On September 1st, 1939, Germany launched a sudden invasion of Poland, marking the official outbreak of World War II. Throughout this deadliest conflict in human history, Germany committed countless horrific war crimes, bringing immense suffering to nations across the globe. But from a purely military perspective, the German military’s combat prowess was truly impressive, especially…
In November 1941, somewhere west of Sidi Rezegh in the Libyan desert, a column of battered Ford F30 lorries rumbled across the open scrubland at 35 mph. Perched in the flatbeds of those lorries, lashed down with rope and field improvised mounts, sat captured Italian Cannone da 47/32 anti-tank guns, weapons designed to sit still…
Somewhere in the jungle of Phuoc Tuy province, five men are lying completely still in the undergrowth. They have not spoken out loud in 3 days. They are not cooking. They are not smoking. They have taped down every buckle on their webbing so that nothing rattles when they move. A few meters away, an…
Normandy, August 1944. A troop of Sherman Fireflies sits in a hedgerow gap near Falaise, engines off, hatches down. From 30 yards away in the blue-gray light before dawn, they don’t look like tanks at all. Their hulls are caked in a thick, uneven paste of local clay, straw, and diesel oil smeared on by…
A steel drum 4 feet long sits on a workbench at the telecommunications research establishment in Malvin Worersha. It is July 1944. The drum is scorched black on one side and the paint on the casing still reads Laurens in stencileled letters that no one in the room can quite believe. Nobody in this room…
On the morning of February 8th, 1945, at exactly 5:00, a young Cameroonian private named Tom Renouf lay flat in a slit trench near Nijmegen, watching the sky above the Reichswald turn the color of a blast furnace. He had joined the 51st Highland Division only weeks earlier, a replacement fed into a unit that…
On a gray November morning in 1962, Elvis Presley pulled into a small gas station on the outskirts of Tupelo, Mississippi. The town where he had been born poor, where he had learned to sing, and where he had never quite stopped belonging. He was not supposed to be there. He was between shows, passing…
Elvis asked an 80-year-old grandmother in the front row a simple question about why she loved his music, but her answer was so heartbreaking that it stopped the entire concert and left 18,000 people in tears. It was Saturday, June 14th, 1975 at the Capital Center in Landover, Maryland. Elvis was performing to a soldout…
Two Days Before Our Wedding, My Mother-In-Law Moved In, And My Fiancé Unpacked For.. Two days before I was supposed to walk down the aisle, my mother-in-law showed up unannounced with a moving truck and hauled her boxes straight into my master bedroom. My fianceé not only helped her settle in, but he also expected…
The first time I saw my father in sixteen years, I was not permitted to approach his coffin. I stood in the center aisle of Holy Cross Church in Harland, Washington, dressed in my United States Army dress blues, my medals aligned, my gloves folded in my left hand, while the entire town watched as…
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