MHQ: The Quarterly Journal of Military History

At the height of the Cold War, personnel in the control room of a supersecret bomber base in Aroostook County, Maine, respond to a Strategic Air Command alert that turns out to be nothing more than a readiness exercise. TODAY: The Hawaii Emergency Ma

In the development of the laws of war in the 19th century, the author of the most influential American document on the subject was Francis Lieber, a Prussian academic who had emigrated to the United States in 1827, changing his name from Franz to Fra

Douglas Stringfellow, an infantryman in the U.S. Army Air Forces who enlisted in 1942, took shrapnel to the spine during his first two weeks of overseas deployment in December 1945 and, in January, was on his way home to Utah—an abbreviated battlefie

In 1939 a 32-year-old secretary, mother, and aspiring author living in Stockholm with her family began keeping personal journals, augmented with pasted-in newspaper clippings, that she would maintain through the end of World War II. Her name was Astr

The sheltered waters of Scapa Flow were bathed in soft twilight as the midsummer sun rested briefly below the horizon of Scotland’s Orkney Islands. The war with Germany was in its third year in 1917, but while casualties were mounting on the Western

The “Hedgehog” Anti-Submarine Projector was a conceptual leap forward in the arsenal of weapons the Allies used against U-boats in World War II. Designed to replace the unsuccessful Fairlie Mortar, the “Hedgehog” was the brainchild of engineers in th

In April 1898, two months after a mysterious explosion sank the USS Maine in the harbor of Havana, carrying 260 American seamen to their deaths, President William McKinley bowed to public pressure and sent the United States to war against Spain, whic

In the spring of 1885, a diminished figure wrapped in a shawl, a knitted cap pulled over his brow, toils in a brownstone on East 66th Street in New York City. His right hand, trained to wield a sword, pushes a pen across curling sheets of paper. Twen

For much of its first two centuries the United States was bent on conquering the wilderness. Cities rose from bare ground, forests were shorn for timber, open fields were subdued by plow, and indigenous peoples were pushed aside. But a dramatic reima

The Texas lancers formed quickly alongside the mountain howitzers. Above the two-rank formation rose nine-foot medieval pikes—weapons peculiarly out of place in the mid-19th century. Just below each lance point flapped a red pennant emblazoned with a

Radioman 2nd Class Mike Hannon walked to work with a palpable sense of unease on the morning of May 23, 1968. As a communications specialist at Submarine Force Atlantic Headquarters, he was responsible for processing dozens of messages each day from

In the 1930s and ’40s, Arturo Toscanini, the most celebrated conductor of opera and symphonic music in history, was also the best-known opponent, among musicians, of Nazism and Fascism. The man who had worked directly with Verdi, Puccini, Debussy, Ri

In World War I, Britain took the unprecedented step of enlisting artists and writers to work for its War Propaganda Bureau, informally known as Wellington House. Louis Raemaekers, a Dutch painter and political cartoonist, was one of them. Raemaekers

By Matthew Restall. 560 pages. HarperCollins Publishers, 2018. $35. Reviewed by Marshall C. Eakin On November 8, 1519, after spending more than six months fighting his way into the heart of Mexico, Spanish explorer Hernando Cortés came face to face w