Military & Wartime

Pierce County, WA

This plaque honors Army Sergeant First Class Nathan Ross Chapman, a Special Forces soldier from the Pacific Northwest. In the opening weeks of the war in Afghanistan that followed the September 11 attacks, Chapman is widely remembered as the first U.S. soldier killed by enemy fire in that conflict. His community dedicated this tribute—'We now have a Hero'—in 2005.

Charlotte, NC

On December 3, 1780, General Nathanael Greene took command of the battered Southern Continental Army at Charlotte, replacing Horatio Gates after the disaster at Camden. A self-taught Rhode Island Quaker's son, Greene rebuilt the ragged force and waged a brilliant war of maneuver against Cornwallis across the Carolinas. He never won a major battle outright, yet steadily bled the British toward defeat.

Irene, TX

Louisiana-born Nathaniel Addison took up arms as a soldier in the Texas Army in 1836, the year Texas won its independence. He lived on to 1900, dying in Hill County long after the frontier struggles of his youth. This marker also remembers his wife, Margaret Ann, a Missouri native who shared his pioneer life.

West Columbia, TX

Nathaniel C. Hazen arrived in Texas in January 1836, at the height of the revolution against Mexico. Captured with James Fannin's command, he was led out to be executed in the Goliad massacre of March 27, 1836, yet managed to escape that mass killing. He went on to fight at the decisive Battle of San Jacinto in Captain William H. Patton's company, only to die in Columbia before the year was out.

City of Rochester, NY

Colonel Nathaniel Rochester was a Revolutionary War veteran and Maryland landholder who, in the early 19th century, purchased a tract of land along the Genesee River and laid out the settlement that would grow into the booming flour-milling city bearing his name. This small park in the South Wedge neighborhood was dedicated in 2008 to honor that founder while celebrating the diverse community that thrives there today. The marker links Rochester's frontier-era origins to the everyday life of one of its historic close-knit neighborhoods.

Town of Huntington, NY

Nathaniel Whitman (1732–1804) served as an officer in the Huntington militia during the American Revolution, one of the citizen-soldiers who defended Long Island's towns in a war fought close to home. After the British victory at the 1776 Battle of Long Island, the region fell under a harsh occupation that made local militia service both perilous and essential. His home and grave mark the life of one of the many ordinary patriots whose service rarely reached the history books.

Philadelphia, PA · est. 1999

When George Washington died in December 1799, Philadelphia was still the nation's capital, and Congress set aside December 26 for formal mourning. The national memorial service filled Zion Lutheran Church, which stood on this site from 1766 to 1870, with President John Adams among the mourners. It was here that Congressman Henry Lee delivered the immortal eulogy remembering Washington as 'first in war, first in peace, and first in the hearts of his countrymen.'

Groton, CT

At Groton, Connecticut — the historic home of America's submarine force — this memorial centers on an actual submarine conning tower and honors the 3,617 submariners lost during World War II. Fifty-two engraved granite stones ring the site, one for each U.S. submarine that never returned from patrol. The submarine service suffered the highest casualty rate of any branch of the U.S. armed forces in the war.

Corpus Christi, TX

Commissioned in March 1941 as the nation prepared for war, Naval Air Station Corpus Christi grew into one of the country's great flight schools, graduating some 35,000 aviators and earning the nickname 'the University of the Air.' Its trainees included future president George H. W. Bush and astronaut-senator John Glenn, while hundreds of WAVES served as instructors, controllers, and technicians across its many auxiliary fields.

Quincy, MA

Naval Air Station Squantum, on the Quincy shoreline, was one of the early cradles of American naval aviation, hosting flights and reserve training from the 1910s into the early Cold War. These reinforced bunkers safely stored the station's ordnance until the ammunition depot was abandoned in 1953 as the base wound down. Their thick walls and earthen mounds are among the last physical traces of a once-busy military airfield.

Key West, FL

The United States bought this harbor-front lot in Key West in 1833, and Congress authorized a Naval Depot here in 1852, built under the supervision of Capt. J.M. Scarritt and Lt. J.J. Philbrick. Key West's deep harbor made it a strategic foothold for the young republic's navy, guarding the vital shipping lanes of the Florida Straits. The storehouse later served as U.S. Coast Guard headquarters.

