VEHICLES, AIRCRAFT & SHIPS

One year later, on September 28th, 1781, a combined American and French army moved out from around Williamsburg and advanced toward British positions at Yorktown, Virginia.

Just days after Guam, another carefully planned amphibious assault unfolded on the nearby island of Tinian. American planners studied Japanese defenses and concluded that a direct assault on the obvious beaches would be too costly, so they chose two much smaller, less expected landing sites on Tinian’s northwest coast. Marines went ashore across those narrow strips of sand using specialized landing craft and intense naval gunfire to suppress enemy positions above the cliffs.

The Mark IV tank was not fast, refined, or comfortable, but it was the machine that helped make Cambrai one of the defining armored battles of the First World War.

As ground combat raged on Okinawa, the United States fleet offshore faced a new and deadly form of air attack in unprecedented numbers. Japanese forces launched a series of large-scale suicide air raids, known as kamikaze attacks, aimed at crippling the invasion armada by sacrificing pilots and aircraft directly against ships. On April 6th, waves of kamikaze aircraft struck radar picket destroyers, carriers, and other vessels, sinking some ships and damaging many more.

As the First World War neared its close, American forces in France were still locked in brutal combat.

A story of survivability and instant readiness told through the crews who sat on alert and the crises they hoped would never come.

One year later to the day, another daring mission unfolded in the skies over the Pacific. On April 18th, 1943, United States forces executed a carefully planned interception of the aircraft carrying Admiral Isoroku Yamamoto, the architect of the Pearl Harbor attack. Guided by intelligence that revealed his inspection tour schedule, a handpicked group of long-range P-38 Lightning fighters flew at low altitude across open ocean to reach the rendezvous point in time.

A story of firepower, adaptation, and endurance told through the gun crews, lookouts, and engineers who carried these older battleships into the heart of the Pacific War.

On the night of November 13th, 1942, American and Japanese surface forces slammed into each other in the dark waters near Guadalcanal in one of the Pacific War’s most chaotic clashes.

A story of survivability and silent reach told through the crews who vanish beneath the waves and the adversaries they deter.

A story of reach, endurance, and compromise told through the crews who rode these lean escorts along the Cold War’s front-line sea lanes.

A story of stealth jets, precision strikes, and a regime suddenly in the dark, and how it changed the wider war.

In the wooded hills of north Georgia, the Western Theater saw its own grim test when Union and Confederate armies collided along Chickamauga Creek.

On December 16th, 1998, American and British forces began a four-day air and missile campaign against Iraqi targets known as Operation Desert Fox.

Less than a year after USS Cole, the attacks of September 11th, 2001 brought the war on terror fully into view.

Another November 8th, separated by two decades, found American paratroopers pushing through thick jungle rather than surf.

On December 18th, 1972, United States bombers and supporting aircraft began a concentrated air offensive often known as the “Christmas bombing” of North Vietnam.

By 1969, the Vietnam War had become a grinding conflict, with North Vietnamese and Viet Cong forces using sanctuaries in nearby Cambodia and Laos to rest, resupply, and move along the Ho Chi Minh Trail. Seeking to disrupt those bases, President Richard Nixon authorized a series of secret bombing raids by B-52 bombers against selected locations inside Cambodia.

A story of low-and-slow fire support, told through the aircrews who flew the Bronco into the jungle fight and the troops who depended on them.

By February 1945, much of Pearl Harbor had returned to the business of war. Battleships and carriers came and went; convoys formed up and headed west toward Iwo Jima and Okinawa. But in a side channel called West Loch, the harbor still hid a graveyard. Months earlier, a chain of explosions had torn through a cluster of tank landing ships loading ammunition for the Pacific campaign.

A story of heavy guns, armored decks, and crews who learned to fight an early-twentieth-century battleship through a very different kind of war.

At a public reception in Buffalo, New York, President McKinley was shot by an assassin, suffering wounds that would prove fatal days later.

A story of small ships on lonely stations, taking the worst hits so the Okinawa invasion could hold together under fire.

A story of reach, listening power, and adaptation told through the crews who rode a jetliner-turned-spyplane into Iraq’s most dangerous airspace.