and militia against a seasoned British force under Lord Cornwallis. Marching through swampy country on poor rations, many of Gates’s men were already in bad condition before the battle even began.

In the winter of the southern campaign, Brigadier General Daniel Morgan led a mixed American force against Lieutenant Colonel Banastre Tarleton’s hard–driving British Legion near the Cowpens in South Carolina. Morgan carefully chose ground that favored his outnumbered Continentals and militia, laying out successive lines so that each could fall back in an orderly way rather than dissolve in panic.

During the First Barbary War, the United States turned a small expedition into an enduring symbol of Marine Corps identity. An overland force of United States Marines and local allies, led by Marine Lieutenant Presley O’Bannon and naval agent William Eaton, marched across harsh desert terrain to attack the port city of Derna on the North African coast. On April 27th, 1805, they assaulted the defenses and captured the town, raising the American flag above the works.

Fast-forward to the summer of the Civil War, and the terrain shifts to the outskirts of Atlanta. Major General William Tecumseh Sherman had pushed his three Union armies close to the rail lines that kept the Confederate stronghold supplied. Newly appointed Confederate commander John Bell Hood tried to break that grip with a series of aggressive counterattacks. At Ezra Church, west of the city, Union troops under Oliver O.

By the spring of 1865, Confederate forces defending Petersburg and Richmond were stretched thin, facing a larger Union army and dwindling supplies. In a last attempt to break the siege, General Robert E. Lee approved a daring pre-dawn attack against Fort Stedman, a strong point in the Union lines east of Petersburg. On March 25th, Confederate troops under General John B. Gordon initially surged through the fog, capturing guns and trenches and creating a dangerous gap.

As the Peninsula Campaign turned sour for the Union in the summer of 1862, the Army of the Potomac tried to slip away toward the James River, its supply line and safety. On June 30th, 1862, near the crossroads at Glendale and the woods around Frayser’s Farm, Confederate forces under Robert E. Lee launched a complex attack meant to cut the retreating Union column in two.

A story of a painful first defeat and how it forced a new army to relearn leadership, tactics, and trust in combat.