PN1501

Colonel William Crawford, a veteran frontier commander leading a 465-man militia expedition against British-allied Indian towns along the Sandusky River, was burned alive at the stake, his bones reduced to “almost ashes,” according to the harrowing eyewitness account of Dr. John Knight, the expedition’s surgeon, who escaped captivity after bludgeoning his guard and walking nearly … Read more

Field Marshal Erwin Rommel, the legendary “Desert Fox” of the German Wehrmacht, privately conceded in the final months of his life that the American Third Army under Lieutenant General George S. Patton Jr. had achieved “the most astonishing achievements in mobile warfare” he had ever witnessed, according to his personal papers compiled nine years later … Read more

Tokyo’s most triumphant broadcast of the Pacific War was built on a lie so complete that the empire that told it would never recover from believing it. On October 16, 1944, Imperial Radio announced to a starving nation that Japanese aviators had destroyed 11 American aircraft carriers, two battleships and three cruisers in the waters … Read more

  VIENNA — Margaret Theresa of Spain, Holy Roman Empress and the central figure of Diego Velázquez’s masterpiece “Las Meninas,” died at the Hofburg Palace on March 12, 1673, at the age of 21, her body destroyed by a genetic inheritance that the most powerful family in Europe had spent two centuries deliberately constructing.   … Read more

MADRID — The autopsy report that landed on the desks of Europe’s royal courts in November 1700 read less like a medical document and more like a confession of two centuries of biological self-destruction. Charles II, the last Habsburg king of Spain, had died at thirty-eight with a heart the size of a peppercorn, lungs … Read more

On a frozen road outside Arlon, Belgium, on the afternoon of December 22, 1944, a 19-year-old infantryman from Worcester, Massachusetts, sat on the running board of a stalled supply truck with hands cracked open at the knuckles and boots soaked through, and he had not eaten a hot meal in three days. He did not … Read more

FRANKFURT, Germany — The processing line at a German POW camp outside Frankfurt had been routine for hours when General George S. Patton stopped walking, his eyes fixed on a single prisoner whose neck bore a chain of metal that caught the April sunlight and revealed a horror no American soldier present would ever forget. … Read more