Like many veterans of the killing fields of World War I, Horace Pippin had a tough time shaking off the memories. So in the decade after the war he captured them, and tamed them, inside sketch-filled journals.He had no dearth of stories to tell. There was the terrified young ...read more
On Christmas Eve 1914, in the dank, muddy trenches on the Western Front of the first world war, a remarkable thing happened. It came to be called the Christmas Truce. And it remains one of the most storied and strangest moments of the Great War—or of any war in history.British ...read more
Like most Americans, Don Seki and Frank Mitoshi Wada remember the Japanese surprise attack on Pearl Harbor in Honolulu, Hawaii as a dark day. For these two “Nisei” (American-born children of Japanese immigrants), December 7th, 1941 was darker than for most, since it led to their ...read more
The first time Joshua Kaufman met Daniel Gillespie was April 29, 1945, when American liberators marched into the notorious Dachau concentration camp 12 miles outside Munich, Germany and smashed in the prison doors. Gillespie, a gunner with the 42nd Rainbow Division, was deeply ...read more
For Robert Whited and Jean White, there was never a question that they would serve in the military. And they never doubted the merit of the war they were sent to fight in Korea. It was this unbending faith in their service as U.S. Marines that carried both men through America’s ...read more
When John McCain made his first bid for public office in 1982, running for a House seat in Arizona, critics blasted him as a carpetbagger, pointing out that he’d only lived in the state for 18 months.“Listen, pal, I spent 22 years in the Navy,” the exasperated candidate ...read more
The first time A.J. Luna escaped death while serving in Iraq, it was thanks to a Marlboro menthol. It was a blisteringly hot day, and his unit was headed from Baghdad toward LSA Anaconda, an Iraqi air force base about 40 miles north. As part of a mile-long convoy of moving ...read more
Since U.S. Army Private Lori Ann Piestewa died in a Humvee ambush in Iraq in 2003, her name—and her legacy—have spread throughout the three mesas of Hopi land in northeastern Arizona. The first American Indian woman to die serving the U.S. Armed Forces, in the first war that ...read more
After coalition forces invaded Iraq in March 2003 and toppled its government, the U.S. military launched an intensive manhunt. The target? The nation’s deposed dictator, Saddam Hussein, who escaped Baghdad when the capital fell. Nine months later, in an operation code-named “Red ...read more
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From the Western and Eastern European front lines to East Africa and China, see how a complex web of alliances led to one of history’s first, truly global wars.
As the summer of 1914 approached, the balance of power in Europe looked shaky at best. It would take only a single crisis—the assassination of Archduke Franz Ferdinand, heir to the Austro-Hungarian throne, and his wife Sophie Chotek by a young Bosnian Serb nationalist in ...read more
The Battle of the Somme, fought in northern France near the Somme River, was one of the biggest and bloodiest battles of the First World War. Starting July 1, 1916, the British and French Armies went head-to-head against Germany for a grueling four months. There was a staggering one million casualties, with the British alone facing 57,470 casualties just on the first day. These haunting photographs provide a glimpse into one of the bloodiest military battles in history.
If you were a royal in the late part of the 19th century, there’s a good chance you were related to Queen Victoria—and if Victoria was your grandmother, you were pretty much guaranteed a glamorous royal wedding to a prince or princess of her choosing.“Victoria’s descendants ...read more
The causes of World War I, also known as the Great War, have been debated since it ended. Officially, Germany shouldered much of the blame for the conflict, which caused four years of unprecedented slaughter. But a series of complicated factors caused the war, including a brutal ...read more
On May 7, 1915, a German U-boat torpedoed the British-owned luxury steamship Lusitania, killing 1,128 people including 128 Americans. The disaster immediately strained relations between Germany and the neutral United States, fueled anti-German sentiment and set off a chain of ...read more
The Schlieffen Plan, devised a decade before the start of World War I, outlined a strategy for Germany to avoid fighting at its eastern and western fronts simultaneously. But what had been meticulously designed to deal a swift “right hook” attack on France and then advance on ...read more
In the years leading up to World War I, audiences flocked to silent movie theaters and danced to ragtime. But an affluent young man was just as likely to spend his summer vacation preparing for war as learning the Turkey Trot or the tango. Beginning in 1913, thousands of American ...read more
The blue benches outside London’s Queen’s Hospital were reserved for men with shattered faces and smashed dreams. The colorful paint job warned the locals that they might want to avert their eyes, shielding them from coming face-to-face with the awful reality of the war and ...read more
World War I, the war that was originally expected to be “over by Christmas,” dragged on for four years with a grim brutality brought on by the dawn of trench warfare and advanced weapons, including chemical weapons. The horrors of that conflict altered the world for decades – and ...read more
It’s unknown exactly how U.S. service members in World War I (1914-18) came to be dubbed doughboys—the term most typically was used to refer to troops deployed to Europe as part of the American Expeditionary Forces—but there are a variety of theories about the origins of the ...read more
As London settled in to sleep on May 31, 1915, a monstrous airborne machine blotted out the stars of the British night. Using the glow of the River Thames as a guide, the biggest flying vessel ever constructed droned over the city. As a trap door opened from underneath the ...read more
1. Manfred von Richthofen The British called him the “Red Knight”; the French, the “Diable Rouge” (the “Red Devil”); but German pilot Manfred von Richthofen is best remembered by the immortal sobriquet the “Red Baron.” Born into a family of Prussian nobles in 1892, Richthofen ...read more
1. Wilfred OwenWilfred Owen only published five poems during his lifetime, but his harrowing descriptions of combat have since made him into one of the towering figures of World War I literature. Just 21 years old when the war broke out, he enlisted in the British army in 1915 ...read more
On the 11th hour of the 11th day of the 11th month of 1918, the incessant boom of artillery abruptly went silent along the Western Front in France. An American medical officer, Stanhope Bayne-Jones, suddenly could hear water dripping off a bush next to him. “It seemed mysterious, ...read more
On February 5, 1918, the U.S. 102nd Infantry reached the front lines of France at Chemin des Dames, north of Soissons. Heavy artillery gunfire and grenade assaults from the Central Powers soon followed. After days and nights of shelling, the exhausted U.S. ...read more
While World War I redrew political borders and introduced modern weaponry such as poison gas, machine guns and tanks, it also spurred the development of practical innovations. From Pilates to Kleenex to drones, these World War I innovations now permeate everyday ...read more
A minute before noon on a November morning in 1918, a telegraph inside the United Press office on the third floor of the New York World headquarters chattered a message of salvation to a war-weary country. After reading the cable from France, pressmen grabbed the largest type ...read more
Shortly after 5 a.m. on November 11, 1918, German, British and French officials gathered inside a railroad dining car in a dark forest north of Paris and signed an armistice to end World War I. Rejecting German calls to immediately halt hostilities, Allied commander Ferdinand ...read more
