On Palm Sunday morning April 18 1943, 18 American P-38 Lightning fighters took off from Guadalcanal at dawn. 16 of them would continue on a 1,000 mile round trip mission across open ocean. Their target was a single Mitsubishi G4M Betty bomber. Inside that bomber was the Japanese admiral who had planned the attack on…
Category: Military Weapons History
On This Day in History: May 7th, 1915
The sinking of RMS Lusitania during WWI RMS Lusitania was torpedoed by a German U-boat on 7 May 1915. The luxury passenger liner was crossing the Atlantic from New York to Liverpool when the German submarine U-20 fired without warning. After a second explosion – the cause of which is still debated – the ship quickly sank. It…
Booby Traps from the Vietnam War
Assessing “Cognitive Warfare”
Despite its introduction over a decade ago by the People’s Liberation Army, there is no common understanding of Cognitive Warfare. Nor is there an agreement on the existence of a human or cognitive domain. These concepts compete in a crowded and confusing field centered around information technology and the related information dimension of statecraft….
Know Your Real Military History: Specters in the Snow, the story of Finland’s Skeleton Helmet
H/T WRSA Specters in the Snow, the story of Finland’s Skeleton Helmet A Savage Snow War On a freezing day in January 1940, near the village of Muurila, a Red Army soldier crept through the snow. He placed himself as close to a tent, as he dared; he knew it contained his Finnish…
Know Your Ammo: 9mm Luger vs 9×19 vs Parabellum – What’s the Difference?
9mm Luger vs 9×19 vs Parabellum: What’s the Difference? Even if you know very little about guns, perhaps just what you’ve picked up from watching TV and movies, you’ve probably gathered there’s a round called 9mm. As you learn more, you probably discover it’s a pistol round, but you’ll soon hear other terms like…
The Guns of Faction: Part One
The Guns of Faction: Part One My 2019 novel, Faction, was recognized by many readers as having weapons which seemed at first glance exotic, but were, in fact, rather straightforward, off-the-shelf weapons with slight modifications to make them more useful in urban operations. Let’s examine them in this series, one by one. The criteria for…
On This Day in WWI History: The Third Battle of Ypres – aka The Battle of Passchendaele
What You Need to Know About the Third Battle of Ypres The Third Battle of Ypres – also known as Passchendaele – has shaped perceptions of the First World War on the Western Front. Fought between July and November 1917, both sides suffered heavy casualties and endured appalling conditions. The name Passchendaele has become synonymous with…
Resource Library: Seven Pillars of Small War Power
Seven_Pillars_of_Small_War_Power THE WORLD SEEMED to breathe a collective sigh of relief at the end of the long Cold War. That momentous event, however, did not mark the end of global armed conflict. While the number of armed conflicts worldwide has been declining since peaking in the early 1990s, and a conventional war between two…
Help Solve a Real-Life Mystery: $50,000 Reward Offered to Find Col. Lutz’s Lost 1911
Help Solve a Real-Life Mystery: $50,000 Reward Offered to Find Col. Lutz’s Lost 1911 Palmetto State Armory is calling on patriots, collectors, and history buffs alike to help solve a powerful mystery—and there’s a $50,000 reward on the table for the person who finds the missing piece. This isn’t fiction. This is about Col. Lutz, a Vietnam…