American Army

Reconstructing the D-Day landings and subsequent Normandy Campaign through terrain analysis, primary sources and on-site fieldwork

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Key facts

🗺️ D-Day & the Normandy Landings, 6 June 1944
⚔️ Conflict: World War Two – Western Front
🪖 Major Allied forces: US First Army; British Second Army; US 82nd and 101st Airborne Divisions; British 6th Airborne Division
🪖 Major German forces: German Seventh Army; 84th Army Corps; 716th Infantry Division, 352nd Infantry Division and 21st Panzer Division
⭐ Principal Allied commanders: Dwight D. Eisenhower; Bernard Montgomery; Omar Bradley; Miles Dempsey
⭐ Principal German commanders: Gerd von Rundstedt; Erwin Rommel; Friedrich Dollmann
🎯 Strategic objective: Establish an Allied lodgement in Normandy for the liberation of north-west Europe
📌 Outcome: Allied victory; five beachheads established and airborne flanks secured, opening the Battle of Normandy.

Reconstructing Korean War battlefields through terrain analysis, primary sources and on-site research

Walking the battlefields of the Korean War (1950-1953)

The Korean War was one of the most consequential conflicts of the 20th century. Fought across the Korean Peninsula between United Nations forces, the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea, and later the Chinese People’s Volunteer Army, the war combined periods of bold manoeuvre with brutal positional warfare in terrain that often favoured the defender.

1950: Dramatic opening moves

The war opened in June 1950 with the North Korean invasion, sweeping southwards and forcing South Korean and UN forces into the Pusan Perimeter, a defensive line anchored on ridges and river lines aroun dteh southern city of Pusan. General MacArthur’s daring Inchon landings shifted the strategic balance, allowing Allied forces to retake Seoul and push north towards the Yalu River. Massive intervention by Chinese forces transformed the war again, forcing UN units into a fighting withdrawal through snow-covered mountains, narrow valleys and harsh winter conditions.

1951-53: Positional warfare

By 1951, the conflict settled into a series of attritional battles along successive defensive belts — the Kansas Line, the Jamestown Line and the approaches to the Iron Triangle. Some of the war’s most famous engagements, such as Heartbreak Ridge, Bloody Ridge, Chipyong-ni, The Hook and Hill 266, were fought for control of high points, spurs and ridgelines that offered observation, artillery dominance and control of movement corridors.

Fighting in Korea was defined by the terrain’s harsh realities. Steep slopes, knife-edged ridges and narrow valleys restricted mechanised movement and required infantry-centric tactics. Weather extremes — from humid summers to −30°C winters — added another layer of difficulty. Every position, from isolated outposts to fortified ridgeline complexes, depended on logistics, engineering, and the ability to hold or seize ground under punishing conditions.

Armistice negotiations

Armistice negotiations commenced on 10 July 1951 in the North Korean town of Kaesong. In October 1951, the talks moved to the nearby village of Panmunjom, which remains the site of formal North Korea-South Korea interactions. An armistice ending hostilities was signed on 27 July 1953, although the war has never officially ended.

Methodology

This collection of battlefield studies examines the Korean War through a terrain-focused lens, combining period maps, unit narratives, aerial photography and on-site reconnaissance. The aim is not only to recount what happened across these battlefields, but to explain why each engagement unfolded the way it did, shaped by terrain, weather, doctrine and the decisions of commanders on both sides.

Reconstructing War of 1812 battlefields through terrain analysis, primary sources and on-site research

Walking the battlefields of the War of 1812

Origins of the war

The War of 1812 (1812–1815) was a complex, multi-theatre conflict fought between the United States, the British Empire, Canadian militia forces and Indigenous nations whose alliances and strategic decisions shaped the course of the war. Often overshadowed by the Napoleonic Wars happening simultaneously in Europe, the War of 1812 unfolded across thousands of kilometres of forests, lakes, rivers and coastal regions in North America, where geography, small armies and rapid movements produced intensely contested campaigns.

Theatres of war

Along the Canadian–American frontier, the war opened with U.S. invasions aimed at securing Upper and Lower Canada. Early actions at Detroit, Queenston Heights and York highlighted the importance of river crossings, militia mobilisation and the decisive role played by Indigenous warriors under leaders such as Tecumseh. As the conflict intensified, battles around the Niagara Peninsula — including Stoney Creek, Chippawa, Lundy’s Lane and Fort Erie — developed into hard-fought engagements where both sides struggled for control of key roads, ridges and fortified positions. An 1813 American advance on Montreal was blunted at the battles of Chateauguay and Crysler’s Farm.

To the west, fighting spread across the Great Lakes and the vast interior regions between Lake Erie and the Mississippi River. Control of the lakes became a strategic priority, leading to major naval actions such as the Battle of Lake Erie, where American victory reshaped the theatre and enabled the recapture of Detroit and the pursuit of British and Indigenous forces into the Thames Valley.