Corsicana, TX

When Texas joined the Confederacy, roughly 87 men from Navarro and neighboring counties enlisted at Corsicana in July 1861 as the Navarro Rifles, led by county founder Clinton M. Winkler. Formally Company I of the 4th Texas Infantry, they marched east to Virginia and fought under the celebrated Texas general John Bell Hood. From their baptism of fire at Yorktown to Hood's bayonet charge at Gaines' Mill outside Richmond, the company earned a fierce reputation, closing the war with 19 dead, 59 wounded, and 10 captured.

Chapel Hill, NC

In May 1942, as the nation mobilized for World War II, forty-four African American musicians enlisted together at Chapel Hill and broke the United States Navy's color barrier by entering at general rank. Known as the Navy B-1 Band, they were among the first Black sailors admitted beyond the messman's role the Navy had long reserved for them. Their music opened a door the service had kept shut.

New York, NY

Along this walk, a living memorial of trees was planted to honor the great sea fights of World War II — from the surprise blow at Pearl Harbor in December 1941 through the carrier duels at the Coral Sea and Midway in 1942, the desperate night actions off Guadalcanal at Savo Island and Cape Esperance, the far-northern clash near the Komandorski Islands, and the climactic Pacific battles of the Philippine Sea and Leyte Gulf. Dedicated in the mid-1940s, the tablet turns a quiet promenade into a roll call of the naval engagements that decided the war at sea. Each named battle marks a turning point where American and Allied fleets blunted and then rolled back Axis power across two oceans.

Point Blank, TX

Born in Georgia in 1795, George Tyler Wood came to Texas in 1839 and rose through the Republic's Congress, the 1845 Annexation Convention, and the first state Senate, which he left to fight in the Mexican War. As governor from 1847 to 1849 he rallied defenses against frontier raids, urged public schools and land sales to pay the state debt, and had Texas's laws codified, its library founded, and its penitentiary built. He is buried near here.

Galveston, TX

In the winter of 1816–1817, Galveston Island sheltered a polyglot force of adventurers united in the cause of freeing Mexico from Spain. Two young leaders — the impetuous Spanish general Francisco Xavier Mina and the French privateer Louis-Michel Aury, already styled "Commissioner" of Galveston — drilled troops and stockpiled supplies here. Mina sailed in April 1817 with eight ships and some 235 men; he won early victories before being defeated and killed, while Aury remained behind raiding Spanish shipping.

Crabbs Prairie, TX

Mark Manning was born in 1750 and served in the American Revolution from the Halifax District of his native North Carolina. Living to a remarkable old age, he came to Texas at the age of 97 to join sons who held large land grants and helped settle Walker County—sons who had themselves fought in the Texas Revolution. Manning was one of some twenty or thirty Revolutionary War veterans who followed the nation's westward movement all the way to Texas, and he is buried in a nearby family cemetery.

Dallas, TX

Marie Isabella "Belle" Boyd became one of the Confederacy's most celebrated spies, beginning her career at just seventeen when she reportedly shot a Union soldier who had threatened her mother. Charming Federal officers into revealing secrets that reached Confederate hands, she endured several imprisonments and eventual exile before reinventing herself as a lecturer and dramatic reader. In the 1880s she lived in a stately mansion near this Dallas site with her third husband before selling the house in 1887.

Junction, TX

In the early 1850s the U.S. Army strung a line of frontier posts from the Red River to the Rio Grande, and this route carried supplies from headquarters in San Antonio to Fort Terrett. Two-thirds of Texas then lay under Comanche control or the threat of raids, so the road was a lifeline of protection. After the fort closed in 1854, settlers adopted the military road as their main路 to San Antonio, and it appeared on county maps into the 20th century.

Tyler, TX

Founded in 1862 by gunsmiths J. C. Short and William Biscoe with Col. George Yarbrough, this Tyler plant contracted to arm Texas troops with thousands of rifles before the Confederate government bought it out in 1863. Staffed by 150 to 200 men—tanners, blacksmiths, carpenters, and draftsmen alongside the gunsmiths—it turned out .54-caliber rifles, cartridges, and canteens by the hundreds of thousands. Its output helped keep Confederate forces west of the Red River supplied against a feared Federal invasion of Texas.

