History Net: Where History Comes Alive - World & US History Online

With the enhanced Mk I Merkava, Israel properly lays claim to one of the world's most formidable battle tanks

In the late 1960s North Korean incursions along the DMZ threatened to reignite the long dormant Korean War

In February 1944 the U.S. Navy turned Japan’s ‘Gibraltar of the Pacific’ into a maritime morgue

Bob Kubo's solo action on Saipan would earn him the highest honor of any Japanese-American soldier in the Pacific

Blenheim was a stupendous victory over absolutism and proved the armies of the French “Sun King” Louis XIV were not invincible

Eduard’s 1/48th scale kit (No. 1119) of the Yak-3 builds into a realistic model of the tough and agile fighter that dominated the Eastern Front during the war’s last days. Construction begins with the cockpit. After painting the plastic pilot’s “tub” and fuselage sidewalls field gray, carefully apply the many prepainted etched metal parts, which …

The Howard 500 was the last production radial-engine passenger transport and the most advanced piston twin ever built. Some date the beginning of business aviation to the first hardware store owner who painted his logo on a Jenny’s fuselage. Others cite the appearance of sophisticated cabin singles such as the Spartan Executive and Beech Staggerwing …

Built in vast numbers, Aleksandr Yakovlev’s fighters were among the most important Allied aircraft of World War II. Yakovlev aircraft have become as closely associated with World War II Soviet air power as Messerschmitts are with the Luftwaffe, Spitfires with the Royal Air Force and Zeros with the Japanese. More Yak fighters were built than …

Michael Kelly went to war, as a journalist, on his own terms

The Fall of the Roman Empire Peter J. Heather, (Oxford University Press, 2006), $40. In 375, the Roman Empire appeared as strong and secure as it had been in its four-hundred-year history. The empire extended from the ramparts of Hadrian’s Wall to the deserts of northern Mesopotamia, and from the deltas of the Rhine and …