Military History

Hiroaki Abe was an admiral in the Imperial Japanese Navy during World War II. Abe graduated from the Japanese Naval Academy (1911) and Naval Staff College (1925). He rose through the ranks as a torpedo officer and during 1922-23 commanded a destroyer.

Abrams was a native of Springfield, Massachusetts, and received an appointment to West Point, where he was a superb student, graduating in 1936, eighteenth in a class of 276. Commissioned a second lieutenant of cavalry, he was promoted to captain in 1940 and transferred to armor. In Europe, during World War II, he brilliantly commanded the Thirt...

Bernard Law Montgomery, the outstanding British commander during WW II famous for his victory at the Battle of El Alamein in November 1942 and his role in allied campaigns leading to the German surrender, was born on November 17, 1887 in London’s district Kennington. He spent most of his early childhood in Tasmania, then still a British colony, ...

Chester William Nimitz, a US Fleet Admiral who commanded the Allied land and sea forces in the Pacific during WW II, was born on February 24, 1885 in Fredericksburg, Texas, US.

William Frederick Halsey Jr., a US naval commander who led many of the most important US naval campaigns in the Pacific during WW II, was born on October 30, 1882 in Elizabeth, New Jersey to US Navy Captain William F. Halsey Sr. and his wife Anne Masters Brewster. He attended the Pingry School in New Jersey and, while waiting to receive an appoi...

Ferdinand Jean Marie Foch, a military theorist, French General and the Commander of the Allied Forces at the end of WW I, was born on October 2, 1851 in Tarbes, Hautes-Pyrenees, France. He attended school in Tarbes and Rodez and college in St. Etienne. Being inspired and influenced from early childhood by the stories of campaigns his maternal gr...

John Joseph Pershing, a US Army general who commanded the AEF (American Expeditionary Force) during World War I, was born on September 13, 1860 on a farm near Laclede, Missouri, US.

Kōshaku (Marquess) Tōgō Heihachirō was born on January 27, 1848, in Kagoshima, Satsuma, Japan. He raised amidst the turmoil created by US commodore Oliver H. Perry's "opening up" of Japan to the West, Heihachiro Togo joined the Satsuma provincial navy in 1866. Four years later, he entered the new imperial Japanese navy as a cadet. From 1871 to 1...