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From the 12th to 14th centuries, mounted samurai fought mainly with the yumi bow and the yari spear, and carried the long, deeply curved tachi, hung from the belt with the edge facing down for slashing at foot soldiers. In the large wars of the Sengoku period, massed ashigaru fought on foot in tight formations where the tachi was too slow to draw. Their short backup dagger, the sasuga, grew longer until it became the katana, thrust through the obi with the edge facing up so that drawing and striking became one motion, the basis of battojutsu and modern iaido. Smiths signed the tang on the side facing away from the wearer, so a signature's position shows whether a blade was a tachi or a katana.

Smiths folded tamahagane steel made from iron sand, then coated the blade with clay, thick on the spine and thin on the edge, heated it to nearly 1,400 degrees Fahrenheit and quenched it in water. The edge became hard martensite, the spine stayed softer, and the uneven cooling bent the blade into its curve. After Toyotomi Hideyoshi's 1588 sword hunt and the Tokugawa peace, the paired daisho became a badge of samurai rank and blades turned ornate. The Meiji government disbanded the samurai and banned carrying swords in 1876, smiths turned to farm tools, and World War II brought oil-quenched factory blades. Today a licensed smith needs a five-year apprenticeship and may make at most two longswords a month.

• The visible frosty band on a polished blade is a cosmetic finish called hadori, while the true hamon is a fine crystalline line seen only by tilting the steel in light.
• A finished sword can pass through up to eight specialists, including the togishi who polishes for weeks and the sayashi who carves the scabbard.
• Connoisseurs judged a blade's shape, the grain of its steel, and particles called nie and nioi described as stars and mist.
• Mass-produced wartime swords are not legally Japanese swords and can be confiscated and destroyed if brought into Japan.
• Sword making was banned from 1945 to 1953, and in 2014 Kawachi Kunihira recreated the lost Kamakura-era utsuri reflection and won the Masamune Prize.

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Military homing pigeons are bred rock doves, and the racing homer created by 19th century Belgian and English breeders crossed the stamina of the French cumulet with the homing instinct of the English carrier, producing birds that average 60 miles per hour over flights of up to 1,100 miles. Armies used them by carrying birds away from fixed lofts and releasing them to fly home. The transcript traces them from a Sultan of Baghdad's network around 1150 BCE, Cyrus of Persia and Julius Caesar to the news of Waterloo in 1815. During the 1870 to 1871 Siege of Paris, pigeons were floated out by balloon and flew back with microfilmed dispatches: about 400 birds carried 115,000 government messages and nearly a million private ones, while the Prussians sent hawks and falcons after them.

In World War I, with telegraph lines cut by shellfire, the French advanced at the Marne with 72 mobile lofts and birds flew in gas-proof boxes with a 95 percent success rate. In October 1918 Cher Ami carried the coordinates of the 77th Division's Lost Battalion over 25 miles after being shot, saving 194 men and earning the Croix de Guerre. In World War II the United States trained 54,000 pigeons and Britain used 250,000 to stay in contact with agents, because a bird gives off no signal to intercept. MI5 kept 100 birds on standby until 1950, the Swiss Army kept its pigeon section until 1996, and Indian police detained suspected spy pigeons from Pakistan in 2010, 2015 and 2020.

• In 1944 Maidenform made 28,500 corset-laced vests so paratroopers could jump with pigeons strapped to their chests, for no more than six hours.
• A single private dealer bought all 27,064 surplus pigeon vests after the war.
• Pigeons trained on the USS Langley in 1922 abandoned the moving carrier and roosted on cranes at the Norfolk Naval Shipyard.
• The US 285th Signal Pigeon Company clipped the wings of 15,000 captured German birds.
• Thirty-two pigeons have received the Dickin Medal, including GI Joe and Paddy, who carried D-Day intelligence across the Channel.

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In the summer of 1792 the French Revolution looked fragile. Louis XVI had been stripped of power, and Frederick William II of Prussia, backed by Austria and Great Britain, sent about 84,000 men under the Duke of Brunswick, including Prussian and Austrian regulars, Hessian auxiliaries and French royalist exiles, toward Paris. They took Longwy in late August and Verdun in early September. France had about 54,000 men in the Army of the North under Charles Dumouriez and the Army of the Center under François Kellermann. Over half the infantry, nearly all the cavalry and the artillery were veterans of the old royal army. Instead of blocking the road to Paris, the two commanders slipped behind the invaders and cut their supply line, while weeks of freezing rain and dysentery wore Brunswick's army down.

