Welcome to Dispatch: U.S. Military History Magazine. This is “This Week in U.S. Military History,” where we walk through key moments that share this week on the calendar. Today we are exploring events from February seventeenth, two thousand twenty six through February twenty third, two thousand twenty six.
From February seventeenth through February twenty third on the calendar, the story of American arms stretches from frontier diplomacy to modern mechanized war and even the first American orbits of Earth. We move from the cession of Florida and the burning of a Confederate capital to black sand beaches on Iwo Jima and armored thrusts through the deserts of Kuwait and Iraq. Along the way, we see how decisions in presidential offices, carrier ready rooms, and cramped submarines have shaped what national defense looks like in different eras. This Week in U.S. Military History is part of Dispatch: U.S. Military History Magazine, developed by Trackpads dot com. It is a busy week. Taken together, these episodes show a long tradition of adaptation, sacrifice, and, at times, hard lessons about judgment and restraint.
Our story opens on February twenty second, eighteen nineteen, when American and Spanish negotiators signed the Adams–Onís Treaty that formally transferred Spanish Florida to the United States. For years, the borderland there had been a tangle of overlapping claims where runaway enslaved people, Native communities, smugglers, and raiding parties slipped back and forth beyond the reach of officials. The border had been porous and violent. Army expeditions under leaders such as Andrew Jackson had already pushed deep into Spanish territory, showing how unstable the situation had become and how easily military crises could erupt. By acquiring Florida outright, the United States gained ports and coastal approaches that helped secure the Gulf of Mexico and allowed long-term planning for fortifications and naval stations. The treaty also clarified boundaries farther west, shaping the map on which later campaigns in Texas and the Southwest would unfold and changing the strategic geometry of the southern frontier for generations.
On February twenty third, eighteen thirty six, Mexican forces under Antonio López de Santa Anna arrived at San Antonio de Béxar and began the siege of the Alamo mission. Inside the walls, a small garrison of local Tejanos and volunteers from the United States, led by figures like William Barret Travis and James Bowie, faced a far larger army. Their improvised stronghold was a converted mission with incomplete walls, limited artillery, and too few men to cover every approach in a textbook way. They chose to stay and fight. When Santa Anna demanded their surrender, the defenders refused, committing themselves to a stand that would end in their deaths after nearly two weeks of bombardment and assault. At the time the struggle was part of a regional rebellion rather than national policy in Washington, yet its memory flowed quickly into the broader American military tradition as a symbol of last-ditch resistance and sacrifice, especially in the Southwest.
We remain in Mexico but move forward to February twenty third, eighteen forty seven, and the climax of the Battle of Buena Vista. There, near Saltillo in northern Mexico, General Zachary Taylor’s outnumbered American force, made up of regular troops and state volunteer regiments, faced a much larger army under Santa Anna along a broken landscape of ridges and arroyos. The ridges became their best allies. The Americans anchored their line on this ground, but Santa Anna spent the day probing for weaknesses, at times driving back parts of the front. Volunteer units, including formations such as the Mississippi Rifles, launched hard-fighting counterattacks that helped stabilize the situation and prevent a collapse. As darkness fell, Taylor’s line still held, and Santa Anna chose to withdraw, claiming victory but abandoning the battlefield. The result secured the American position in northern Mexico, boosted Taylor’s popularity at home, and highlighted how terrain, disciplined fire, and determined volunteers could offset superior numbers in mid-nineteenth century warfare.
On the night of February seventeenth, eighteen sixty four, off Charleston, South Carolina, the Confederate submarine H L Hunley crept toward the Union sloop of war U S S Housatonic. The Hunley was a crude but daring machine, a hand-cranked, cigar-shaped craft with a spar torpedo fixed to its bow. It was a deadly proof of concept. Its crews had already suffered fatal accidents during earlier tests, but on this mission the boat reached its target and detonated its explosive charge, sending Housatonic to the bottom in minutes. Union sailors now confronted the frightening idea that an unseen attacker could strike from below the surface, even inside a blockade. The Hunley itself never returned from the sortie, a reminder of how fragile early undersea technology remained. Yet the attack marked the first successful sinking of a warship by a submarine in combat and foreshadowed the rise of undersea warfare in the twentieth century, when submarines would shape naval strategy on a global scale.
