Minatoga: A Missed Opportunity
One of the still-unexplained puzzlers of the Battle for Okinawa is why Lieutenant General Simon Bolivar Buckner allowed two veteran Marine divisions to stand idle in the northâthe First for a month, the Sixth for nearly two weeksâinstead of using them to relieve one or two Army infantry divisions badly battered in his three-division assault on the Naha-Shuri-Yonabaru line. The…
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
THE MECHANICS OFÂ EMPIRE
The general appearance of such a metalled road and footway is shown in an existing street of Pompeii. Native earth,…
Fairchild Republic A-10 Thunderbolt II â âactual death from above!â
 An A-10 Thunderbolt II, like this one, is among the various U.S. Central Command Air Forces air assets available…
Alternative WWI: Kitchener in the Middle East II
Kitchener with General Birdwood at Anzac, November 1915 The Ottoman officialsâ surprising response was to offer to destroy the two…
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 âGrand Strategyâ
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
The Reconquista 1212â1222
An extraordinary transformation of the political landscape occurred in the nearly forty years following the Crusade of Las Navas de…
Cold War Submarine Warfare II
For a short time, Nautilus was the worldâs only nuclear-powered submarine. Admiral Rickover noted that, âNautilus did not mark the…
OKB-1 EF 131
EF-140 â Russian built EF-131 with 2 RR Nene (flown in 1948) From late 1944 the Red Army overran many…
More Stories
WWI: Behind Enemy Lines by Aircraft I
British âSophwith 1 1/2 Strutterâ biplane The Second World War was not the first time that intelligence agents had been flown behind enemy lines. A quarter of a century earlier, soon after the outbreak of the First World War, one of Franceâs most remarkable pioneer aviators became the first pilot…
Ambush at the ford
MANGAPIKO STREAM, WAIKATO, NEW ZEALAND, 1864 After the United Kingdom had signed the Treaty of Waitangi with chiefs of the indigenous Maori people in 1840, the British regarded the whole of New Zealand as a colony within their empire. Many Maori saw the situation differently. Disagreements over the treatyâs implications…
Croatian Survival
Relief of the battle of Sisak. Map of Croatia in 1593. Although fairly autonomous, Croatia was part of the Hungarian kingdom and thus political relations between Croatia and the Ottoman Empire were mainly confined to interactions with local authorities, such as correspondence about and negotiations of borderland issues. Despite the…
SERIES XIV (1938) Soviet Submarine
The K-class âSeries XIV ocean-going submarines of 1,487/2,102tons, 22/10 knots, armed with ten 533mm torpedo tubes, two single 100mm, two 45mm AA guns and 20 mines, were the largest and undoubtedly the best Russian wartime boats. The six boats completed before the war in Leningrad were transferred to the Northern…
RAF COASTAL COMMAND LAND-BASED AIR PATROLÂ II
The Condors Arrive In the North Atlantic, Dönitzâs son-in-law GĂŒnter Hessler in the new IXB U-107 found convoy Outbound 279 on February 3, 1941. After flashing an alert, Hessler attacked, sinking a 4,700-ton freighter, then shadowed during the day. Dönitz relayed the report and ordered six other boats to converge…
VICKERS FB5 (âGUNBUSâ)
On 19 November 1912, the Admiralty placed an order with one of its favoured armaments contractors, Vickers, Son & Maxim, who had opened an aviation department the previous year, for a âfighting aeroplane armed with a machine gunâ, presumably intending it to be employed in the defence of its shore…
THE DECLINE AND FALL OF FRENCHÂ HEGEMONY
The Duc de Villars, a marshal of France, leading his troops during the Battle of Denain in 1712. Map: Europe in 1700 The year 1683 represented the high-water mark of French hegemony in Europe. âNot a dog barks in Europe unless our king says he mayâ, was the hubristic boast…
The âI-Goâ Operation
Admiral Isoroku Yamamoto, commander of Combined Fleet, transferred headquarters to Rabaul for Operation I-Go. A2-2-152 was flown by a wingman of carrier Junyo. 2-1-202 was flown by a wingman of carrier Junyo. Solomon islands, during I-GO operation, April 1943. This plane shows two vertical red bands that means when Junyo…