East Columbia, TX

Brothers J. H., George, and David Dance opened a shop on the Brazos River in 1850 that would become one of Texas's few native arms makers. During the Civil War the shop produced revolvers to help arm the Confederacy, prized for their precision. In peacetime the Dances also built machinery for grist mills, cotton gins, sugar refineries, and sawmills.

Merkel, TX

On February 15, 1870, Corporal Hilliard Morrow and five soldiers of Company E, 24th U.S. Infantry, rode from Fort Griffin to relieve the guard at the Mountain Pass mail station. Soon after they arrived, a Comanche raiding party estimated at seventy-five warriors besieged them, but the vastly outnumbered soldiers held their ground and drove off the attack, losing no men though the raiders made off with army mules and a horse from the mail company.

Galena Park, TX

On April 19, 1836, as Sam Houston's army raced toward destiny, soldiers tore up the flooring of Isaac Batterson's house to build rafts and ferry the troops across rain-swollen Buffalo Bayou. Some 248 men, many of them ill, were left behind at the Batterson place while the rest marched on to triumph at San Jacinto two days later. Batterson, a New York transplant, had bought the land in 1835 and named his settlement "Clinton" for his old home — the community that would one day become Galena Park.

Anahuac, TX

In June 1832, after fighting broke out at Anahuac over the heavy-handed rule of Mexican agent Juan Davis Bradburn—who had jailed colonists including the young William B. Travis—settlers gathered at Turtle Bayou. There they drafted resolutions condemning President Bustamante's violations of Mexico's 1824 constitution and calling Texans to the cause of civil liberty. Many who signed would fight in the Texas Revolution just four years later.

San Felipe, TX

Near this spot in the old capital of Anglo-American colonization stood a town hall built about 1830 that became a cradle of Texas self-government. Within its walls met the Conventions of 1832 and 1833 and the Consultation of 1835, and the provisional government operated here until Texas declared independence in March 1836. As the Mexican army advanced weeks later, the building and the town of San Felipe were burned to deny them to the enemy.

Canyon, TX

The Panhandle town of Canyon spent years trying and failing to fund a public hospital before Dr. Robert A. Neblett stepped in. A Tennessee-born, University of Texas–trained specialist in children's medicine, he announced in 1937 that he would build one himself, and that year a sixteen-room, air-conditioned hospital rose on 16th Street. It closed while he served nearly two and a half years in the Pacific during World War II, reopened on his return, and cared for Canyon residents and West Texas State students until 1975.

Tyler, TX

Before the waters of Lake Palestine swallowed it, the Neches Saline was a salt lifeline for East Texas—Spanish missionaries recorded its brine springs as early as 1765, and settlers boiled water from shallow wells to harvest the salt a frontier economy could not do without. Local salt-making faded in the 1850s as cheaper English salt arrived, but the Civil War's Federal blockade revived it: one operator was reported to run twelve furnaces here, turning out about a hundred bushels a day for the Confederacy.

Nederland, CO

High in the Colorado Rockies above the old mining and mill town of Nederland, this memorial honors every resident who has worn the nation's uniform. Like thousands of community war memorials across the country, it gathers the service of many generations—from distant wars to recent ones—into a single place of remembrance.

Needham, MA

This town memorial honors the men and women of Needham who served in the armed forces across every American conflict. Rather than singling out one war, it gathers generations of local service—from those who marched off to distant fronts to those who stood watch in peacetime—into a single tribute. Community memorials like this became a fixture of the New England town landscape, a public acknowledgment of shared sacrifice.

Needham, MA

This Needham memorial remembers three local residents—Susan L. Blair, Lisa Fenn Gordenstein, and David E. Retik—who were killed in the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001, along with all the innocent victims of that day. The attacks struck flights that departed from nearby Boston, making the loss especially close for Massachusetts communities. The inscription's promise that "the fruit of the innocent is a tree of life" turns private grief toward hope and remembrance.

Pittsburgh, PA

Alexander Negley was among the German-speaking immigrants of Swiss descent who streamed into eastern Pennsylvania in the 1730s and later pushed west toward the Ohio country. After serving in the War for Independence, he brought his family to the forks of the Ohio in 1778 and took up land along the wooded ridges that are now Pittsburgh's Highland Park — frontier ground when the Revolution was still being fought. His homestead helped anchor one of the early European settlements in what was then the western edge of American reach.

