(This clock belonged to the chaplain on the USS Arizona and was stopped“The Inland Sea of Japan was still veiled in darkness when the anchorage at Hashirajima began to awaken. On board the aircraft carrier Akagi, white-clad crewmen, ghostly in the deep twilight on the forecastle, began raising the ship’s anchors. The clatter of the capstan was overlain with the bright sound of spraying water as the…
Ten years ago, a couple of weeks from now, I emerged from a burning, shattered Pentagon to a scene of utter chaos in South Parking, jammed cell lines and what soon became a traffic jam bordering on the Apocalyptic. Today, while much further to the south of DC, but actually closer to the quake’s epicenter,…
Today Steve Ambrose joins the project with the battle of the Eastern Solomons. Â A former S-3 NFO, Steve has a wonderful blog that runs the gamut from hand-crafted wooden canoes to an on-line novel about life at sea (‘On The Line‘). Coral Sea was the scene of the first carrier vs carrier battle where…
Project Valour-IT Update: Army is getting crabby – and too close for comfort. Come on Navy – let’s show ’em the passing game… 20 Nov 1933: Lieutenant Commander T. G. W. Settle and Major Chester L. Fordney, USMC, flying a 600,000 cubic foot free balloon, set a world’s altitude record of 61,237 feet in a…
At Marne, the industrial warfare hinted at barely half a century earlier came to fruition. On a sunny, December morning, the rules of naval warfare were inexorably altered and four years later was answered in the light of a terrible, new weapon, one that its creator was prompted to utter “I am become death, the…
While Midway was not the combat debut of the B-26 Marauder (that was left to B-26’s of the 22nd Bombardment Group launching attacks against Rabaul two months earlier), Midway was nonetheless the most auspicious of the Marauder’s early actions. Originating from a 1939 Army Air Corps specification for a twin-engined medium bomber (Circular Proposal 39-640),…
