PEOPLE & COMMANDERS

In the gray dawn of May 12th, 1864, Union soldiers surge through fog and rain toward a bulging section of Confederate works near Spotsylvania Court House known as the Mule Shoe. What follows is one of the most brutal episodes of the Civil War, later remembered as the Bloody Angle. For nearly twenty hours, men on both sides fire from opposite sides of the same log parapets, stab with bayonets, and club with musket stocks as trees are splintered by constant musketry and artillery.

In the early morning hours, Confederate batteries around Charleston harbor opened fire on Fort Sumter, a brick fortification held by a small United States Army garrison. The standoff over supplies and sovereignty that had simmered through the winter suddenly turned into open combat. For more than a day, shells and heated shot crashed into the fort’s walls and buildings, setting fires and forcing the defenders to husband their ammunition carefully.

During the opening weeks of the Iraq War, United States Army armored units pushed toward Baghdad in a series of rapid thrusts designed to shock and disorganize Iraqi defenses. One of the most important objectives was Baghdad International Airport, whose capture would provide a major logistical hub and symbolic foothold on the edge of the capital.

Off the North Carolina coast, the earthworks of Fort Fisher guarded the entrance to the Cape Fear River and the vital port of Wilmington, the last major Confederate gateway on the Atlantic. After an earlier Union attempt failed, a massive second expedition began on January 13th, 1865, with warships pounding the defenses while soldiers under Major General Alfred Terry prepared to storm the works.

During the War of 1812, the Niagara frontier became a key line where American and British forces tested each other’s strength. On May 27th, 1813, United States troops supported by naval gunfire came ashore near Fort George in Upper Canada and pushed inland under heavy resistance. The combined land and naval operation forced the British garrison to abandon the fort, giving American forces control of an important position opposite Fort Niagara.

In the dead of winter during the Revolutionary War, Virginia officer George Rogers Clark led a small force of frontiersmen and French militia through flooded Illinois country to strike the British post at Vincennes, in what is now Indiana. After a grueling march through icy water and mud, his men surrounded Fort Sackville and convinced the British commander, Lieutenant Governor Henry Hamilton, that he faced a much larger American force.

In the early weeks of the Revolutionary War, a small American force moved quietly across Lake Champlain toward the poorly defended British post at Fort Ticonderoga. Led by Ethan Allen and Benedict Arnold, the raiders surprised the garrison at dawn and demanded its surrender, capturing the fort and its store of artillery with barely a shot fired. Those heavy guns did not simply sit in the stone walls they had just taken.

On May 18th, 1944, Allied troops finally occupy the shattered ruins of the monastery and town of Cassino in Italy, ending a months-long struggle along the Gustav Line. Earlier attacks in winter and early spring had seen United States and other Allied units bleed heavily against well-prepared German defenses in rough terrain. The controversial bombing of the historic abbey and repeated assaults through mud, rivers, and rubble turned Monte Cassino into a symbol of the grinding Italian campaign.

As the Second World War entered its middle years, senior Allied leaders needed to decide where to strike next and how to balance competing priorities. On January 14th, 1943, President Franklin D. Roosevelt and Prime Minister Winston Churchill began meeting in Casablanca, Morocco, accompanied by senior American and British military planners.

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 through shouted orders and alarm bells.

The jungle ravine near Capoocan, on the island of Leyte, funneled sound like a drum. Machine guns hammered from the slopes, echoing off the trees. A thin stream cut the bottom of the gulch, its surface slapped into white splashes as bullets stitched across the water. Sergeant Charles E. Mower, just nineteen years old, stood in that stream with his squad of Company A, 34th Infantry Regiment, advancing into the teeth of a Japanese defense on a November day in 1944.

In the late summer of the Revolutionary War, General George Washington issued a general order at his headquarters in Newburgh, New York, establishing a new distinction for enlisted soldiers and noncommissioned officers. The Badge of Military Merit took the form of a heart made of purple cloth, to be worn over the left breast by those who had performed “any singularly meritorious action” in the service of the Continental Army.

By early 1945, Allied forces in Western Europe had driven the Wehrmacht back to the Rhine, the last great natural barrier before the German heartland. Several crossings were already underway or planned, including the famous seizure of the Remagen bridge, but General George S. Patton’s Third Army sought its own foothold.

The snow was hard as concrete on the Belgian hillside, the January cold locking the ground into a sheet of ice. Staff Sergeant Curtis F. Shoup and the soldiers of his company lay sprawled on that frozen slope, their dark uniforms stark against the white as German machine guns raked the hillside. The attack had stalled almost as soon as it began. The enemy gun on the rising ground ahead had perfect fields of fire, sweeping every fold and hollow where the Americans tried to move.

A Medal of Honor story of courage under fire and relentless assault in the Pacific War.

The ridge ahead looked less like a battlefield and more like a shattered hillside of rock, clay, and smoke. It was early May 1945 on Okinawa, and the Marines of Company E had stalled below Hill 60. Japanese machine guns chattered from hidden bunkers. Mortar rounds crashed into the slope, showering the men with dirt and splinters of coral. Every attempt to move up the ridge drew a fresh burst of fire that pinned them flat.

Early in the Civil War, Colonel Elmer Ellsworth led the 11th New York “Fire Zouaves,” a regiment drawn from New York City firefighters, across the Potomac River to occupy Alexandria, Virginia. On May 24th, 1861, Ellsworth personally took down a large Confederate flag flying above the Marshall House inn, a banner that could be seen from the White House and that deeply angered President Lincoln.

In the early hours of January 6th, 1919, Theodore Roosevelt died in his sleep at Sagamore Hill, closing the life of a man who had left a deep imprint on American military history. As a young politician, he had resigned his post to help raise the volunteer cavalry regiment that would be remembered as the Rough Riders in the Spanish-American War. His charge up the hills above Santiago, alongside regular Army units and fellow volunteers, became part of the nation’s martial legend.

Decades after Appomattox, the nation marked the passing of the general who had borne so much of the Union’s burden in the Civil War. Ulysses S. Grant died at a mountaintop cottage in New York after a long illness, having raced the clock to complete his memoirs and provide for his family. The former lieutenant general and eighteenth president had guided the Union armies through the brutal Overland Campaign, siege of Petersburg, and final pursuit of Robert E. Lee.

A story of a desperate hilltop stand, a fixed bayonet charge, and how it helped turn a Civil War invasion back.

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

The jungle pressed in on both sides of the Ormoc Road, a narrow ribbon of mud and broken pavement cutting through the hills near Limon on the island of Leyte. December rain had turned the ditches into brown pools. American infantrymen crouched behind a hasty roadblock of felled trees, sandbags, and wrecked vehicles, listening to the grinding approach of steel.

How a quiet engineering officer led hundreds from the dark below decks during one of World War II’s worst carrier disasters.

A story of a long-shot bombing raid, a borrowed carrier deck, and how one gamble shifted the course of a global war.