Matt Fratus is a staff writer for Coffee or Die, and he prides himself on uncovering the most fascinating tales of history by sharing them through any means of engaging storytelling. He writes for his micro-blog @LateNightHistory
Ernest Taylor Pyle was born on Aug. 3, 1900, at the turn of the 20th century. The famed war correspondent and columnist was better known as “Ernie” and had the reputation as the voice of the American servicemen during World War II. He chronicled the ...
Mikhail Kalashnikov had two separate life-changing moments while bedridden in a hospital. The first came when he realized his fellow Soviet Red Army soldiers lacked a universal weapon that could compete with the Germans during World War II. The ...
Navy SEAL Lt. Thomas “Tommy” Norris and South Vietnamese naval commando Nguyễn Văn Kiệt pushed off from the shore in an abandoned sampan while dressed as Vietnamese fishermen. The pair were on an impossible mission to find Iceal "Gene" Hambleton, a ...
The king of battle, in all its thunderous glory, has struck fear into the hearts of enemies for centuries. Throughout the history of warfare, different varieties of artillery weapons have been used on battlefields to great effect and have ranged from ...
Having a sniper on the battlefield ensures the safety of an allied raiding or assault force. Their ability to covertly take out enemies from long distances has saved numerous lives. Snipers also provide battlefield surveillance, collect intelligence, ...
When the U.S. military entered World War II, American businesses geared their entrepreneurial efforts toward supporting the war effort as a means of survival. This meant the majority of raw materials were used to produce weapons, ammunition, armor, ...
Sitting in the driver’s seat with his foot on the gas, Major Gerald “Jerry” Johnson drove to the Alert Tent in the early morning hours of Oct. 13, 1943, as jeeps carrying other pilots from the 9th Fighter Squadron, 49th Fighter Group, Fifth Air Force ...
His commanding officer, Captain John Schwabe, had warned him the night before not to venture out on his own into Japanese territory to capture prisoners of war (POWs). Two days after the invasion of Saipan, commonly referred to as “Suicide Island,” ...
The nose of their amphibious tank entered the ocean and bobbed through the waves en route toward the reef of Saipan, the largest archipelago among the Northern Mariana Islands. Wayne “Twig” Terwilliger, a radioman assigned to the 2nd Armored ...
“The chair is against the wall” and “John has a long mustache” were two phrases repeated twice through a radio broadcast in the popular scene of the 1984 cult-classic “Red Dawn.” These phrases were inspired by the real broadcasts sent to bands of ...
During World War I, a plethora of “good boys” and dog breeds participated in tasks that would be deemed unusual in today’s modern wars. Among them were dogs who pulled carts with machine guns on the other end, while others hauled supplies. Bruce, a ...
“Ten men in 103 minutes,” Master Sergeant John C. Woods told the Sioux City Journal on Oct. 19, 1946, three days after the scheduled execution of Nazi war criminals convicted at the Nuremberg Trials. “That’s fast work.” The executioner’s manifest ...
“Are y’all the suicide squad?” asked a curious U.S. Navy sailor aboard the USS Almaack at a port in New York. “The Amphibious Scouts,” another chimed in. Similar renditions were repeated to other sailors who had arrived with orders assigned to Navy ...
When reading the Medal of Honor citation of a soldier, Marine, sailor, or airman, we often have to fill the gaps with our own imagination in order to recreate the scene unfolding line by line. In the case of Henry Johnson — the World War I Harlem ...
A C-5A Galaxy transport plane was waiting on the tarmac as women belonging to the Defense Attaché Office (DAO) Saigon and Defense Intelligence Agency (DIA) escorted 250 South Vietnamese children aboard. "We bucket-brigade-loaded the children right ...
lex West threw his wetsuit and surfboard in the bed of his truck. He had spent the morning surfing off Del Mar on a picturesque Southern California day. After 15 combat deployments, injuries, and relentless stress, the only place that calms his ...
Over the course of history, major superpowers have all had one thing in common: a powerful navy. Battles at sea have contributed to both the rise and the fall of empires, with individual sailors sometimes being all that stood between victory and ...
On July 19, 1776, delegates signed the Treaty of Watertown signifying a treaty of alliance and friendship between the Mi’kmaq Nation of northern New England and Canada and the United States. During the American Revolution, General George Washington ...
Modern day U.S. Navy SEALs have the latest and greatest diving equipment including wetsuits, rebreather oxygen tanks, GPS devices, and all sorts of technology that increases the success of maritime operations. However, during the island-hopping ...
During World War II, Captain Brooke Dolan and Major Ilia Tolstoy, two Office of Strategic Services (OSS) officers, were chosen for an arduous military-diplomatic mission through India to Tibet and finally to China. Their journey was to make contact ...
The Boston Massacre in 1770 led to the Boston Tea Party in 1773, and by 1775, the 13 colonies had banded together against British tyranny. On the night of April 18, 1775, hundreds of British troops traveled from Boston toward Concord, Massachusetts, ...
Machine-gun fire ripped through Captain Campbell’s body as he collapsed off his galloping horse while traveling through a gap in enemy barbed wire. Campbell, the commanding officer of the Fort Garry horse-mounted squadron, was in charge of an ...
The relationship between the CIA and El Salvador is complicated. The Central American country was controlled by military dictatorships from the 1930s through the Salvadoran Civil War that broke out in 1979. In the time between those years, the nation ...
America was late to join World War I compared to the rest of their European allies who were in the midst of desperate trench, chemical, and air warfare. As the U.S. military crossed the Atlantic to enter the fight, wood was still considered a prized ...
The unforgivable mountainous terrain, vast deserts, and impassable rivers of the American Southwest were great challenges for the U.S. Army during the expansion in the 1830s. Alternate solutions debated between U.S. Army Lieutenant George H. Crosman ...
The U.S. military had its hands full when they entered World War II in 1941, as much of the country's attention was on winning the war. Some animators, illustrators, and painters enlisted their talents as combat artists to document scenes of ...
John Gunther Dean was prominently known as a career Foreign Service Officer (FSO) where he worked as an ambassador in Cambodia, Denmark, Lebanon, Thailand, and India from the 1960s to the 1980s. The native German immigrated to the United States when ...
The Soviet Union and the United States may have been allies during World War II, but during the 1950s, the two nations were in the midst of the Cold War, a stand-off between two of the world’s most influential superpowers that had both nations ...
While serving on the front lines of World War II, some allied soldiers would go weeks without seeing a woman. They'd often keep Polaroid photos of their girlfriends and wives in their front shirt pockets to provide some semblance of life back home. ...
Major General Gordon Granger took to his personal stationery located in the Headquarters District of Texas, Galveston, to handwrite General Order No. 3, a historic declaration ending slavery in the entire state that effected some 250,000 slaves. The ...
