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Great Military Stories

The Death of the Red Baron

The Death of the Red Baron

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In 1915, von Richthofen transferred to the Imperial German Army Air Service (Luftstreitkrafte). He studied aerial tactics under the master German strategist, Hauptman Oswald Boelcke, flying his first combat mission after less than thirty hours of flight instruction. Despite an indifferent start as a fighter pilot, he nonetheless was invited to join Boelcke's Jagdstaffel 2 squadron and soon excelled in combat following the Boelcke Dicta, which included approaching his enemy from above with the sun behind him, firing only at close range, always keeping his eyes on his target, and attacking in a group of four to six planes. The History of The Red Baron At the beginning of 1917, he had 16 confirmed kills, had been awarded Germany's highest military decoration, Pour le Merite, and was commander of a squadron, Jasta 11, of elite fighter pilots.  In April 1917 alone, he downed 22 British planes. Flying a series of Albatros aircraft, his vanity led him to have each painted red. As the...

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Gunnery Sgt. John Lee Canley, U.S. Marine Corps (1953-1981)

Gunnery Sgt. John Lee Canley, U.S. Marine Corps (1953-1981)

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As 1967 turned to 1968, American forces had officially been fighting in Vietnam for years, and many believed the Vietnamese Tet holiday would pass uneventfully, as it had in years past. They were wrong. On January 31, 1968, North Vietnamese and Viet Cong forces launched an offensive across South Vietnam, targeting more than 100 towns and cities.  It was the largest operation from either side until that point in the war. Eighty thousand communist troops hoped to spark a mass uprising against American and South Vietnamese (ARVN) forces among the populace. The uprising never happened, and a U.S. and ARVN counterattack quickly took back what was lost in the surprise.  One notable exception was the city of Hue, Vietnam's ancient capital. After taking Hue, the communists would have to be forcibly pushed out of the city street by street and house by house. It took 17 battalions of the U.S. Army, U.S. Marine Corps, and ARVN troops to dislodge them.  Sgt. John Lee Canley Led...

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WW2 – The Battle of Iwo Jima

WW2 – The Battle of Iwo Jima

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The Battle of Iwo Jima was an epic military campaign between U.S. Marines and the Imperial Army of Japan in early 1945. Located 750 miles off the coast of Japan, the island of Iwo Jima had three airfields that could serve as a staging facility for a potential invasion of mainland Japan. American forces invaded the island on February 19, 1945, and the ensuing Battle of Iwo Jima lasted for five weeks.  In some of the bloodiest fighting of World War II, it's believed that all but 200 or so of the 21,000 Japanese forces on the island were killed, as were almost 7,000 Marines. But once the fighting was over, the strategic value of Iwo Jima was called into question.  According to postwar analyses, the Imperial Japanese Navy had been so crippled by earlier World War II clashes in the Pacific that it was already unable to defend the empire's island holdings, including the Marshall archipelago. In addition, Japan's air force had lost many of its warplanes, and those it had were unable to...

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Escape from Libby Prison: The Largest Successful Prison Break of the Civil War

Escape from Libby Prison: The Largest Successful Prison Break of the Civil War

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On February 9, 1864, more than 100 Union prisoners tunneled their way to freedom in an audacious escape from Libby Prison in the Confederate capital of Richmond, Virginia. More than half of the prisoners made their way to Union lines while others were recaptured and returned to the confines of Libby. Libby Prison started as an old food warehouse on Tobacco Row along the James River. Captain Luther Libby, along with his son George W. Libby, leased the three-story brick building where they operated a ship chandlery and grocery business. In 1862, the Confederacy took over the building and turned it into a prison for Union officers. Colonel Thomas E. Rose, a Union officer from the 77th Pennsylvania Volunteer Infantry, was captured during the Battle of Chickamauga and taken to Libby Prison. He found conditions appalling and immediately started plotting his escape. He devised an ambitious plan to dig a tunnel from the cellar of the prison to a tobacco shed that stood just outside the...

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The American Indian Wars – The Battle of Bear Valley

The American Indian Wars – The Battle of Bear Valley

When we think of the Indian Wars that pitted the American Indian tribes against the United States Army, we tend to think of U.S. Army Cavalry, wearing their trademark stetson hats, sabers gleaming, riding into battle. They're usually fighting Native tribesmen who are shooting rifles while riding bareback across the Great Plains. That may have been how some of those battles looked, but after the closing of the frontier in 1890, it looked a lot different. The last great battle (The Battle of Bear Valley) waged between the Indian tribes and the U.S. Army came in 1918 after the Army was shaped by its experience in World War I. Its opponent was the Yaqui tribe, who was looking to establish an independent state inside Mexico.  The Battle of Bear Valley Was the Last Official Battle of the American Indian Wars The Battle of Bear Valley looked a lot different than the battles of our popular imagination and was the last official battle of the American Indian Wars.  American Indian tribes...

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Where Are the Alien Bodies?

Where Are the Alien Bodies?

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By now, we all know the gist of the story. An unidentified flying object crashed in the desert near Corona, New Mexico, in 1947. Military and government agents from nearby Roswell Army Air Field rushed to the site and found alien bodies hidden among the wreckage and debris. Then, they immediately covered it up and left the American public in the dark.  The Army didn't help matters any, releasing a report claiming to have captured some kind of "flying disc." It immediately retracted that claim, saying it was instead a kind of weather balloon, fuel for the conspiracy theory fire that would burn for the next 50 years.  The Government Hide the Alien Bodies Conspiracy theorists went wild in the years following the Roswell Incident. Self-proclaimed UFO-ologists claimed to have pieces of the alien wreck and claimed that at least three sets of extraterrestrial remains were found on the site. But where did the government hide the bodies? Theories pointed to one of two places. One is the...

