Battle of Cherbourg: Brutal Urban Combat After D-Day (June 1944) 🇺🇸🇩🇪
After D-Day, U.S. forces fought intense battles through the streets of Cherbourg to capture the strategically vital deep-water port, a key objective of the Normandy campaign.
As American soldiers cleared the city block by block, German prisoners were rounded up and local civilians struggled to salvage their lives amid the destruction.
After days of fierce urban fighting, U.S. forces gradually secured the city, paving the way for a crucial Allied supply hub in France.
Digitally restored, enhanced, and presented with sound design to recreate how these moments may have looked and sounded at the time.
On this day in 813, a Bulgarian khan routed a Roman emperor, then rode to the gates of Constantinople to remind everyone he drank wine from the skull of the last emperor he killed.
His name was Krum, and the Byzantines were terrified of him. Two years earlier he had ambushed and destroyed an entire imperial army, killed Emperor Nikephoros, and had his skull lined with silver and turned into a drinking cup. He passed it around at feasts.
In 813 the new emperor, Michael I, marched out to settle things near Adrianople. The two armies sat staring at each other for days. When the fighting finally started at Versinikia, the Byzantines actually had the bigger force.
It did not matter. Part of the imperial army broke and ran almost immediately, and to this day historians argue whether it was panic or deliberate betrayal by ambitious officers who wanted the throne for themselves. Either way the line collapsed, and Krum's men ran them down.
The defeat destroyed Michael. He abdicated within weeks, and one of the generals at the battle, Leo the Armenian, took the crown. Krum, meanwhile, rode all the way up to the walls of Constantinople itself and reportedly made sacrifices outside the gates while the city watched.
He was preparing a massive assault on the capital when, the next spring, he suddenly dropped dead. The city he terrified outlived him.
1,213 years ago today.