Harlem, January 1947. The door closed in front of Bambi Johnson, shut by a Brooklyn crew that believed it owned the streets. Seventeen weapons waited inside. One man bled on the sidewalk. The insult spread faster than the blood. Six hours earlier, none of it was supposed to happen. The smell hit first: thick tobacco … Read more
On the afternoon of February 7, 1952, a large man in a gray coat sat alone on a bench in Harlem’s Colonial Park, his hands folded in his lap and his eyes fixed on nothing in particular. He wore no gloves despite the cold, and passersby who recognized him gave him only a brief glance. … Read more
In February 1945, Joseph Stalin sat down with Franklin Roosevelt and Winston Churchill at Yalta while Marshal Zhukov's armies stood roughly 40 miles from Berlin. Roosevelt wanted Soviet help against Japan. James Byrnes, a member of the American delegation, described the situation bluntly: the question was not what the West would allow the Russians to … Read more
Filip Müller was born on January 3, 1922, in Sered, then part of Czechoslovakia. He was only 17 years old when the Second World War began on September 1, 1939. During the war, two major alliances confronted each other: the Axis powers and the Allied powers. The three principal partners in the Axis Alliance were … Read more
Josef Meisinger earned the nickname "Butcher of Warsaw" for atrocities so brutal that they appalled even his Nazi superiors. Born on September 14, 1899, in Munich, he was just 14 when World War I began. He volunteered for the army in 1916 and was seriously wounded on the Western Front the following year, receiving the … Read more
On September 12, 1942, in the South Atlantic about 600 miles off the coast of West Africa, the German submarine U-156 torpedoed a British troop ship. As the vessel sank, Commander Werner Hartenstein surfaced to capture officers for interrogation. Then he heard voices — hundreds of them. Hartenstein realized what he had done. The ship … Read more
On November 14, 1938, inside the White House, President Franklin Roosevelt finished presenting his sweeping plan to build 10,000 warplanes. One by one, the influential men around the table voiced their complete agreement. Then Roosevelt turned to a brigadier general attending his first White House meeting. Surrounded by chiefs who had already endorsed the idea, … Read more
In 1948, a seven-year-old girl in Berlin sat down to write a letter. Around her, the city lay in ruins. Two million people faced the threat of starvation. Soviet forces had blocked every road and railway into West Berlin. But Mercedes Simon was not writing about hunger or fear. She was writing to complain about … Read more
In September 1944, General Dwight D. Eisenhower was recovering from a knee injury suffered in an emergency landing during an inspection trip to the front. He was confined to his aircraft at Brussels airport, unable to walk on the tarmac. It was his first meeting with Field Marshal Bernard Montgomery since late August. Upon arrival, … Read more
In 1989, Washington, D. C. , a city then known as the murder capital of America, drug dealers began parking their flashy cars. It was not because of a police crackdown or a new law. It was because of one man: Wayne “Silk” Perry. If he saw you driving something nice, he assumed you had … Read more