28 MAY 1754 WASHINGTON STARTS A WAR We know it as the French and Indian War, in Europe it was the Seven Years War between England and France. The war ignited in western Pennsylvania with control of North America as the Read More
18-20 MAY 1863 THE YAZOO CITY SHIPYARD After the failure of the Yazoo Pass expedition before Confederate Fort Pemberton in March 1863, MGEN Ulysses Grant adopted a new strategy against Vicksburg, the last and most menacing Rebel city preventing Union control Read More
SPRING 1898 FORT JEFFERSON–GIBRALTAR OF THE GULF Sixty-eight miles west of Key West, Florida, lies a cluster of small islands named for the turtles early sailors harvested there. The Dry Tortugas were notable in the 19th century because they lay athwart Read More
6 MAY 1944 BUCKLEY vs. U-66 (cont.) Every available sailor manned BUCKLEY’s (DE-51) rail with a tommy gun, rifle, or any manner of weapon the arms lockers could yield. Depth charges, set to explode at the surface, arched from the destroyer Read More
6 MAY 1944 BUCKLEY vs. U-66 Oberleütnant zur See Gerhard Seehausen was in desperate need of re-supply. Operating in the mid-Atlantic west of the Cape Verde Islands, his cruise so far had been constantly dogged by US aircraft from a nearby Read More
29-30 APRIL 1945 STAFFORD vs. MANCHEN Convoy KN-382 coursed its way slowly north from Key West to New York, this night reaching a position 98 miles east of Cape Henry. The long war looked to be winding down, at least in Read More
25 APRIL 1914 1ST OPERATIONAL SORTIE Though the Navy and Marine Corps had been experimenting with the new-fangled flying machines of the early 20th century, their operational role was still being defined. Aerial reconnaissance seemed a logical task, as such technology Read More
19 APRIL 1861 THE “ANACONDA” PLAN At the outbreak of the Civil War the senior-most officer in our federal Army was GEN Winfield Scott, the victor of the Mexican War of the 1840s. As an overall strategy to deal with the Read More
12 APRIL 1945 USS MANNERT L. ABELE (DD-733) WWII generated a boom in warship construction such that the 23 April 1944 launch of the 42nd Allen M. Sumner-class destroyer from the Bath Iron Works in Maine hardly attracted unusual attention. She Read More
7 APRIL 1966 LOST H-BOMB Considering the pace of Cold War activities in the 1960s, accidents were bound to happen. Such was the case on 17 January 1966 when an Air Force B-52 collided with a KC-135 tanker during an aerial Read More