WARS & HISTORICAL ERAS

Undeterred by the first setback, Grant prepared a larger, more coordinated assault for May 22nd, 1863. Union artillery pounded the Confederate lines through the morning, and attacking columns moved out with specially chosen volunteers—the so-called “forlorn hope”—carrying ladders and planks to cross obstacles. Across the front, Union regiments advanced against steep slopes, dense abatis, and well-sited rifle pits, enduring a storm of small-arms fire and exploding shells.

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

On August 29th, 1862, Union forces under Major General John Pope hurled repeated attacks against Confederate positions near an unfinished railroad grade outside Manassas, Virginia.

On May 18th, 1917, President Woodrow Wilson signs the Selective Service Act, creating a national mechanism to draft men into military service. The law requires eligible males to register for possible induction, and it lays out how local boards will classify and call individuals. For the United States, whose small prewar Army cannot sustain large operations in Europe, the act is essential to raising a mass citizen force.

As war raged overseas but before the United States formally entered the Second World War, political leaders grappled with how to prepare a peacetime democracy for potential conflict.

Even as battles raged in Normandy and the Pacific, policymakers were looking ahead to the millions of service members who would one day come home. On June 22nd, 1944, President Franklin D. Roosevelt signed the Servicemen’s Readjustment Act, soon known simply as the GI Bill. The law offered a package of benefits including education assistance, home loan guarantees, and support for finding work, all intended to ease the transition from military to civilian life.

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.

On November 15th, 1864, Major General William Tecumseh Sherman led his Union army columns out of a largely destroyed Atlanta and turned them toward the Georgia coast.

On February 17th, 1865, Union forces under Major General William Tecumseh Sherman entered Columbia, the capital of South Carolina, as part of the Carolinas campaign that followed the March to the Sea. Confederate defenses had crumbled, and the city’s fall carried heavy symbolic weight because South Carolina had led secession. That night, fires swept across large sections of Columbia.

After cutting a swath across Georgia in the famous March to the Sea, Major General William Tecumseh Sherman captured the port city of Savannah in December 1864.

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 autumn settled over Virginia in 1781, combined American and French armies under George Washington and the Comte de Rochambeau began the methodical work of besieging Lord Cornwallis at Yorktown.

The struggle for Petersburg combined failed assaults, trench warfare, railway interdiction, and repeated battles on an expanding front. This overview follows the campaign from June 1864 through the April 1865 evacuation, preserving the distinctions between individual award actions.

Port Hudson protected a difficult stretch of the Mississippi River. Farragut’s March passage preceded Banks’s land siege, whose costly assaults and prolonged investment ended with the Confederate surrender on July 9, 1863.

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.

On May 7th, 1915, the British liner Lusitania approached the coast of Ireland, carrying civilians, including many American passengers, through waters patrolled by German submarines. When a German U-boat torpedoed the ship, the blast and a rapid list sent the liner under in a matter of minutes, leaving thousands in the water and claiming well over a thousand lives. Among the dead were American men, women, and children, whose loss resonated far beyond the Atlantic crossing itself.

In the frigid, dark waters of the North Atlantic, war at sea often struck suddenly and without mercy. In the early hours of February 3rd, 1943, the American troopship Dorchester, carrying more than nine hundred soldiers, seamen, and civilian workers, was torpedoed by a German submarine while en route to Greenland. The blast knocked out power and communication, and the ship began to list and sink in bitter cold, far from land and under threat of further attack.

As the Pacific war neared its end, the heavy cruiser USS Indianapolis completed a secret mission: delivering components of the first atomic bomb to a base on Tinian. After departing without a dedicated escort, the ship steamed west toward the Philippines. Shortly after midnight on July 30th, a Japanese submarine fired torpedoes that tore into the cruiser’s side. The ship sank in minutes, and around a thousand sailors and Marines were cast into the open ocean with few lifeboats.

The technological face of United States naval power carried its own risks, even in peacetime. On May 23rd, 1939, the submarine USS Squalus submerged for a test dive off the New Hampshire coast and suffered a catastrophic failure in one of its main air and water systems. Seawater flooded aft compartments, sending the boat to the bottom in cold, dark water with part of the crew trapped inside.

In late May of 1754, a young Virginia officer named George Washington led colonial troops and Native allies through the forests of the Ohio Country. Near a small encampment of French soldiers at a place later called Jumonville Glen, his party launched a surprise attack that killed or captured most of the detachment, including its commander.

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

When delegates in South Carolina voted on December 20th, 1860 to leave the Union, they set in motion a crisis that would soon reshape the United States military.

Jumping ahead to August 12th, 1898, American and Spanish representatives signed a protocol that halted fighting in the Spanish-American War. In a conflict that had opened only a few months earlier with battles around Cuba and the Philippines, United States forces quickly destroyed Spanish naval squadrons and seized key positions.