UNITS & FORMATIONS

A 22-year-old heavy machine gunner who held back a German attack in the Battle of the Bulge

Just days after the call for volunteers, a respected career officer faced his own decision. On April 20th, 1861, Colonel Robert E. Lee resigned his commission in the United States Army rather than take command against his native Virginia. Lee had served for decades in the regular army, distinguishing himself as an engineer and commander during the war with Mexico. In the tense weeks after Fort Sumter, senior leaders in Washington considered him for high command in the Union field army.

A story of block-by-block urban fighting and the hard decision to take back a city at any cost.

In the middle of the Sicily campaign of the Second World War, Lieutenant General George S. Patton’s Seventh United States Army drove into Palermo and seized one of the island’s most important ports. The advance came after a rapid push along Sicily’s northern coast, with American armored and infantry columns racing over mountain roads and through towns battered by previous fighting.

The hill had a simple name on the map—Zebra Hill—but nothing about it was simple up close. Ahead of the assault troops the ground rose in a broken, rocky slope, pocked with shell holes and scraps of shattered brush. Hidden in that terrain were Japanese pillboxes and trenches positioned to command every approach. As the American infantrymen pushed forward, the hillside erupted with machine-gun bursts and grenades, turning the advance into a crawl and then into a standstill.

As the Pacific war neared its climax, the Battle of Okinawa became one of the bloodiest and most complex operations ever undertaken by American forces. By late May of 1945, United States Army and Marine units had fought their way against layered Japanese defenses centered on the Shuri Line, a fortified belt anchored by Shuri Castle. On May 29th, 1945, Japanese commanders began abandoning this vital position under relentless artillery and air bombardment, slipping southward to new lines.

As fighting raged around Okinawa, one of the largest battleships ever built, the Japanese Yamato, steamed south on what was essentially a one-way mission. The plan called for Yamato and a small escort force to reach Okinawa, beach the ship, and fight as a coastal battery in a desperate attempt to blunt the American invasion. United States Navy carrier task forces detected the sortie and launched waves of aircraft that attacked the battleship and her escorts far from their destination.

A story of a precision raid, a missing prize, and how a failed rescue still reshaped a distant war.

While history often remembers the April surrender at Appomattox Court House as the Civil War’s end, organized Confederate resistance lingered west of the Mississippi River. On May 26th, 1865, officials representing General Edmund Kirby Smith’s Trans-Mississippi Department agreed to terms that effectively surrendered the last large Confederate field command.

The first significant ground clash between United States and North Korean forces occurred at Osan on July 5th, 1950, when a small blocking force known as Task Force Smith took up positions south of Seoul. Comprised mainly of infantry from the 21st Infantry Regiment, supported by limited artillery and outdated anti-tank weapons, the force was ordered to delay the North Korean advance.

On January 30th, 1968, during the lunar new year holiday known as Tet, communist forces launched coordinated attacks across South Vietnam. Viet Cong guerrillas and North Vietnamese Army units struck provincial capitals, district towns, and military bases, often achieving tactical surprise. In the days that followed, the world saw images of fighting near the United States Embassy in Saigon and fierce clashes around Khe Sanh, as well as the long, bloody struggle for Hue.

It is the early hours of 10 March 1945 on Luzon in the Philippine Islands. The jungle around the Villa Verde Trail is black and close, broken only by a thin ridge that juts out from a larger hill. On that ridge, just ahead of the main American perimeter, three foxholes scrape a shallow line in the earth. In one of them lies Private First Class Thomas Eugene “Gene” Atkins of Company A, 127th Infantry. His job is simple and deadly: watch the trail and buy time if the enemy comes.

During the Vietnam War, American units operated in a confusing environment where enemy fighters, civilians, and local political forces often mingled in the same villages and rice fields. On March 16th, 1968, a United States Army company entered the My Lai area in South Vietnam expecting to find a strong enemy presence.

In the winter of the American Revolution, diplomats in Paris secured an agreement that transformed the struggle for independence. On February 6th, 1778, the United States and France signed a formal Treaty of Alliance and a companion treaty of commerce, bringing a major European naval and military power openly into the war against Britain.

After years of war and months of negotiation, delegates of the Confederation Congress gathered in Annapolis to ratify the peace treaty that had been signed in Paris the previous year. By approving the agreement on January 14th, 1784, the United States formally ended the Revolutionary War in the eyes of European powers and secured recognition of its independence and new borders.

In a remote stretch of New Mexico desert, the United States Army’s Manhattan Engineer District prepared to test a weapon unlike any used before. In the early hours of July 16th, 1945, scientists and soldiers watched as the “Gadget,” an experimental plutonium device, detonated atop a tower at the Trinity site. The explosion produced an intense flash, a rising fireball, and a towering mushroom cloud that confirmed the destructive potential of nuclear fission weapons.

On January 31st, 1950, President Harry Truman announced that the United States would move ahead with development of a thermonuclear or hydrogen bomb. The decision followed the Soviet Union’s first atomic test and intense debate among scientists, soldiers, and policymakers about the future of nuclear weapons. A hydrogen bomb promised yields far beyond earlier fission devices, raising questions about strategy, morality, and the very possibility of controlled war.

Two days after the invasion began, President Harry Truman announced that he had ordered American air and naval forces to support South Korea and directed the Seventh Fleet to the waters near Taiwan. The decision, made without a formal congressional declaration of war, marked one of the earliest and most consequential uses of presidential authority to commit U.S. forces in the emerging Cold War.

Five days after North Korean forces crossed the 38th parallel and invaded South Korea, President Harry Truman took a decisive step. On June 30th, 1950, he authorized the deployment of United States ground combat units to support South Korean forces already reeling under the assault. Air and naval power had been committed earlier, but this order meant American soldiers would again fight on the ground in Asia.

By the summer of the Second World War, Allied forces were fighting their way up the Italian boot while strategic air forces targeted the infrastructure that kept Axis armies supplied. On July 19th, 1943, hundreds of bombers from the United States Army Air Forces and the Royal Air Force attacked rail yards and communications nodes in and around Rome. The strikes aimed to disrupt German logistics and pressure Italy’s leaders at a moment when the regime of Benito Mussolini was already wobbling.

During the Second World War, Allied planners launched a raid on the German-held French port of Dieppe to test defenses and gather experience in amphibious operations. Among the mostly Canadian and British troops who went ashore that August morning were several dozen members of the newly formed United States Army Rangers, making their first combat appearance in Europe.

After months of siege warfare around Petersburg, Virginia, General Grant ordered a major assault on the overstretched Confederate lines protecting both Petersburg and the capital at Richmond. Union forces, including troops from several corps that had been steadily probing and extending the siege lines, attacked at multiple points along the defensive works. The Confederate positions, manned by weary soldiers of General Robert E.

As global war raged and American involvement drew nearer, leaders in Washington recognized that the Army’s air component needed a more robust structure. On June 20th, 1941, the War Department reorganized the existing Army Air Corps into the United States Army Air Forces, giving it a more unified command structure and increased authority over training, doctrine, and operations.

On February 2nd, 1901, Congress created the United States Army Nurse Corps as a permanent part of the regular Army. The Spanish-American War and campaigns in the Philippines had highlighted how crucial trained nursing was to survival, not only in battle but also against disease. Before the Corps, the Army relied heavily on contract nurses and ad hoc arrangements that made it difficult to build experience and enforce standards.