Austin, TX

Master builder Abner Cook raised this Greek Revival mansion of hand-cut limestone around 1853 in the young capital of Austin, using a mortar famously bound with pig bristles. In its early decades it served as Texas's first Institute for the Blind and, in 1865, as a hospital for Civil War soldiers, before becoming home to Republic of Texas figure Col. Andrew Neill and later Judge Thomas B. Cochran. Its walls trace Austin's growth from frontier town to state capital.

Bardstown, KY

Nelson County, formed in 1784, honors Thomas Nelson (1738–89), a Virginia planter-statesman who served in the House of Burgesses, the first provincial convention, and the Continental Congress, where he signed the Declaration of Independence. As commander of the Virginia militia and wartime governor, he is remembered for ordering American guns to fire on his own house at Yorktown when the British made it their headquarters.

Leggett, TX

Nelson Henry Rice and Sarah Ann Stanley married in Alabama in 1841 and, having buried several children there, brought the rest of their family to Texas in 1854, finally settling this land in 1865 on about a thousand acres. Local memory holds that Rice drove a stake into this very spot and declared it his burial place; he also deeded land for nearby Wilson Chapel and gave plots to his children, seeding the Rice community. Civil War, World War I, and World War II veterans rest among the more than 140 graves.

Sulphur Bluff, TX

In December 1842 a wagon train from Warrick County, Indiana, led by two Hargrave brothers, reached the Sulphur River country, and settlement soon followed. The earliest burial came in 1843, and over decades several nearby graveyards—McFall, Hargrave, and the church plot at Pleasant Hill—merged into what became Nelta Cemetery when the community took the name of its 1882 post office. Trustees expanded the grounds through land purchases into the 1920s.

Bremond, TX

The prairie community here was first named for early farmer Absalom Beck, then renamed Nesbitt after a postal clerk misspelled the Nisbett family's store name in 1900. In 1875 A. J. Sharp donated former Methodist church property for burials and a school, and the Beck Prairie Missionary Baptist Church organized the same year. The church disbanded in 1956 and deeded its property to the cemetery, which endures under the care of descendants.

Nescopeck, PA · est. 1948

On this ground stood Nescopeck, a village of Shawnee and Delaware people along the Susquehanna. After General Braddock's shattering defeat in 1755 opened the Pennsylvania frontier to raids, the town became a gathering place for Native fighters aligned against the English, until the building of Fort Augusta the following year shifted the balance. For that brief, violent interval it sat at the heart of the borderland war.

Nye County, NV

Chosen in 1950 as the nation's continental proving ground, the Nevada Test Site sprawls across 1,350 square miles of isolated desert flats where nuclear devices were detonated for defense and other purposes beginning with the first test on Frenchman Flat in January 1951. It became the country's principal nuclear-explosives testing laboratory and one of the most vivid landscapes of the Cold War. Beneath that atomic history lies far deeper time: archaeology reveals some 9,500 years of continuous human occupation, most recently by the Southern Paiute.

Mount Pleasant, TX

The Nevill family came from Tennessee to Titus County in 1838, laying out a family burial ground on their headright survey, where the earliest grave dates to 1854. Among those resting here is James "Sam" Rowland, a Nevill son-in-law and one of the few men officially hanged in the county. Deeded to a Baptist church in 1906, the cemetery grew to more than 1,100 graves and became home to an annual decoration day begun in 1913.

Collier Township, PA · est. 1947

This stone house called Woodville was built in 1785 by General John Neville, a Revolutionary War officer who later took the unpopular job of federal excise inspector for western Pennsylvania. When enraged whiskey rebels burned his nearby Bower Hill mansion in July 1794, his family fled here for refuge, one violent flashpoint in the tax revolt that soon drew a presidential army. Woodville still stands as one of the region's oldest homes.

New Braunfels, TX

Founded in 1845 during the days of the Republic of Texas by Prince Karl of Solms-Braunfels, New Braunfels became the focal point of German immigration into central and western Texas. During the Civil War the town sent men and supplies to the Confederacy. Today it is a historic and recreational hub, home to Landa Park, the Sophienburg Museum, and the Comal, billed as the shortest large-volume river in the country.

