PLACES, BASES & BATTLEFIELDS

Night on Iwo Jima never really felt dark. The sky glowed faintly from flares and burning wreckage, and the volcanic ash underfoot seemed to swallow every step. In a shallow foxhole—a rough, shoulder-deep fighting position scraped into that ash—Private George Phillips stood watch while the rest of his squad finally slept. They had spent the night trading grenades and rifle fire with Japanese troops slipping through the lines.

After nearly two years of brutal fighting up the Italian peninsula, German Army Group C formally laid down its arms to the Allied command on May 2nd, 1945. United States Fifth Army and its partners had slogged through mountains, rivers, and heavily fortified defensive lines, from Salerno and Anzio to the Gothic Line in the north.

On July 2nd, 1863, both armies were now largely concentrated, and the second day at Gettysburg turned into a brutal struggle for the flanks of the Union position. Confederates under James Longstreet pushed against the Union left, targeting places that would become famous: Devil’s Den, the Wheatfield, the Peach Orchard, and Little Round Top. Union units shifted under intense pressure, some arriving just in time to plug gaps and counterattack up rocky slopes.

On the far side of the Pacific, another struggle over sea lanes and airfields was drawing to a close. By February 9th, 1943, American commanders were confident enough to declare the island of Guadalcanal secure after months of brutal fighting against Japanese forces. What began in August 1942 as a risky landing to seize an unfinished enemy airstrip had turned into a grinding campaign by land, sea, and air, where both sides committed ships, aircraft, and infantry in repeated offensives and…

On August 10th, 1944, American commanders declared Guam secured after nearly three weeks of brutal fighting that began with landings in late July. The island, seized by Japan shortly after the attack on Pearl Harbor, lay in a position that made it a natural forward base for the United States in the central Pacific.

On August 7th, 1964, the United States Congress passed what became known as the Gulf of Tonkin Resolution, a short but far-reaching measure tied to contested events earlier that week. American destroyers operating off the coast of North Vietnam had reported an attack on August 2nd and a second, disputed encounter on August 4th, prompting the Johnson administration to order retaliatory air strikes, known as Operation Pierce Arrow, on August 5th.

On May 10th, 1969, paratroopers of the 101st Airborne Division began a series of assaults against a steep, jungle-covered height in the A Shau Valley that would become known as Hamburger Hill. The Vietnamese Army defenders were dug into bunkers and trenches woven into the slopes, forcing American units to climb under fire again and again through mud, foliage, and concealed obstacles.

The fuel gauges in Harold Bauer’s Wildcat fighter were already edging toward empty when the coastline of Guadalcanal slid beneath his wings. He had just finished leading a long, tense, overwater flight of Marine fighters up from Espiritu Santo, six hundred miles of nothing but ocean and cloud. Henderson Field, the hard-bitten airstrip the Marines called home, lay ahead as a thin strip of coral and mud, promising rest, repairs, and—most of all—gasoline.

After years as a United States territory and a key overseas outpost, Hawaii formally entered the Union as the fiftieth state on August 21st, 1959. Long before that date, the islands had already become central to American strategy in the Pacific, from the attack on Pearl Harbor to the vast network of airfields and naval bases that supported World War II operations.

The black volcanic sand of Iwo Jima offered no cover, only shallow shell holes and the hulks of stalled tanks. Late on February 23, 1945, Marines of the 21st Regiment lay pinned down, staring across a short stretch of open ground that felt a mile wide. Ahead of them, a maze of reinforced concrete pillboxes spat machine-gun fire in crossing patterns, every burst chewing fresh craters into the sand.

As war raged across Europe and Asia, the United States still officially stood neutral in January 1941, but the lines were beginning to blur. On January 10th, 1941, President Franklin Roosevelt’s administration saw the Lend-Lease bill introduced in Congress, proposing that the United States could lend or lease war material to nations whose defense was deemed vital to American security.

In the Central Pacific, United States forces opened a new phase of the war against Japan with the amphibious assault on Saipan in the Mariana Islands. On June 15th, 1944, Marines of the 2nd and 4th Marine Divisions, supported later by soldiers of the 27th Infantry Division, hit the beaches under fire from well-prepared Japanese defenses dug into coral, caves, and ridges.

