Military History

Late on the afternoon of Feb. 7, 1864, the Union steamer Diligent began an urgent roll across the Mississippi River from the landing at Natchez, Miss., toward the banks of Vidalia, La. The boat was loaded with a regiment of 300 black soldiers about to embark upon a remarkable trek—one that would help change the tone of America’s Civil War. 

Though the predawn Vietcong attack near the Pleiku Air Base in central Vietnam on Feb. 7, 1965 surprised American soldiers there, President Lyndon B. Johnson and his top advisers were well aware that some such provocation might occur. The political and military position of the unstable South Vietnamese government had deteriorated considerably. Buddhist protests and fasts had been mounting...

In the fall of 1941, I was a 19-year-old seaman not long out of “Great Lakes” school (the U.S. Navy’s boot camp). My first assignment was aboard the USS Case, a Mahan-class destroyer commissioned in Boston in 1936.

When first told of Abraham Lincoln’s assassination, the formerly enslaved Virginia-born Charlotte Scott purportedly exclaimed, “The colored people have lost their best friend on Earth.” Those who owed their freedom to the Emancipation Proclamation—an executive order issued by the president on Jan. 1, 1863 freeing all slaves in Confederate states—doubtless shared her sentiment...

World War II veteran Roy Laman saw the results of war: the destruction, the death and maiming, and the desperate people along the roads begging for food.  Sixty-seven years later it still bothers him. Yet while telling his story, he also spoke of a wonderful three-week reprieve...

The use of canines during warfare dates back to ancient times, when they often served as sentries and sometimes even escorted soldiers into dangerous battles.

As a youngster growing up in Fremont, Ohio, in the ’50s and ’60s, I developed a passing interest in one of my ancestors, Cpl. Henry Graback (also spelled Greybach and Grabach), when my maternal grandmother told me he had been killed during the Civil War.

Brett Watson was still a teenager when he enlisted in the U.S. Army during the Vietnam War. He became an airborne trooper and was thrust into some harrowing battles.

In January 1958, Willie O’Ree of the Boston Bruins became the first African-American player in the National Hockey League, but few of even the most ardent hockey fans know that the New York Rangers nearly broke the league’s color barrier a decade earlier...

When battle-hardened Confederate soldiers splashed through the cool waters of the Potomac River on their way into Maryland on Sept. 4, 1862, the fortunes of war now seemed in their favor...