Did you know that Fold3 has a huge number of documents from World War II about the Women’s Army Corps (WAC), including hundreds of photos? If you’re not already familiar with the WAC, you might be surprised to find out just how versatile this group was during the war. The WAC was originally formed as…
In early March 1918, soldiers with the flu began reporting to the infirmary at Camp Funston, an army training camp in Kansas. Within three weeks, 1,100 men at that camp had also come down with the flu. It was the start of a pandemic that would kill as many as 100 million people worldwide. Though…
On March 2, 1865, Philip Sheridan‘s Union troops under the command of George A. Custer defeated Jubal Early‘s Confederate force at Waynesboro, Virginia, ending the last Confederate threat in the Shenandoah Valley. Both armies had been wintering in the Shenandoah Valley after a series of Union victories that had hit Early’s troops hard. In February,…
After General Sherman’s destructive march through Georgia at the end of 1864, he turned his army north to the Carolinas. When they reached Columbia, the capital of South Carolina, in mid-February 1865, the Union troops found the Confederates forces already evacuating. According to Sherman, there was no plan to burn Columbia, aside from destroying strategic…
This month marks the 200th anniversary of the end of the War of 1812. The hostilities formally ended on February 17, 1815, at 11 p.m., when President Madison exchanged ratification documents for the Treaty of Ghent with a British representative. Although both countries had been exploring the possibility of peace since almost the beginning of…
January 5 marks the day in 1942 that Rear Admiral Ben Moreell was given authorization to create the Seabees, the naval force that would carry out an astonishingly diverse array of construction tasks at home and abroad for the Navy during World War II. The creation of the Seabees (short for Construction Battalions) was deemed…
On January 15, 1865, Fort Fisher, in North Carolina, fell after a three-day combined land-and-sea assault by Union troops. In December, Union major general Benjamin Butler had tried to bring down the Confederate fort (known as the “Gibraltar of the South” for its defenses) with the assistance of Rear Admiral David D. Porter but had…
