Apr
03
You know about the Doolittle Raid – or at least, you should. On April 18, 1942 – just over four months after the Pearl Harbor attack – sixteen B-25B Mitchell medium bombers took off from an American aircraft carrier, and bombed Tokyo. They did this without any fighter escort, and...
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Mar
28
The eight-shot, semiautomatic M1 Garand rifle got the American infantryman through both the Second World War and Korea. General George S. Patton called it "the greatest battle implement ever devised.” But times change, and so do standard-issue rifles. Next, the military tried something that at a distance looked a lot...
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Mar
19
You’ve heard of John Paul Jones, the first great hero of the United States Navy. But remember that in his heyday, there was no “U.S. Navy” as we think of it. All we had was the prequel, the Continental Navy. And we had yet to build a single warship. At...
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Mar
14
When did our country make itself independent from British rule? Was it when the “shot heard ’round the world” was fired at Lexington? Was it when John Hancock and 55 other patriots signed the Declaration in Philadelphia? Was it at Yorktown? Or did it take until 1783, when the Treaty...
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Feb
26
“A primary object should be the education of our youth in the science of government,” said George Washington. And how well do you think we’re doing with that right now? Not so well. In fact, if we look around at the political turmoil around us, we might assume we’ve failed...
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Feb
26
(In photo above, Myron Harrington uses a radio during the assault on Dong Ba tower during the Battle of Huế in 1968.) The Relic Room lost a friend, and the whole country lost a hero – a great American – on Feb. 19, when Col. Myron Harrington, USMC-Ret., passed away...
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Feb
04
Few of us are experts on the Vietnam War, but most of us have heard that perhaps the greatest flaw in the way the United States conducted it was that military higher-ups in Saigon collected, believed and passed to Washington information that indicated the fight was going better than it...
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Jan
11
If you’re of a certain age, you may recall a silly comedy film from 1965 called “Those Magnificent Men in Their Flying Machines.” It made slapstick fun of man’s often improbable early attempts to conquer the skies. But in real life, there were men in the first part of the...
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Jan
08
Folks who are not historians tend to think of warfare in terms of things that go bang – rifles, machine guns and bombs. But for most of human history, certainly since the start of the Iron Age, combat was all about the cold, sharp, naked blade. Especially the sword. That’s...
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Dec
16
When you enter the South Carolina Confederate Relic Room and Military Museum, you will find a new certificate recognizing its extraordinary efforts to commemorate the service of South Carolinians in the Vietnam War over the last few years. The museum received the recognition because the U.S. Department of Defense found...
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