Princess Alice of Battenberg, mother of Prince Philip, Duke of Edinburgh, spent her final years in a small room at Buckingham Palace. She wore the plain gray habit of the nursing order she had founded in Athens and owned almost nothing beyond two suitcases. She smoked constantly, refused most medical attention, and watched the palace … Read more
She did not break in at night. She did not pick locks, forge documents, or disguise herself as a cook to slip through the service entrance. She simply admired something beautiful. She made it clear that she admired it, and then she waited with the patience of a woman who knew that patience, combined with … Read more
On the evening of April 23, 1964, in a flat above the Courtauld Institute overlooking Portman Square, a 56-year-old man stood silently at a tall window. His name was Anthony Blunt, a Knight Commander of the Royal Victorian Order and Surveyor of the Queen's Pictures. Across the room stood Arthur Martin, an officer of MI5, … Read more
In the frozen darkness of December 1944, Supreme Allied Commander Dwight D. Eisenhower faced the most agonizing decision of World War II in Western Europe: how to save 10,000 American paratroopers encircled in the Belgian crossroads town of Bastogne before German forces annihilated them. The 101st Airborne Division, along with fragments of armor and infantry … Read more
On March 15, 1939, German mechanized columns rolled toward Prague through cold spring snow. There was no battle and no defense of the city. Six months earlier, the Munich Agreement had stripped Czechoslovakia of its border fortifications and handed the Sudetenland to the Third Reich. Now Adolf Hitler ordered the Wehrmacht to occupy what remained … Read more
On January 27, 1945, a prisoner in a Nazi maternity home gave birth to a daughter. The baby's father had been dead for six months, executed the night his plot to kill Hitler failed. She was Konstanze, the fifth child of Claus von Stauffenberg. The regime had already decided what to do with his family: … Read more
On March 26, 1945, US Army units advancing toward Central Germany liberated Hadamar, a psychiatric clinic that had served as one of six killing facilities in the Nazi so-called euthanasia program. What the soldiers found was catastrophic. More than 500 patients were starved and weakened by systematic neglect and targeted malnutrition. Although the US Army … Read more
Commodus, Emperor of Rome from 177 to 192 AD, is remembered as one of the most notorious rulers in Roman history, yet the reality of his reign was stranger than the fictional portrait popularized by the film Gladiator. Believing himself to be the living incarnation of the god Hercules, he turned the Colosseum into a … Read more
In early 1940, General George C. Marshall sat in his office at the War Department in Washington, D.C., staring at a number that seemed impossible. The United States Army had just 190,000 soldiers. Across the Atlantic, Hitler's Wehrmacht was rolling across Europe with a speed that made the generals of the last war look like … Read more
Before dawn on December 17, 1944, in the wooded heights east of the twin villages of Krinkelt and Rocherath in the northern Ardennes, the German attack was barely a day old and already behind schedule. The officer commanding the lead assault guns of an SS panzer regiment had been told what to expect on the … Read more