Brackettville, TX

When Fort Clark's aging 1870s cavalry barracks crumbled, the Army built three modern stone replacements in 1931–1932, and this fourth barracks rose on ground left vacant since the post commissary burned in 1892. Its state-of-the-art bays, mess hall, and offices were showcased to justify keeping Fort Clark as a permanent post. Over the next decade it quartered the 5th U.S. Cavalry, the Texas National Guard, the Buffalo Soldiers of the African-American 9th Cavalry, and, during World War II, 182 African-American women of the Women's Army Corps.

Montgomery, TX

Founded on December 1, 1868 to relieve the crowded "Old" Methodist plot, this Montgomery burial ground gathers a remarkable cross-section of early Texas. Among those at rest is Dr. Charles B. Stewart, a signer of the Texas Declaration of Independence and the young Republic's first secretary of state, alongside soldiers of the Texas army and veterans of the Civil War and later American conflicts. Its first interments were three men killed by vigilantes, a stark reminder that frontier order was still being fought for.

New York, NY

In the Staten Island neighborhood of New Dorp — one of the oldest European settlements on the island, its Dutch name meaning "new village" — residents raised this tribute to the local men and women who answered the call during World War II. Between 1941 and 1945, communities across America sent a remarkable share of their young people into the armed forces, and small neighborhoods like this one kept careful count of their own. Memorials like this were typically erected by neighbors, veterans' posts, and civic groups in the years during and after the war to make sure those names were never treated as anonymous.

Portsmouth, NH

In quiet town squares and cemeteries across New Hampshire, stones like this one keep a standing promise: that no soldier, sailor, airman, or Marine who was captured or never came home will be forgotten. The abbreviation POW/MIA — prisoner of war, missing in action — became a fixture of American memory during and after the Vietnam War, when families and veterans pressed the nation to keep accounting for the missing, giving rise to the familiar black-and-white flag and annual remembrance vigils. This memorial widens that vow to every conflict, honoring Granite State men and women lost or held captive across the whole span of America's wars. Portsmouth, a seacoast community with deep naval and shipbuilding roots, is fitting ground for such a pledge.

Portsmouth, NH

When the United States entered the Great War in 1917, New Hampshire sent thousands of its young men into the trenches of France and onto the decks of a wartime navy, and roughly 700 of them never came home. This monument in Portsmouth — long a Navy town anchored by the historic Portsmouth Naval Shipyard — was raised by a grateful state to honor everyone who served between America's 1917 entry and the peace that followed in 1919. It belongs to the wave of memorials that communities across the country built in the 1920s and 1930s to fix the war's sacrifice in bronze and granite before living memory faded.

Mineola, TX

New Hope Cemetery grew alongside the New Hope Baptist Church, organized in 1864, with its earliest surviving gravestone dating to 1875. Sold to the church for a single dollar in 1917, the ground carries the customs of its people — rock cairns, a tabernacle, and graves once kept as bare mounded barrows. Confederate and Union veterans lie here together, alongside educators, leaders, and neighbors, tended still by descendants who gather yearly.

Wills Point, TX

To draw settlers to the community that became New Hope, Mexican War veteran William James set aside land after 1871 for a school, church, and cemetery, and is believed to be the first person buried here. The oldest surviving marker belongs to Frances E. Whitfield, who died in 1876, and another grave is thought to hold a woman who died while traveling the Dallas–Shreveport Road in 1880. Four Confederate soldiers rest here as well, including one who surrendered with General Robert E. Lee.

Paulding County, GA

In the spring of 1864, the hills of Paulding County became a battleground as Union armies drove south toward Atlanta and Confederate forces dug in to slow them. The fighting around New Hope Church was close, wooded, and brutal, and many of the dead were laid to rest here where they fell, their names lost to the chaos of the campaign. This stone stands over those unknown soldiers, marking a place where a war's grand strategy came down to men buried by neighbors and comrades in a country churchyard.

Beckville, TX

Begun in 1870 in the rural community once called Scruggs, New Prospect Cemetery took shape on land donated by homesteaders for a church and graveyard, its oldest recorded burial that of Elizabeth Scruggs. More than a hundred graves lie unmarked among the pioneer settlers, many of them children, resting here. Veterans of the Civil War, both World Wars, and the Korean War are buried in its grounds, still tended by descendants.

Longview, TX

This Gregg County cemetery grew up around the New Providence Missionary Baptist Church, founded in the 1880s, with its first recorded burial in 1896. Fire, windstorm, and lightning destroyed the church, and the congregation disbanded—reorganizing only briefly to tend the graves. Among the fifty-eight burials rest veterans of five American wars, a former county judge, and a former district judge.

