BETWEEN THE MAMLUKS AND THE MONGOLS
1250–1260 With Tturanshah’s bloody heart at Louis’s feet and his body dumped in the Nile, life was draining out of the Ayyubid dynasty. It was the Mamluk regiment created by al-Salih that had massacred the Christians at Mansurah and saved Egypt. This professional military corps had become the power behind the throne, and during the 1250s, they took it. It…
Operation Mars II
The fourth item of evidence is in the memoirs of Army General A.I. Gribkov, who as a captain on the General Staff took part in ‘Mars’. The corps he was attached to (Solomatin’s) fought for several days in encirclement, and after the remnants of it had managed to break through to the Soviet lines on 15 December, he and the…
“Grief” in Combat
In last few months of the war the He 177 was used on the Eastern Front and for the first…
Augsburg I
17 April 1942 The entry into operational service of the RAF’s new four-engine heavy bomber, the Avro Lancaster, had provided…
Hittite-Hurrian Wars (c. 1620-c. 1325 B. C. E.)
The Hittite Empire at its greatest extent under Suppiluliuma I (ca. 1350–1322 BC) and Mursili II (ca. 1321–1295 BC) The…
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Battle of Huan’erzui
Mongol army storming a Chinese city. The achievements of Genghis Khan remained a popular subject for stories and illustrations throughout the Turco-Persian world and the Mogul emperors of India looked to Genghis Khan as their great forebear. At the Battle of Huan’erzui (Badger’s Mouth) in February 1212, the Mongols under…
Martial Art – archery (kyudo/kyujutsu)
Archery (kyudo; literally “the way of the bow”) was the weapon most closely associated with warriors and was in common use by the end of the prehistoric era, during the fourth or fifth centuries C.E. While the term kyudo is more common today, kyujutsu (“technique of the bow”) was used…
Battle of Tarawa Atoll
The capture of the Pacific Atoll of Tarawa in November 1943 launched the Marshall Islands campaign, which initiated the U.S. drive across the central Pacific. Tarawa is an atoll in the Gilbert Islands consisting of small islands, the largest of which, Betio, is no more than 2.5 miles in length.…
German Infantry – Eastern Front
In the spring of 1943, German forces were no longer the undisputed masters of the battlefield. In North Africa they were being pushed back into an enclave in Tunisia, facing defeat by the combined Allied forces, and in Russia they were on the back foot after Stalingrad. The battle of…
The conquest of Italian East Africa
Haile Selassie, Emperor of Abyssinia, was exiled by Mussolini in 1936 after the Italian occupation of his country. In May 1941 he was escorted back to his capital, Addis Ababa, and to his throne by Colonel Orde Wingate (left) following a daring guerrilla campaign. His was the first country to…
Peace of Augsburg, (September 25, 1555)
Following the Convention of Passau (1552), Ferdinand I and Charles V agreed to a general settlement of the confessional and princely wars in Germany. What occasioned concession for Ferdinand was pragmatism; for Charles it was military defeat and personal melancholia, which also moved him to abdicate. Augsburg established a principle…
Hans Georg von Arnim-Boitzenburg, (1581–1641)
Mercenary field marshal of Brandenburg birth. Nominally a Lutheran, he fought in Poland and Russia with Gustavus Adolphus, 1613– 1617, then against the Swedes in behalf of Poland (1621). Arnim was born in Boitzenburger Land, Brandenburg. After studies at Frankfurt (Oder), Leipzig, and Rostock, he entered into service at the…
WUNDERWAFFEN
The Ju 287 project started in June 1943. The aircraft was to have had swept-back wings and four turbojets, one beneath each wing and one on either side of the forward fuselage. However, the low speed stability problems of swept wings had at that time not been solved, so in…
KV-85 AND IS-85/I HEAVY TANKS
The KV-85 was a stopgap solution to the problem of replacing the ageing KV-1 heavy tank. A new turret, intended for the IS-85 (later redesignated the IS-1) and armed with the same 85mm (3.34in) gun as the T-34/85, was mounted on the KV-1-S chassis. Concurrent to the development of the…
Dieppe Churchills
The Mk.I and Mk.II Churchills often seen in photos of the disastrous Dieppe raid. The Dieppe Raid was planned to temporarily take control of the French port of Dieppe using a strong force of about 6,000 troops – mostly drawn from inexperienced Canadian units. The operation, codenamed Rutter, would test…