LONDON — The bomb that tore apart a 29-foot fishing boat off the coast of County Sligo on August 27, 1979, killed Lord Louis Mountbatten, two teenage boys, and an 83-year-old baroness in a single blast heard across the bay. But the explosion did not merely end four lives. It shattered a sixty-year system of … Read more
American tanks rolled toward the small German town of Hammelburg in March 1945, expecting a fight that should have ended in hours. Instead, scouts radioed back a report that stopped the advance cold: Nazi soldiers had dragged civilians into the streets and chained them in front of every defensive position. Old men. Women clutching infants. … Read more
LONDON — In the cramped, smoke-filled war rooms beneath Whitehall, where Winston Churchill had spent six years willing the Allied armies toward Berlin, a single telegram shattered the reputation of Britain’s most celebrated battlefield commander in the space of a heartbeat. The message arrived on the evening of March 23, 1945, and it came not … Read more
During the Pacific War, an estimated hundreds of thousands of women and girls were abducted, sold into prostitution, and held against their will in brothels that served the Japanese military. The victims came from Korea, China, Japan, the Philippines, Thailand, Vietnam, Malaysia, Taiwan, and Indonesia, where they were forcibly conscripted into sexual servitude and subjected … Read more
FRONT LINES, EUROPEAN THEATER — A captured German general’s demand for a private room and fine wine ended in a freezing mud ditch late Saturday after Lt. Gen. George S. Patton Jr. personally ordered the aristocratic officer thrown into a flooded drainage trench alongside a muddy supply road. The confrontation, which unfolded at approximately 1400 … Read more
Thirty-two American soldiers died on a road in southern Germany on March 27, 1945, and for 36 years the United States Army buried the reason why. They died because a four-star general sent 314 men 60 miles behind enemy lines on a mission that every officer in the room told him would fail, and because … Read more
WASHINGTON — The American general who commanded the largest U. S. field army in Europe during World War II, led his troops across the Rhine at Remagen, closed the Ruhr Pocket and met the Red Army on the Elbe River, remains almost entirely unknown to the public he served — and historians say the silence … Read more
Wild Bill Hickok was shot and killed from behind while playing poker in Deadwood, Dakota Territory, on August 2, 1876. The gunman, a drifter named Jack McCall, walked up behind the legendary frontiersman, shouted “Damn you, take that,” and fired a single bullet into the back of his head at point-blank range. The assassination marked … Read more
I’m 57 years old and spent 29 years as a civil engineer in Fort Wayne, Indiana. I designed bridges and drainage systems, infrastructure that most people drive over without a second thought. The job taught me one thing above everything else: every structure has a load capacity. There is a real, calculated number beyond which … Read more
On June 10, 1963, Bumpy Johnson walked into Smalls Paradise in Harlem and sat down at table number seven. He was unarmed, surrounded by roughly 250 witnesses, and facing the man who had taken over his criminal empire while Johnson spent 11 years in Alcatraz. Johnson did not come for revenge or ego. He came … Read more