Military History

[Re. “Many Waters to Cross,” by James F. Byrne Jr., March 2019:] The famous painting by Emanuel Leutze, “Washington Crossing the Delaware,” on P. 22, contains many flaws: 1) The flag with the 13 stars and stripes did not exist until the summer of 177

British search and recovery firm Merlin Burrows [merlinburrows.com] has discovered the wreck of USS Bonhomme Richard, the 152-foot, 42-gun frigate commanded by Capt. John Paul Jones, Continental Navy hero and “Father of the American Navy.” The ship l

At the 1914 outbreak of World War I Britain rushed cadets of the Royal Naval College, Dartmouth, from the classroom to sea. Among them was 15-year-old Eric Bush, who shipped out aboard HMS Bacchante, flagship of 7th Cruiser Squadron. Bacchante was pr

In December 1942 German Field Marshal Erich von Manstein’s Army Group Don was preparing to launch Unternehmen Wintergewitter (“Operation Winter Storm”) to relieve the encircled Sixth Army at Stalingrad, Russia. To the south along the Chir River the G

As Israel developed an armored corps, it faced the quandary of acquiring weaponry from an outside world devoid of trustworthy sources. The grim losses it suffered during the 1973 Yom Kippur War—with 1,500 of its more than 2,500 dead being tankers—und

On a damp and windy day in late February 1932 presidential hopeful Adolf Hitler and his devotees in the National Socialist German Workers’ Party gathered in a secluded corner of a Munich café to discuss an article in Hamburg’s Social Democrat newspap

The cheering Korean crowds were enough to stop any man in his tracks—even the president of the United States. South Korea was the final layover on Lyndon Johnson’s 17-day, seven-nation tour of Asia in the fall of 1966, and he had come primarily to th

In the aftermath World War II the United States and the Soviet Union administratively split the Korean peninsula along the 38th parallel north. In 1948, after the communist north rejected a United Nations–brokered election aimed at creating a unified

In April 1731, offshore from Havana, the Spanish guarda costa vessel Isabella under the command of Captain Juan de León Fandiño stopped the British merchantman Rebecca, ostensibly on suspicion of smuggling. That ship’s irate master, Richard Jenkins,

History has singled out certain countries as natural poison to any power with the hubris to invade them. Even if successfully overrun, such regions prove impossible to control, ultimately wearing down each invader until it throws up its hands and lea

The army stood in silence as its general, a battle-hardened Roman veteran and proconsul, glared down on them. His remaining eye burned with intelligence and purpose, and his scarred face proclaimed his tenacity. In combat he was as strong and sharp a

Just after dawn on Christmas Day 1941 wounded Canadian Pvt. Sid Vale lay in his bed in Hong Kong’s St. Stephen’s College, then in use as an Allied military field hospital. Immobilized by his injuries, he could only shudder at the screams of a nurse b

The Pirate World: A History of the Most Notorious Sea Robbers, by Angus Konstam, Osprey Publishing, Oxford, 2019, $35 Vikings, corsairs, filibusters, buccaneers, sea beggars, privateers, diehards—by whatever name they were called, pirates have been w

In 1812 President James Madison entered the United States into an unpopular war stemming from Europe’s ongoing Napoléonic wars. A year earlier the British had instituted a naval blockade off U.S. ports to choke off trade to France, in the process sei