On the Atlantic seaboard, the war took a different form. British naval supremacy allowed raids along the coast, culminating in the 1814 assault on Washington, including the burning of public buildings. Yet American forces successfully defended key positions such as Baltimore, where the stand at Fort McHenry inspired the Star-Spangled Banner.

Final battles

The war’s final major action occurred far to the south at New Orleans, where Andrew Jackson’s mixed force of regulars, militia, free men of colour and frontiersmen repelled a seasoned British army in one of the conflict’s most dramatic battles — fought after the peace treaty had already been signed.

This collection of battlefield studies examines these diverse campaigns through period maps, contemporary accounts and on-site exploration, revealing how geography, logistics, alliances and leadership shaped the war’s shifting fortunes.

Firsthand battlefield analysis of the campaigns and battles involving the legendary Easy Company, 506th PIR ‘Band of Brothers’

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Walking the battlefields of Easy Company 506th PIR ‘Band of Brothers’ (1944-45)

Easy Company, 2nd Battalion, 506th Parachute Infantry Regiment, 101st Airborne Division, immortalised by Stephen Ambrose and the HBO miniseries Band of Brothers, fought its way through some of the most consequential battles of the Northwest European theatre. Easy Company’s combat history formed part of the much larger World War Two battlefield campaigns examined across Battlefield Travels. Its first combat operations began during the D-Day and Normandy landings, before the company later fought in the Netherlands, the Ardennes and Germany.

This collection of battlefield studies goes beyond the screen. I have walked every battlefield in Easy Company’s combat journey, from the hedgerows of Normandy and the bridges of Holland to the frozen woods around Bastogne and the mountain approaches of Bavaria, combining first-hand fieldwork, terrain analysis, period maps and primary accounts to reconstruct how these battles actually unfolded on the ground.

Normandy

Easy Company’s war began around Sainte-Mère-Église in the early hours of 6 June 1944. Dick Winters landed outside the town, not far from where the aircraft carrying Easy’s commander, Lieutenant Thomas Meehan, crashed, killing all on board. Winters and a Little Group of Paratroopers clashed with a German convoy just east of Sainte-Mère-Église before moving south to the 506th PIR rally point near Sainte-Marie-du-Mont. Easy Company’s first major actions were the celebrated assault on the Brecourt Manor gun battery and the subsequent push towards Carentan, where Easy Company fought through the causeways and streets to link the Utah and Omaha beachheads. The defensive battle at Bloody Gulch immediately afterwards tested them again as they held the line against German counterattacks.

Holland

Three months later, the 101st Airborne dropped into the Netherlands for Operation Market Garden, where Easy Company fought a very different campaign — a fast-moving, canal-lined, village-to-village battle across Eindhoven, Son Bridge, Helmond, Nuenen, Koevering and the defended dikes of ‘The Island’, fighting a small unit action against overwhelming odds at the Randwijk Crossroads. The terrain shifted again: open fields, raised roads, waterways, soft ground and long sightlines that favoured ambushes and defensive fire. At Son Bridge, Nuenen, and Koevering, I walked in the footsteps of Private David Webster, who so vividly described these actions in his memoir Parachute Infantry.

Ardennes

In December 1944, Easy Company entered the Ardennes to hold the line around Bastogne. Here, in the frozen woods of Bois Jacques overlooking Foy, they endured one of their harshest tests — days of bombardment, extreme cold, limited supplies and trench fighting under constant threat of German assault. Their advance into Foy in January 1945 became one of the 101st Airborne Division’s most lauded actions.

Bavaria and Austria

The final chapter carried Easy Company into Germany and Austria, through the collapsing Nazi heartland and ultimately to the symbolic heights of the Eagle’s Nest at Berchtesgaden.

This collection of Easy Company battlefield studies traces their combat path through detailed terrain analysis, field reconnaissance, period maps and first-hand accounts. I have walked the ground on every one of these battlefields, allowing readers to follow, step by step, one of the most celebrated combat journeys of the Second World War. New battlefield studies—from Bastogne and Foy to Nuenen, Veghel, Son Bridge, Koevering and Eagle’s Nest—will continue to expand the collection as they are completed.

Firsthand battlefield analysis of Vietnam War campaigns and battles

Walking the battlefields of the Vietnam War (1955-1975)

The Vietnam War (1955–1975) began as an effort to stabilise South Vietnam in the aftermath of the French Indochina War and the French withdrawal in 1955. The war escalated through the early advisory years, the deployment of major U.S. combat forces in 1965, the nationwide crises of 1968, and the gradual handover to South Vietnamese forces during the ‘Vietnamisation’ period from 1969 onwards. The war concluded with the final North Vietnamese offensives in 1975. Throughout, conventional battles, counter-insurgency operations, and strategic bombing campaigns intersected in a conflict defined by shifting strategies, multinational involvement, and competing political visions for Southeast Asia.

