Allied liaison officers embedded with U. S. armored units in the final weeks of World War II witnessed a battlefield improvisation so audacious it defied every regulation in the military handbook — and it may have helped shatter the last German defenses in the West. The observers, veteran Australian officers hardened by desert tank warfare … Read more
On November 22, 1963, inside a wood-paneled bedroom at a Texas hotel in Fort Worth, a tall, imposing man in a tailored suit stood over his wife. His voice cut through the humid morning air. Lyndon Baines Johnson was berating her about her clothes, mocking her weight, and issuing rapid-fire orders about how she should … Read more
On March 12, 1998, a retired fingerprint examiner named A. Nathan Darby sat in his Austin home, studying two sets of prints under a magnifying glass. One was a copy of an unidentified fingerprint lifted from a cardboard box on the sixth floor of the Texas School Book Depository, collected on November 22, 1963, the … Read more
LONDON — The British High Command expected a polite colonial auxiliary when the 1st Canadian Infantry Division began disembarking in the United Kingdom in late 1939. What they got instead, according to wartime records and firsthand accounts now being reexamined by military historians, was a force that would shatter nearly every assumption the aristocratic British … Read more
In May 1945, the war in Europe was over. The SS was surrendering across Germany. An SS officer was brought to Third Army headquarters as a prisoner. He was high-ranking and arrogant, still wearing his black uniform as if it meant something. He had been captured near the Austrian border. His unit had tried to … Read more
Am 10. Januar 1943, am frühen Morgen südlich von Wjasma, herrschte eine Kälte von minus 28 Grad. Der Schnee war hart wie Beton. Die Motoren der Panther-Panzer sprangen nicht an, sie klagten nur. Benzin verdickte sich in den Leitungsfiltern, das Öl wurde zäh wie Honig. In der Stille zwischen den Bäumen hörte man das Knacken … Read more
By late April 1945, the collapse of Nazi Germany was no longer a military campaign. It had become a descent into hell. General George S. Patton's Third Army was tearing through the Bavarian countryside and into Austria, moving so fast that their maps were obsolete within hours. But as the American tanks rolled deeper into … Read more
LONDON — The British High Command expected a polite colonial auxiliary when the 1st Canadian Infantry Division began disembarking in the United Kingdom in late 1939. What they got instead, according to wartime records and firsthand accounts now being reexamined by military historians, was a force that would shatter nearly every assumption the aristocratic British … Read more
Mickey Burke appears in Goodfellas for a single scene. She is the hostess wife in the living room, the woman present when Karen Hill first understands she is not married to an ordinary man. She throws the party, delivers the gossip, and holds the room together. That is everything the most important mob film ever … Read more
On June 5, 1963, President John F. Kennedy, Vice President Lyndon B. Johnson, and Texas Governor John Connally met in a suite at the Cortez Hotel in El Paso, Texas. They were discussing Kennedy's upcoming trip to Texas, a trip the president had resisted for months. Then Kennedy asked a simple question. "Well, Lyndon, are … Read more