Defeat This Quiz About Historic Battle Sites

Anzac Day occurs every year on April 25 to commemorate the Australian and New Zealand Army Corps (ANZAC) who aided Allied Forces in their attempt to conquer Gallipoli, a peninsula in modern-day Turkey, from the Ottomans during World War I. Though the Ottomans were successful in their defense, Anzac Day remains an important day of remembrance for Australians and New Zealanders.

The Battle of Hastings was a fight for the English crown between the recently enthroned Harold Godewineson and the invading Duke William of Normandy. During the skirmish, King Harold was slain by a chance Norman arrow. Pope Alexander II later ordered William to make penance for his invasion, after which William commissioned an abbey on site that stands to this day.

Considered the deadliest one-day battle in American history, the Battle of Antietam occurred during the Civil War, on September 17, 1862, in Sharpsburg, Maryland. Though the battle was considered a tactical draw, it gave President Lincoln enough confidence to subsequently issue the Emancipation Proclamation ending slavery in Confederate states. The site is now under the purview of the National Park Service and features more than 90 monuments honoring fallen soldiers.

The Battle of Dien Bien Phu was a 1954 conflict in the First Indochina War. The result was a decisive Vietnamese victory that drove French colonizers out of the country for the first time since 1884. In the wake of the battle, the region was divided into North and South Vietnam, thus laying the framework for the Vietnam War.

Now known as Volgograd, the city of Stalingrad was successfully defended by the Soviets against German invasion from August 22, 1942, until February 2, 1943. The battle is considered the largest in WWII and perhaps in human history, as total casualties approached 2 million. A 280-foot-tall memorial statue called “The Motherland Calls” was completed in 1967 to honor those lost.

The Battle of Thermopylae occurred in 480 BCE during the Greco-Persian Wars, and served as the basis for the 2006 film “300.” Greek king Leonidas led an army of just 7,000 men against King Xerxes I of the Achaemenid Empire and his troops, which were estimated to number between 70,000 and 300,000 men. In 1955, King Paul of Greece erected a statue of Leonidas at the site to honor his bravery.

The Lion’s Mound in Waterloo, Belgium, is a 141-foot-tall artificial hill topped with a cast-iron lion that was constructed as a memorial to the Battle of Waterloo, which saw a decisive defeat of Napoleon’s army in 1815. King William I of the Netherlands ordered the mound’s construction, which consists of earth collected from the surrounding areas where the battle occurred.

“The shot heard round the world,” a phrase coined by poet Ralph Waldo Emerson, was fired on April 19, 1775, during the Battles of Lexington and Concord. It occurred just after dawn during a skirmish between about 700 British soldiers and 500 members of the Colonial militia, marking the start of the Revolutionary War. The site is now part of the Minute Man National Historical Park.

President Abraham Lincoln uttered the now-famous phrase “a new birth of freedom” during his Gettysburg Address, which was delivered during the dedication of the Gettysburg Civil War Cemetery on November 19, 1863. Months earlier, the Battle of Gettysburg had marked a turning point in the American Civil War. You can learn about its history today at the Gettysburg National Military Park.

D-Day, also known as the Normandy Invasion or Operation Overlord, marked a turning point in World War II and saw Allied forces land on five separate beachheads in the Normandy region of France: Omaha, Utah, Juno, Sword, and Gold. The event occurred on June 6, 1944, and is considered the largest amphibious invasion in military history. Today, the beaches are marked with a variety of memorials and remembrance sites.