This book is a rousing collection of eyewitness accounts detailing 150 of the most crucial battles in the past 2,500 years of world history. From the Spartan defeat of the Athenians at Delion, recounted in 424 b.c. by Thucydides, to a fighter pilot’s firsthand account of an air attack by a squadron of Tornados on Iraq in Operation Desert Storm, with dramatic immediacy this stirring Mammoth volume chronicles 25 centuries of military history in the words of the hoplites, knights, musketeers, foot soldiers, cavalrymen, and bombardiers who fought them. Drawn from the reports both of commanding officers and of rank-and-file soldiers in the presentation of critical battles in such military conflicts as the Crusades, the Hundred Years War, the American War for Independence and Civil War, and World Wars I and II, the book’s selections provide both an overview of what happened and a vivid picture of what it was like in the trenches or on the field when it happened. Where it happened ranges from Antioch to Agincourt to Austerlitz to Antietam, from Bunker Hill to San Juan Hill, from the Crimea to the Somme, from Crecy to Coruna to Khe Sanh in Vietnam. Throughout, editor Richard Lawrence places the eyewitness accounts in a narrative context and includes more than 50 maps that situate the battles and the fields where this volume’s officers and infantrymen momentously made history.