April 01, 1700: April Fools tradition popularized

On this day in 1700, English pranksters begin popularizing the annual tradition of April Fools’ Day by playing practical jokes on each other.

Although the day, also called All Fools’ Day, has been celebrated for several centuries by different cultures, its exact origins remain a mystery. Some historians speculate that April Fools’ Day dates back to 1582, when France switched from the Julian calendar to the Gregorian calendar, as called for by the Council of Trent in 1563. People who were slow to get the news or failed to recognize that the start of the new year had moved to January 1 and continued to celebrate it during the last week of March through April 1 became the butt of jokes and hoaxes. These included having paper fish placed on their backs and being referred to as “poisson d’avril” (April fish), said to symbolize a young, easily caught fish and a gullible person.

Historians have also linked April Fools’ Day to ancient festivals such as Hilaria, which was celebrated in Rome at the end of March and involved people dressing up in disguises. There’s also speculation that April Fools’ Day was tied to the vernal equinox, or first day of spring in the Northern Hemisphere, when Mother Nature fooled people with changing, unpredictable weather.

April Fools’ Day spread throughout Britain during the 18th century. In Scotland, the tradition became a two-day event, starting with “hunting the gowk,” in which people were sent on phony errands (gowk is a word for cuckoo bird, a symbol for fool) and followed by Tailie Day, which involved pranks played on people’s derrieres, such as pinning fake tails or “kick me” signs on them.

In modern times, people have gone to great lengths to create elaborate April Fools’ Day hoaxes. Newspapers, radio and TV stations and Web sites have participated in the April 1 tradition of reporting outrageous fictional claims that have fooled their audiences. In 1957, the BBC reported that Swiss farmers were experiencing a record spaghetti crop and showed footage of people harvesting noodles from trees; numerous viewers were fooled. In 1985, Sports Illustrated tricked many of its readers when it ran a made-up article about a rookie pitcher named Sidd Finch who could throw a fastball over 168 miles per hour. In 1996, Taco Bell, the fast-food restaurant chain, duped people when it announced it had agreed to purchase Philadelphia’s Liberty Bell and intended to rename it the Taco Liberty Bell. In 1998, after Burger King advertised a “Left-Handed Whopper,” scores of clueless customers requested the fake sandwich.

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Daily Quiz for April 1, 2017

In 1910 Georges Claude filed a patient for this.

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No more Burials at Arlington in 25 years? Famed Cemetery is Running Out of Space

Officials say expansion projects won’t be enough, and new burial eligibility rules for veterans may be needed WASHINGTON — When Arlington National Cemetery was established in 1864, it served as an overflow for other Washington, D.C.-based burial grounds overburdened by the rising tide of Civil War casualties.   More than 150 years later, the site …

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Daily Quiz for March 31, 2017

This company was the first online service to offer Internet connectivity.

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March 30, 1981: President Reagan shot

On March 30, 1981, President Ronald Reagan is shot in the chest outside a Washington, D.C., hotel by a deranged drifter named John Hinckley Jr.

The president had just finished addressing a labor meeting at the Washington Hilton Hotel and was walking with his entourage to his limousine when Hinckley, standing among a group of reporters, fired six shots at the president, hitting Reagan and three of his attendants. White House Press Secretary James Brady was shot in the head and critically wounded, Secret Service agent Timothy McCarthy was shot in the side, and District of Columbia policeman Thomas Delahaney was shot in the neck. After firing the shots, Hinckley was overpowered and pinned against a wall, and President Reagan, apparently unaware that he’d been shot, was shoved into his limousine by a Secret Service agent and rushed to the hospital.

The president was shot in the left lung, and the .22 caliber bullet just missed his heart. In an impressive feat for a 70-year-old man with a collapsed lung, he walked into George Washington University Hospital under his own power. As he was treated and prepared for surgery, he was in good spirits and quipped to his wife, Nancy, ”Honey, I forgot to duck,” and to his surgeons, “Please tell me you’re Republicans.” Reagan’s surgery lasted two hours, and he was listed in stable and good condition afterward.

The next day, the president resumed some of his executive duties and signed a piece of legislation from his hospital bed. On April 11, he returned to the White House. Reagan’s popularity soared after the assassination attempt, and at the end of April he was given a hero’s welcome by Congress. In August, this same Congress passed his controversial economic program, with several Democrats breaking ranks to back Reagan’s plan. By this time, Reagan claimed to be fully recovered from the assassination attempt. In private, however, he would continue to feel the effects of the nearly fatal gunshot wound for years.

Of the victims of the assassination attempt, Secret Service agent Timothy McCarthy and D.C. policeman Thomas Delahaney eventually recovered. James Brady, who nearly died after being shot in the eye, suffered permanent brain damage. He later became an advocate of gun control, and in 1993 Congress passed the “Brady Bill,” which established a five-day waiting period and background checks for prospective gun buyers. President Bill Clinton signed the bill into law.

After being arrested on March 30, 1981, 25-year-old John Hinckley was booked on federal charges of attempting to assassinate the president. He had previously been arrested in Tennessee on weapons charges. In June 1982, he was found not guilty by reason of insanity. In the trial, Hinckley’s defense attorneys argued that their client was ill with narcissistic personality disorder, citing medical evidence, and had a pathological obsession with the 1976 film Taxi Driver, in which the main character attempts to assassinate a fictional senator. His lawyers claimed that Hinckley saw the movie more than a dozen times, was obsessed with the lead actress, Jodie Foster, and had attempted to reenact the events of the film in his own life. Thus the movie, not Hinckley, they argued, was the actual planning force behind the events that occurred on March 30, 1981.

The verdict of “not guilty by reason of insanity” aroused widespread public criticism, and many were shocked that a would-be presidential assassin could avoid been held accountable for his crime. However, because of his obvious threat to society, he was placed in St. Elizabeth’s Hospital, a mental institution. In the late 1990s, Hinckley’s attorney began arguing that his mental illness was in remission and thus had a right to return to a normal life. Beginning in August 1999, he was allowed supervised day trips off the hospital grounds and later was allowed to visit his parents once a week unsupervised. The Secret Service voluntarily monitors him during these outings. If his mental illness remains in remission, he may one day be released.

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Daily Quiz for March 30, 2017

In 1850 Congress banned this in the District of Columbia.

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March 29, 1973: U.S. withdraws from Vietnam

Two months after the signing of the Vietnam peace agreement, the last U.S. combat troops leave South Vietnam as Hanoi frees the remaining American prisoners of war held in North Vietnam. America’s direct eight-year intervention in the Vietnam War was at an end. In Saigon, some 7,000 U.S. Department of Defense civilian employees remained behind to aid South Vietnam in conducting what looked to be a fierce and ongoing war with communist North Vietnam.

In 1961, after two decades of indirect military aid, U.S. President John F. Kennedy sent the first large force of U.S. military personnel to Vietnam to bolster the ineffectual autocratic regime of South Vietnam against the communist North. Three years later, with the South Vietnamese government crumbling, President Lyndon B. Johnson ordered limited bombing raids on North Vietnam, and Congress authorized the use of U.S. troops. By 1965, North Vietnamese offensives left President Johnson with two choices: escalate U.S. involvement or withdraw. Johnson ordered the former, and troop levels soon jumped to more than 300,000 as U.S. air forces commenced the largest bombing campaign in history.

