In the afternoon of Aug. 24, 1814, First Lady Dolley Madison wrote in her journal: “We have had a battle…near Bladensburg, and I am still here within sound of the cannon!” Within a few hours, that cannonade would come steadily closer until the British 3rd Brigade marched into Washington, D.C., virtually uncontested and proceeded to…
From the wildly popular traveling Van Gogh exhibit to the immersive “King Tut” experience that trades artifacts for hauntingly lit and realistic tableaux, museums everywhere are departing from conventional curated collections to find new ways to engage visitors. At the National Museum of the United States Army at Fort Belvoir, Virginia, staff hope a new…
For over a century the M2 Browning .50-caliber machine gun, known affectionally among troops as “Ma Deuce,” has been the staple small arms weapon in the United States military arsenal. While certain enhancements have been made throughout the 20th and 21st centuries, the core of the gun has remained relatively unchanged. So much so that…
On Nov. 8, 1942, the United States opened a new front against Germany, Italy and Vichy France when its forces landed in Morocco and Algeria. At the same time, the British First and Eighth armies advanced against the receding Axis forces from the east. On March 10, 1943, an ailing Field Marshal Erwin Rommel was…
More than 80 years later, the remains of U.S. POWs buried as “unknowns,” or entombed in the holds of Japanese “hell ships” sunk by U.S. warplanes and submarines, have started coming home to families who kept their memories alive. In an extraordinary and ongoing effort, specialists from the Defense POW/MIA Accounting Agency, using new techniques…
When the American Expeditionary Forces joined the Allied armies on the Western Front in World War I, there was one condition upon which their commander, Gen. John Pershing, insisted. He wanted the AEF to fight as an army, not a collection of separated units scattered among the Allied armies. For the most part, he got…
