In 1974, a London coroner signed the death certificate of 14-year-old Bernadette Whelan, who was crushed to death in a crowd surge at a David Cassidy concert. In November 2017, another medical examination was conducted on Cassidy himself, and the cause of death was listed as liver failure caused by chronic alcohol poisoning. The 43 … Read more
PRAGUE — Karel Čurda, the Czechoslovak paratrooper whose betrayal of the assassins of Nazi Reich Protector Reinhard Heydrich condemned hundreds of resistance fighters and their families to execution, was hanged at Pankrác Prison in Prague at dawn on April 29, 1947, closing one of the darkest chapters of the Nazi occupation of Bohemia and Moravia. … Read more
A teenage girl with braided pigtails walked up to a woman sitting alone on a park bench in Haarlem, Netherlands, in 1943, asked her name, confirmed her identity, and shot her dead before pedaling away on her bicycle — an act of assassination that saved hundreds of Jewish lives and opened one of the most … Read more
World War II hero Richard “Dick” Winters, the stoic commander of Easy Company whose story became the heart of HBO’s acclaimed miniseries “Band of Brothers,” once threatened to sever all ties with executive producer Tom Hanks in a furious dispute over profanity and a 𝒔𝒆𝒙 scene that he believed would desecrate the legacy of the … Read more
Ellsworth “Bumpy” Johnson walked uninvited into a Harlem funeral for a man the neighborhood barely knew. The name on the program read Elias Carter, printed clean and respectable, but the expensive flowers around the casket told a different story. Mourners shifted in their pews, and men along the walls tightened their coats as Johnson moved … Read more
General George S. Patton Jr. ordered the execution of a German infantry general by firing squad at 6 a. m. on April 23, 1945, bypassing the Nuremberg tribunal system entirely, according to a handwritten pencil order composed at 11:47 the previous night on standard army notepad paper. The order was four sentences long. The last … Read more
LUXEMBOURG — A captured SS officer who threatened General George S. Patton inside his own headquarters during the Battle of the Bulge learned in devastating fashion that the American commander was not a man to be intimidated, according to accounts of the confrontation that have circulated among military historians and veterans of the Third Army. … Read more
METZ, France — A four-star general climbed into a muddy drainage ditch in the rain of a November morning in 1944 and crouched beside a wounded private who had been waiting three days for someone to come back for him. The private, 22-year-old Pfc. Thomas Garrett of Tennessee, looked up and asked the only question … Read more
A single word, spoken quietly in a cold Dutch farmhouse on the morning of March 3, 1945, may have been the most explosive utterance of the entire Western Allied campaign — and no official record of it exists. According to accounts pieced together from staff diaries, private notebooks, and a letter that was written but … Read more
LONDON — In a candlelit private dining room at Claridge’s Hotel on the evening of August 10, 1943, Gen. George C. Marshall delivered a seven-point ultimatum that would decide the course of the Second World War and, with it, the map of postwar Europe. Prime Minister Winston Churchill had summoned the U. S. Army chief … Read more