In April 1945, in Germany, a routine inspection report from a forward command post contained an unusual note near the bottom of its third page. Captain Robert Callaway, commander of a supply company outside the town of Wardsburg, had taken in a German child found alone in a bombed building three weeks earlier. The boy … Read more
In October 1986, during the first state visit by a reigning British monarch to China, the Duke of Edinburgh appeared to go out of his way to call on one man in Beijing. The man was Max Boisot, a 42-year-old professor and the son of a cabaret star the Duke had known since he was … Read more
On September 21, 2016, a Wednesday, shortly after midday, a car sat on the shoulder of Route 67 in Roxbury, Connecticut, a two-lane road winding through wooded hills and old farmland about 90 miles northeast of Manhattan. Inside was a 27-year-old man named Thaddaeus Wilk Farrow, suffering from a life-threatening gunshot wound. Emergency services responded, … Read more
In April 1945, a captured German field hospital in southern Germany became the setting for a confrontation between duty and defiance. Captain Mike Reynolds lay bleeding from shrapnel wounds to his chest, his breathing shallow. The medics had done what they could, but Reynolds needed a surgeon. The hospital had been in German hands until … Read more
On April 12, 1945, a warm spring afternoon at Warm Springs, Georgia, President Franklin Delano Roosevelt was sitting in his favorite leather armchair inside the little White House. He laughed with the women in the room, then suddenly slumped forward and said, "I have a terrific headache." Those were his last words. The woman who … Read more
A general court-martial file three inches thick, a four-sentence confession, and a commanding general’s decision to tear the whole thing in half — this is the story of Corporal Daniel Reeves, and why the man who commanded the Third Army in France chose to destroy the case against him. The charge sheet was straightforward. Assault … Read more
In November 1944, the Third Army was fighting through the fortresses of the Moselle River in France during the Battle of Metz. The campaign had dragged on for weeks, and the fighting was unlike anything the units involved had faced before. Private First Class Thomas Garrett was wounded on the morning of November 14th. A … Read more
The popular version of the story is simple: the Queen Mother disliked Diana Spencer from the moment she appeared, and everyone around the royal family understood why. The historical record is messier, and more interesting. Queen Elizabeth, the Queen Mother, had every reason to see Diana as exactly the kind of young woman the monarchy … Read more
The British royal family has spent decades distancing itself from its German roots, but the historical record tells a far more complicated story. In 2015, private family footage from 1933 surfaced in the press showing a six-year-old future Queen Elizabeth II in a garden with her mother, younger sister, and uncle, laughing and giving Nazi … Read more
Allied commanders were still writing home to promise their families they would be back by Christmas when General George S. Patton stood over a map of the Western Front and concluded that tens of thousands of American soldiers were about to be massacred. It was November 1944, and across the Allied lines snaking through France … Read more