The Garden State has made innumerable contributions to our nation's military history, on both battlefield and homefront, but many of those stories remain hidden within the larger national narrative. Perhaps the most crucial one-day battle of the Revolution was fought in Monmouth County, and New Jersey officers engineered the conquest of California in the Mexican War. During the Civil War, a New Jersey unit was instrumental in saving Washington, D.C., from Confederate capture. In World War II, New Jersey women flocked to war production factories and served in the armed forces, and a West Orange girl helped ferry Spitfire fighters in England. War came home to the coast in 1942 with the sinking of the SS "Resor" by a German submarine, but the state's citizens reacted by contributing everything they could to the war effort. Uncover these and other stories from New Jersey's hidden wartime history.

On December 7, 1864, William McGee, a drummer boy from Newark, New Jersey, was credited with leading a Federal force to a decisive victory over the Confederates in a clash just thirty miles from the carnage at Franklin. This 15-year-old Irish-American, on convalescent duty and acting as an orderly to General Lovell Rousseau, was recognized for the capture of two guns, several hundred prisoners, and the saving of Fortress Rosecrans in Murfreesboro from the famed Nathan Bedford Forrest. For his actions, young McGee would soon be awarded a Medal of Honor, written up in newspapers and books as a glorious New Jersey legend, be commissioned as a lieutenant in the United States Army at age 18, and then, inexplicably at the height of his notoriety, virtually disappear from history for more than 100 years. This is the story of a lost war hero, a man-child with the world at his feet, whose fall from grace is accelerated by fame, lies, alcohol, bigamy, and murder.