During the next few years, the extended length of the war, the high number of U.S. casualties, and the exposure of U.S. involvement in war crimes, such as the massacre at My Lai, helped turn many in the United States against the Vietnam War. The communists’ Tet Offensive of 1968 crushed U.S. hopes of an imminent end to the conflict and galvanized U.S. opposition to the war. In response, Johnson announced in March 1968 that he would not seek reelection, citing what he perceived to be his responsibility in creating a perilous national division over Vietnam. He also authorized the beginning of peace talks.

In the spring of 1969, as protests against the war escalated in the United States, U.S. troop strength in the war-torn country reached its peak at nearly 550,000 men. Richard Nixon, the new U.S. president, began U.S. troop withdrawal and “Vietnamization” of the war effort that year, but he intensified bombing. Large U.S. troop withdrawals continued in the early 1970s as President Nixon expanded air and ground operations into Cambodia and Laos in attempts to block enemy supply routes along Vietnam’s borders. This expansion of the war, which accomplished few positive results, led to new waves of protests in the United States and elsewhere.

Finally, in January 1973, representatives of the United States, North and South Vietnam, and the Vietcong signed a peace agreement in Paris, ending the direct U.S. military involvement in the Vietnam War. Its key provisions included a cease-fire throughout Vietnam, the withdrawal of U.S. forces, the release of prisoners of war, and the reunification of North and South Vietnam through peaceful means. The South Vietnamese government was to remain in place until new elections were held, and North Vietnamese forces in the South were not to advance further nor be reinforced.

In reality, however, the agreement was little more than a face-saving gesture by the U.S. government. Even before the last American troops departed on March 29, the communists violated the cease-fire, and by early 1974 full-scale war had resumed. At the end of 1974, South Vietnamese authorities reported that 80,000 of their soldiers and civilians had been killed in fighting during the year, making it the most costly of the Vietnam War.

On April 30, 1975, the last few Americans still in South Vietnam were airlifted out of the country as Saigon fell to communist forces. North Vietnamese Colonel Bui Tin, accepting the surrender of South Vietnam later in the day, remarked, “You have nothing to fear; between Vietnamese there are no victors and no vanquished. Only the Americans have been defeated.” The Vietnam War was the longest and most unpopular foreign war in U.S. history and cost 58,000 American lives. As many as two million Vietnamese soldiers and civilians were killed.

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Daily Quiz for March 29, 2017

This was the original name of Google.

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French Lessons at West Point

How Napoleonic strategy and tactics influenced generations of American officers. It is easy to characterize the U.S. Army in the 19th century as an organization of amateurs lacking the professionalism of its European contemporaries. The United States Military Academy at West Point has suffered from a similar characterization—being viewed as just an engineering school that …

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Interview with Antulio J. Echevarria II

In his newly published analysis of how the United States has, throughout its history, waged war—Reconsidering the American Way of War—retired U.S. Army lieutenant colonel Antulio J. Echevarria II confronts a significant disconnect between popular myths and actual practice: He notes that “many beliefs concerning the American way of war—such as its alleged apolitical and …

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Book Review: No End Save Victory

No End Save Victory: How FDR Led the Nation Into War By David Kaiser. 416 pages. Basic Books, 2014. $27.99 In this extraordinary book David Kaiser, professor emeritus of strategy at the Naval War College, traces President Franklin Roosevelt’s role in pushing a reluctant American people toward participation in the Second World War. Innumerable scholars …

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Book Review: In the Hour of Victory

In the Hour of Victory: The Royal Navy at War in the Age of Nelson  By Sam Willis. 416 pages. W. W. Norton, 2014. $35.00 This big handsome book grew out of naval historian Sam Willis’s discovery in the British Library of a forgotten national treasure—a bound collection of original dispatches sent by commanders in …

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Book Review: Give Me a Fast Ship

Give Me a Fast Ship: The Continental Navy and America’s Revolution at Sea  By Tim McGrath. 560 pages. NAL Caliber, 2014. $26.95 Yes, there really was a naval component to the American Revolution, but it was by no means well organized or brilliantly executed. There was incompetence, self-interest, and plain bad luck among the Continental …

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And shells go crying over them—Voices of the Great War

World War I spawned a generation of British soldier-poets whose verse took poetry in a raw new direction. Rupert Brooke led the way with an unadorned realism, but his famous poem “The Soldier” still voices the patriotic fervor of the early war years. Brooke died of sepsis in April 1915, on his way to fight …

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Martyrs for God and Spain

An Indian attack on a mission in New Spain thwarts colonial aspirations and inspires a fantastical piece of art. New Spain held uncertain control over the frontier region of eastern Texas in the mid- 18th century. While French incursions over the border of nearby Louisiana were a constant concern to the Spanish, raiding Apache tribes, …

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The Curse of Cromwell

His soldiering was ruthless, brilliant, and backed by faith. At the outbreak of the English Civil War in 1642 an unheralded military genius was waiting in the wings. Oliver Cromwell, already past 40 years old when he first took up arms, approached the conflict with few preconceptions, instead bringing an uncluttered pragmatism and a religious …

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How to Prepare for a Battle: Riga

At Riga in 1917, the German Eighth Army showed the Russians how it’s done. The German army offensive to capture the Latvian seaport city of Riga and destroy the Russian Twelfth Army was one of the most complex—and meticulously planned—operations of World War I. It required a combat crossing of nine divisions at the Düna …

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Stalin Attacks the Red Army

Stalin had been purging his enemies—real and chimerical—for years, including military officers. Then the 1941 German invasion exposed the Red Army’s real problems. In late June, 1941, without a declaration of war, the Axis armies of Germany, Hungary, and Romania invaded the Soviet Union along a broad front stretching from the Baltic to the Black …

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March 28, 1979: Nuclear accident at Three Mile Island

At 4 a.m. on March 28, 1979, the worst accident in the history of the U.S. nuclear power industry begins when a pressure valve in the Unit-2 reactor at Three Mile Island fails to close. Cooling water, contaminated with radiation, drained from the open valve into adjoining buildings, and the core began to dangerously overheat.

The Three Mile Island nuclear power plant was built in 1974 on a sandbar on Pennsylvania’s Susquehanna River, just 10 miles downstream from the state capitol in Harrisburg. In 1978, a second state-of-the-art reactor began operating on Three Mile Island, which was lauded for generating affordable and reliable energy in a time of energy crises.

After the cooling water began to drain out of the broken pressure valve on the morning of March 28, 1979, emergency cooling pumps automatically went into operation. Left alone, these safety devices would have prevented the development of a larger crisis. However, human operators in the control room misread confusing and contradictory readings and shut off the emergency water system. The reactor was also shut down, but residual heat from the fission process was still being released. By early morning, the core had heated to over 4,000 degrees, just 1,000 degrees short of meltdown. In the meltdown scenario, the core melts, and deadly radiation drifts across the countryside, fatally sickening a potentially great number of people.

As the plant operators struggled to understand what had happened, the contaminated water was releasing radioactive gases throughout the plant. The radiation levels, though not immediately life-threatening, were dangerous, and the core cooked further as the contaminated water was contained and precautions were taken to protect the operators. Shortly after 8 a.m., word of the accident leaked to the outside world. The plant’s parent company, Metropolitan Edison, downplayed the crisis and claimed that no radiation had been detected off plant grounds, but the same day inspectors detected slightly increased levels of radiation nearby as a result of the contaminated water leak. Pennsylvania Governor Dick Thornburgh considered calling an evacuation.

