Wars and famous battles flashcards

What's in it

Every deck follows the course outline, with tags you can study or suspend topic by topic. Open a deck to study its free sample right here.

Study guide

Topics covered

The decks follow the order of the course outline. Numbers are cards per topic.

• Greece & Persia 13
• Alexander the Great 9
• Rome & Carthage 13
• Late Antiquity & Early Middle Ages 7
• High & Late Middle Ages 17
• Early Modern Wars 15
• Napoleonic Wars 18
• Colonial Wars 8
• American Revolution 18
• War of 1812 9
• Texas & the Mexican-American War 10
• Civil War 44
  • 1861–1862 15
  • 1863 14
  • 1864–1865 15
• Causes of the War 15
• Western Front 19
• Eastern & Other Fronts 16
• War at Sea & in the Air 10
• Home Fronts & U.S. Entry 15
• Armistice & Peace 17
• Road to War 13
• Blitzkrieg & the Battle of Britain 13
• Eastern Front 14
• North Africa & Italy 10
• War in the Atlantic 11
• D-Day to Berlin 15
• The Holocaust 16
• Japan's Expansion & Pearl Harbor 15
• Turning Points in the Pacific 11
• Island Hopping 18
• The U.S. Home Front 22
• The Atomic Bombs & Surrender 14
• Aftermath 10

A study plan

• 17 new cards a day covers everything in a month, leaving the last weeks for review.
• 9 new cards a day covers everything in two months, leaving the last weeks for review.
• 6 new cards a day covers everything in three months, leaving the last weeks for review.

Willys schedules reviews for you (FSRS spaced repetition), so the daily number above is only for new cards; reviews of what you have learned come back on their own. Study a topic's cards right after you meet it in class, suspend topics you have not reached yet, and use the app's quiz mode in the final two weeks.

How to get these decks

1. Install Willys on your iPhone, iPad or Mac — App Store. 14-day free trial, then $14.99 a year.
2. In Willys, tap Exam Library at the top of your Decks (or Browse Exam Library… under the + button), find the exam on its shelf or by search, tick it and tap Add.
3. Study. The exam comes in as its own collapsible folder, every card scheduled by FSRS spaced repetition. Nothing you already have is changed.

About these cards

Review status: Second-reader reviewed, with corrections applied.

Checked against:

