INDOPACOM Battle Knowledge Centers

Spanning more than 500 years of military events, the book begins its coverage with the Battle of Mabila in 1540 during the Age of Discovery and ends with the Second Battle of Falluja during the Iraq War/Insurgency in 2004. The 100 battles spotlighted in this work are deemed to have had the greatest impact on American history.

In November 1965, some 450 men of the First Battalion, Seventh Cavalry, under the command of Lt. Col. Harold Moore, were dropped into a small clearing in the Ia Drang Valley. They were immediately surrounded by 2,000 North Vietnamese soldiers. Three days later, only two and a half miles away, a sister battalion was brutally slaughtered. Together, these actions at the landing zones X-Ray and Albany constituted one of the most savage and significant battles of the Vietnam War.

Stephenson assembles an impressive roster of the world's best military historians and writers to discuss the impact of geography on military strategy and history. This collection of essays, illustrated with vintage and modern maps, offers geographic adventure around the world, across centuries, and through every kind of terrain, shedding new light on famous battles and introducing less well-known-but nevertheless significant-moments in military history.

In Battling the Elements, geographer Harold A. Winters and former U.S. Army officers Gerald E. Galloway Jr., William J. Reynolds, and David W. Rhyne, examine the connections between major battles in world history and their geographic components, revealing what role factors such as weather, climate, terrain, soil, and vegetation have played in combat. Each chapter offers a detailed and engaging explanation of a specific environmental factor and then looks at several battles that highlight its effects on military operations.