In February 1945, near Metz, a muddy and frozen prisoner-of-war enclosure held hundreds of captured German soldiers under the watchful eyes of American guards. Rain glistened on the barbed wire. Among the crowd stood Major Kurt Meier, 42, a defeated Wehrmacht officer in a dirty uniform, clutching a torn, water-damaged page in trembling fingers. It … Read more
On February 4, 1945, Hauptmann Georg Lessing, an intelligence officer with the 352nd Volksgrenadier Division, was processing a prisoner intake report near Saarbrücken when a detail stopped him. It was not tactical. It was human. The report, drawn from interrogations of three captured American soldiers over the previous 48 hours, described an incident at a … Read more
In May 1945, Germany surrendered and the war in Europe ended. But for 5,000 American soldiers, the war was not over. They were prisoners liberated from German camps by Soviet forces. Under the Yalta agreement, they should have been returned to American control immediately. They were not. They were held in Soviet-controlled territory, behind a … Read more
On July 22, 1943, George Patton stood in his command tent in Sicily, reading a report that made his jaw clench. Terry Allen's 1st Infantry Division had just disobeyed a direct order again. Patton had ordered the division to halt and consolidate its positions. Allen's men were 12 miles beyond the halt line, chasing retreating … Read more
Major Richard “Dick” Winters, the celebrated commander of Easy Company whose wartime leadership became the subject of the landmark book and television series “Band of Brothers,” has offered a rare and unflinching account of the psychological toll of returning home from combat, describing a slow and ongoing struggle to adapt to civilian life that he … Read more
The streets have always had a simple rule. You either go to prison or you go to the grave. Almost every kingpin in American history has ended up in one of those two places. But a small number of them made millions and never spent a day behind bars for it. Some walked away. Some … Read more
In April 1945, at a POW camp outside Munich, an American mess sergeant faced a problem he had never encountered before. He had just served lunch to 200 German prisoners: standard rations of bread, soup, and canned meat. The food was good, better than what most Germans were eating at the time. But the prisoners … Read more
The Mongol Empire is remembered for its brutality, and rightly so. The terror was real, and the destruction was vast. But focusing only on the violence obscures a far more consequential story: the Mongols did not just conquer the world, they connected it. Under Genghis Khan and his successors, the vast trade networks of Asia … Read more
Barbara Stanwyck died on the evening of Saturday, January 20, 1990, in a room at Saint John's Hospital in Santa Monica. She was 82 years old. The room was quiet. There was no crowd of family at the bedside, no circle of loved ones holding hands, no grandchildren ushered in to say goodbye. The woman … Read more
Albert Blithe did not die in 1948 from a sniper’s bullet in Normandy. He did not fade from history as a broken soldier who never recovered from the terror of combat. According to a firsthand account attributed to Major Richard Winters, the celebrated commander of Easy Company, 506th Parachute Infantry Regiment, 101st Airborne Division, Blithe … Read more