History

The dead house had been breached again. The padlock that Apprentice Codor kept on a cord around his neck was still locked, the key still in his possession, and yet the heavy iron lock hung open against the hasp when he reached the cabin on the morning of November 10th. He pushed the door inward … Read more

The field telephone crackled on the desk, and General Alexander Patch heard the last voice he had expected. On the other end was George Patton, the commander whose armored divisions had spent the past days crashing through the boundaries of Patch’s Seventh Army like a fist through a paper wall. Now Patton needed artillery fire. … Read more

The damp mist of the English Channel in early 1944 carried a weight heavier than the Atlantic itself, for it was the breath of a million men waiting for the signal to begin the great crusade. For General George S. Patton, Jr. , this period was a suffocating psychological purgatory, a professional limbo born from … Read more

The night of October 12th, 1954, Bernice Colette would later tell authorities that Venicia Graverly kept glancing toward the store’s windows as if she were watching for something that might appear in the daylight. She had come to Marlington earlier than usual that morning, looking nervous and distracted, like a woman working against a deadline. … Read more

The water was black and still. Somewhere behind her, the largest ship ever built was sliding into the Atlantic, its stern rising against a sky full of stars. Madeleine Force Astor gripped an oar with bare hands and pulled. She was 18 years old. She was five months pregnant. And the richest man in America, … Read more

The English Channel had become a graveyard of steel and flesh before the sun even rose on June 6th, 1944. Twenty-four thousand airborne soldiers had already vanished into the darkness over France. Now, in the half-light before dawn, the first assault craft churned toward a coastline fortified with more explosives per square mile than any … Read more

The message from Alexander arrived on the evening of July 12th, 1943, and when George S. Patton read it, the temperature inside his command trailer seemed to drop. The British general was proposing a radical shift in the operational boundaries of the Sicilian campaign, and the target was Highway 124, the vital paved artery that … Read more

Some men carry a thing inside them for the rest of their lives and never name it out loud. They walk past it every morning. They sit beside it at supper. They lie down with it at night. And when somebody asks how they are, they say fine, and they mean it the way you … Read more

The first week of May 1864, the men along Rocky Face Ridge could see for miles. From a thousand feet above the valley floor, the Confederate soldiers of the Army of Tennessee looked out over North Georgia and watched an army come toward them. They saw the dust clouds first, then the wagon trains, miles … Read more