Forced to turn back, Brunswick met the French at Valmy on September 20, 1792, with the armies facing the wrong way: the French with their backs to Germany, the Prussians toward Paris. Kellermann had the windmill on his ridge torn down to deny Prussian gunners a ranging mark. In the long cannonade, standardized Gribeauval guns with prepackaged ammunition stopped the Prussian infantry after about 200 yards. When a Prussian shot blew up three French ammunition wagons, the veterans closed ranks and the volunteers held. Kellermann raised his hat on his sword and shouted Vive la Nation, and his troops sang La Marseillaise and Ça Ira. Brunswick called off the assault and retreated past the Rhine. The monarchy was abolished on September 21 and the Republic declared the next day.

• Thomas Carlyle described the campaign's weather as rain as of the days of Noah.
• Prussia also needed its army intact because Catherine the Great was moving forces into Poland.
• Out of about 70,000 combatants, casualties were roughly 300 French and 200 Prussians.
• Rumors that Brunswick was bribed with the stolen Bourbon crown jewels have no support in the archives.
• Goethe, traveling with the Prussian army, told dejected soldiers that night that a new epoch in world history had begun.

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In August 1914 Germany's Schlieffen Plan sent most of its army west and left only the Eighth Army to guard East Prussia, on the assumption that Russia would need months to mobilize. Russia instead invaded by day 15 to honor its pledge to France, but its speed hid fatal weaknesses. Its wider railway gauge stopped trains at the German border, so troops marched on foot through sandy tracks while thousands of horses ate about ten times a soldier's ration. A shortage of copper telephone wire forced General Alexander Samsonov of the Second Army to rely on radio, and because too few new codebooks had been issued, he broadcast his orders in the clear. After a German attack at Gumbinnen failed, Maximilian von Prittwitz proposed retreating to the Vistula and was relieved by Helmuth von Moltke.

Paul von Hindenburg, called out of retirement, and Erich Ludendorff met on the train east and joined staff officer Max Hoffmann. Intercepts confirmed that Paul von Rennenkampf's First Army and Samsonov's army were drifting apart, so the Germans left a screen facing Rennenkampf and shifted a corps more than 150 kilometers south by rail. Front commander Yakov Zhilinsky forced Samsonov to split his forces, Hermann von François smashed the Russian left once his artillery arrived, and by August 29 the Russians were trapped in a pocket near Frögenau. Samsonov, cut off from his radio, walked into the woods at night and took his own life.

• Hoffmann claimed Rennenkampf and Samsonov had hated each other since the Russo-Japanese War and would not help one another.
• German trains ran every 30 minutes day and night, and troops had 25 minutes to unload and clear each platform.
• François refused Ludendorff's order to attack until his heavy guns were off the trains.
• The fighting centered near Frögenau and Allenstein, about 30 kilometers from Tannenberg, a name Hindenburg chose to avenge the Teutonic defeat of 1410.
• Hindenburg later said Ludendorff panicked on the eve of battle and had to be steadied behind a hedge.

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The Teutonic Order came to the Baltic in the 13th century to fight pagans and spent a century raiding Lithuania. In 1385 Grand Duke Jogaila of Lithuania married Queen Jadwiga of Poland, converted, and was crowned Władysław II Jagiełło, leaving the crusaders without a pagan enemy but with a rich monastic state in Prussia and control of trade on the Neman, Vistula and Daugava. Grand Master Ulrich von Jungingen challenged the conversion before a papal court and fought over Samogitia, the land bridge to Livonia. When a truce expired in June 1410, Jagiełło and Grand Duke Vytautas combined about 43,000 men from 22 states and regions, including Ruthenians, Czech mercenaries and Tatar horse archers of the Golden Horde, crossed the Vistula at Czerwińsk on a prefabricated pontoon bridge, and marched on Marienburg.

On July 15, 1410, near Grunwald and Stębark, roughly 23,000 Teutonic troops waited for hours in the sun. Their bombards fired only two effective shots after rain dampened the powder, and envoys delivered two unsheathed swords to goad Jagiełło, who calmly accepted them. Vytautas' Lithuanian and Tatar cavalry fought for an hour and then fled, drawing the knights out of formation. Polish heavy cavalry struck, Ulrich was killed by a lance through the neck, and the Lithuanians returned to hit the rear. The Order lost over 200 senior brothers. The allies waited three days, failed to take Marienburg, but the 1411 Peace of Thorn's silver indemnities bankrupted the Order.

• Chronicler Jan Długosz described the Lithuanian flight as cowardice, crediting victory to the Poles alone.
• In 1963 Swedish historian Sven Ekdahl found a Teutonic letter warning future grand masters about the same feigned retreat.
• Teutonic camp followers turned on their masters as the battle collapsed.
• Germany named its 1914 victory over Russia the Battle of Tannenberg as revenge for 1410, and both Nazi and Soviet propaganda later exploited the battle.
• Surveys from 2014 to 2019 found over 1,500 artifacts and placed the main fighting a couple of kilometers from the traditional monument.

