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Davids vs Goliaths part I: The Winter War

Nathan Drescher — Thu, 02 Oct 2025 15:02:34 GMT

Simo Häyhä lay in the snow at -40°C. A farmer from southern Finland, he’d killed somewhere north of 500 Soviet soldiers with his iron-sighted rifle. No scope. No fancy equipment. Just patience, white camouflage and an intimate knowledge of frozen wilderness survival. The Soviets called him “White Death.” He preferred to stay quiet and let his rifle do the talking.

Häyhä wasn’t alone. In the winter of 1939-1940, an entire nation of farmers, hunters, and reservists was about to give Joseph Stalin the most embarrassing military lesson of his career.

Welcome to our next big series!

Islands of Blood is finished. It took two and half years to explore the island battles of the Pacific War. Now, we’re moving on to the next series: Davids vs Goliaths. This time we’ll be exploring when smaller nations or armies defeated much larger opponents. And to kick off the series we’re looking at one of the most definitive modern David vs Goliath stories around: the 1939-1940 Winter War between the giant USSR and little Finland.

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From drones to SIM cards, this is what modern war looks like

Nathan Drescher — Mon, 15 Sep 2025 15:15:16 GMT

A buzzing drone can mean the death of an entire squad. A stray cell phone signal can pinpoint your location, and even your nationality. The Ukraine war has stripped away the old rules of the battlefield and revealed something new: a war where the physical and the digital come together in brutal ways.

The battlefields of Ukraine have forced militaries all…

The Unendurable: The end of WWII

Nathan Drescher — Thu, 21 Aug 2025 12:06:17 GMT

80 years feels like a long time ago but it’s nothing in the grand scale of history. It’s a life. If you have a grandparent in their 90s today, they remember 80 years ago. Some may have been serving in the military at the time. Most will recall the day in August when the greatest conflict in human history finally came to end.

It did so in two fiery flash…

Islands of Blood XIII: Okinawa

Nathan Drescher — Tue, 15 Jul 2025 10:45:16 GMT

There are places in the Pacific where you can still hear the whispers of the war. The scarred reefs of Tarawa and the rusting wreckage dotted around Guadalcanal give glimpses of the battles that took place 80 years ago. Okinawa is different. It doesn’t merely whisper: it hollers.

I knew this series would end on the rocky hills of Okinawa when I first set out to write Islands of Blood. After all, the island is part of the Japanese homeland, only 340 miles from Japan, and where the entirety of the Second World War played out its final, brutal military campaign. Before Hiroshima changed everything, Okinawa was to be the prelude to a full scale invasion of Japan. It was the last island the Americans would fight over in the bloody Pacific War.

Okinawa may be a historic part of Japan, but its people are not Japanese. They consider themselves Okinawans. They speak a dialect of Japanese different from the home islands, and those in Tokyo wouldn’t understand them if they spoke in their native tongue. It’s a tropical island filled with limestone and coral, palm trees and papaya. Okinawa is to Japan what Hawaii is to the United States of America.

Operation Iceberg

Early 1945, and the gargantuan American war machine has battled its way across the Pacific Ocean. It leaves a trail of airfields and sunken warships in its wake, along with the names of places that would never be forgotten: Iwo Jima, Peleliu, Tarawa, Saipan, Leyte, Guadalcanal. There’s one target left: Okinawa.

Larger than Saipan, closer to Japan than Iwo Jima, and absolutely vital to any planned invasion of the Japanese homeland for the deployment and subsequent supply of a campaign of such magnitude. Both American and Japanese planners know that if the US can take Okinawa, the full weight of the American military would be on Japan’s doorstep.

Roundup from the Command Post: What to read this week

Nathan Drescher — Wed, 09 Jul 2025 16:35:27 GMT

I love reading what other sharp minds are writing about across the Substack battlefield. There are deep dives into conflicts I’ve never heard of, and fresh takes on tanks and generals. There really is something deeply satisfying about discovering history through someone else’s lens. So in that spirit, here are some standout reads I know you’ll enjoy fro…

Davids vs Goliaths, and such

Nathan Drescher — Tue, 11 Mar 2025 15:15:52 GMT

This year has been intense, and it’s only two months old. The USA has become somewhat unhinged in global affairs, the war drums around the world are beating at a fever pitch, and the weather sucks.

We’re stuck in this weird timeline whether we like it or not. The best we can do is take some solace from similar times in history when the chessboard was co…

Ukrainians capture a Russian

Nathan Drescher — Sat, 08 Mar 2025 15:34:05 GMT

Incredible footage of Ukrainian forces engaging with and capturing a Russian soldier, and then saving his life.

Incredible photos from Operation Bagration

Nathan Drescher — Wed, 05 Mar 2025 17:01:26 GMT

I recently stumbled upon a collection of incredible photographs taken during the Soviet’s massive offensive of summer 1944 that drove through Belarus and into Poland. These were posted on Reddit by u/Iron_Cavalry.

A warning: these photographs are graphic, and fully capture the horror of the war on the eastern front.