Finally, at about 8 p.m., plant operators realized they needed to get water moving through the core again and restarted the pumps. The temperature began to drop, and pressure in the reactor was reduced. The reactor had come within less than an hour of a complete meltdown. More than half the core was destroyed or molten, but it had not broken its protective shell, and no radiation was escaping. The crisis was apparently over.

Two days later, however, on March 30, a bubble of highly flammable hydrogen gas was discovered within the reactor building. The bubble of gas was created two days before when exposed core materials reacted with super-heated steam. On March 28, some of this gas had exploded, releasing a small amount of radiation into the atmosphere. At that time, plant operators had not registered the explosion, which sounded like a ventilation door closing. After the radiation leak was discovered on March 30, residents were advised to stay indoors. Experts were uncertain if the hydrogen bubble would create further meltdown or possibly a giant explosion, and as a precaution Governor Thornburgh advised “pregnant women and pre-school age children to leave the area within a five-mile radius of the Three Mile Island facility until further notice.” This led to the panic the governor had hoped to avoid; within days, more than 100,000 people had fled surrounding towns.

On April 1, President Jimmy Carter arrived at Three Mile Island to inspect the plant. Carter, a trained nuclear engineer, had helped dismantle a damaged Canadian nuclear reactor while serving in the U.S. Navy. His visit achieved its aim of calming local residents and the nation. That afternoon, experts agreed that the hydrogen bubble was not in danger of exploding. Slowly, the hydrogen was bled from the system as the reactor cooled.

At the height of the crisis, plant workers were exposed to unhealthy levels of radiation, but no one outside Three Mile Island had their health adversely affected by the accident. Nonetheless, the incident greatly eroded the public’s faith in nuclear power. The unharmed Unit-1 reactor at Three Mile Island, which was shut down during the crisis, did not resume operation until 1985. Cleanup continued on Unit-2 until 1990, but it was too damaged to be rendered usable again. In the more than two decades since the accident at Three Mile Island, not a single new nuclear power plant has been ordered in the United States.

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Six Questions | Author Allen Boyer

ALLEN BOYER is a former senior appellate counsel in the enforcement division of the New York Stock Exchange. Rocky Boyer’s War: An Unvarnished History of the Air Blitz That Won the War in the Southwest Pacific, to be published this year by Naval Institute Press, is his fifth book. 1. What inspired you to write this book? Rocky Boyer’s …

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Norman Wiard’s Unique Cannon

A Canadian may have invented the Civil War’s best fieldpiece ll sorts of new weapons were developed during the Civil War. Breechloading rifles, repeating rifles, and metal-cased ammunition all made their mark on battlefields. But such innovations were not limited to small arms. One inventor in particular, Norman Wiard, developed a number of cannons and …

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5 Questions: Revered Ground at Pamplin Park

About 4:30 a.m. on April 2, 1865, the Army of the Potomac’s 6th Corps breached the Confederate defenses near Petersburg, Va., ending a bloody 10-month stalemate. The Confederate capital of Richmond had to be evacuated the next day, and Robert E. Lee’s Army of Northern Virginia surrendered a week later at Appomattox Court House. The …

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Experience: What a Chaos!

A stretcher bearer on the Western Front, 1916. John (Jack) Barrett, an Irish engineer who enlisted in the British Army in World War I, spent several months on the Western Front as a stretcher bearer. He described some of that time in a letter to his cousin Mary Meagher. Barrett was subsequently wounded in action, …

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Behind the Lines: Faux Paris, 1918- Construire un autre Paris? Non, c’est impossible!

But build a second Paris they did, in one of the oddest episodes of World War I. The project was set in motion by the French Ministry of War as a massive decoy to fool German airmen, who had begun bombing Paris seriously in early 1916. By the spring of 1917 the threat of aerial …

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Laws of War: TR’s 1905 Treaty of Portsmouth

The night of February 8–9, 1904, Japan launched a damaging surprise attack on the Russian fleet moored at Port Arthur, Manchuria, heralding the opening of the Russo-Japanese War. For the next two years a rising, rapidly modernizing Imperial Japan inflicted a series of severe defeats on a moribund tsarist Russia. In America President Theodore Roosevelt …

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DVD Review: When I Have Your Wounded

When I Have Your Wounded: The Dustoff Legacy, DVD  directed by Patrick Fries, Arrowhead Films, 2013 Part recruiting ad and part personal tribute to the narrator’s father, medevac pioneer Major Charles L. Kelly, When I Have Your Wounded is also a compelling documentary about the vital work performed by helicopter crews to rush wounded soldiers …

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Book Review: Death Zones and Darling Spies

Death Zones and Darling Spies  by Beverly Deepe Keever, University of Nebraska Press, 2013 The Vietnam conflict established women war correspondents as the equals of their male colleagues, and Beverly Deepe Keever set the bar high for her sisters who would follow her into the bloody jungles and paddies of Vietnam. Between 1965 and 1973, …

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Book Review: Misalliance by Edward Miller

Misalliance: Ngo Dinh Diem, the United States, and the Fate of South Vietnam  by Edward Miller, Harvard University Press, 2013 On Nov. 2, 1963, the president of the Republic of Vietnam, Ngo Dinh Diem, and his brother and closest adviser, Ngo Dinh Nhu, were assassinated during a coup staged by the leading generals of the …

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Giap’s Second Masterpiece

Long-held beliefs that the Tet Offensive was intended to produce a single-stroke victory are challenged by new insights into one of the 20th century’s most astute military commanders. General Vo Nguyen Giap understood very early in the game what the major players in the United States’ strategy failed to grasp until 1968—that a South Vietnamese …

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Good Boom! Project RENEW

Founded by Vietnam veterans but operated by the Vietnamese, Project RENEW is working to rid Quang Tri province of unexploded ordnance left over from the war. Dong Ha, Vietnam – They say it’s 42 degrees… Celsius…this Monday in late May, around noon. That’s 108 degrees Fahrenheit. The 18 members of the Project RENEW Battle Area …

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A Study in Terror

Fifty years ago, a Saigon Special Action Team took the Viet Cong terrorism campaign to a new level by bombing the Capital–Kinh Do Theater. On the evening of Feb. 16, 1964, during the Tet Lunar New Year holiday, about 500 Americans were attending a showing of the film The List of Adrian Messenger at the …

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From the Bulge to Tet

Brigadier General Albin F. Irzyk played a significant role in two of America’s most famous battles. The frozen, bitterly cold forest in Europe during a major World War II offensive and the steamy South Vietnamese capital city at the height of the Vietnam War were thousands of miles and thousands of days apart. But for …

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“Everybody was a Hero that Day”

In the battle for Widows’ Village during Tet 1968, a single scout platoon earned three DSCs, six Silver Stars and 22 Bronze Stars. In late January 1968, my scout platoon—part of the 9th Infantry Division’s 2nd Battalion, 47th Infantry (Mechanized)—set up in a defensive position off High- way 15, the major road leading to the …

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Letter from the Editor- Vietnam February 2014

A Worthy Opponent General Vo Nguyen Giap, who died in Hanoi on October 4 at age 102, evoked a wide range of emotions from opponents and compatriots alike, but ambivalence was not among them. To some he was a reviled butcher willing to expend lives wholesale to achieve his military goals, to others a revered …

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My War: Nancy Jurgevich

Captain, Women’s Army Corps, October 1968 – December 1970 I grew up in Stoyswood in western Pennsylvania, a small town near the region’s steel mills, but I wanted to travel instead of work in a factory or be a housewife. I enlisted right after high school, in 1958, and received basic training at Fort McClellan, …

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Intel- Vietnam Magazine February 2014

Crowds Mourn General Giap Tens of thousands of Vietnamese from all provinces of the country flooded into Hanoi when word came of General Vo Nguyen Giap’s death at age 102 on Oct. 4, 2013, at Military Hospital 108, where he had spent the last four years. The crowds gathered for a brief vigil at Giap’s …

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Letters from Readers- Vietnam February 2014

Convoy Casualty AS A FORMER CONVOY COMMANDER WITH the 8th Transportation Group, I read with great interest “Hard Ride in a Hard War” in the December 2013 issue. I served from July 1967 to July 1968 as a platoon leader and convoy commander with the 64th Transportation Company (Medium Truck), 124th Transportation Battalion. We made …

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Laws of War | Massing for La République

Europe's first military conscription law, adopted in the wake of the French Revolution

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Vasco da Gama’s Breakout Voyage

Portuguese explorers reached India in the 15th century, establishing a legacy of misunderstanding, suspicion, hostility—and violence

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Can You Hear Me Now?