The final events in this week’s window unfolded in the shifting landscape of the post–Cold War world. In the early hours of August 2nd, 1990, Iraqi armored and mechanized units crossed the border into Kuwait, quickly overwhelming the small country’s defenses and seizing its capital. The invasion stunned the region and set off a wave of diplomatic and military responses.

In the wake of the September 11th attacks and years of tense inspections and sanctions, the United States and a coalition of partners confronted Iraq over weapons of mass destruction and compliance with international demands. After issuing a final ultimatum to Saddam Hussein’s regime, American forces launched the opening strikes of what would become known as the Iraq War on March 19th, 2003.

On February 19th, 1945, the beaches of Iwo Jima filled with landing craft as Marines of the 4th and 5th Marine Divisions came ashore under fire. The island was small but strategically important, lying between the Marianas and the Japanese home islands and hosting airfields that could threaten American bombers.

The draw is narrow and steep, its sides scoured by months of shellfire and rain. At the bottom, the earth is churned to powder. Above it, hidden in the scrub and broken stone near Cisterna di Littoria, German machine guns wait for anything that moves. Private James Henry Mills can hear them before he sees them—the clatter of automatic fire, the sharper crack of rifles, the dull thump of grenades exploding somewhere ahead.

The ground in front of Sugar Loaf Hill is already chewed into mud and craters when Corporal James Lewis Day crawls forward to look for cover. It is May 1945 on Okinawa, and the Marines trying to cross this open killing ground are being shredded by Japanese mortar and artillery fire. The air is thick with pulverized coral dust. Fragments of shattered ammunition boxes and discarded packs lie where men dropped them running for their lives.

The ridge near San Jose Hacienda rose steep and stubborn out of the jungle, a wall of earth and rock that dominated the valley floor. Somewhere up there, hidden in spider holes—small, camouflaged fighting pits—and pillboxes, Japanese soldiers waited behind interlocking bands of machine-gun fire. To reach the crest, Company I of the 160th Infantry Regiment had only one narrow approach, a trail that funneled men into a killing zone. Staff Sergeant John C.

The B-24 shook as it skimmed over the Romanian countryside, treetops flashing beneath the wings and church steeples knifing up toward the formation. Ahead, the sky over Ploesti was already boiling with black bursts of antiaircraft fire and thick columns of oily smoke. Colonel John Riley Kane, commanding the third element of heavy bombers in a massive low-level strike, peered through the haze and realized something was wrong. The main force that should have been ahead of him was gone.

In a televised address during the Vietnam War, President Lyndon B. Johnson announced a partial halt to the bombing of North Vietnam and, in a stunning closing, declared that he would not seek nor accept his party’s nomination for another term. The speech came in the wake of the Tet Offensive, a widespread enemy campaign that had shaken public confidence despite heavy Communist losses.

The black volcanic sand of Iwo Jima offered no cover, only shallow shell holes and jagged rock. On the morning of March 9, 1945, Platoon Sergeant Joseph R. Julian lay there with the rest of his company, pressed into the ash while enemy fire tore long furrows across the slope. Ahead of them, a line of Japanese trenches and pillboxes guarded a critical rise. Machine guns hammered from narrow firing slits.

Standing before a large crowd in West Berlin on June 26th, 1963, President John F. Kennedy used a few carefully chosen phrases to encapsulate American support for a divided city. The Berlin Wall, erected nearly two years earlier, loomed as a concrete symbol of Cold War confrontation, and residents of the Western sectors lived each day with the knowledge that Soviet and East German forces stood just across the barrier.

On the Korean peninsula, three years of brutal fighting ended with signatures on a document at Panmunjom, not with a victory parade. Delegates representing the United Nations Command, North Korea, and China agreed to a cease-fire that froze front lines near where they had started, around the Thirty-Eighth Parallel. The agreement established the Demilitarized Zone, a fortified strip of land that remains one of the most heavily guarded borders in the world.

On August 7th, 1942, United States forces launched their first major offensive of the Pacific War with amphibious landings in the Solomon Islands. Elements of the First Marine Division came ashore on Guadalcanal, Tulagi, and nearby islets to seize an airfield that Japanese engineers were building, one that threatened the sea lanes linking the United States and Australia.