In December 1944, with the Battle of the Bulge entering its second week, General George S. Patton was doing what he routinely did during critical operations: moving between the front lines of his Third Army unannounced, on foot or by jeep, to verify the conditions his staff reports described. Near a small village outside Bastogne, … Read more
In September 1991, divers descended more than 200 feet into the Atlantic Ocean, roughly 60 miles off the New Jersey coast, and found something that should not have existed. Lying on the seafloor was an intact German U-boat from World War II, torpedoes still loaded, with the remains of its crew still inside. Neither the … Read more
In September 1941, Adolf Hitler appointed Austrian-born General Franz Böhme as the commander in occupied Serbia, granting him direct authority to crush resistance against German occupation. Within just three months, Böhme’s policies led to the deaths of tens of thousands of civilians, including one of the largest mass executions carried out by the German military … Read more
Martin Bormann was among the most sinister figures in Hitler’s inner circle, and by 1945 he had become the gatekeeper to the ailing Führer. In the final weeks inside the bunker beneath the Reich Chancellery garden in Berlin, Bormann was in many respects running things, often drafting orders on blank sheets of paper that Hitler … Read more
Before the gunfight near the O. K. Corral turned him into an enduring symbol of the American frontier, Doc Holliday lived a quieter, more complicated life in the Arizona territorial capital of Prescott. The man who would become famous in Tombstone spent months in Prescott on two separate occasions in 1879 and 1880, and the … Read more
Leni Riefenstahl spent more than sixty years telling a story about herself—that she was a politically naive artist who had been swept into the Nazi film world against her will and knew nothing of the regime’s crimes. It took seven hundred boxes of her own archive, opened after her death, to dismantle that narrative. In … Read more
British military exercises in London this week have centered on defending the UK against a conventional Russian missile attack, using disused sections of the underground railway system for the drill. The exercise coincides with press reports detailing how Russian cruise missiles could strike British targets with virtual impunity, a warning that has now drawn renewed … Read more
When frontier towns talked about the most dangerous men in the Old West, the name Bill Longley carried a weight that even Billy the Kid and Jesse James rarely matched. Cold-blooded, unpredictable, and known for his speed with a gun, Longley built a reputation as one of the most feared figures of the era. William … Read more
Dana Delany’s portrayal of Josephine Marcus in the 1993 film *Tombstone* has become one of the most memorable performances in the modern Western genre. While the movie is best known for its gunfights and legendary lawmen, Delany brought depth and complexity to a woman who stood as an equal beside Wyatt Earp. Her path to … Read more
The story of Soviet citizens who served in German military units during World War II is often reduced to the Russian Liberation Army of General Andrei Vlasov. But there was another, far more ruthless formation that history has largely overlooked: the Kaminski Brigade, a renegade Russian unit that became part of the Waffen SS and … Read more