Before telegraph, telephone, and radio, how did the ancients exert battlefield command and control?

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Postwar Agony in Greece

After German occupation, civil wars among communists, collaborators, monarchists, rebels, ex-partisans, and death squads all but destroyed Greece

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FILM RECON: Five Came Back

SNAPSHOT: Filmmaker Laurent Bouzereau’s excellent Netflix documentary, Five Came Back, is adapted from Mark Harris’ 2014 book and tells the absorbing story of five Hollywood directors during World War II. By the early 1940s, Americans were in love with the movies—over half of its adult population went to the cinema at least once a week. …

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Blind Bear at Bay: The Russians at Tannenberg

Obligated by treaties to declare war in August 1914, Russia found that its vast army was no match for German intelligence, reconnaissance, and railways

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Daily Quiz for March 26, 2017

Myra Bennett of Daniel’s Harbour, Newfoundland was awarded several medals by the British government for her work as this.

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Book Review: Assault From the Sky

Assault From the Sky: U.S. Marine Corps Helicopter Operations in Vietnam  by Dick Camp, Casemate Publishers, 2013 T he iconic image of Vietnam’s helicopter war is that of a Bell UH-1 Huey carrying, supporting or evacuating U.S. Army troops. There was, however, a parallel helicopter force accompanying the U.S. Marines since their first medium helicopter …

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1964: Misread Signals, Lost Opportunities

New insights—from intelligence archives of the United States and North Vietnam—highlight the genesis 50 years ago of a flawed strategy. Had President Lyndon B. Johnson, advisers and intelligence services not disregarded, rejected, missed or misread the signals emanating from Asia in the early to mid-1960s, they might his policy not have stubbornly adhered to an …

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Suicide Charlie Hits a Wall of Steel on Hill 110

A storied Marine rifle company’s mission impossible against an overwhelming enemy force— and ghastly friendly errors. On April 21, 1967, Operation Union I was launched, its objective to find, fix and destroy enemy forces in the Que Son Valley, a large, rugged area of mountains, valleys and villages about 40 kilometers west of Tam Ky. …

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Doc Parker: Chopper Surgeon, Door Gunner

When not manning a machine gun, Lyle Parker’s job was to keep the men of the 188th Assault Helicopter Company safe and sane. LZ SALLY (Empire News, June 1968) — Lyle A. Parker has a guitar and enjoys strumming at the officers club tent. He plays a mean game of volleyball. He flies missions as …

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Letter from the Editor- Vietnam April 2014

Sons of ‘Nam The service members who returned home from Vietnam were each affected by their war experiences in unique and life-changing ways. The effects range from profound impacts of physical and psychological disability and other crushing outcomes common to any war to merely a delayed education or career. In some cases individuals emerged with …

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My War: Al Sohl Jr.

Specialist 4, 173rd Airborne Brigade, January 1968–March 1969 I volunteered for the paratroopers and received my wings on July 5, 1967, and was stationed at Ft. Bragg. I was assigned to the 82nd Airborne Division and I picked up a lot from the guys who had already served in Vietnam and were finishing out their …

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Interview with Ron Osgood: To See the War From All Sides Now

When Ron Osgood decided com- munity college wasn’t for him in 1967, he failed to grasp the consequences until he received his draft notice. His subsequent enlistment in the Navy inadvertently led to his pursuit of a career in television and ultimately to teaching media and telecommunications at the college level for more than 25 …

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Intel- Vietnam Magazine April 2014

Statue Honors Canines in Combat Four breeds—Doberman pinscher, German shepherd, Belgian Mali- nois and Labrador retriever—flank a soldier in the nation’s first monument honoring dogs in military service, dedicated in October 2013. The nine-foot bronze statue was erected at the Lackland Air Force Base in San Antonio, Texas, where dogs have been trained for military …

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Letters from Readers- Vietnam April 2014

Cambodian UXO Survivors Siem Reap near Angor Wat in Cambodia has a group searching for unexploded ordnance (UXO) from the same time frame as shown in the story “Good Boom,” February 2014. Here is a photograph taken by me and my wife, Bonna Nong (now a U.S. citizen, who lost all of her immediate family …

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Rolling Thunder: After More Than 25 Years, Closure at Last

A downed pilot, his daughter and the ring that brought peace of mind. Robin Smith’s father disappeared in Vietnam during the summer of 1969, and his daughter went to look for him—26 years after Lt. Col. Robert N. Smith, a Marine pilot, dropped from the sky north of the Demilitarized Zone. Robin Smith did not …

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Book Review: Understanding and Teaching the Vietnam War

Understanding and Teaching the Vietnam War edited by John Day Tully, Matthew Masur and Brad Austin, University of Wisconsin Press, 2014 For today’s college and high school students, the Vietnam War may as well be the Peloponnesian War, since it took place ages before they were born. What’s also true is that increasing numbers of …

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Book Review: Team 19 in Vietnam

Team 19 in Vietnam: An Australian Soldier at War by David Millie, University Press of Kentucky, 2013 Americans often forget that they were not the only foreign forces to become involved in the Vietnam War and that the involvement of those allied forces was extensive. A seldom mentioned group among the 8,000 Australians who served …

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Book Review: Losing Vietnam

Losing Vietnam: How America Abandoned Southeast Asia by Ira A. Hunt Jr., University Press of Kentucky, 2013 Almost 40 years after the April 1975 fall of Saigon the debate continues. On one side the prevailing argument says the struggle in Southeast Asia was a lost cause right from the start: the wrong war in the …

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Valor at Dai Do

When the fighting of April 30-May 3, 1968, was finished, there were two Medals of Honor, many other awards for heroism, and seemingly everyone had a Purple Heart. The Tet Offensive launched on Jan. 30, 1968, was North Vietnam’s strategic plan to split South Vietnam, cut off critical American military bases and destroy them piecemeal. …

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Homesick Angel: Last Flight From Da Nang

World Airways CEO Ed Daly defied U.S. authorities and led a daring mission to rescue women and children as the South Vietnamese army collapsed in 1975. A tsunami of more than a million refugees swept over the coastal city of Da Nang in early March 1975, desperately fleeing the rapidly advancing North Vietnamese Army as …

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To Tell the World: Wives of POWs

The wives of POWs in Hanoi’s most notorious prison camp raised their voices to make sure Washington and the world knew the plight of their husbands. THE POWS CALLED IT ALCATRAZ, a Hanoi jail where 11 Americans were separated from other prisoners and held in solitary confinement because they were the leaders of POWs who …