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When Toyotomi Hideyoshi died in the late 1590s, his heir Hideyori was five years old, and Tokugawa Ieyasu, the richest lord in Japan, saw an opening. His rival was Ishida Mitsunari, a loyal Toyotomi administrator who had made the military class hate him as an inspector auditing generals during the Korean campaigns. In 1598 seven generals marched on Mitsunari's mansion to kill him, and Mitsunari fled to Ieyasu, who shielded him and mediated, casting himself as the indispensable elder statesman while keeping his rival alive as a lightning rod. Japan split into Ieyasu's Eastern Army and Mitsunari's Western Army. Ieyasu bought large numbers of Tanegashima matchlocks, took Gifu Castle before the Western coalition could assemble, and pushed Mitsunari into the open valley of Sekigahara.

On October 21, 1600, about 150,000 men waited in freezing fog. Letters from that day suggest fighting began near 10 a.m. and lasted about two hours. Ii Naomasa of the crimson-armored Red Devils took the first spear charge himself, a sign the real work was done. Kobayakawa Hideaki, with 15,000 men on Mount Matsuo, had already agreed to switch sides, and Kikkawa Hiroie had delivered hostages to keep the Mori army out of the fight. Mitsunari was captured and executed. Ieyasu redistributed 6.8 million koku, confiscated the domains of 87 lords, became shogun in 1603 and ruled from Edo, beginning more than 250 years of Tokugawa rule.

• Decades later, Prussian adviser Jakob Meckel studied the deployment map and declared the Western Army must have won easily.
• The tale that Ieyasu fired matchlocks at Kobayakawa's hill to force his hand fails on distance, since the guns could not reach and the shots would not have been heard.
• Kikkawa Hiroie froze the Mori advance by telling his superiors his men were busy eating lunch.
• The Shimazu cut their way out through Ieyasu's own lines yet became the only major Western clan to keep their lands intact.
• Ieyasu promised many rewards verbally and delayed the written charters to keep new turncoat lords anxious and compliant.

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In 1915 a secret British committee that included Winston Churchill was developing land cruisers to break the trench stalemate of World War I. Shipments were first to be labeled water carriers, until the committee secretary realized the abbreviation WC meant water closet, so they settled on tank. The idea of mobile protected firepower was ancient: Han general Wei Qing ringed armored wagons against the Xiongnu around 119 BC, Jan Žižka armed war wagons in the Hussite Wars, and Leonardo da Vinci sketched a hand-cranked fighting vehicle. It only became practical when the internal combustion engine, steel plate and the agricultural caterpillar track came together. Engineers at the White Hart Hotel in Lincoln built Little Willie, which led to the Mark I, first used at the Somme in September 1916.

The Mark I was slow, roasting and full of fumes, and commanders sent tanks out in small groups. The 1918 French Renault FT set the lasting layout of rear engine and rotating turret. In 1940 German panzer divisions with a two-way radio in every tank beat French forces whose better-armored Char B1s often had none. Mass production then won out over the complex Tiger, with about 65,000 T-34s and over 40,000 Shermans built, and over 10,000 tanks at Kursk in 1943. Cold War main battle tanks faced the iron triangle of firepower, protection and mobility, answered with Chobham composite armor, the M1 Abrams gas turbine, and now active protection systems against cheap missiles.

• Robert Falcon Scott tested motorized tracked vehicles on Antarctic ice in 1911, years before tracks crossed barbed wire in France.
• Male tanks carried naval cannon in side sponsons, while female tanks carried machine guns to protect them from infantry.
• Ceramic layers in Chobham armor shatter and disrupt the superheated copper jet of a shaped-charge round.
• The Abrams' 1,500 horsepower turbine pushes over 60 tons to 45 miles per hour but demands a constant train of fuel trucks.
• Israel's Trophy system uses millimeter-wave radar to detect incoming missiles and fires explosively formed shrapnel to destroy them in the air.

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In 1816 surveyor John C. Sullivan dragged a 66-foot Gunter's chain north from the mouth of the Kansas River for 100 miles, then east to the Des Moines River, which he described as a small river with shallow, gentle water. When Missouri wrote its 1820 constitution, with Sullivan sitting as a delegate, it fixed the northern border at the rapids of the River Des Moines, wording meant to point to the Des Moines Rapids on the Mississippi. Nobody cared until 1834, when the federal government opened the Half-Breed Tract north of the line to white settlement. In 1837 Missouri hired J.C. Brown to resurvey, and he found rapids on the Des Moines River near Keosauqua, about 9.5 miles north of Sullivan's line, letting Missouri claim a strip along the whole border.

