PLACES, BASES & BATTLEFIELDS

The failed December 1864 expedition and successful January 1865 assault were separate attempts to close Wilmington’s protected sea approach. This overview distinguishes bombardment, amphibious landings, naval and army assaults, and the later advance on Wilmington.

In the dark, humid hours before dawn on Okinawa, the American line around Kakazu Ridge was little more than a jagged string of foxholes and shattered stone. Technical Sergeant Beauford “Andy” Anderson and the men of his weapons platoon had spent the night listening to the island—distant artillery rumbled, mortars coughed, and now and then a Japanese flare turned the terraced fields silver for a heartbeat before dropping them back into blackness.

Two days after the blockade began, American and British planners put into motion a response that few had imagined on such a scale: they would feed and fuel an entire city by air. On June 26th, 1948, transport aircraft began flying regular supply missions into Berlin, using narrow air corridors agreed upon at the end of World War II.

Three years after the end of World War II in Europe, the uneasy coalition that had defeated Nazi Germany fractured sharply over the future of occupied territories. On June 24th, 1948, Soviet authorities cut road, rail, and canal traffic into the Western sectors of Berlin, effectively trying to starve out the American, British, and French presence deep inside their occupation zone.

That same date, three years and an ocean away from Hampton Roads and decades after Veracruz, marked one of the most destructive air raids in history. On the night of March 9th, 1945, United States Army Air Forces B-29 bombers carried out a low-level incendiary attack against Tokyo, dropping a mix of bombs designed to ignite the city’s tightly packed, largely wooden neighborhoods.

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.

In the wake of the D-Day landings, Allied planners understood that securing a major port was essential if the Normandy foothold were to become a sustained campaign across France. That task fell largely to the United States VII Corps, which fought its way up the Cotentin Peninsula against German units determined to hold Cherbourg’s fortifications and coastal guns as long as possible.

Just one day after the armistice protocol, on August 13th, 1898, American forces executed a planned assault that led to the capture of Manila in the Philippines. Communications delays meant that officers on the spot did not treat the earlier agreement as the end of hostilities, and the operation proceeded under prearranged signals with Spanish commanders in the city.

A story of a shattered defensive line, a race against explosives, and the one intact bridge that cracked open the last barrier into Germany.

More than a century after the Civil War, United States troops were again fighting over steep slopes, this time in the A Shau Valley of Vietnam. From May 10th through May 20th, 1969, airborne infantry and supporting units battled to seize Hill 937, a thickly forested height that soldiers nicknamed “Hamburger Hill” because of the grinding nature of the combat.

While Dutch Harbor burned, the decisive blows of that wider Japanese plan were being struck far to the south. On June 4th, 1942, United States Navy carriers Enterprise, Yorktown, and Hornet launched waves of torpedo planes and dive bombers against a powerful Japanese carrier force near Midway Atoll. Early attacks by torpedo squadrons suffered terrible losses, but they drew enemy fighters and disrupted Japanese flight decks.

Even as Corregidor fell, the fortunes of the Pacific war were beginning to shift at sea. In early May 1942, American and Japanese carrier groups maneuvered through the Coral Sea, each searching for the other’s position with aircraft rather than surface scouts. On May 8th, following the sinking of the light carrier Shoho the day before, the main carrier duel unfolded.

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.

Union attacks on September 29 broke parts of Richmond’s outer defenses and brought Black troops into a costly assault at New Market Heights. The capture of Fort Harrison survived Lee’s counterattack, but the advance did not take Richmond.

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.

The crisis in north China produced several connected operations: defense of the foreign legations, the unsuccessful Seymour expedition, fighting around Tientsin, and the August advance on Peking. Their recipients did not all fight at the same place or on the same day.

On May 11, 1898, crews from Marblehead and Nashville worked close to the Cuban shore under fire to cut submarine cables. The operation damaged communications but did not establish complete isolation of the port.

By the late nineteenth century, the United States stood on the edge of a new role beyond its continental borders. After the explosion of the battleship Maine in Havana harbor and rising tensions over Cuba’s rebellion against Spanish rule, American public opinion and political pressure built toward intervention. Naval forces were already moving, and a blockade of Cuba had begun on April 21st.

As the deadline for Iraqi forces to leave Kuwait approached in the winter of 1991, the United States confronted a crucial decision. On January 12th, 1991, after intense debate, Congress passed a resolution authorizing the use of military force to uphold United Nations demands and drive Iraqi troops out of Kuwait. The vote affirmed the president’s ability to lead a coalition into combat but also underscored the constitutional role of the legislature in questions of war and peace.

On this date, the Second Continental Congress voted to adopt the New England militia forces already besieging British-held Boston and to form them into a Continental Army. Before this decision, the men surrounding Boston answered primarily to their individual colonies, making coordination and supply uneven and uncertain.

On August 13th, 1942, the United States Army Corps of Engineers officially established the Manhattan Engineer District, better known by the shortened phrase that would later describe the atomic bomb project. The district’s creation gave the Army formal responsibility for coordinating a vast, secret effort that drew together physicists, chemists, industrial firms, and military planners.

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.