• Checked against Encyclopaedia Britannica and edited reference works (Gale's Encyclopedia of World History: War, Encyclopedia of Modern Europe, Encyclopedia of Russian History and Renaissance: An Encyclopedia for Students; Europe, 1450 to 1789; the Oxford Companion to British History; the Oxford Dictionary of Phrase and Fable; the Columbia Encyclopedia; the New Catholic Encyclopedia; the Encyclopedia of World Biography; World Encyclopedia; the Neue Deutsche Biographie) on the battles and wars covered, with disputed dates and figures (e.g. Tours 732/733, army sizes) left out or flagged; also against scholarly books (Pollock and Maitland's History of English Law; Ian Worthington's and Richard Stoneman's lives of Alexander; Peter Brown, The Rise of Western Christendom; Lynn White Jr, Medieval Technology and Social Change; Hertslet's Map of Europe by Treaty), Frederick the Great's Politische Correspondenz, the Pleiades gazetteer (ISAW, NYU), the Polish History Museum, Blenheim Palace's official site and Merriam-Webster (reference only; no text copied). All wording original.
• World History Encyclopedia (worldhistory.org), consulted, not copied.
• Also checked against primary texts in published English translations (Herodotus, Thucydides, Xenophon's Hellenica, Arrian's Anabasis, Polybius, Diodorus, Plutarch, Velleius Paterculus, Suetonius, Ammianus Marcellinus, Lactantius, Eusebius, Augustine, Jordanes, Froissart, the Tours (732), crusade and 1453 accounts in the Internet Medieval Sourcebook and De Re Militari, the Berlin Decree, Cervantes, and the Treaty of Münster of 24 October 1648 from the Avalon Project), Shakespeare's Henry V, Southey's Life of Nelson, and the battle and history pages of the National Army Museum, Royal Museums Greenwich, English Heritage and the Fondation Napoléon (reference only; no text copied).
• Checked against National Park Service battlefield and park history pages (nps.gov; US government work), the treaty texts in the Yale Law School Avalon Project (Paris 1763 and 1783, Ghent, Guadalupe Hidalgo), the National Archives Milestone Documents and the State Department Office of the Historian (archives.gov, history.state.gov; US government works), Library of Congress exhibitions (loc.gov), Ulysses S. Grant's Personal Memoirs (Project Gutenberg; public domain), the Texas State Historical Association's Handbook of Texas, the Dictionary of Canadian Biography, Encyclopedia Virginia, the South Carolina Encyclopedia and American Battlefield Trust battle summaries (battlefields.org). Reference only; all wording original.
• Also checked against the Naval History and Heritage Command's Dictionary of American Naval Fighting Ships (history.navy.mil; US government work), Parks Canada's history of the Fortress of Louisbourg, the National Battlefields Commission's account of the 1759–1760 battles on the Plains of Abraham, John Burgoyne's A State of the Expedition from Canada (London, 1780; Internet Archive; public domain), Polk's war message to Congress of May 11, 1846 (Miller Center), the 1864 election results in the American Presidency Project, the Alamo's official site (thealamo.org) and the Mexican state and municipal records on the Niños Héroes (Congress of Durango, City of Acapulco) (reference only; no text copied).
• Checked against Imperial War Museums First World War pages, the Canadian War Museum First World War pages, National Army Museum (UK) pages, the National Archives (US) Milestone Documents on the Zimmermann Telegram and the Fourteen Points, the U.S. Office of the Historian (history.state.gov), CDC 1918 pandemic history pages, and Encyclopaedia Britannica reference entries (reference only; all wording original).
• Also checked against the treaty and document texts of the Avalon Project (Yale Law School) and the World War I Document Archive (Brigham Young University Library), the Representation of the People Act 1918 as enacted (legislation.gov.uk, Open Government Licence v3.0), Hansard, other National Archives (US) pages, the Library of Congress (U.S. Reports), the 2019 Armenian Genocide resolutions of the U.S. House and Senate (H. Res. 296, S. Res. 150), the U.S. Naval History and Heritage Command, Arlington National Cemetery, the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum Holocaust Encyclopedia, Veterans Affairs Canada, the National WWI Museum and Memorial, the New York State Military Museum, the Musée de l'Armée, the Palace of Versailles, the Truman Library, the American Battle Monuments Commission, the British Red Cross, the London Museum and the RAF Museum; edited reference works (the Oxford Companions to British History and to American Military History, the Oxford Dictionary of Phrase and Fable, Gale's Encyclopedia of Modern Europe, Encyclopedia of Russian History, World War I Reference Library and Americans at War, the Dictionary of American History, the Encyclopedia of World Biography, the Encyclopedia of Western Colonialism since 1450 and World Encyclopedia); and scholarly books (among them Tuchman, The Guns of August; Henig, Versailles and After; Spiers, A History of Chemical and Biological Weapons; Spencer C. Tucker, The Great War 1914-18; Chatty, Displacement and Dispossession in the Modern Middle East) (reference only; no text copied).
• Australian War Memorial (awm.gov.au), consulted, not copied.
• Deutsches Historisches Museum, LeMO (dhm.de/lemo), consulted, not copied.
