q1903 On December 21, 1945, at 5:47 p.m., General Dwight Eisenhower sat in his office at the Farbin Building in Frankfurt, Germany, reading a cable from the 130th Station Hospital. General George S. Patton Jr. had died at 5:50 p.m., twelve days after a car accident near Mannheim. He was sixty years old and paralyzed from … Read more
Le bip de la machine à carte a résonné dans la pharmacie bondée comme une alarme, suivi du cri du caissier qui a fait tourner toutes les têtes vers moi. Je suis Colette, 71 ans, ancienne surveillante générale de collège. Ma belle-fille pense que je ne suis qu’une vieille veuve distraite, mais elle oublie que … Read more
On the morning of January 11, 1945, Franklin Roosevelt read his intelligence brief before breakfast at the White House. He had been president for twelve years, managing economic collapse, world war, and the daily difficulty of leading a democracy that did not always wish to be led where it needed to go. The file that … Read more
At 6:41 on the morning of January 3, 1945, the war room at 12th Army Group Headquarters in Luxembourg City was already running at full hum. Signals traffic moved in and out. Situation maps were being updated. Overnight reports from six different corps were being assembled into the picture that Omar Bradley would read over … Read more
On August 10, 1943, General Dwight Eisenhower sat in his headquarters in Algiers reading the most damaging report he had received since taking command of Allied forces in the Mediterranean. Two medical officers had submitted formal complaints about General George S. Patton. The complaints described incidents at two evacuation hospitals in Sicily. Patton had physically … Read more
On June 3, 1944, Salzburg hosted a lavish wedding while the Second World War entered its fifth year. Millions had already perished across Europe, and the Allied invasion of Nazi-occupied Europe was only days away. Adolf Hitler presided over the ceremony at Mirabell Palace. The celebration then moved to the Eagle's Nest high in the … Read more
On June 22, 1941, under the code name Operation Barbarossa, Nazi Germany invaded the Soviet Union, its former partner in the war against Poland. Within weeks, German forces swept across vast stretches of the East, including Lithuania, Latvia, and Estonia, the three Baltic states that Stalin's Soviet Union had annexed the previous year. The German … Read more
L’appel est arrivé un mardi soir de septembre, trois semaines avant le mariage de mon fils. Je me rappelle avoir regardé le nom s’afficher sur l’écran du téléphone, le nom d’un traiteur que je ne connaissais pas, et j’ai failli ne pas décrocher. Les démarcheurs, les erreurs de numéro, tout ça, je connaissais. Mais j’ai … Read more
Quand mon mari est parti, notre divorce avait scellé la fin d’une époque, j’ai tout reconstruit seule. Ma fille était mon absolu, mon unique priorité, et je ne l’ai jamais lâchée d’une semelle, jamais manqué un rendez-vous, jamais failli à une promesse. Je la revois encore avec ses nattes brunes et ses genoux écorchés, fillette … Read more
Maria Mandl was born on January 10, 1912, in the Austrian town of Münzkirchen, then part of Austria-Hungary. Her father worked as a shoemaker, and after attending elementary school she became a clerk for the Austrian Post. She was 26 years old when Adolf Hitler annexed Austria into the German Reich in the event known … Read more