Missouri tax agents crossing into what are now Van Buren and Davis counties were chased off with pitchforks, and on the way out they cut down three hollow bee trees to settle the debt. Clark County sheriff Uriah "Sandy" Gregory was seized by an Iowa crowd and jailed in Muscatine. Missouri governor Lilburn Boggs sent militia under Major General David Willock, and Iowa territorial governor Robert Lucas called out his own. Willock refused to fight, both governors stood down, and after Iowa became a state in 1846 the Supreme Court decided Missouri v. Iowa in 1849, upholding Sullivan's line on the principle of acquiescence.

• On the frontier, honey served as sweetener, food preservative and a near currency, so the bee trees were a real economic loss.
• Iowa volunteers came armed with blunderbusses, rusty flintlocks, a plow coulter on a log chain, a six-foot sheet iron sword and a sausage stuffer.
• The Missouri militia's total pay for seven days on the border came to $46.
• A new survey in 1850 traced Sullivan's crooked line, leaving a jog near Keokuk that forms Iowa's southernmost tip.
• In 2005 surveyors with GPS were still searching for the 1850 iron markers to settle property disputes.

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On December 9, 1824, about 7,000 royalist troops holding the heights of Condorcunca in the Peruvian Andes had less than five days of food and word that Colombian reinforcements were coming. They descended to attack roughly 5,780 patriots under Antonio José de Sucre on the Pampa de Ayacucho. The royalists were weakened long before the battle. In 1820 the mutiny of General Rafael Riego at Cádiz kept 20,000 Spanish reinforcements from sailing and forced Ferdinand VII to restore the 1812 constitution. In Peru the liberal Viceroy José de la Serna then faced a revolt by the absolutist Pedro Antonio Olañeta in Upper Peru, which drained 5,000 veterans. On the patriot side, Simón Bolívar fell ill on New Year's Day 1824 and in February unpaid troops at Callao locked up their officers and handed the fortress to Spain.

At Ayacucho, Colonel Rubín de Celis dragged his guns onto the plain ahead of their infantry screen, and General José María Córdova ordered his division forward at the pace of victors and overran them. The royalist left collapsed, General Monet was wounded crossing a ravine, and La Serna's raw reserves fled. La Serna was wounded and captured, and by 1 p.m. General Canterac signed a capitulation. In Spain, returning officers were branded Ayacuchos and accused of a Masonic defeat. Olañeta was killed by his own mutineers at Tumusla in April 1825, and Upper Peru declared independence that August.

• Days earlier at Corpahuaico the royalists inflicted over 500 casualties while losing barely 30, and Sucre retreated through quinoa fields.
• Asked his plan after the Callao mutiny, Bolívar answered with one word: triumph.
• The patriot ranks included British and Irish veterans of the Peninsular War and Carlos Sowersby, who had fought at Borodino.
• Royalist losses were about 1,800 dead and 700 wounded against roughly 370 patriots killed.
• Deputy Manuel Martín Cruz argued that as Rome came from Romulus, the new nation should be Bolivia, and Bolívar passed the presidency to Sucre.

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On June 24, 1859, during the Second Italian War of Independence, roughly 300,000 soldiers collided in the hills of northern Italy. Emperor Franz Joseph I led the Austrians, while Napoleon III of France and King Victor Emmanuel II of Piedmont-Sardinia led the allied army, the last time every army on a battlefield was under the personal command of its monarch. Neither side had scouted properly. Franz Joseph had reversed his army to counterattack while Napoleon III advanced, believing the Austrians were in retreat, and the two forces ran into each other around Solferino, San Martino and Medole. A French corps held a thin five-kilometer line in the south from about 4 a.m., Napoleon III committed his Imperial Guard against Solferino, and the Austrian center broke at Cavriana around 6 p.m. At San Martino the heights changed hands repeatedly until a fourth Sardinian assault at 8 p.m.

About 40,000 men were killed, wounded or missing. Shaken by the carnage, with Prussia threatening to mobilize and French Catholics protesting, Napoleon III secretly agreed the armistice of Villafranca with Franz Joseph. Piedmont gained Lombardy but not Venetia, and Count Cavour resigned in protest. The Swiss businessman Henry Dunant, passing through Castiglione delle Stiviere, used his carriage to carry wounded men to the town's church, then wrote A Memory of Solferino, proposing volunteer relief societies and a treaty protecting medics and the wounded. It led to the first Geneva Convention and the International Committee of the Red Cross.

• The Austrian emperor's chief of staff and top adjutant general were bitter rivals sabotaging each other during the campaign.
• Napoleonic shoulder-to-shoulder formations marched into rifled muskets and artillery that hit at long range.
• Local women nursed soldiers of every army under the motto tutti fratelli, all are brothers.
• A 70-meter tower built at San Martino in 1893 honors Victor Emmanuel II, while nearby ossuary chapels hold the bones of thousands of unnamed dead.
• At the 160th anniversary in 2019, Karl von Habsburg attended a reconciliation ceremony and the EU presidency recognized Solferino as the ground where humanitarian law began.