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Battles & Campaigns

British Crusader tank with crew in the desert, 1942

The Second Battle of El Alamein opened on Oct. 23, 1942, with Montgomery’s more than 190,000 men and over 1,000 tanks facing 116,000 German and Italian soldiers with 540 tanks

El Alamein sits on Egypt’s Mediterranean coast about 60 miles west of Alexandria, with the

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An M-2 Treadway bridge section descends under parachutes after a drop by the 314th Troop Carrier Group, Dec. 7, 1950.

How eight C-119s parachuted 2,900-pound Treadway bridge sections in December 1950 to replace a bridge destroyed at Funchilin Pass for Marines coming out of the Chosin Reservoir

Sixteen feet of missing bridge stood between the 1st Marine Division and the road south

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The B-17F Memphis Belle on display at the National Museum of the U.S. Air Force, January 2022.

The Memphis Belle was not the first U.S. heavy bomber to finish 25 missions, the Air Force museum says; it credits a B-17E named Suzy-Q, which flew in the Pacific in 1942

Twenty-five missions was the number that sent a World War II bomber crew home, and

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A surviving section of the Berlin spy tunnel on display at the AlliiertenMuseum in Berlin.

How the CIA’s 1,476-foot Berlin spy tunnel yielded 443,000 transcribed conversations even though the KGB knew about the project from its start

The tunnel ran 1,476 feet from a U.S. Air Force radar site in West Berlin

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American infantry and tanks in a ruined Aachen street, 1944

How U.S. troops took Aachen on Oct. 21, 1944, the first large German city lost in the war, according to the Army’s official history

Five minutes past noon on Oct. 21, 1944, the fight for Aachen ended in a

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Wright Military Flyer biplane reproduction in a museum

The 1909 Wright Military Flyer, which the Smithsonian calls the world’s first military airplane, sold to the Army for $30,000 after beating its 40 mph speed requirement with a 42.5 mph average

Two miles per hour over the line was worth $5,000 in the summer of 1909.

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Concrete Mulberry harbour caissons on the beach at Arromanches

How the D-Day Mulberry harbors, built from prefabricated parts weighing over 600,000 tonnes, landed more than 2 million men in Normandy

Rather than fight for a defended French port, the Allies decided to bring their own

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Pave Low helicopter on museum display

How Army Special Forces raiders rehearsed about 170 times on a canvas-and-wood mock-up before raiding the Son Tay prison camp on Nov. 21, 1970, and found no POWs there

A replica prison camp built of canvas and wooden frames stood at Eglin Air Force

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Tall memorial column at Montfaucon in the Argonne

About 1.2 million American troops fought in the 47-day Meuse-Argonne offensive of 1918, which the National Park Service calls the largest battle in American history

At 5:30 a.m. on Sept. 26, 1918, after a three-hour artillery bombardment, three corps of

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B-25 bomber taking off from the deck of USS Hornet in 1942

USS Hornet was commissioned at Norfolk on Oct. 20, 1941, and less than six months later she launched 16 Army B-25 bombers about 650 miles from Japan for the Doolittle Raid

Oct. 20, 2026 marks 85 years since USS Hornet (CV-8) was commissioned at the Naval

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