Category: Military History

The One Time Nazis Helped China Fight Japan Chinese cadets with German helmets in the 1930s Most people who stayed awake for at least half of their high school history class knows that the Axis Powers in World War II consisted of Germany, Italy and Japan. But few know that German tactics and weapons—not to… Continue reading WWII Nazis Help China Fight Japan

Details Released After 53 Years Bob Hicks was spending a cold December night in his barracks 53 years ago at Ellsworth Air Force Base near Rapid City when the phone rang. It was the chief of his missile maintenance team, who dispatched Hicks to an incident at an underground silo. “The warhead,” the team chief… Continue reading Nuclear Missile Accident 1964

Revolutionary War Death Ship HMS Jersey After the British evacuated Boston on March 17, 1776, Gen. George Washington guessed correctly that their next target would be New York. By mid-April, Washington had marched his 19,000 soldiers to Lower Manhattan. He strengthened the batteries that guarded the harbor and constructed forts in northern Manhattan and on… Continue reading AR Death Ship HMS Jersey

Forty-two years after the fall of Saigon, veterans from The Villages® and countless others are still battling the aftermath of Agent Orange. It was 1966. Bob Westfall was just 19, a kid really, too young to vote but old enough to fight for his country. He wasn’t much different than most of the young men who… Continue reading Agent Orange, A Toxic Legacy

Everything You Need to Know Before Seeing the Movie Christopher Nolan’s film Dunkirk inspired new attention to the famous evacuation by sea, in 1940, of four hundred thousand British troops under harrowing air attack. Had that evacuation failed, the United Kingdom would have been deprived of a land army to oppose Nazi Germany. But before Dunkirk, British and French… Continue reading WWII Dunkirk

How Thaddeus Lowe took the skies and invented aerial reconnaissance before the age of airplanes. As the moon hung high in the morning Cincinnati sky, an eccentric aeronaut blasted one last puff of coal gas into his balloon, the “Enterprise.” It was April 20, 1861, and just eight days earlier the first shots had rang… Continue reading The Man in the Balloon

The photo this winter of a smiling Mar-a-Lago guest with the uniformed military aide who carries the “nuclear football” was a rare—and unease-inducing—public reminder that just steps from the president at all times are the keys to end the world as we know it. Americans normally see very little of the massive apparatus that surrounds… Continue reading President’s Secret Air Force

April 18, 1942 James Harold Doolittle, 0-271885, Lieutenant General, promoted to General in 1985 Pilot Crew 1 Born December 14, 1896, Alameda, California Died September 27, 1993, Carmel, California Tokyo. April 18, 1942. A clear and quiet morning. The one hundred and thirty-third day of Japan’s war with the United States. Everything seemed normal in… Continue reading WWII Doolittle Raid

The Soviet-German war was the fiercest, most brutal and most costly chapter in World War II. Since this conflict ended with the destruction of both Germany’s Wehrmacht and Adolf Hitler’s Third Reich, it was also the war’s most decisive theater. It is unfortunate, therefore, that until very recently— for largely political, ideological and military reasons—… Continue reading WWII Forgotten Battles of the Great Patriotic War

Of the numerous ships that have added to the laurels of the United States Navy since its official inception more than two centuries ago, a handful stand out, both for their individual deeds and for their ability to epitomize the era in which they earned their fame. Of those, arguably the most famous is the… Continue reading USS Constitution: The Legendary Survivor