The German invasion of the Netherlands began on May 10, 1940, eight months after the start of the Second World War. German bombers struck military airfields and barracks around The Hague, while paratroopers were used to capture tactical points and support the advance of ground troops. Adolf Hitler justified the attack with a lie, claiming … Read more
On December 9, 1992, the British Prime Minister stood in the House of Commons and read a statement confirming what half the country already suspected. The Prince and Princess of Wales were separating. John Major delivered the statement in the flat, careful tone reserved for containing constitutional damage, and by that evening the palace press … Read more
The year was 1968. Robert F. Kennedy was running for president and was the favorite to win the Democratic nomination. He had survived the loss of his brother, years of political conflict with Lyndon Johnson, and the chaos of the antiwar movement that was tearing the Democratic Party apart. By the spring of that year, … Read more
The British 11th Armored Division liberated the Bergen-Belsen concentration camp on April 15, 1945, southwest of Bergen in Nazi Germany. The camp would come to epitomize the true bestiality and horrors of the Nazi regime and its death camps. When British forces entered the camp, they found 13,000 unburied dead bodies and almost 60,000 prisoners … Read more
In May 1945, the war in Europe was over. The guns were silent, Hitler was dead, and the Nazi regime had collapsed. In Berlin and along the Elbe River, American and Russian soldiers hugged, danced, and drank vodka and whiskey together. The world was celebrating. But one man was not smiling. General George S. Patton … Read more
At 12:30 p.m. on November 22, 1963, shots rang out in Dealey Plaza in Dallas, Texas. President John F. Kennedy was struck by two bullets and rushed to Parkland Memorial Hospital. At 1:00 p.m., doctors pronounced him dead. Ninety-eight minutes later, at 2:38 p.m., Lyndon Baines Johnson stood in the cramped 16-foot cabin of the … Read more
Washington — President John F. Kennedy fired CIA Director Allen Dulles in November 1961, a decision that set in motion a chain of events culminating in the president’s assassination two years later, according to a newly surfaced analysis of declassified documents and operational records. The story begins on April 17, 1961, at 6:14 a. m. … Read more
On June 22, 1941, the German army stormed across the Soviet border. Panzer tanks crushed dismantled checkpoints, and Luftwaffe bombers roared down on Brest, Minsk, and Lviv. Villages burned in their wake. Behind the armored spearheads marched members of the Einsatzgruppen, Nazi mobile death squads. Together with local nationalists, they herded Jews and political commissars … Read more
Clint Hill was the last surviving person who had ever been inside the presidential limousine on November 22, 1963. For more than 60 years, he carried a weight that no promotion and no presidential commendation could take away. It drove him to alcoholism, damaged his marriage, and forced him into early retirement at just 43 … Read more
On the late afternoon of May 11, 1937, the control tower at Croydon Airport near London received a radio message from an aircraft requesting permission to land. Croydon was then London's major aviation hub, long before Heathrow or Gatwick existed. Major airlines such as Imperial Airways, an ancestor of today's British Airways, and the German … Read more