The USS Conestoga left the Navy yard at Mare Island, Calif., on Good Friday, 1921, bound for Pearl Harbor, with a complement of 56 sailors. It cleared the Golden Gate at 3:25 p.m. and steamed into the Gulf of the Farallones in heavy seas. The Conestoga was a rugged oceangoing tug that had once hauled coal…
Category: Military History
Cold War Files: Some Obscure Cold War History (In Comics)
The World’s Highest War … in Comics ‘Siachen: The Cold War’ depicts a pointless conflict In 1984, India and Pakistan went to war over the Siachen Glacier. A 2003 ceasefire halted most of the fighting, but troops from both sides are still facing off and losing more soldiers every year to the climate, altitude and…
Military History: “Stalingrad on the Yangtze”, The Battle of Shanghai 1937
Today Shanghai is a hub of international trade and culture and one of the world’s great cities. But in 1937, it was a battlefield. Imperial Japanese troops fought the Chinese Nationalist army in the seaside metropolis in one of history’s most terrible battles. Westerners watched from their neighborhoods as two ancient rivals fought a new…
Cold War and Espionage Files: The Last Casualty of the Cold War
Cold War Memories: The Last Casualty In March of ’85 I had a chance to go hang out in Copenhagen for a week with some friends. Buffoonery was the only thing on the agenda and my travel partner and I were masters of it. It had been months since either of us had been…
Military Weapons from the Past: The British Sten Mk. VI(S) Sub-Machine Gun
The Royal Small Arms Factory built the first suppressed Sten submachine gun following a request from the Special Operations Executive — Britain’s World War II commando headquarters — for a weapon for clandestine missions demanding lots of firepower. Early experiments with suppressing the Thompson submachine gun — the weapon British commandos preferred earlier in the…
Military History: Battleground Dublin, Remembering the O’Connell Street Landmarks of 1916
“To commemorate the 100th anniversary of the Easter Rising, the Irish building supply company Chadwick’s is offering MilitaryHistoryNow.com this infographic exploring some of the O’Connell Street landmarks that were damaged and destroyed during the battle.” FOR MANY, Dublin’s famous O’Connell Street is considered ‘ground-zero’ for the Easter Rising of 1916. At the start of the five-day insurrection, which ran…
Military Defense News: Increase, Don’t Decrease Marine Lethality
On February 2, the Senate Armed Services Committee heard conflicting testimonyfrom the Army and Marines about integrating women into the infantry. The Marine Corps had opposed the change, drawing the ire of Navy Secretary Ray Mabus. So he took gender integration a giant step farther, ordering the Marines toabolish their separate male and female boot…
Military Defense News: US Army to Retire OH-58D Kiowa Warrior Scout Helicopter by 2017
With tensions at a recent high, the U.S. Army is sending the last of its OH-58D Kiowa Warrior scout helicopters to the Korean Peninsula for one more mission. After decades of service in war zones including Afghanistan and Iraq, the venerable copters should leave service by 2017. On March 19, the Army announced that 400…
Espionage & Cold War Files: Cuba and Operation Northwoods
I have been reading and studying about Espionage and the History of the CIA, KGB, MI6, Mossad, etc. for some time, and although most things I come across really don’t surprise me, this one did. Truth is certainly stranger than Fiction. -SF Did You Know That the US Once Planned to Attack Itself — and…
Military Weapons From the Past: Historical Weapons Found in Libya War Zone
Armament Research Services (ARES) has a database of Conflict Material (CONMAT), logging arms and munitions documented within the illicit sphere in conflict and post-conflict zones. I have been working on co-athoring a report with N.R. Jenzen-Jones covering Libyan arms trading conducted via social media platforms between November 2014 and November 2015 for Small Arms Survey. One of the…