• Checked against the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum Holocaust Encyclopedia (ushmm.org); the Avalon Project's texts of the Versailles Treaty, the Munich Agreement, the Nazi-Soviet Pact and its secret protocol, the 1940 Franco-German armistice, the Yalta Conference protocol, the German surrender instruments and the Nuremberg indictment and judgment (avalon.law.yale.edu); Hansard (api.parliament.uk); Admiral Ramsay's Dunkirk despatch (London Gazette, 17 July 1947); the U.S. National Archives (archives.gov) and the State Department's Office of the Historian (history.state.gov); the RAF Museum's Battle of Britain history (rafmuseum.org.uk); Bletchley Park (bletchleypark.org.uk) and GCHQ's history page on the 1939 Pyry meeting (gchq.gov.uk); Naval History and Heritage Command pages (history.navy.mil); the Auschwitz-Birkenau State Museum (auschwitz.org), the Majdanek State Museum (majdanek.eu) and the Dachau Concentration Camp Memorial Site (kz-gedenkstaette-dachau.de); the Eisenhower Presidential Library (eisenhowerlibrary.gov), the American Battle Monuments Commission (abmc.gov), the Miller Center (millercenter.org), GOV.UK's history of past prime ministers (gov.uk), the United Nations' Holocaust Outreach Programme (un.org) and the National WWII Museum (nationalww2museum.org); Imperial War Museums history pages (iwm.org.uk) and Encyclopaedia Britannica; the National Army Museum, Royal Museums Greenwich, the Canadian War Museum, Veterans Affairs Canada, The Canadian Encyclopedia, the National Park Service and the International Churchill Society; and edited reference works (the Oxford Companions to British History and to American Military History, the Oxford Dictionary of Phrase and Fable, Gale's Encyclopedia of Modern Europe, Encyclopedia of Russian History, World War II Reference Library and Encyclopedia of U.S. History: War, the Dictionary of American History and the Encyclopedia of World Biography). Reference only; all wording original.
• Checked against the National Archives (milestone documents on Executive Orders 9066 and 8802, the GI Bill and the Marshall Plan; the "We Can Do It!" still-picture record; Prologue magazine and the "A People at War" exhibit on the Navajo code talkers; the guide to the Office of Price Administration's records; the Commission on Wartime Relocation report via DocsTeach; the FDR Library's blog), Public Law 100-383 (Civil Liberties Act of 1988) on govinfo, the Supreme Court's opinions in Korematsu v. United States (1944) and Trump v. Hawaii (2018), Naval History and Heritage Command battle histories and its pages on the Navajo code talkers, the U.S. Strategic Bombing Survey's Summary Report (Pacific War), Louis Morton's The Fall of the Philippines (U.S. Army official history), the U.S. Army's history of the 442nd Regimental Combat Team, the National Security Agency's cryptologic history of Midway, the judgment of the International Military Tribunal for the Far East, the State Department Office of the Historian, the Avalon Project texts of the Japanese Instrument of Surrender and the Soviet declaration of war on Japan, the National Diet Library texts of the Potsdam Declaration and the Constitution of Japan, the war-damage records of Japan's Ministry of Internal Affairs and Communications, the UN Charter, Truman Library public papers and education pages, the CIA's history of the Navajo code talkers, the U.S. Department of Energy's Manhattan Project history and National Park Service pages, the National Security Archive (George Washington University), the National WWII Museum, Densho, Encyclopaedia Britannica, the Battleship Missouri Memorial, the Smithsonian National Air and Space Museum, the Atomic Heritage Foundation, TreasuryDirect, the Marine Corps' own history of Tarawa, the American Presidency Project text of Executive Order 9024, edited reference works (the Oxford Companions to American Military History and to United States History, Oxford's World Encyclopedia, Dictionary of World Religions and Pocket Dictionary of Current English, the Dictionary of American History, Gale's World War II Reference Library, Korean War Reference Library, American Home Front in World War II, Encyclopedia of U.S. Economic History, Europe Since 1914, Encyclopedia of Espionage, Intelligence, and Security, Encyclopedia of World Biography, Encyclopedia of Sex and Gender and St. James Encyclopedia of Popular Culture, the Encyclopedia of Western Colonialism since 1450, the Columbia Encyclopedia) and scholarly books (Heinrichs, Threshold of War; Feis, The China Tangle; Carlson, Joe Rochefort's War; Astor, The Greatest War; Fogel, ed., The Nanjing Massacre in History and Historiography; Large, Emperor Hirohito and the Pacific War; Wetzler, Hirohito and War; Yamashita, Daily Life in Wartime Japan and Leaves from an Autumn of Emergencies; Pacific War Research Society, Japan's Longest Day). Reference only; all wording original.
• Checked against the references used by the Wars & Battles study decks: Encyclopaedia Britannica entries; edited reference works (the Oxford Companions to British History, to American Military History and to United States History, the Dictionary of American History, Gale's Encyclopedia of Modern Europe, Encyclopedia of the Early Modern World, Encyclopedia of World Biography, World War II Reference Library and American Home Front in World War II, and World Encyclopedia) and scholarly books (among them Heinrichs, Threshold of War; Carlson, Joe Rochefort's War; Holmes, Double-Edged Secrets; Falkenhayn's memoir, General Headquarters 1914-1916); American Battlefield Trust battle summaries (battlefields.org); the National Archives, Library of Congress and National Park Service (US government works); Imperial War Museums, the U.S. Office of the Historian, the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum Holocaust Encyclopedia, Naval History and Heritage Command pages and the National WWII Museum. Disputed dates and figures are left out. Reference only; no text copied.
• Also checked against Herodotus, Thucydides, Xenophon and Polybius in public-domain English translations; treaty and surrender texts in the Yale Law School Avalon Project; the National Diet Library's text of the Potsdam Declaration; Hansard (api.parliament.uk); the World War I Document Archive (Brigham Young University); Ulysses S. Grant's Personal Memoirs (public domain); the American Presidency Project (UC Santa Barbara); the National Army Museum, Royal Museums Greenwich, RAF Museum, English Heritage and the National WWI Museum and Memorial; the Eisenhower Presidential Library; the CDC; and the U.S. Department of Energy's Manhattan Project history (osti.gov). Reference only; no text copied.
• Original questions written for this deck; no official, textbook or question-bank items were copied.

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