Escalation 1960-1968

In the early 1960s, the war centred on a Viet Cong insurgency in the south, and the struggle for control of rural provinces. By mid-1965, U.S. ground forces directly entered the fighting, leading to large-scale engagements such as LZ X-Ray in the Ia Drang Valley — the first major meeting of American and North Vietnamese regular forces. Over the next three years, the conflict expanded across the Central Highlands and the demilitarised zone, including the hard-fought battles of Dak To, Hill 875, and the bloody assaults on Khe Sanh.

The Tet Offensive of 1968 marked a turning point: a coordinated nationwide attack that included the brutal urban fighting at Hue, reshaping U.S. public opinion despite being a tactical failure for North Vietnam. In the south, Australian and New Zealand forces conducted counter-insurgency operations across Phuoc Tuy province, exemplified by the intense battle of Long Tan in 1966. Special operations units also played a critical role, culminating in missions such as the Son Tay Raid — an audacious 1970 attempt to rescue American POWs deep inside North Vietnam.

Vietnamisation 1969-1975

From 1969 onward, the war shifted again as U.S. forces gradually drew down and the Army of the Republic of Vietnam (ARVN) assumed greater responsibility. Despite local successes, ARVN struggled to counter major offensives such as the Easter Offensive (1972). In 1975, with American support no longer forthcoming, a rapid conventional campaign by the People’s Army of Vietnam overran South Vietnam, culminating in the fall of Saigon.

This collection of Vietnam War battlefield studies explores these campaigns through a clear, historically grounded lens — drawing on contemporary accounts, operational records, period mapping and on-site field exploration to explain not only what occurred during the conflict, but how key battles shaped its course.

Reconstructing World War One battles through terrain analysis, primary sources and on-site research

Walking the battlefields of the First World War

Western Front – crucible for adaptation

World War One (1914–1918) was a truly global conflict fought across multiple theatres, each shaped by its own terrain, climate and operational pressures. On the Western Front, the combination of immense troop density, fortified trench systems and narrow avenues for manoeuvre produced a form of attritional warfare unprecedented in scale. The colossal battles of the Somme and Verdun in 1916, the mud-choked offensives around Ypres in 1917, and the seismic shifts brought about by the German Spring Offensive and the Allied Hundred Days in 1918 all unfolded on a landscape dominated by artillery, machine guns, barbed wire, dugouts and observation posts.

Yet even in this seemingly static environment, armies were constantly adapting. The British and Dominion forces refined the set-piece, limited-objective attack seen at Polygon Wood; the Germans developed infiltration and stormtroop tactics to strike at weak points during their 1918 offensives; and the first massed combined-arms mechanised operations were trialled at Cambrai and perfected during the breakthrough at Amiens. The Western Front was not a stagnant line—it was a laboratory of tactical innovation forged under immense pressure and in the face of unforgiving ground.

Eastern Front – enormous space and never enough troops

In the East, the problem was the inverse: vast distances and too few troops to hold front lines stretching across forest, marsh and steppe. The opening campaigns in East Prussia and Galicia brought sweeping manoeuvre, catastrophic casualties and wild oscillations in momentum. The 1916 Brusilov Offensive showed how coordination, surprise and careful exploitation of terrain could rupture an entire defensive system, while the Russian Revolution in 1917 fractured the Eastern Front from within, triggering political collapse, military disintegration and Allied interventions in the north and Siberia.

The southern theatres – Italy, Gallipoli and Salonika

In the southern theatres, the search for a strategic “back door” led to campaigns on the Gallipoli Peninsula, through the mountains of Salonika, and across the deserts of the Sinai and Palestine, where the Arab Northern Army—supported by British advisers like T. E. Lawrence—conducted deep operations behind Ottoman lines. On the Italian Front, the narrow confines of the Isonzo valley became the setting for eleven costly Italian offensives before the dramatic collapse at Caporetto, where terrain, weather and infiltration tactics combined to shatter an entire army.

The peripheral theatres – Asia, Pacific, Middle East

Beyond Europe, the war extended into Africa, the Middle East, China, and the Pacific. German East Africa saw a mobile guerrilla campaign across mountains, rivers and savannah; Japan and Australia seized German colonies across the Pacific; and even after the 1918 armistice, fighting continued as Allied forces intervened in the Russian Civil War.

This collection of World War One battlefield studies examines these campaigns through a terrain-focused, ground-truth perspective—combining period maps, aerial photographs, personal accounts and modern field reconnaissance to explain not only what happened, but why events unfolded as they did in the landscape itself.