Exactly one year later, on February seventeenth, eighteen sixty five, Union forces under Major General William Tecumseh Sherman entered Columbia, the capital of South Carolina, during the Carolinas campaign. Confederate defenses had crumbled in the face of his advance, and the fall of the city carried enormous symbolic weight because South Carolina had led the states into secession. The city paid a terrible price. That night, fires swept through large sections of Columbia, with accounts from the time conflicting over how the blazes started and who bore responsibility for the destruction. Whatever their origin, the flames wrecked a major Southern urban center and burned into local memory. For Union commanders, the capture of Columbia disrupted rail lines, workshops, and depots that had fed Confederate armies farther north. Strategically, it showed that Union forces could move deep into the interior of the Confederacy, unhinging defenses and undermining morale as the war moved toward its final chapters.
On February twenty second, eighteen sixty five, Union troops completed the seizure of Wilmington, North Carolina, after earlier taking nearby Fort Fisher and fighting their way up the Cape Fear River. Wilmington had served as the Confederacy’s last major Atlantic port, a vital outlet through which blockade runners slipped in weapons, cloth, and other supplies from overseas. The blockade had finally done its work. Once the ring of coastal forts fell and Union gunboats dominated the river, Confederate logistics suffered a severe blow. General Robert E. Lee’s army in Virginia could no longer count on imported goods reaching it through that harbor and instead had to rely on shrinking internal resources and increasingly fragile railway networks. The capture of Wilmington also gave Union planners more flexibility in moving their own troops and supplies along the coast. In the larger picture, the port’s loss marked another tightening of the vise that would soon close around Richmond and Petersburg.
Jumping ahead to February nineteenth, nineteen forty two, we move from battlefields to the home front with the signing of Executive Order nine zero six six by President Franklin Roosevelt. Little more than two months had passed since the attack on Pearl Harbor, and fears of sabotage or invasion along the West Coast ran high. The human cost was enormous. The order gave military commanders power to declare exclusion zones and remove people from them, authority soon applied mainly along the Pacific coast states. In practice, more than one hundred thousand people of Japanese ancestry, most of them American citizens, were forced from their homes and sent to inland camps under armed guard, while smaller numbers of German and Italian nationals were also affected. The armed forces now had to guard facilities, process families, and enforce vast restricted zones. Decades later, official reviews concluded that fear, racism, and political pressure had outweighed sound military judgment, leaving a lasting lesson about civil liberties and security in wartime.
In mid-February nineteen forty four, airpower reshaped two distant theaters almost simultaneously. On February seventeenth, fast carriers of the United States Pacific fleet launched Operation Hailstone against Truk Lagoon, a major Japanese stronghold in the Central Pacific. Airpower was reshaping both oceans at once. Waves of carrier aircraft struck ships at anchor, airfields, and support installations, sinking or damaging a large portion of the enemy’s local naval strength and reducing Truk’s value as a forward bastion. Just days later, beginning on February twentieth, American heavy bombers in Europe opened the concentrated campaign remembered as Big Week, hammering German aircraft factories and related targets. Losses were heavy, but the growing presence of long-range escort fighters gradually turned the air battle in favor of the Allies. Together, these operations showed how the United States was using sea-based and land-based aviation to hollow out enemy fleets and air forces before launching major ground offensives such as the Normandy invasion and the drive across the Central Pacific.