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Rescue at Kham Duc

Intrepid pilots maneuvered planes through gunfire and wreckage to land and pick up troops being overrun by enemy forces. In early May 1968, the U.S. Army Special Forces at Kham Duc seemed far removed from the war zone. Established in 1963 as Camp A-105 on the extreme western fringe of Quang Tin Province southwest of …

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The Man Who Knew No Fear: General Lucian K. Truscott

Lucian K. Truscott Jr. had a voice like gravel, a brain for combat, and a heartfelt grasp of the soldiering life

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Confounding Father | Thomas Jefferson’s Polarizing Public Image

The book cover of Confounding Father: Thomas Jefferson’s Image In His Own Time is not meant to be an optical illusion. Rather, the blurred image of Thomas Jefferson alludes to the duality of not only his nature, but of public opinion. Author Robert M.S. McDonald explores this polarization and analyzes the gap between Jeffersonian politics …

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Book Review: The Lucky Few by Jan K. Herman

The Lucky Few: The Fall of Saigon and the Rescue Mission of the USS Kirk  by Jan K. Herman, Naval Institute Press, 2013 Entering service in 1971, the U.S. Navy destroyer escort Kirk was designed primarily to fight enemy submarines, but after the ship joined the Seventh Fleet in the Gulf of Tonkin it performed …

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Book Review: I Heard My Country Calling

I Heard My Country Calling: A Memoir  by James Webb, Simon & Schuster, 2014 Vietnam veterans have been churning out a steady stream of memoirs in recent years as baby boomers retire—and the burgeoning self-publishing industry has made it easier than ever to get words between covers. The typical 21st-century memoir by a Vietnam veteran …

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Book Review: Westmoreland’s War

Westmoreland’s War: Reassessing American Strategy in Vietnam, by Gregory A. Daddis, Oxford University Press, 2014 Addressing the seemingly dogged entanglement in South Vietnam with General William Westmoreland, Brig. Gen. Willard Holbrook Jr. advised the incoming chief of the Military Assistance Command, Vietnam (MACV) to avoid being made a scapegoat “for a situation for which there …

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North Vietnam’s Big-Unit War and the Man Behind It

A fierce advocate of offensive battles using large forces, Communist leader Le Duan shaped military strategy throughout the war. In December 1964, the Viet Cong, famous for their hit-and-run guerrilla tactics, overran villages in four South Vietnamese provinces near Saigon with the powerful force of two regiments. One of those big units, the 272nd Regiment, …

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Grinding to a Halt

South Vietnam’s 1971 invasion of Laos to cut NVA supply routes was supposed to be a showcase for Nixon’s plan to decrease American involvement in the war, but that all changed when Operation Lam Son 719 came … IN EARLY 1971, their history, the South Vietnamese armed forces launched a corps-level campaign on a foreign …

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The Vinh Window and the Ho Chi Minh Trail

Code-breakers enabled U.S. spies to peer into the communications centers of the North Vietnamese, but then problems arose. THROUGHOUT MUCH OF THE WAR, AMERICAN code-breakers intercepted North Vietnam- ese radio transmissions of planned actions along the Ho Chi Minh Trail—perhaps the National Security Agency’s greatest contribution during the war. President Lyndon B. Johnson certainly thought …

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Storms of Steel

Artillery barrages from U.S. Army fire support bases proved devastatingly effective in both offensive and defensive roles. EARLY IN THE MORNING a large Communist force was about to attack his small camp about 5 kilometers from the Cambodian frontier. Conrad, a West Point graduate commanding the 2nd Battalion, 8th Regiment, 1st Brigade, 1st Cavalry Division …

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June 2017 Table of Contents

The June 2017 issue features a cover story about George Armstrong Custer and the personal consequences of his defeat at the 1876 Battle of Little Bighorn

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Letter from the Editor- Vietnam August 2014

Strong Support for the War Fighters For U.S. troops in Vietnam, fire support bases were like the frontier outposts in the Old West. The difference, one gunner in an artillery battalion said, “was that the Indians who always seemed to be surrounding the place” used AK-47s and rocket-propelled grenades instead of bows and arrows. Those …

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My War: John Bercaw

Warrant Officer: September 1967-January 1968, 4th Cavalry, 1st Infantry Division; January-September 1968, 101st Aviation Battalion, 101st Airborne Division My troubled teenage years prompted me to join the Marine Corps in late 1960, at age 17. After my four years in the Marines, I attended school and tried to decide what I wanted to do with …

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Intel- Vietnam Magazine August 2014

Cyclists Fund Drive for Vietnam Visits Seven soldiers turned cyclists completed a six-day, 320-mile journey through former battlefields of central Vietnam in early April to raise money that will help veterans of the war pay for return visits to Vietnam, according to a McClatchy report. One of the seven is a Vietnam veteran; others have …

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Letters from Readers- Vietnam August 2014

Kham Duc Too I enjoyed the Kham Duc story in the June issue. I was there between May and November 1964 with an A Team—one of four Southern Special Forces Groups stationed at Fort Bragg, N.C., that went as a unit to Vietnam for six months. We were also at Khe Sanh. This photo of …

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Fort Stanton Underground

The Fort Stanton Cave Study Project has published a history of the storied New Mexico system

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The Truth About Facial Recognition Technology

If a historical image lacks provenance, the ‘eyes’ don’t have it

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Book Review: Dodge City

Tom Clavin brings the rollicking 19th-century cow town of Dodge City, Kansas, to vivid life

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Book Review: Isaac I. Stevens

Kent Richards reveals the career of a little-known U.S. Army officer during the Civil War and in the Pacific Northwest

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Book Review: Death at the Little Bighorn

DOD historian Phillip Thomas Tucker reassesses tactics at the 1876 Battle of the Little Bighorn

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Book Review: Artifacts of the Battle of Little Big Horn

Author/photographer Will Hutchison highlights 355 artifacts from the 1876 Battle of the Little Bighorn

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Book Review: Murder in the Mile High City

Wild West contributor Linda Wommack examines more than 40 murders from the first century of Denver history

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Book Review: Nicodemus

Charlotte Hinger throws new light on the black homesteaders of Nicodemus, Kansas

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Dan Bullock: The youngest American killed in the Vietnam War

Pfc. Dan Bullock died at age 15 in 1969 and efforts to recognize the young African-American Marine continue and are highlighted in this Military Times documentary. (Rodney Bryant and Daniel Woolfolk/Military Times)

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Gilcrease Museum

Oklahoma entrepreneur Thomas Gilcrease deeded his art to Tulsa with the Gilcrease Museum

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Author Peter Cozzens

Peter Cozzens reassesses the narrative of the Indian wars in his new book “The Earth Is Weeping”

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Book Review: U.S. Combat Shotguns

U.S. Combat Shotguns by Leroy Thompson, Osprey Publishing, Oxford, England, 2013 The shotgun, scattering multiple rounds at close range rather than a single bullet from a distance, is a nasty weapon whose use by U.S. military forces is something few know or particularly wish to know. Nevertheless, argues Leroy Thompson in his entry in Osprey’s …

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Book Review: Lockheed A-12 by Paul F. Crickmore

Lockheed A-12: The CIA’s Blackbird and Other Variants by Paul F. Crickmore, Osprey Publishing, Oxford, England, 2014 The shooting down of Francis Gary Powers’ Lockheed U-2 by SA-2 surface-to-air missiles at 70,500 feet showed that high altitude alone could not be a defense for American spy planes. Clarence L. “Kelly” Johnson and Lockheed’s “Skunk Works” …

