Military History

The September 2018 feature “Barbarians at the Gate” was excellent. One minor oversight: Author Tang Long notes, “Unlike traditional recurve bowmen, crossbowmen required minimal training to achieve proficiency. Within 10 days of instruction a peasant

More than six decades after the 1950–53 Korean War the remains of thousands of U.S. service members killed in North Korea may finally be headed home. During their June 12 summit in Singapore U.S. President Donald Trump and North Korean Supreme Leader

This spring President Donald Trump awarded Medals of Honor to recipients separated by several decades and conflicts. First Lt. Garlin Murl Conner, an Army veteran of World War II, and Master Chief Special Warfare Operator Britt Slabinski, a Navy SEAL

Michael John O’Leary British Army Victoria Cross France Feb. 1, 1915 In 1914, at the outbreak of World War I, Ireland was part of the United Kingdom. But Irish republicans had long been pushing for independence, and tensions ran high in the Emerald I

Whatever his shortcomings, British Maj. Gen. Edward Braddock did not lack courage. In battle along the Monongahela River in Ohio Country (present-day western Pennsylvania) on July 9, 1755, French and Indian attackers shot out several horses from unde

On the morning of Aug. 31, 1966, Aviation Photographer’s Mate 2nd Class Mike Delamore boarded a tubby U.S. Navy amphibious helicopter with his camera and plenty of film. He expected to shoot a typical day in a chopper crew’s life flying combat search

On the morning of Sept. 25, 1915, just west of the village of Loos-en-Gohelle in far northern France, Captain Gerald C.B. Buckland of the 2nd Battalion, 8th Gurkha Rifles, realized something had gone decidedly wrong. After crossing no-man’s-land with

The 13-day (Sept. 25–Oct. 8, 1915) battle that raged around the northern French village of Loos-en-Gohelle was the biggest British offensive of the year, marked the first use of poison gas by the British and saw the debut of their all-volunteer New A

The date was Oct. 13, 1944, and Canada’s 1st Battalion, Black Watch (Royal Highland Regiment), was paying the price for having launched an attack on Friday the 13th. A gray dawn broke as Companies B and C (the latter 30 minutes behind schedule) advan

When asked why he forbade successive Spartan campaigns against the same foes, the legendary Spartan lawgiver and military reformer Lycurgus explained, “So that [the enemy] may not, by becoming accustomed to defending themselves frequently, become ski

Subordinates may have regarded portly British Maj. Gen. Frederick Middleton as pompous and plodding. But the 59-year-old commander of the Canadian Militia—who had been recommended for the Victoria Cross during the 1857 Indian Rebellion and honorably

The Rise of Rome: From the Iron Age to the Punic Wars, by Kathryn Lomas, Belknap Press, Cambridge, Mass., 2018, $35 Durham University researcher Kathryn Lomas insists a broader Italian context is mandatory for an understanding of how Rome, one among

Little more than five weeks before the Allied invasion of Normandy—the largest amphibious assault the world has ever seen—a training exercise gone awry resulted in appalling carnage. Yet the April 27–28, 1944, fiasco at Slapton Sands, England, which