New York, NY

New York Life Insurance Company is one of America's oldest and largest mutual insurers, its Manhattan headquarters a fixture of the nation's financial life since the 19th century. On Memorial Day, May 30, 1946, the company's own American Legion chapter — NYLIC Post 503 — dedicated this memorial to the employees who had left their desks to serve in the armed forces in wartime, most recently the millions of Americans just home from the Second World War. Corporate honor rolls like this bloomed across the country after both World Wars, as businesses reckoned with how many of their own had gone to fight.

Comanche vicinity, TX

Pioneers reached this stretch of Comanche County in the mid-1850s and named their settlement for the nearby South Leon River. In 1872 P.W. Brewer set aside land for a cemetery and church, and the oldest documented grave, that of Rosie E. McCurdy, dates to 1875. Renamed Newburg in the 1880s, the graveyard holds local pioneers and veterans of conflicts reaching back to the Mexican War.

Newport, KY

At the mouth of the Licking River where it empties into the Ohio, the U.S. Army built Newport Barracks in the early 1800s to anchor its presence on the young nation's western river frontier. For most of the nineteenth century the post served as a recruiting depot, supply base, and mustering ground, sending soldiers downriver through the War of 1812, the Mexican-American War, and the Civil War. Chronic flooding at the low riverside site eventually drove the Army to abandon it in the 1890s for higher ground at nearby Fort Thomas.

Newport, KY

Newport was a mustering point in the War of 1812, where Kentucky volunteers crossed the Ohio in August 1812 to march to the relief of General Hull at Detroit. Their campaign turned tragic at Frenchtown on the River Raisin, where all but thirty were killed or captured days after taking the town. A second wave gathered here in 1813 and, led by Governor Isaac Shelby, helped defeat the British and their Native allies at the Battle of the Thames, ending the fighting in the Old Northwest.

Chevy Chase, MD

In 1774, on the eve of the Revolution, Thomas Johns—soon to serve as a colonel in the Continental cause—joined Georgetown merchant Thomas Richardson to raise flour mills along the reliable current of Rock Creek. Grinding grain into flour for the growing capital region, mills operated on this site for roughly a century, outlasting the men who built them and falling silent only in the 1870s. In an age before steam, a dependable creek was industrial infrastructure, and Rock Creek's waters turned the stones that fed Georgetown's wharves and tables.

Newton, TX

Newton Cemetery has served this Newton County seat since it was formally set aside in 1903, though its first burial came in 1864 when landowner G.W. Robinson laid his young son to rest. After Robinson's death the land passed to another resident who donated it as a public burial ground. Its graves hold veterans of the Civil War and both World Wars, Korea, and Vietnam, and since 1943 a citizens' association has cared for the site.

Midlothian, TX

This family plot holds the Newtons, Peters Colony pioneers who reached the Ovilla area in the 1840s. Patriarch Larkin Newton, born in South Carolina in 1794, was a War of 1812 veteran who fought at the Battle of New Orleans and served as a county commissioner in three states before settling in Ellis County, where he built a schoolhouse for his family. The oldest grave is his own, from 1858, joined over time by his wife, children, and grandchildren.

Newton, TX

By 1941, with mechanized armies overrunning Europe, the U.S. Army confronted its own unreadiness and staged the massive Louisiana Maneuvers, sprawling across 3,400 square miles of Texas and involving nearly half a million troops in 19 divisions. Newton County residents opened their land to the exercises, where troops, tanks, vehicles, and aircraft flying 'flour' bombing raids rehearsed modern combat. The maneuvers of 1941–1944 phased out the horse cavalry and taught the Army how to fight — and win — a mechanized war.

Newton, TX

During the Civil War, remote Newton County became a vital Confederate supply corridor, guarding against Federal attempts to push up the Sabine River and into Texas. Confederates threw up breastworks and kept an arsenal at Burkeville, while "The Old Beef Trail" drove thousands of Texas cattle eastward as far as Mobile—its ferries fitted with pens and ox-led swimming herds. Towns like Farrsville tanned leather, ground corn, and made boots for the army, and the county, which had voted 178 to 3 for secession, sent some 400 men to fight.