Secrecy is one of the best currencies in war, so it’s sometimes best for commanders to keep their best assets hidden from the enemy and the public. While the military has admitted that most of the units on this list existed at some point, a lot of their missions were classified for decades before being…
Category: Military History
Military Weapons From The Past: The Spanish FR-8 “Cetmeton” Rifle
The FR-8 is a Spanish rifle manufactured in the 1950s as part of Spain’s adoption of the CETME semiautomatic rifles. Spain was not only moving to their first semiauto rifle, but also changing from 8mm Mauser to the new 7.62mm NATO. It was not possible to immediately equip everybody with the new rifles, so a…
World War II History: The Female Russian Sniper that Planted Over 300 Germans
The 2015 film Battle for Sevastopol is the true story of how Lyudmila Pavlichenko, a female Soviet sniper who killed more than 300 Axis soldiers during World War II, became a gal-pal of the first lady of the United States. That’s a topic so compelling in and of itself that it’s worth putting up with Battle…
Military Aviation History: The First Anti-Aircraft Gun
The Prussian made “Ballon Kanone” was the first Purpose Made AA Gun The first untethered balloon flight took place on Nov. 21, 1783, with the first military use occurring during the French Revolutionary Wars. A century later during the Franco-Prussian War, the French again deployed observation balloons — and when Prussian troops besieged Paris, they became a…
Bad-Ass Files: Virathus, One Of The First Guerilla Fighters
So I was watching this series on the History Channel the other night called Barbarians Rising and the first episode was about Hannibal and Virathus. The Hannibal story was good, but I knew about most of it already, Having read more than a few books on Hannibal, including The Ghost of Cannae, which I highly recommend…..
World War I Era Weapons: Gewehr 1898 Rifle
The Gewehr 1898 was the product of a decade of bolt action repeating rifle improvements by the Mauser company, and would be the standard German infantry rifle through both World Wars. Today we are looking at a pre-WWI example (1905 production) that shows all the features of what a German soldier would have taken to…
What A Veteran Taught Me About Facing My Own War
Bringing Iraq — and my experience in Somalia — to the homeland by MARK WILKERSON Memorial Day is over. You had your barbecue. Now, you can stop thinking about America’s wars and the casualties from them for another year. As for me, I only wish it were so. It’s been Memorial Day for me ever since I first met…
World War II History: 1965 Movie “Battle of the Bulge” Was So Bad Eisenhower Came Out of Retirement To Slam It!
The 1965 movie “The Battle of the Bulge” is generally considered by war movie buffs to be the most inaccurate war movie ever made. It stars Henry Fonda leading a large cast of fictional characters (though Fonda’s Lt. Col. Kiley was based on a real U.S. troop). The film was made to be viewed on a…
History of Terrorism: How British Intelligence Infiltrated the IRA
This is an article from The Atlantic in 2006 but I thought it a great read on the History of the IRA from the British perspective.-SF I first met the man now called Kevin Fulton in London, on Platform 13 at Victoria Station. We almost missed each other in the crowd; he didn’t look at…
World War II History: Separating Fact from Fiction About the Polish Air Force
When the 1950s T.V. documentary series Air Power got around to covering the opening battles of World War II, it unfortunately reinforced a popular, and entirely incorrect, notion. “The Polish air force is caught on the ground,” narrator Walter Cronkite grumbled over images of German bombers pummeling Polish installations. “The Polish air force is destroyed…