t1703

Thirty-two German prisoners of war dropped their shovels and refused a direct order at a U. S. Army camp in the Third Army sector, triggering a disciplinary crisis that reached Gen. George S. Patton’s headquarters within hours and ended with the transfer of the camp’s most defiant prisoner before the week was out. The standoff … Read more

LÜNEBURG, Germany — Three women who served as guards at the Bergen-Belsen concentration camp were hanged at Hamelin Prison on December 13, 1945, becoming the first women executed under British military law in the aftermath of World War II, as the world received its first unfiltered glimpse into the industrialized horror of the Holocaust. The … Read more

Five former female guards of the Stutthof concentration camp were hanged together before a crowd estimated at 200,000 people on a hill overlooking Gdansk, bringing to a close one of the most closely watched war crimes proceedings to emerge from the ashes of the Second World War. The executions, carried out at Biskupia Górka on … Read more

The men of Easy Company, the celebrated paratroopers of World War II immortalized in the HBO miniseries “Band of Brothers,” did not ride off into a simple sunset after the guns fell silent in 1945. Their lives after the war were as varied, complicated, and at times as tragic as the combat they endured, and … Read more

Vice President Hubert Humphrey walked out of the Oval Office on a February afternoon in 1965 visibly shaken, his face flushed, his composure shattered — and according to staff accounts, he closed the door to his private office and wept, sobbing so loudly that aides outside could hear him. The confrontation that broke him had … Read more

Declassified documents and newly surfaced historical records are reigniting one of the most explosive questions in American history: did the Central Intelligence Agency possess both the motive and the operational machinery to remove President John F. Kennedy before his fateful trip to Dallas in November 1963? The question, long dismissed by official investigations as the … Read more

Gen. George S. Patton, the most feared commander in the U. S. Army, stood in his command tent in Sicily on July 22, 1943, staring at a report that would have ended most officers’ careers. Maj. Gen. Terry Allen’s 1st Infantry Division had disobeyed a direct order again, pushing twelve miles beyond the halt line … Read more