MHQ: The Quarterly Journal of Military History

At 7:55 a.m. Hawaii time on December 7, 1941, a dive-bomber bearing the red symbol of the Rising Sun of Japan on its wings appeared out of the clouds above the island of Oahu. Within just a few minutes, Japanese warplanes filled the sky over Pearl Ha

King George VI (in front, wearing uniform) tours Southampton to inspect areas of the city that sustained heavy damage during a Luftwaffe raid five days earlier. TODAY: Terrified families are evacuated as police confiscate a live incendiary bomb that

I was surprised that there was no mention in Alan Green’s “Surprise!” [War List, MHQ, Spring 2021] of the latest and greatest use of operational surprise by American armed forces—namely, Operation Desert Storm, the U.S. military operation in 1991 tha

In World War I, a military dropout assembled an army that help put Poland back on the map. By Peter Zablocki Visit HISTORYNET.com, with more than 13,000 articles and exclusives PRINT, TABLETS, and READERS Shop at SHOP.HISTORYNET.com KINDLE AMAZON.com

When Japanese planes attacked Pearl Harbor on the morning of December 7, 1941, Philip M. Rasmussen was a 23-year-old second lieutenant in the U.S. Army Air Corps. Assigned to the 46th Pursuit Squadron at Wheeler Field on the island of Oahu, he was on

On the morning of December 26, 1862, 38 men were hanged on a single gallows in Mankato, Minnesota. It was the largest simultaneous execution in American history. The execution of these men, all Dakota Indians, closed the first chapter of the most vio

The Porter turret rifle was one of those weapons that brimmed with ingenious features but was critically flawed. From the 1830s, several American firearms designers strove to develop effective repeating rifles that incorporated the new percussion sys

“What hath God wrought?” Those were the words that the daughter of Henry Leavitt Ellsworth famously suggested Samuel F. B. Morse send from the basement of the U.S. Capitol on May 24, 1844, to officially open the much-anticipated telegraph line from W

Richard Fleischer, the director of the American sequences of Tora! Tora! Tora!, the 1970 film that is the subject of Wendell Jamieson’s cover story in this issue of MHQ, was a gifted Hollywood veteran whose other credits included The Narrow Margin (1

The USS Yorktown (CV-10) steamed gently 30 miles off the coast of San Diego on a golden December morning in 1968. As the ship turned into the wind, its silhouette left no doubt as to its pedigree: This was a World War II–vintage Essex-class aircraft

When Chinese emperor Zhu Yuanzhang and his Ming Dynasty forces conquered Yunnan Province, the last remaining Mongol bastion, in 1382, they captured a 10-year-old Muslim boy whose father had been killed in the bloody fighting. The boy, Ma He, brazenly

On the morning of December 7, 1941, Private James Jones was enjoying a quiet Sunday breakfast in the mess hall at Schofield Barracks, 25 miles inland from the silvery beaches of Honolulu, Hawaii. Jones had enlisted in the U.S. Army almost exactly two

In 1887, Allen & Ginter, a tobacco company in Richmond, Virginia, hit on the idea of turning the blank pieces of cardboard used to stiffen its packs of cigarettes into colorful—and collectible—trading cards depicting top-flight baseball players and o

In the spring of 1922, George Owen Squier, a major general in the U.S. Army, paused under a large tree in Rock Creek Park, the 1,700-acre preserve that snakes through the nation’s capital. After studying the tree for a moment, Squier pulled a coil of

On the morning of September 11, 2001, Robert Gschaar was working on the 92nd floor of the South Tower of the World Trade Center in New York City when five terrorist hijackers crashed United Airlines Flight 175 into the side of the skyscraper. Just mo

Richard C. Hottelet was born in Brooklyn, New York, in 1917, to German-immigrant parents who spoke no English at home. After he graduated from Brooklyn College in 1937, Hottelet, who was fluent in German but had no clear career plans, enrolled at the

By the time he was sworn in as the U.S. Army’s chief of staff in 1930, Douglas MacArthur was a man of many eccentricities. He fancied a jeweled cigarette holder, cooled himself with a Japanese fan, and often wore a kimono over his uniform while in hi

Just before 6 o’clock on the morning of April 19, 1956, Lionel Crabb, an expert British diver, quietly left the Sally Port Inn in Portsmouth, England, accompanied by his minder, a tall, slim American going by the name of Bernard Smith. The two men ma

On June 17, 1942, the very first edition of Yank, the weekly magazine that the U.S. military published during World War II, rolled off the presses. A gaggle of high-ranking Pentagon officials had come from Washington, D.C., for the launch party in th

By Serhii Plokhy 464 pages. W. W. Norton & Company. $35. Reviewed by Paul Starobin On May 21, 1962, Soviet premier Nikita Khrushchev called a meeting of the Defense Council of the USSR to present an idea that had attached to his restless imagination

In September 1914, in the First Battle of the Marne, French forces threw back a massive German advance that had come within 30 miles of Paris. French illustrator and caricaturist Félix Lacaille (1856–1923) portrayed the Allied victory as a “coup de m