On February nineteenth, nineteen forty five, Marines of the Fourth and Fifth Marine Divisions rode their landing craft toward the black volcanic beaches of Iwo Jima under enemy fire. The island was small but strategically crucial, lying between the Marianas and the Japanese home islands and hosting airfields that could threaten American bombers. Every yard had to be earned. Japanese defenders under General Tadamichi Kuribayashi had prepared a deeply buried network of tunnels, bunkers, and concealed artillery positions rather than the more exposed defenses seen in earlier island battles. As Marines tried to climb the steep sand, machine-gun and mortar fire tore into the waves of assault troops, producing heavy casualties in the first hours alone. For the United States Navy and Army Air Forces, seizing Iwo Jima promised emergency landing strips and fighter bases closer to Japan. For the Marine units on the ground, the island quickly became a test of endurance, coordination, and small-unit leadership in some of the harshest conditions of the Pacific war.
Four days later, on February twenty third, nineteen forty five, a patrol from the Twenty eighth Marine Regiment climbed Mount Suribachi, the volcanic peak that dominated the southern end of Iwo Jima, and raised an American flag. A larger flag soon replaced the first, and an Associated Press photographer captured the image that would become one of the most reproduced photographs in American military history. The photograph traveled far beyond the island. It shows six Marines straining together to plant the flag, and for many Americans it came to symbolize the combined effort and sacrifice of the entire Pacific campaign. On the island itself, the sight of the flag lifted spirits among troops still locked in brutal fighting among ridges and ravines. Yet the moment did not mark the end of the battle, and most of the casualties on Iwo Jima occurred after that day as units pushed north against stubborn resistance. The image later appeared in war-bond drives and inspired the Marine Corps War Memorial near Washington, tying a specific patrol’s effort to a long tradition of remembrance.
On February twentieth, nineteen sixty two, Marine Corps officer John Glenn rode the spacecraft Friendship seven into orbit atop an Atlas rocket, becoming the first American to orbit the Earth. The mission lasted only a few hours and three circuits of the planet, but its weight in the Cold War competition for space was enormous. It was a carefully watched flight. Glenn’s background as a fighter and test pilot linked early spaceflight to the skills and culture of military aviation, and controllers tracked the mission closely as minor technical concerns, including worries about a possible heat-shield issue, forced adjustments to the flight plan and reentry. When the capsule splashed down safely and Navy ships recovered Glenn, the United States gained a badly needed public success after earlier disappointments in the space race. The mission highlighted the central role of military aviators, tracking networks, and recovery forces in early human spaceflight and foreshadowed later debates over the military’s role in the growing domain of space.
Finally, on the night of February twenty third into February twenty fourth, nineteen ninety one, coalition ground forces launched the main land offensive of Operation Desert Storm after weeks of intensive air strikes. United States Marine divisions attacked into Kuwait from the south while United States Army armored corps and allied units executed a wide left hook through the deserts of western Iraq to outflank Iraqi defenses. The ground war moved with startling speed. Months of planning and rehearsal meant that units surged forward with impressive coordination, backed by artillery, attack helicopters, and close air support that worked together to break enemy positions. Iraqi front-line formations, already battered from the air, often collapsed quickly, though pockets of resistance and dangerous engagements still occurred. The campaign liberated Kuwait in a matter of days and demonstrated the power of modern combined-arms maneuver supported by precision-guided munitions and real-time intelligence. For the American military, Desert Storm became a showcase of the post-Vietnam, all-volunteer force and a reference point for doctrine, training, and public expectations in the years that followed.
The events gathered within this single week’s dates show that American military power has always been about more than armies meeting in open fields. Diplomatic signatures in far-off capitals, desperate holds at frontier missions, and decisions taken in Washington offices can shape campaigns as surely as charges across ridgelines or amphibious landings on hostile shores. These days link the seizure of Florida and the fall of Confederate ports with air raids over Truk Lagoon and armored thrusts into Kuwait, showing how geography and technology constantly redefine what “defense” means for the United States. These seven days hold many lessons. Moments such as the signing of Executive Order nine zero six six remind us that wartime choices about security and loyalty can carry human costs far from the front lines. Looking across this week, we see courage and innovation, but also the need for judgment and restraint, and we connect today’s service members and citizens to a long, complicated story of how the nation has used armed force.