MHQ: The Quarterly Journal of Military History

Bravo Zulu on creating the Thomas Fleming Award for Outstanding Military History Writing and awarding first prize to John McManus [for “The Man Who Would Be President,” MHQ, Winter 2019]. The author honored certainly deserves the recognition, as does

In the spring of 1782 George Washington was a man in the grip of a seemingly intractable problem. The war against Britain was finally going well for the Americans, and the British defeat at Yorktown in October 1781 had signaled that American independ

On the afternoon of March 11, 1958, a Boeing B-47E Stratojet took off from Hunter Air Force Base near Savannah, Georgia. Accompanied by other B-47s, the high-altitude, long-range bomber headed for Bruntingthorpe Air Base in England, where it was to s

When the United States entered World War I in April 1917, Major General John J. “Black Jack” Pershing was made the commander of the American Expeditionary Forces on the Western Front, and he brought Captain George S. Patton Jr. with him to France. Pa

Fireships were vessels that, when filled with combustibles or explosives, could be floated or blown into enemy ships to disable or destroy them. In the age of sail, fireships could wreak their flaming havoc with terrifying rapidity. They could also f

“All warfare is based on deception,”Sun Tzu, the legendary Chinese general and military strategist, wrote in The Art of War. Centuries earlier, of course, the ancient Greeks had employed deception on a grand scale—a huge wooden horse presented as a p

In the late morning of November 26, 2002, at a secret CIA torture site in Thailand code-named Cat’s Eye, al-Qaeda operative Abd al Rahim al-Nashiri looked past James Mitchell and Bruce Jessen, the interrogators who had been slamming him into a wall,

In early July 1863, as the Battle of Gettysburg was ending some 80 miles to the north, President Abraham Lincoln took a break from monitoring Civil War hostilities to watch a rehearsal for Washington, D.C.’s forthcoming Independence Day parade. The r

Bundled head-to-toe in their fur-lined flight suits, Edmond Genet, Edwin Parsons, and James “Mac” McConnell, pilots of the famed Lafayette Escadrille in World War I, walked across an airfield in Saint Juste, France, to their Nieuport 17 biplanes. McC

In most of the eras recorded by military history, it was a reliable truism that an army could lose more men to disease than to the lethal efforts of its enemies. Diseases, particularly those of the insect-borne or water-specific types, have been resp

In 1917 British and American publishers released what they said was a nonfiction book titled Christine, by Alice Cholmondeley. The book’s protagonist is a young English woman living in Berlin just before the outbreak of the World War I. She’s a violi

Mary Borden was born in 1886 with the proverbial silver spoon in her mouth: Her father, a prominent Chicago lawyer, had struck it rich as one of the lead investors in a fabulously successful silver-mining venture in Colorado. After graduating from Va

When Japanese forces invaded the Philippines in early 1942, General Douglas MacArthur, the commander of U.S. Army forces in the Far East, was ordered to leave. He escaped to Australia but famously vowed to return. By the time he fulfilled his pledge

At the beginning of director Peter Jackson’s World War I documentary, They Shall Not Grow Old, we see British soldiers preparing for battle as we’ve always seen them: flickering figures moving herky-jerky through a silent world of gray and black in o

By Andrew Lambert. 399 pages. Yale University Press, 2018. $30. Reviewed by Craig L. Symonds In an ambitious and provocative work that spans 25 centuries, Andrew Lambert, a professor of history at King’s College, London, draws a sharp distinction bet