In January 1945, German prisoners at Camp Ellis, Illinois, boarded a train for Chicago, convinced American photographs of towering skyscrapers were crude propaganda. Lieutenant Friedrich Weber had…
In January 1945, Colonel Harrison McKinley, the commander of Camp Ellis, Illinois, made an announcement that would change everything the prisoners believed. A group of German POWs, selected for good behavior and cooperation, would be taken on an educational excursion north to Chicago, where they would see how American civilians lived and worked. The stated … Read more
On December 22, 1944, inside a frozen foxhole near Bastogne, an American paratrooper had not eaten in eighteen hours, his ammunition was rationed, and wounded men behind him were dying for lack of…
The temperature in the foxhole was twenty-two degrees below zero. The American paratrooper inside it was one of fifteen thousand US soldiers dug into the frozen earth around the small Belgian town of Bastogne on the night of December 22, 1944. He had not eaten in eighteen hours. His rifle ammunition was rationed. The wounded … Read more
In 1943, a dozen captured German generals stepped off a train in Virginia and were marched into a compound where American guards greeted them in fluent German. Men who had commanded divisions…
The train screeched to a halt beneath the gray winter sky of Virginia, 1943. Steam hissed against the cold morning air as a dozen German generals stepped down onto American soil for the first time, their boots sinking into frostbitten gravel. They carried no weapons, no papers, only the pride that had survived surrender. The … Read more
On January 22, 1901, at Osborne House, a German emperor knelt beside a small bed and held his dying grandmother’s arm for nearly three hours so she could breathe. The woman was Queen Victoria. The…
The small bed at Osborne House had never seemed smaller. On the evening of the 22nd of January, 1901, the woman lying in it was physically tiny, frail, and had been drifting in and out of consciousness for hours. There was no grand final speech, no last coherent monologue, whatever the dramatizations might claim. The … Read more
In 1899, Norah McMullen wrote to Andrew Mellon, one of the richest men in America, refusing his proposal. Marriage to him, she warned, would bring the…
In 1899, a young Englishwoman in Hartford wrote a letter to one of the richest men in America. The letter said no. It warned that marrying him would bring them both only misery. Her name was Nora McMullen. The man was Andrew Mellon. She married him anyway. When her warning came true, his own biographer … Read more
In January 1889, Crown Prince Rudolf of Austria arrived at the Mayerling hunting lodge for a hunting party, but the next morning he did not come out. His valet knocked on the bedroom door from…
When the valet Johann Loschek finally broke through the wooden panel of the bedroom door with a hammer and a piece of firewood, the dim light inside revealed a scene that would haunt him for the rest of his life. The heir to the Austro-Hungarian throne, Archduke Rudolf, lay motionless, leaning over the edge of … Read more
In May 1864, Ulysses S. Grant crossed the Rapidan River with 120,000 men and met Robert E. Lee in the tangled Wilderness of Virginia, where artillery was nearly useless and visibility dropped to a…
Robert E. Lee stood in the early morning darkness before Fort Stedman and watched his men move forward. It was March 25, 1865, and everything he had built over three years of war had come down to this one assault, a desperate lunge at the Union lines around Petersburg intended to force Ulysses S. Grant … Read more
On June 25, 1876, Custer divided his regiment into separate columns miles apart, leaving roughly 210 men marching north along the Little Bighorn with no knowledge of what waited ahead. His scouts…
The sun stood almost directly overhead when the world collapsed for the 210 men of the Seventh Cavalry who followed George Armstrong Custer up the bluffs east of the Little Bighorn River. Historians would later measure their final ordeal at roughly thirty minutes, a span of time so short that it seemed to mock the … Read more
On July 2, 1863, John Bell Hood’s Texas scouts returned with news that stopped him cold: the Union left flank around Round Top Mountain was open, and behind it sat the Army of the Potomac’s…
The staff officer rode back with the same answer Hood had already received twice before, and the words must have landed like a physical blow in the July heat: General Lee’s orders are to attack up the Emmitsburg Road. John Bell Hood had never protested an order in his entire military career. Not once. He … Read more
On June 25, 1876, Lieutenant Charles DeRudio rode into the Little Big Horn valley expecting to surprise a Native American encampment. Instead, he foun…
On June 25, 1876, Lieutenant Charles DeRudio rode with the Seventh Cavalry toward the banks of the Little Big Horn River. A veteran soldier who had once fought as a revolutionary in Europe before joining the United States Army, DeRudio had already lived through more than most men could imagine. But nothing in his past … Read more