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Book Review: Charlie Chasers by Larry Elton Fletcher

Charlie Chasers: History of USAF AC-119 “Shadow” Gunships in the Vietnam War, by Larry Elton Fletcher, Hellgate Press, 2013 Falling chronologically between the more famous Douglas AC-47 “Spooky” and the more potent Lockheed AC-130 “Specter” gunships, the Fairchild AC-119 “Shadow” was very much an interim weapon, selected because it was newer, more powerful and could …

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Book Review: Invasion of Laos 1971

Invasion of Laos 1971: Lam Son 719 by Robert D. Sander, University of Oklahoma Press, 2014 The 1971 invasion of Laos is one of the forgotten episodes of the Vietnam War. Perhaps this is because it involved primarily soldiers of the Army of the Republic of Vietnam (ARVN), with the United States providing only air …

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General Shoemaker: Helicopter War Guru

Used essentially as delivery vans in World War II and as medical evacuation vehicles in Korea, helicopters were transformed into hunter-killers in Vietnam, thanks in large part to the efforts of a former infantry officer. My father, a combat Marine veteran of the Okinawa campaign in World War II, once told me he was evacuated …

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Deadly Mistake on Hamburger Hill

On the ridges of what would be called Hamburger Hill for the way troops were ground up in the fighting there, U.S. helicopters mistakenly hit a 101st Airborne unit on the verge of winning its battle against rough mountain terrain, dense rain forest and a well-entrenched enemy.  IN ONE OF THE WAR’S BLOODIEST BATTLES, troops …

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A Soviet Spy in Saigon: The Case of the French Doctor

A story of CIA officers, Russian agents in Paris, the French FBI, lavish parties and one doctor who operated a clinic in South Vietnam. The only known Soviet espionage agent permanently based inside South Vietnam during the war was a Frenchman who treated tuberculosis patients and mingled freely with U.S. and Vietnamese officials. The “French …

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Bailout! Bailout!

When his B-52 bomber was struck by a North Vietnamese missile, the pilot ordered a bailout, but the navigator’s ejection seat failed and he had just seconds to find another way out of the burning plane. A B-52 Stratofortress with the call sign Ruby Two, under the command of Lt. Col. Gerald Wickline, flew over …

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Letter from the Editor- Vietnam October 2014

So You Thought You Had a Bad Day? Everyone has bad days. Those days when the “check engine” light comes on and the computer conks out, when it seems like things could not get any worse and they do. But the next time you are bemoaning your bad day, think about the really bad days …

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My War: ‘Overseas’ in Texas and Vietnam

For me, 1965 was the year of my high school graduation, my first job and the Vietnam War. My final grades wouldn’t get me into any college, and having a low draft number, I considered joining the service. The local Air Force recruiter in Arlington, Virginia, told me that if I chose to join I …

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Interview with Doniphan Carter: A Perspective on War From a Man Who Was in Three

Doniphan “Don” Carter was a lieutenant with the famed 10th Mountain Division in Italy during World War II, a major and 179th Infantry regimental operations staff officer in Korea, and a colonel with the 25th Infantry Division in Vietnam. Interspersed with tours in three war zones were two NATO assignments and four stints at the …

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Intel: Vietnam Magazine October 2014

Fight Over Vietnam at Nixon Library The selection of a new director for the Nixon Presidential Library in Yorba Linda, California, has been snarled in a controversy over the library’s treatment of the Vietnam War, according to the library’s former director, Tim Naftali, who resigned in 2011 and is now director of the Tamiment Library …

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Letters from Readers- Vietnam October 2014

ASA Out of the Closet Historian John Prados tells an interesting story about an occurrence that evolved into the “Vinh Window” program (August 2014). He gives credit to the Air Force Security Service, Naval Security Group, National Security Agency and the Army’s “comint men.” Those Army comint men had a name: the Army Security Agency. …

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Juan Soto: The Human Wildcat

Bandido Juan Soto stalked California’s Coast Range with abandon—until Sheriff Harry Morse caught up to him

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Review: The Trial of Jane Fonda

The Trial of Jane Fonda, a stage play by writer-director Terry Jastrow, world premier Edinburgh, Scotland, July-August 2014 The long-running visceral feud between America’s Vietnam veterans and anti-war activist Jane Fonda was successfully brought to the stage during this year’s Edinburgh Festival in Scotland. The performers played to a packed house for almost a month, …

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Book Review: I am a Soldier of Fortune

I Am Soldier of Fortune: Dancing with Devils by Robert K. Brown, Casemate Publishers, 2013 Mention Robert K. Brown and many people will ask, “Who?” But tell them he is the man behind Soldier of Fortune magazine, founded in Boulder, Colorado, in 1975, and all will say, “Whoa!” At last, we finally have his memoirs, …

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6 Questions | Author John Wukovits

JOHN WUKOVITS is a military historian specializing in World War II. He is the author of nine books including Tin Can Titans: The Heroic Men and Ships of World War II’s Most Decorated Navy Destroyer Squadron, which has just been published by Da Capo Press. Wukovits lives in Michigan. 1. How did you become interested in …

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Book Review: So Much to Lose

So Much to Lose: John F. Kennedy and American Policy in Laos by William J. Rust, University Press of Kentucky, 2014, E-book available So Much to Lose William Rust’s second tome on American-Laotian relations in the is a fitting title for post-1945 era, following his outstanding Before the Quagmire: American Intervention in Laos, 1954-1961 (2012). …

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Our Woman in Saigon

He was an American spy. She was a South Vietnamese chemist for an oil firm. They teamed up to root out corruption that threatened her country’s survival. When William R. Johnson arrived in Saigon at the end of 1972 as the new chief of the CIA’s base there, he badly needed two sources: someone who …

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Faith Under Fire: Military Chaplains and the Morality of War

Confronted with the moral complexities of their duties in Vietnam, chaplains often found that one religious value conflicted with another. Military chaplains know they must be moral examples to the troops or lose their credibility as clergy. They also know they must be able relate to those troops—on the base and on the battlefield—or lose …

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June 2017 Readers’ Letters

Readers share dispatches about "Big Nose Kate" Horony, Texas film stars, Western wolves, Tom Horn and Earp researcher David Cruickshanks

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Top 30 Vietnam War Books

America’s wars have inspired some of the world’s best literature, and the Vietnam War is no exception. The Vietnam War has left many legacies. Among the most positive is an abundance of top-notch books, many written by veterans of the conflict. These include winners of National Book Awards and Pulitzer Prizes, both fiction and nonfiction. …

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Descent into the DMZ

The story of a Marine assault force’s tragic landing during Operation Beau Charger is told in a corporal’s letters home. When Lance Cpl. Robert Francis Galluzzo sat down on May 26, 1967, to write to his parents in Massachusetts, he described how a quirk of fate spared his life less than a week earlier as …

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Letter from the Editor: Vietnam December 2014

The Vietnam War: A Reader’s Guide An anniversary of a major historic event is always an occasion to publish new books. The 50th anniversary of President John F. Kennedy’s assassination spawned more than 200 books in 2013 alone. But anniversaries are also a good reason to revisit the best books already written on the commemorated …

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My War: “Sugarbear” and The Mod Squad

I graduated from high school in May 1968 at the age of 17 and had no job. I had received a football scholarship to Grambling State University, but I didn’t make the team, so I drifted around my hometown of Minden, Louisiana, trying to make up my mind about what to do with myself. I …