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Quick backgrounder

The Germans were in…

Blood & Mud: Allied medical treatment in the First World War

Nathan Drescher — Wed, 22 Jan 2025 15:46:36 GMT

“This was the home of the great god Pain, and for the first time I looked through a devilish chink into the depths of his realm.”
- Ernst Junger, Storm of Steel, 1915

The scale of suffering in the Great War is hard to imagine more than 100 years on. Between 22 million and 30 million were killed, making it one of the deadliest conflicts in human history. …

Top 7 worst war movies ever

Nathan Drescher — Tue, 22 Oct 2024 13:45:50 GMT

There are a lot of bad war movies out there. Directors and writers take way too many liberties when creating these spectacles, which doesn’t make sense when you consider the audience they’re pandering to. Us.

That is, history buffs. And we know our shit. Compound that with the insane cost of producing a war movie, and you’d think they would take extra s…

Forager in the Marianas

Nathan Drescher — Tue, 27 Aug 2024 14:00:14 GMT

One of the more fascinating things about the island of Guam is how many South Koreans take their honeymoons here. The island is an active US military base with a large naval and air force presence. It’s been a key strategic island for the United States since 1898, when they first took it from Spain.

It’s a beautiful island and the largest in the Mariana…

Ukraine invades Russia

Nathan Drescher — Thu, 08 Aug 2024 17:55:11 GMT

It began as a three-day special military operation to take Kyiv. Two and a half years later Russian forces are desperately trying to stem a Ukrainian advance into the Kursk Oblast. The Ukrainian armoured column has advanced nearly 20 km in three days and captured five Russian towns and over 100 Russian army POWs.

At least 1,000 Ukrainian troops, along w…

The mighty Matilda

Nathan Drescher — Tue, 06 Aug 2024 11:28:13 GMT

Sometimes it’s the little ones you gotta watch out for. At the Royal Australian Armoured Corps museum in Puckapunyal, in Victoria, Australia, there’s a still-operational Matilda tank from the Second World War. It’s among 70 specimens of this much-loved British light tank still working around the world. The Matilda was small, cramped, and it only had a t…

The Great Marianas Turkey Shoot

Nathan Drescher — Thu, 25 Jul 2024 19:12:19 GMT

The Philipinne Sea is arguably the most beautiful stretch of the Pacific Ocean you’ll ever find. The waters are calm and a deep blue. Little tropical islands are scattered around, complete with white sand beaches and palm trees. Most of the islands to the east, known as the Marianas, were formed by tectonic plate movements. There’s a lot of that going o…

Bradleys & HIMARS in Ukraine

Nathan Drescher — Tue, 25 Jun 2024 17:44:42 GMT

America’s surplus weapon systems left over from the 1990s is proving to be more than a match for Russian forces in Ukraine. I’m talking specifically about the M142 HIMARS and the M2 Bradley, both of which have been used extensively in Ukraine.

The US government donated 39 HIMARS systems to Ukraine at the end of 2022, on the condition that the large calib…

Retracing the Band of Brothers

Nathan Drescher — Tue, 18 Jun 2024 11:03:11 GMT

There’s no denying that Band of Brothers is one of the greatest war series ever produced. I’d challenge anyone here to think of a better series. The show as historically accurate and the production duo of Tom Hanks and Steven Spielberg put a lot of effort into research.

This is great for us history nerds, because it means we can retrace exactly where Ea…

T-34s vs M4 Shermans in Korea

Nathan Drescher — Fri, 14 Jun 2024 11:01:48 GMT

It was sunset, and the port at Pusan was bustling with activity. There were several large American cargo ships moored up, and many more waiting their turn in the bay. Cranes were unloading trucks and 105mm howitzers from the ships. Korean workers were busy running all over the place, while streams of American GIs were unloading from the boats down long …

The Last Banzai: the battle of Saipan (with maps!)

Nathan Drescher — Thu, 30 May 2024 11:44:01 GMT

Hell’s Pocket. Death Valley. Purple Heart Ridge. These were just some of the names given to places around the island of Saipan by the US Marines who fought there from 15 June to 9 July, 1944. The battle of Saipan was only a month long, a short time by Second World War standards, but it was one of the bloodiest engagements of the campaign in the Pacific.…

Black Friday 1944

Nathan Drescher — Thu, 21 Mar 2024 20:27:07 GMT

The sounds of Rolls Royce Merlin engines roaring over the south of England have been replaced by the steady hum of traffic and commercial jet liners. But in 1944 there were more than 2,000 heavy bombers taking off and landing at over 100 air bases. Many of these airfields have been abandoned and are still visible today.

More than a million men and women …

Horror on Marye's Heights

Nathan Drescher — Tue, 27 Feb 2024 16:00:16 GMT

“See there! A field officer has been struck by one of the missiles and a couple of men who have raised him to his feet are calling loudly for more help to get him off the field. As the line advances up the slope, men wounded and dead drop from the ranks.” - Union private Ben Borton - Martin, Jeremy, Storming Marye’s Heights, Unseen Histories

“When the fi…