Hello and Welcome!
This site is currently supporting the third year-long history series by Mother of Tanks (Sasha Maggio), collaborating with the US Army Combined Arms Center and the Army’s Center for Military History, along with CMH’s Community of Interest and FC61 Historians.
The “Why We Fight ~ 1943” series will cover the full year, 1943, with a focus on the remaining months of the North Africa Campaign, and into the Mediterranean and European Theaters.
There is a Pacific Theater is covered by historians with the National Museum of the US Marine Corps.
The content has been expanded this year. In the first two years/series, I stuck mainly to producing two thread on Twitter each week. This year, the Tuesday thread is on my Twitter account and Saturday’s threads are on the Combined Arms Center’s account. Links to all these accounts are on the Links page. Twitter discontinued the Moments feature so I have brought links to all of these series to this website. You can find them in the Saved Threads tab above.
The Twitter threads are being turned into narrated video presentations to make accessing them more convenient and also to help folks keep up if they find it easier to listen than read 40-50 tweets or so – I know some of my threads get really long! Those presentation videos are on my MoT YouTube account.
There are some behind the scenes and “my process” videos on TikTok and YouTube videos as well. By the end of this year I should have a reusable template that PAOs and other historians can use to create their own series in this style, though probably not on the same scale because this is a huge commitment even for me – Once I finish 1945 (in 2025) I will likely dial it back a bit.
On my MoT Facebook page, and often shared in a shorter form on Instagram, you can find “This Day in History/80 Years Ago” types of posts. These would ideally be daily but I don’t always have the time and I don’t always have a story to share on each day, so I post what I can.
Reference materials — YouTube, Twitter, and Facebook will often include links to references at the end of the post or thread or, in the case of YouTube, in the description box.
And the Podcast quickly became a much bigger part of this project than I anticipated, but that’s ok! I had thought I’d be lucky to find folks to help me fill 24 episodes. It looks like we might double that throughout the year. I am completely blown away by this level of enthusiasm and I hope that this project helps our audience find ways to connect with our history and understand the importance of this time period.
Thank you for the continued support, enthusiasm, and encouragement to do this. Considering it is largely a “passion project” and hobby for me, the enthusiasm and encouragement has kept me going now into the third year, and I think this one is shaping up to be the best one yet!