Category: Military
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3309 – The battle of Maldon: Bloodshed on the Blackwater
The battle of Maldon is remarkable in the history of Anglo-Saxon and Viking warfare, indeed in the history of Dark Age battles, because we are so well informed about it. We have several sources which have come down to us, especially an anonymous poem which survives almost complete and which must have been written close…
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3308 – Fix Bayonets! An heroic old-fashioned charge in the Korean War
‘1951 had begun disastrously for the United Nations forces in Korea. On December 31st, 1950, the Chinese 13th Army breached UN defences below the 38th parallel as part of the Third Phase Campaign and, on January 3rd, Seoul was evacuated by the US Eighth Army. The Eighth Army was commanded by Lieutenant General Matthew B.…
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3307 – The Aitape-Wewak Campaign
‘On their seemingly inexorable advance south in 1942, the Japanese had occupied Aitape in northern New Guinea on their advance south. Allied offensives to halt the Japanese advance began in 1943 and in April 1944 units of the United States Army, especially the 163rd Regimental Combat Team from the 41st Infantry Division landed at Aitape…
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3306 – Heroism in the Hundred Days Offensive
On 27 September 1918, Captain Frisby and Lance Corporal Jackson led the assault against enemy machine-gun positions during the battle of the Canal du Nord, Nord-pas-de-Calais region of Northern France. Following the successes of the German Spring Offensive in March 1918, the Allies launched a series of successful counter-attacks from May to July 1918 which…
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3305 – The Battle of Montgisard
‘Founded at the conclusion of the First Crusade in 1099, The Latin Kingdom of Jerusalem was always in a precarious position. It was surrounded by Muslim enemies and suffered from a lack of resources and support from its Christian allies, both in Europe and the Byzantine Empire. The rise of Saladin in Egypt and Syria…
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3304 – Epaminondas of Thebes – Part 2
Epaminondas’ victory at Leuctra created the Theban Hegemony, a brief period where Thebes dominated Greek politics. There has always been criticism that when Thebes defeated Sparta at the battle of Leuctra they had no real plan to replace the Spartan domination of Greece with one of their own. Hence the Theban hegemony of Greece was…
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3303 – Epaminondas of Thebes, part 1
Epaminondas of Thebes is one of the greatest and most revolutionary commanders in military history, destroying the might of Sparta in a single day at the Battle of Leuctra in 371 BC. At that battle, Epaminondas led the outnumbered Theban phalanx to an overwhelming victory over an army of feared Spartan hoplites. Theban victory that…
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3302 – The Battle of Alcazar
By mid-afternoon on the 4th of August 1578, three monarchs lay dead on the battlefield of Alcazar in Morocco: two Sultans and King Sebastian I of Portugal. The consequences of their deaths would resonate for decades throughout Europe and North Africa. The Battle of Alcazar is known by several names, all of which are attempts…
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3301 – Charles Hazlitt Upham V.C. and Bar
Just before his 31st birthday in September 1939, Charles Upham volunteered as a private in the Second New Zealand Expeditionary Force. He had been in the Territorials but refused to join at any higher rank. He was soon singled out for his natural leadership qualities and made temporary lance corporal, but refused to attend the…
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3210 – The White Death: Finnish marksman Simo Häyhä
Simo Häyhä tormented Soviet forces invading his native Finland between December 1939 and March 1940, killing 542 enemy soldiers in only 98 days. In the hostile, minus forty-degree conditions of the Finnish winter of 1939-40, a man clad all in white lay with packed snow mounded in front of him as he awaited his enemy.…