Category: Military History

After Great Britain was driven from continental Europe in disgrace, it realized that the offensive capabilities it wanted to employ against Germany must be tried elsewhere. Thus, after winning the battle of Britain, it shifted its main weight of forces to fight in the deserts of North Africa. The ensuing struggle eventually caused some cheer […]

Read Part One here. Rumors were going around within a week of being on the job that we were deploying to Afghanistan that winter, only four months away. Right before we loaded up for a month-long rotation to the National Training Center (NTC), it came down the pipe that our battalion would be given the […]

December 7th, 1941 saw the Japanese attack on America’s Pacific Fleet in Pearl Harbor, Hawaii, and as President Franklin D. Roosevelt would later opine, it was indeed a day that would live on in infamy.  The events of that day, and the tumultuous war the attack led America to enter, have been the subject of […]

The event that gave birth to the world’s deadliest sniper was a short but bloody conflict that Josef Stalin initiated on November 30, 1939, and concluded on March 13, 1940. Known as the Russo-Finnish War, or Winter War, the goal was to reclaim territory lost in the Russian civil war of 1917. Convinced the territory […]

Arafat has long been a pain in the ass for most western countries with close ties to Israel. A self-proclaimed freedom fighter, he made no secret about using terrorist tactics to accomplish his agenda.  His celebrity-like charisma polarized the Palestinian population, forced the U.S. to acknowledge him, and ultimately made him a dead man walking […]

“Wait…you were his platoon leader?” I’ve received this particular question probably about a hundred times over the last five years, and roughly 95% of the time, it’s followed by a particular look of recognition, doubt, and horror, all combined into one washing over the asker’s face. As I recall the details of the story, and […]

Using side-firing weapons on aircraft can be traced back to 1927, when a concept was demonstrated by fixing a .30 caliber machine gun to the side of a biplane and flying a simple maneuver known as a pylon turn. Named after the air racing term, it involved positioning an aircraft in a gentle bank and […]

WHITE SANDS MISSILE RANGE, N.M., March 21, 2017 — The 75th anniversary of World War II’s infamous Bataan Death March was observed by 7,200 people who gathered here in the early-morning hours to participate in an 8.5-mile walk, March 19, 2017. Once again, Ben Skardon, a retired Army colonel, was the oldest participant and the […]

Dr. Henry Murray began making a name for himself during World War II by working with the Office of Strategic Services (OSS) to train its spies to withstand the most brutal interrogation tactics they may be faced with at the hands of their Nazi enemies.  In the years to come, as the OSS would give […]

My recent research on Asian SOF based units has taken me back in time for another look at the Korean War, often referred to as America’s Forgotten War due to it taking place in the aftermath of World War Two, being much shorter than that war (1950-1953), and Americans turning a blind eye to a […]

Hunter S. Thompson, the famed author of books like “Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas,” and inventor of “Gonzo journalism” – a journalistic method in which he placed himself at the forefront of stories about drugs, violence, and even the Hell’s Angels, was the type of writer that writers tend to love.  I have a […]

Nuclear weapons have been an integral part of American offensive and defensive capabilities since their very inception.  Ever since J. Robert Oppenheimer uttered the famous words, “I am become death, the destroyer of worlds,” in awe and terror while witnessing the destructive power of splitting the atom, the United States has done everything it could […]