On the night of June 5, 1944, a German radio intercept team in northern France picked up a coded BBC broadcast and recognized exactly what it meant. The Allied invasion of Europe was coming within 48 hours. The officer in charge passed the warning up the chain, and the entire 15th Army went on full … Read more
On October 20, 1944, American troops stormed ashore at Leyte Gulf in the Philippines, fulfilling General Douglas MacArthur’s promise to return. The invasion was the gateway to Luzon and ultimately Japan itself, and it forced the Imperial Japanese Navy into a desperate gamble. With the Philippines lost, Japan would be cut off from the oil … Read more
In January 1945, in eastern France near the German border, General George S. Patton received a three-page intelligence report about a German POW camp that had just been overrun. The language was clinical, but the numbers were devastating. The camp held 380 American prisoners. Their average weight at liberation was 94 pounds. A year earlier, … Read more
In 1873, four men—Obadiah Quinneville, his brother-in-law Esau Vandermolen, Tobias Scothrop, and Lemuel—rode into a small village hidden in a bowl of land between three ridges in the Appalachian Mountains. They had been sent by the Holston River Land Company to survey a tract of land that appeared on no official map. The village was … Read more
In 1972, the United Nations appointed its fourth secretary-general. He was Austrian, a seasoned diplomat who had spent decades building a reputation as one of the most capable international statesmen of his generation. His name was Kurt Waldheim, and for the next decade he led the most powerful international institution on earth. What the United … Read more
On September 2, 1944, in a small farmhouse just behind the lines in northern Belgium, Field Marshal Bernard Law Montgomery stood over a paper map of Northwestern Europe. A single bare light bulb lit the room. In one hand he held a freshly sharpened pencil, in the other a cup of tea long gone cold. … Read more
On the evening of October 15, 1946, Hermann Göring sat on the edge of his cot in cell block C of Nuremberg prison, eating black bread. In two hours, the International Military Tribunal would read his sentence. Everyone in courtroom 600 already knew what it would be. Göring knew. The guards knew. The prosecutors had … Read more
Hermann Göring ended his life in his Nuremberg cell on the night of October 15, 1946, just hours before his scheduled execution. His death closed one chapter in history and opened another. The question of what happened to the family he left behind would unfold over decades. In the final weeks of the war, Emmy … Read more
Just after midnight on June 5, 1968, Ethel Kennedy stood behind her husband in a Los Angeles hotel kitchen, wearing a polka-dot dress. She was seven months pregnant with their eleventh child. Robert F. Kennedy had just won the California primary. He was shaking hands with a hotel worker named Juan Romero when three shots … Read more
In November 1944, on a windswept limestone ridge above the Morhange valley in northeastern France, a 22-year-old Black corporal from the docks of the Savannah River told an Army Third staff major that his calculations were wrong. The major had the rank. He had the training. He had the numbers. And General George S. Patton … Read more