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MajGen. Keith L. Ware, U.S. Army (1941–1968)

MajGen. Keith L. Ware, U.S. Army (1941–1968)

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MajGen Keith Lincoln Ware was born in Denver on November 23, 1915. His military career began on July 9, 1941, when he undertook his basic training at Camp Roberts, California, following his induction into the Army under the Selective Service Act. He attended Officer Candidate School at Fort Benning, Georgia, and was commissioned a Second Lieutenant of Infantry on July 18, 1942. Keith Lincoln Ware Was Awarded the Medal of Honor Assigned to the 3rd Infantry Division, he sailed on October 22, 1942, from Hampton Roads, Virginia, and was part of the North African invasion force. He participated in the Algeria-French Morocco and Tunisian Campaigns. The next major operations he participated in were the invasion of Sicily, the Naples-Foggia battles of southern Italy, the landings at Anzio Beachhead, and then on the San Tropez beaches of southern France August of 1944. On June 18, 1945, he was awarded the Medal of Honor. An excerpt from the citation states, "On December 26, 1944, while...

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WW2 – The Battle of Saipan

WW2 – The Battle of Saipan

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War inevitably equals mass casualties, whether numbering in the dozens or the hundreds, or the hundreds of thousands - this truth that has accompanied war for thousands of years. A generally accepted fact is that these casualties, whether civilian or military, are usually the direct result of enemy soldiers attacking, disease, and famine in the wake of an invasion. Sometimes, however, other means account for mass deaths in war. Such was the case of the Battle of Saipan in the Second World War when it became apparent that Americans would take the island. Around one thousand Japanese civilians - men, women, and children, old and young - tragically chose to take their own lives rather than surrender. The Beginning of The Battle of Saipan The Battle of Saipan began on June 15, 1944, when around 8,000 US Marines landed on Saipan's island on the first day of the invasion. Naval bombardment of the island had started two days earlier on the 13th and had some effect in weakening Japanese...

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The Hero Dog Of Verdun

The Hero Dog Of Verdun

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A courageous World War I war dog was widely hailed a hero, after battling bravely through no man's land to deliver a life-saving message to French troops during the Battle of Verdun in WWI. The Hero Dog Of Verdun Service The wonder dog - named, oddly enough, Satan - was assigned the dangerous task of delivering the message from French commanders that contained the words that would bring vital relief to the besieged soldiers under heavy attack by the Germans. The life-saving message read: " For God's sake hold on. We will relieve you tomorrow."  With the gas mask in place, two baskets containing carrier pigeons on his back, and a brass tube attached to his collar with the communication securely stored inside, Satan dashed determinedly towards the desperate men Employing the skills he had been trained to use, Satan zigzagged his way through a hail of bullets fired by German soldiers, whose single-minded aim was to bring him down before he could complete his mission. Despite his...

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Famous Military Unit: American Forces Network (AFRTS)

Famous Military Unit: American Forces Network (AFRTS)

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In 1984, the first commercially available DynaTAC audio-only cell phone cost just short of $4,000, with each call billed at 45 cents per minute. Forty years later, anyone in uniform accesses audio-visual news from thousands of sources using a personal cell phone throughout the world, wherever a signal and transmission tower can reach. Yet, for eighty years, the most reliable military broadcast remains the Armed Forces Radio and Television Service (AFRTS). AFN Was Founded in 1942 as the Armed Forces Radio Service (AFRS) In 1942 the War Department established the ARMED FORCES RADIO SERVICE (AFRS), followed in 1954 by its first television detachment at Limestone AFB, Maine. American Forces Network global operations are now headquartered at Fort Meade, MD, and emanate from AFN BROADCAST/DEFENSE MEDIA CENTER in Riverside, CA. The modern network was founded in London and later moved to France. Always tying us together has been news from home whether we are assigned to a Tender at sea or an...

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The Philippine-American War

The Philippine-American War

After its defeat in the Spanish-American War of 1898, the Treaty of Paris (1898) transferred Philippine sovereignty from Spain to the United States, ending centuries of Spanish control over the politics and economy of its longstanding former colony. Filipino leaders, however, did not recognize America's authority and had no intention of ceding their homeland to a new colonial power. The decision by U.S. policymakers to annex the Philippines was not without domestic controversy, either. Americans who advocated annexation evinced a variety of motivations: the desire for commercial opportunities in Asia, a concern that Filipinos were incapable of self-rule, and fear that if the United States did not take control of the islands, another power (such as Germany or Japan) might do so. Meanwhile, American opposition to U.S. colonial rule of the Philippines came in many forms, ranging from those who thought it morally wrong for the United States to be engaged in colonialism, to those who...

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PO3 Robert Eugene Bush, U.S. Navy (1944–1945)

PO3 Robert Eugene Bush, U.S. Navy (1944–1945)

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Robert Eugene Bush wasn't old enough to join the Navy when the Imperial Japanese Navy attacked Pearl Harbor in 1941. He was still in high school. His neighbor in his hometown of Raymond, Washington, was a Fireman aboard the USS Arizona. "He's still on board the Arizona," Bush said in a Veterans History Project Interview. Bush could barely stand the wait to join the war. He wouldn't be old enough until his 17th birthday in the Fall of 1943. He and a friend from school dropped out and enlisted in the U.S. Naval Reserve. "We just wanted to be part of it," he said. "A little of it was adventurous, but the rest of it was to get even." He would only be in the military for one year, six months, and 22 days, the shortest tour of duty of any of the Medal of Honor recipients in World War II. But the battle he would fight to earn the medal would be one of the war's biggest and deadliest: the Battle of Okinawa.  For 98 days, U.S. Army soldiers and United States Marines fought the Japanese...

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