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Letter From Wild West – June 2017

The foreshortened romance of George and Libbie Custer was one for the ages

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Interview with Scott L. Reda

Any war is a mosaic of many individual stories—and those are the stories documentary maker Lou Reda Productions Inc. wants to tell in new films about the Vietnam War. The company, founded in 1978 in Easton, Pennsylvania, has been producing documentaries on military history for the History channel and other TV networks for more than …

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Intel: Vietnam Magazine December 2014

Dempsey First Joint Chiefs Leader to Visit Vietnam After End of War In August, General Martin Dempsey became the first chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff to travel to Vietnam since 1971. Dempsey, who arrived on August 14 for a four-day visit, met with Vietnam’s Prime Minister Nguyen Tan Dung and Defense Minister Phung …

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Letters from Readers- Vietnam December 2014

B-52 Strikes a Chord Your story “Bailout! Bailout!” (October 2014) brought back both good and bad memories. I was in-country 1971 and 1972, but in 1968 I was the training NCO for the munitions squadron of Project Arc Light supporting our B-52s in Operation Linebacker. We were in Guam for a 180-day temporary duty from …

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Book Review: Gettysburg by Iain C. Martin

Gettysburg: The True Account of Two Young Heroes in the Greatest Battle of the Civil War  Iain C. Martin, Sky Pony Press, 2013, $16.95 With art by Civil War painter Don Troiani, lavish use of photographs and maps, and innovative page design, Gettysburg: The True Account of Two Young Heroes in the Greatest Battle of …

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Book Review: The Fire of Freedom

The Fire of Freedom: Abraham Galloway & the Slaves’ Civil War  David Cecelski, University of North Carolina Press 2013, $30 The Federals captured New Bern, N.C., in March 1862 and stayed until the end of Reconstruction. The city quickly became a refuge for runaway slaves, a recruiting center for United States Colored Troops and the …

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Book Review: The Day Lincoln Was Almost Shot

The Day Lincoln Was Almost Shot: The Fort Stevens Story  Benjamin Franklin Cooling III, Scarecrow Press, 2013, $45 Every Civil War battlefield deserves a champion as passionate and learned as Frank Cooling is about the Defenses of Washington, the imposing ring of fortifications surrounding the Union capital from 1861 to 1865. Unfortunately, the remnants of …

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Book Review: Confederate General William “Extra Billy” Smith

Confederate General William “Extra Billy” Smith: From Virginia’s Statehouse to Gettysburg Scapegoat  Scott L. Mingus, Sr., Savas Beatie, 2013, $29.95 Few figures from the war era are as complex and intriguing as William “Extra Billy” Smith. A national celebrity in antebellum America, he remains relatively unknown in terms of overall scholarship. Scott Mingus’ biography fills …

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Book Review: The Election of 1860- Reconsidered

The Election of 1860: Reconsidered Edited by A. James Fuller, Kent State University Press 2013, $49.95 The Election of 1860: Reconsidered provides a valuable look at Abraham Lincoln’s pivotal first presidential election. Editor James Fuller has compiled nine essays by leading experts that address a number of questions and concerns surrounding the events that changed …

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Book Review: Gone to God, by Keith Kehlbeck

Gone to God: A Civil War Family’s Ultimate Sacrifice Keith Kehlbeck, Windy City Publishers, 2013 $27.99 (cloth) $18.99 (paper) The Reverend John Towles and h youngsters in Prince William is wife Sophronia raised seven County, Va. The war absorbed their three grown boys into its brutal maw. All three enlisted in the 4th Virginia Cavalry, …

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Book Review: America’s Longest Siege

America’s Longest Siege: Charleston, Slavery, and the Slow March Toward the Civil War  Joseph Kelly, Overlook, 2013, $27.95 South Carolina was the heart of the secessionist movement, and Charleston was the heart of South Carolina, which makes Joseph Kelly’s America’s Longest Siege one of the most important books on the war published in a long …

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‘Deeds of Noble Daring’

Black troops earned praise from a commander and grudging respect from a foe. U.S. Colored Troops played a significant role in the Union victory at Nashville on December 15-16, 1864. The newly formed USCT Division, consisting of nine regiments in two brigades, helped lead the attack against Maj. Gen. S.D. Lee’s Confederates on Overton Hill …

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Beating a Messy Retreat: Confederates Escaping Nashville

Could battered rebels escape a Yankee trap at Nashville? Private Matthew Raspberry of the 15th Mississippi slumped forward against the stone wall. Then another soldier sprawled face down, and Lt. Col. James Binford realized his troops were being shot in the back. The Federals had broken through the Confederate line, putting the Mississippians in a …

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‘Now on to Mexico!’

The Civil War had not even ended when U.S. leaders began contemplating another war. A few days after the Confederate surrender at Appomattox in April 1865, Union General Ulysses S. Grant reportedly joked to a member of his staff, “Now, on to Mexico!” But was Grant really joking? The United States and Mexico had fought …

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Rebel Rally in the Sunshine State

Union hopes in Florida end with a thud at the 1864 Battle of Olustee. The value of Florida to Union prospects in the Civil War— and to some degree President Abraham Lincoln’s reelection hopes—was apparent by December 1863. Confederate authorities had conceded earlier in the conflict that they didn’t have the man power, resources or …

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Burnside’s Bleak Midwinter

The reluctant general from Rhode Island nearly ruined the Army of the Potomac. Weary of giving insubordinate George McClellan chances to prove his worth, Abraham Lincoln replaced him with Ambrose Burnside as commander of the Army of the Potomac in November 1862. But the dynamics between the citizen-soldiers who made up the bulk of the …

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Cease Fire: Lincoln in Jeopardy!

It was not so much that the students of Newtown, Conn., have suffered enough, which heaven knows they have— and their parents, too. But back in late July, Alex Trebek, of all people, who should know better, somehow managed to disoblige the much-tried community—on national television, yet—and literally place the Lincoln legacy in “jeopardy” in …

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Her War: First feminist Angelina Grimke

Angelina Grimke was like a meteor flashing across the 19th-century sky. Few individuals were more historically consequential. In her life and work, Grimke brought together the two great human rights issues the United States faced in the 19th century: slavery and women’s rights. Born in Charleston, S.C., the daughter of John Grimke, a planter, slaveholder, …

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Letters from Readers- America’s Civil War January 2014

That’s one magic bullet! I have subscribed to America’s Civil War for several years now and thoroughly enjoy all the articles from cover to cover. I recently discovered a mistake in the September 2013 issue. On P. 40 of Peter Cozzens’ article “What Price Victory?” it states that John Bell Hood was wounded at Chickamauga …

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War List | From Soldiers to Saints

Marc G. DeSantis describes military men who found a higher calling

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Book Review: American Civil War Guerrillas

American Civil War Guerrillas: Changing the Rules of Warfare By Daniel E. Sutherland, Praeger, 2013, $37 Celebrated historian Bruce Catton characterized guerrilla activities during the Civil War as “a colorful, annoying, but largely unimportant side issue.” Daniel Sutherland has spent a career refuting Catton’s conclusion by bringing the extent and ferocity of guerrilla warfare to …

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Book Review: From Schoolboy to Soldier

From Schoolboy to Soldier: The Correspondence and Journals of Edward Staley Abbott, 1853-1863  By Quincy S. Abbot, Abbot, 2013, $16.95 Every time letters from a Civil War participant are found and published, a new insight into the spirit of the era comes to light. In the case of Quincy S. Abbot’s self-published reconstruction of the …

