Monte Cassino's Last Battle Won Rome and Cost the Campaign Its Moral Record

Before World War II, students at the US Naval War College assumed a future Pacific war would be settled by a single decisive clash of battleship fleets — and Japanese planners reac…

Every account of the 1939–40 Soviet-Finnish war eventually arrives at the same image: white-clad ski troops gliding out of the tree line, Red Army columns frozen stiff along narrow…

Eighteen Americans died in eighteen hours of urban combat on October 3–4, 1993, and by the next spring every U.S. soldier was gone from Somalia. Both facts are confirmed record. Wh…

On May 14, 1940, a single pontoon bridge over the Meuse River carried the entire logistical weight of Nazi Germany's war-winning gamble. Lose that bridge, and the breakthrough at S…

Lieutenant General Frederick "Boy" Browning reportedly told Major General Roy Urquhart, in the days before the operation launched, that the plan to reach Arnhem might be "a bridge…

Earlier this month, around 150 soldiers from the British 2nd Parachute Battalion walked the old invasion route from San Carlos to Goose Green as part of a routine training exercise…

Popular histories of American airpower in World War II tend to credit engines, airframes, and pilot skill. A recent roundup of essays from War on the Rocks's "Cogs of War" series o…

Seventeen days in temperatures that fell to roughly minus 35 degrees Celsius will do strange things to an army's equipment and to its mythology in equal measure. Weapons jammed. Bl…

In 2003, five years into an occupation that was starting to look like an insurgency nobody in Washington had planned for, someone at the Pentagon's Office of Special Operations and…

Three pieces of serious military-history writing landed this fall that, read together, make the same point from different centuries: the stories institutions tell about their own s…

On the night of November 20–21, 1970, a joint Army-Air Force team flew deep into North Vietnam, assaulted a prison compound near Son Tay with near-textbook precision, and found no…

Here is the number that gets repeated in every popular account of Third Ypres: roughly 275,000 British casualties against roughly 220,000 German, for a battlefield that was evacuat…

On July 1, 1950, Maj. Gen. William F. Dean gave Lt. Col. Charles B. Smith orders that amounted to a shrug with a rifle attached: block the road north of Pusan as far as possible, f…

Sixteen B-25 Mitchell bombers sat lashed to the deck of USS Hornet in April 1942, and every crewman aboard knew something the American public didn't: nobody had planned for these p…

The numbers have been wrong for eighty years, and the wrongness was never accidental. On the morning of July 12, 1943, the II SS Panzer Corps — three divisions holding the southern…

The popular verdict on Market Garden is that it was a bridge too far — one objective too ambitious, one gamble too many. That verdict is not wrong, but it is incomplete. The operat…

The argument has a seductive logic: China's military has documented shortcomings — limited combat experience, political interference in command culture, institutional dysfunction s…

The aircraft were capable. The bombs fell where they were aimed, more or less. The pilots flew into some of the most heavily defended airspace in the history of aerial warfare. Non…

I covered the street-level mechanics of Stalingrad's urban defense in an earlier issue — how the 62nd Army learned to fight in rubble, how strongpoints replaced linear defense, how…