Twenty-Fourth Tank Corps of 1st Guards Army in the Tatsinskaya Raid, December 1942
Red Christmas The Tatsinskaya Airfield Raid 1942 On 19 November 1942 Soviet forces launched their carefully prepared counter-offensive against the over-extended German, Rumanian, and Italian forces which had pushed to the frontiers of Asia. By 24 November the Red Army had encircled the German 6th Army, elements of the 4th Panzer Army in Stalingrad itself and to the west, destroyed…
Referenced by West Point, Wikipedia, Army University Press (army.mil), Library of Congress (loc.gov), Encyclopedia Britannica and more.
Newsletter
Get the latest from Weapons and Warfare right to your inbox.
Follow Us
NEU EUROPA – NO ROOM FOR RUSSIAN ÉMIGRÉS
The Russian émigrés would certainly not be welcomed back. Not only had they done nothing for their homeland, but the…
Liberators in Europe I
‘The first of the Consolidated B-24 Liberator groups activated had been the 44th on 15 January 1941 at MacDill Field,…
Austria – Second Quarter of the 18th century
Austria, Grenadier zu Pferde (Horse Grenadiers) 1730 by Rudolf von Ottenfeld. Coalitions in Europe between 1725 and 1730. Signatories of…
Most Recent
What were the South’s two main military strategies at the beginning of the war?
When the Civil War began, leaders in both the North and the South thought that it would be a short war, but the two sides had very different military strategies regarding how to bring about…
The Anaconda Plan
Following the attack on Fort Sumter and the secession by the Confederacy the Union devised a strategy to limit the length of the war. Lincoln had no desire for further bloodshed and thus wanted a…
George Washington and The American Revolution War “Grand Strategy”
The entire goal of the American Revolution including the penning of the Declaration of Independence was to gain the colonists and the newly formed American nation legitimacy internationally. The Declaration of Independence was written to…
Popular Categories
Random Reads
French Navy, 1946–1954, Vietnam
Richelieu served as a command vessel for the 6th French Infantry off French Indochina during France’s war against Vietnamese insurgents…
German Destroyers
Zerstörer 1936A DKM Z-39 (Destroyer) (1945) In addition to the destroyer production of those naval powers that represented the victors…
Spanish Military Power – First Half of the Eighteenth Century II
Recruitment of Spanish Troops Despite Philip V’s reliance on foreign troops, his army was largely Spanish, that is, recruited from…
The F-15S over Yemen, 2015
The F-15SA is the most advanced production F-15 Eagle ever built. Saudi Arabia ordered 84 new build F-15SAs and close…
More Stories
T-39 Soviet Super-heavy Breakthrough Tank
The T-39 tank was designed to be a breakthrough tank. With a rather ridiculous 4 turrets, and up to 90 mm of armour, the tank was even more powerful than the KV-1 and KV-2 that would follow it 6 years later. A number of options were presented. Two options were…
Grumman F4F Wildcat
The US Navy’s requirement of 1936 for a new carrier-based fighter resulted in the Brewster Aeronautical Corporation receiving an order for a prototype of its Model 39 under the designation XF2A-1. This became the US Navy’s first monoplane fighter in squadron service, but so tentative was the US Navy in…
First Siege of Tenochtitlán, (June 24–30, 1520)
Aztecs and Spanish Conquistadors, “La Pintura y la Guerra “La Noche Triste” -art by Jose Ignacio Redondo The capital of the Aztec Empire was far larger than most European cities at over 240,000 souls, many tens of thousands of them elite Aztec warriors. Moral arrogance or reckless stupidity or military…
The Gallic testudo at Alesia
Vercassivellaunus, kinsman to Vercingetorix, has been given the task of ripping a hole through Caesar’s defences once and for all. The previous two assaults had come to nothing but a bloody mess, so this time a careful reconnaissance was conducted by scouts led by local farmers who probed the Roman…
Order of Sword Brothers
The Livonian Brothers of the Sword were a military order established by their second bishop, Bishop Albert of Riga, in 1202. Pope Innocent III sanctioned the establishment in 1204 for the second time. The membership of the order comprised German “warrior monks”. Following their defeat by the Samogitians and Semigallians…
Mediterranean Coastal and Torpedo Craft
Known popularly as PT boats, World War II–era patrol-torpedo boats were the American equivalent of German E boats and British motor torpedo boats. They were small, fast, wooden-hulled, shallow-draft vessels that depended on surprise, speed, and maneuverability and thus did their best work in coastal waters. During World War I,…
Siege of La Rochelle
The siege of the Huguenot stronghold of La Rochelle by the forces of Louis XIII, 1627-9, was a huge operation that lasted for fifteen months. The king’s forces had to devise massive seaward barriers to prevent the English, who had occupied the fle de Re, from assisting their Huguenot allies.…
The Tlaxcalans
Tlaxcalan conquistadors. This scene from the pictorial conquest account called the Lienzo de Tlaxcala depicts Tlaxcalan warriors fighting in the 1522 campaign into Michoacán in western Mexico. The expedition’s leader, Nuño de Guzmán, is shown along with one other Spaniard and a Spanish mastiff, outnumbered by four Tlaxcalans in full…