Western Germany, March 23, 1945 — The Allied coalition is facing its gravest internal crisis since D-Day after Field Marshal Bernard Montgomery formally demanded the removal of Lt. Gen. George S. Patton from command, triggering an extraordinary intervention from Gen. Douglas MacArthur in the Pacific that has stunned Allied leadership and reshaped the confrontation. According … Read more
Lady Sarah Armstrong Jones, the only niece of Queen Elizabeth II, was present at her mother’s bedside when Princess Margaret died on February 9, 2002. Born on May 1, 1964, at Kensington Palace, she entered the world seventh in line to the throne. Her birth placed her at the heart of one of the most … Read more
A Virginia colonel and personal friend of George Washington was burned alive for two to three hours on an Ohio prairie in June 1782, and the full account of what preceded his death — and why the Lenape chose him instead of the officer who led the massacre they were avenging — has been preserved … Read more
The legend of Jim Bridger, the quintessential American frontiersman whose life spanned the better part of the 19th century, is once again capturing the public imagination, but the true story of the man behind the myth is far more complex and fascinating than any Hollywood portrayal. Born in 1804, Bridger would go on to become … Read more
GDANSK, Poland — In an unprecedented spectacle of public justice that drew a crowd estimated at 200,000 people, eleven former guards and officials of the Stutthof concentration camp were hanged simultaneously from gallows erected on Biskupia Gorka Hill on July 4, 1946, their executions carried out in a manner so deliberately slow that each condemned … Read more
Franz Stangl, the Nazi commander who ran the Sobibor and Treblinka extermination camps where nearly one million people were murdered, was hunted across three continents for more than two decades by a Holocaust survivor who refused to let the world forget. Stangl’s capture in Brazil in 1967 and his subsequent conviction in West Germany marked … Read more
August 1944. Brittany, France. The Americans had been sweeping the Germans out of France for two months. Patton’s Third Army was moving east fast, sometimes fifty miles in a day, town after town, the Germans falling back ahead of them. On this particular morning, a supply convoy was moving through a stretch of Brittany that … Read more
John Hunyadi emerged as a warrior and general who rose to defend Europe against the tide of Ottoman expansion, and his story is one of valor and resilience that solidified his status as a legendary figure in history. The early life and ancestry of John Hunyadi remains cloaked in mystery, and his towering reputation has … Read more
April 12, 1945, near Hamburg, Germany. Dawn came in gray streaks over the wire, and the first thing Sergeant Eli Mercer saw was not a rifle, not a guard tower, not even the dead horse rotting beside the road. It was a boy. He stood outside the shattered gate of a makeshift prison camp in … Read more
April 12, 1945, near Hamburg, Germany. Dawn came in gray streaks over the wire, and the first thing Sergeant Eli Mercer saw was not a rifle, not a guard tower, not even the dead horse rotting beside the road. It was a boy. He stood outside the shattered gate of a makeshift prison camp in … Read more