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Book Review: The Wars of Reconstruction

The Wars of Reconstruction: The Brief Violent History of America’s Most Progressive Era By Douglas Egerton, Bloomsbury Press 2013, $30 With the Civil War sesquicentennial nearing its conclusion, attention will soon turn to Reconstruction. Depending on your point of view, the commemoration will either be quite brief (after all, President Andrew Johnson declared Reconstruction complete …

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Book Review: The Battle of Fisher’s Hill

The Battle of Fisher’s Hill: Breaking the Shenandoah Valley’s Gibraltar  By Jonathan A. Noyalas, The History Press 2013, $19.99 Jonathan Noyalas’ new book on one of the war’s lesser-known battles is a fitting addition to The History Press’ “Civil War Sesquicentennial” series, a recent collection of studies that, while not truly authoritative, provide short, readable …

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Book Review: Bushwhacking on a Grand Scale

Bushwhacking on a Grand Scale: The Battle of Chickamauga, September 18-20, 1863  By William Lee White, Savas Beatie 2013, $12.95 Short, concise treatments of battles and events seem to be the current fad in Civil War scholarship, with various prominent publishers jumping on the bandwagon with varying results. By using well-known experts on each topic, …

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Book Review: Stuart’ Finest Hour

Stuart’ Finest Hour By John J. Fox III, Angle Valley Press 2013, $31.95 James Ewell Brown Stuart resonates across the decades with as much cachet as any of the horsemen who galloped through Civil War scenes. But in late spring 1862, he projected only a modest profile, not much differentiated among several cavalrymen learning how …

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Favorite Sons of the Civil War

Even in war, parents need their children as much as their children need them. They stood together, the wife leaning close to her husband. Grasping his rough hand in hers, she begged him not to go. He was all she had in this world. All but their boy. Stay home, she pleaded, “before you orphan …

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Stonewall’s Shenandoah Showdown

Nathaniel Banks’ Yankees are no match for Jackson’s ‘foot cavalry’ at 1st Winchester. Stonewall Jackson had two missions in Virginia’s Shenandoah Valley in the spring of 1862. The first was to make sure the region, a vital agricultural hub between the Blue Ridge and Appalachian mountains, stayed in Confederate hands. He had worked toward that …

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Grudge Match at the O.K. Corral

For the Earps, Clantons, and McLaurys, the Civil War never really ended. THE UNITED STATES WAS STILL reeling from the Civil War in the 1880s. Reconstruction had barely ended and many still suffered from wartime injuries. In the South, countless families never recovered economically. Bitterness ran high. Many veterans from both North and South pinned …

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A Devil of a Mess in Tennessee

What possessed Nathan Bedford Forrest’s troops to massacre their foes at Fort Pillow? Major General Nathan Bedford Forrest could not have known the whirlwind he was set to unleash as his men closed in on a small isolated fortification on the banks of the Mississippi River north of Memphis on April 12, 1864. Forrest would …

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Her War: Harriet Jacobs’ blunt biography

This winter thousands of American moviegoers have been introduced to Solomon Northup, a free black man kidnapped and sold into slavery in Louisiana. His life narrative provides the subject of Steve McQueen’s brutally painful new film, 12 Years a Slave. The movie is difficult to watch and, while it uncritically deploys elements of the standard …

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Cease Fire: Take note, and long remember

Back in November 1963, John F. Kennedy was scheduled to appear at Gettysburg National Military Park to deliver the commemorative speech marking the 100th anniversary of Abraham Lincoln’s Gettysburg Address. Just before the event, the White House announced the president was canceling. He had accepted another offer he could not refuse: a political trip to …

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Letters from Readers- America’s Civil War March 2014

Share the glory I truly enjoyed Chris Howland’s article “Foiled at Fort Wagner” in the November 2013 issue. I was sad to see, however, that there was no mention of the activities of Col. Edward W. Serrell’s 1st New York Engineers. This famous regiment was responsible for building the “Swamp Angel” battery and digging the …

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Comments | Piqued at Prestonpans

Readers respond to stories about the Battle of Prestonpans, the Thirty Years' War, and the War of 1812

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The Shock of War

Rage Of Battle’ Forever Haunted Some Veterans n 1862, Owen Flaherty left his wife and son in Terre Haute, Ind., and joined the 125th Illinois Infantry. He was, by all accounts, a quiet and easygoing man, well-liked and quick to share a laugh and a drink with his comrades. Until the Battle of Stones River, …

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Confederate Con Artist

A mysterious woman of many names and dubious merit became a southern media celebrity or 140 years, historians have puzzled over a book published in 1876 titled The Woman in Battle, the memoir of a woman calling herself Loreta Velasquez, one of her many names, who claimed to have dressed in a Confederate uniform, adopted …

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Why Did the US Respond in WWII?

I had earlier posted this question somewhere on the Historynet website about why the Japanese decided to attack the United States; but at the time didn’t realize you existed, Mr. History. None of the usual explanations have fully answered this question, so I ask you now: Why did the Japanese leadership think the US would …

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Daily Quiz for March 21, 2017

This history-minded American founded the White House Historical Association.

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Book Review: The Vicksburg Campaign

The Vicksburg Campaign: March 29–May 18, 1863 Edited by Steven E. Woodworth and Charles D. Grear; Southern Illinois University Press, 2013, $32.50 As with previous volumes in the SIU Press’ “Civil War Campaigns in the Heartland” series, Steven E. Woodworth and Charles D. Grear gather an impressive array of talent to deliver an enjoyable look …

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Book Review: What the Yankees Did to Us

What the Yankees Did to Us: Sherman’s Bombardment and Wrecking of Atlanta By Stephen Davis, Mercer University Press, 2013, $37 Thanks to Clark Gable and Vivien Leigh, the Burning of Atlanta is one of the Civil War’s most iconic images. Yet little is actually known about the devastation brought on by Gen. William Sherman’s siege …

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Book Review: Home Front- Life in the Civil War North

Home Front: Life in the Civil War North By Peter John Brownlee, Sarah Burns, Diane Dillon, Daniel Greene and Scott Manning Stevens; University of Chicago Press 2013, $35 A success story from the Civil War sesquicentennial has been the emergence of a number of good new books on nontraditional subjects, such as the environment, emerging …

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Book Review: Nature’s Civil War, by Kathryn Shively Meier

Nature’s Civil War: Common Soldiers and the Environment in 1862 Virginia By Kathryn Shively Meier, University of North Carolina Press, 2013, $39.95 Not until the 20th century did artillery and small-arms fire prove to be a greater threat to soldiers in Western armies than the microbes prevalent in military encampments of earlier wars. In Nature’s …

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Book Review: Appomattox, by Elizabeth Varon

Appomattox: Victory, Defeat, and Freedom at the End of the Civil War  By Elizabeth R. Varon, Oxford University Press 2013, $27.95 Wars, as Thucydides observed, are driven by fear, honor and interest. Consequently, as Americans have painfully learned over the past decade, bringing them to a close can be a tricky business. Political differences so …

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‘I will never consent’: The Daughter of Jefferson Davis Falls for a Yankee

All’s not quite fair in love and war for the daughter of Jefferson Davis. Varina Anne “Winnie” Davis, younger daughter of Confederate President Jefferson Davis and his second wife, Varina Howell Davis, was born in June 1864, only a month after the death of Confederate hero General Jeb Stuart during a string of Rebel victories. …

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