Y1806

American infantrymen of the 5th Infantry Division crossed the Rhine River at Oppenheim, Germany, in the pre-dawn darkness of March 23, 1945, executing the first planned assault crossing of the war’s most formidable natural barrier more than 24 hours ahead of Field Marshal Bernard Montgomery’s massive Operation Plunder — and without informing Supreme Headquarters in … Read more

ROME — The United States military commission in Rome delivered a verdict that would echo through every officer’s barracks in occupied Europe: Gen. Anton Dostler, commander of the German 75th Army Corps, was guilty of murdering 15 American soldiers in uniform, and he would die before a firing squad. The decision, handed down in October … Read more

LONDON — In the gray pre-dawn hours of mid-January 1945, a government car slipped through blacked-out London streets carrying a man who had crossed the Atlantic not to attend a meeting, but to confront a wound that paper could not heal. General George C. Marshall, Chief of Staff of the United States Army, had read … Read more

LONDON — For nearly half a century, the most consequential royal servant in Britain waged a quiet, relentless campaign against the American divorcée who brought down a king, and newly examined accounts of his life reveal that Tommy Lascelles reached his damning verdict on Edward VIII years before Wallis Simpson ever entered the picture. Alan … Read more

FRANKFURT, Germany — The German officers walked into the hall with their faces set like stone, determined to surrender without surrendering their pride, and George S. Patton had already made certain that their defiance would mean nothing. On May 8, 1945, inside a requisitioned Wehrmacht officers hall that had been transformed overnight into a formal … Read more

American field kitchens were delivering hot, freshly cooked meals to infantrymen pinned down in foxholes under enemy fire — a logistical achievement so far beyond the reach of the German Wehrmacht that its officers recorded it in combat diaries with open disbelief, according to wartime reports and military historians. The revelation, drawn from Wehrmacht internal … Read more

When Adolf Hitler declared war on the United States in December 1941, the aristocratic Prussian-trained generals of the German High Command did not flinch. They believed they were facing a nation of shopkeepers, factory workers, and farm boys — a mongrel people, as Nazi propaganda minister Joseph Goebbels had spent years insisting, soft, decadent, and … Read more

LONDON — The Allied breakout across France in August 1944 left British commanders so profoundly bewildered that many could not explain, even to themselves, how American armored columns were advancing 30 to 60 miles a day through territory that military textbooks said should have been impossible to cross. The shock inside the British High Command … Read more