Y1806

By May 1945, Germany was a country in ruins. Cities burned through the night, factories stood silent, and railway stations overflowed with refugees. The roads of the collapsing Third Reich became rivers of fear. Old men pushed broken carts through the mud. Women carried children wrapped in blankets. Exhausted German soldiers wandered westward with empty … Read more

On the morning of December 22, 1944, four figures in field gray uniforms stepped out of the freezing fog of the Ardennes Forest onto a snow-covered dirt road. They carried a large white flag of truce. Blindfolded and escorted by heavily armed, freezing American infantrymen, the German delegation had come to deliver a written ultimatum … Read more

On May 10, 1945, a single photograph reached the desk of General Dwight D. Eisenhower. The Supreme Commander of the Allied Forces looked at it, and according to the account, his blood ran cold. The image did not show a battlefield or the horrors of a concentration camp. It showed a captured German field marshal … Read more

On December 30, 1944, Brigadier Francis de Guingand sat at Allied Supreme Headquarters in Versailles and read a message Dwight Eisenhower had drafted but not yet sent. It was addressed to Churchill and the Combined Chiefs of Staff. In precise, measured language, it stated that the situation between Eisenhower and Field Marshal Bernard Montgomery had … Read more

In April 1945, a cold spring wind moved across a yard of frozen mud and rusted barbed wire near Hammelburg, Bavaria. It carried the smell of sickness. Hundreds of American prisoners stood in ragged formation. Their uniforms hung from shoulders that no longer filled them. Their cheeks were sunken, and their eyes looked past the … Read more

In April 1945, a cold spring wind moved across a yard of frozen mud and rusted barbed wire near Hammelburg, Bavaria. It carried the smell of sickness. Hundreds of American prisoners stood in ragged formation. Their uniforms hung from shoulders that no longer filled them. Their cheeks were sunken, and their eyes looked past the … Read more

In March 1945, inside a Third Army prisoner processing compound in occupied Germany, a captured German major waited for an audience with a senior American commander. He had been in American custody for less than three days. He was unhurt and had been fed. He had walked into captivity at the head of his surviving … Read more