Some weeks the bags held hundreds of pages. Some weeks they held thousands. The operational documents went to the G-2 staff. The personal diaries were translated as time permitted. The translations filed and the originals retained in evidence boxes. Many of these translations would survive the war. Many of the originals would not. The voices…
He had killed pilots over Clarkfield, over Java, over Port Moresby. He flew his zero with a tail code V107 and later V173 that Allied recognition officers had begun circling on debrief charts because the man flying it never seemed to lose. Above him in the formation flew Lieutenant Commander Tadashi Nakajima, the Tynan Air…
If the plan worked, the entire German force in southern Russia would be pinned against the Naper River and the Sea of Azov and annihilated. The war on the Eastern Front would be over. For 6 weeks, it looked as though it might succeed. Kursk fell to Soviet forces on February 8th. Belgod fell on…
He set the red folder on the table. He did not sit down. He spoke for 4 minutes. The last sentence was the one that mattered. The SAS had failed. Three of the officers present nodded. Two wrote something down. Nobody asked a question. The briefing ended at 0904. The folder remained on the table…
The operation Damian Lewis called 06 Bravo happened in March 2003 in northern Iraq during the second invasion, not in January 1991. 60 SPS operators and SAS embeds driving open Land Rovers over a thousand kilometers to request the surrender of a 100,000 strong Iraqi Army Corps. The operators themselves nicknamed it Operation No Return…
In Belton Cooper’s accounting, Cooper was an ordinance lieutenant assigned to drag the burned hulks back to the maintenance battalion of the third armored division. His division entered Normandy with 232 Sherman tanks. By the time the war ended in May 1945, 648 had been totally destroyed in combat. Another 700 had been knocked out,…
At this rate, the war could drag into 1946, maybe longer. Dwight Eisenhower, Supreme Commander, 54 years old, has a letter on his desk. It arrived in April from Winston Churchill. The words still burn. Postwar France must be our friend. It is not alone a question of humanitarianism. It is also a question of…
The information had come through in the early hours of the morning, originating from signals intelligence monitoring Iraqi military communications, human intelligence sources embedded in key locations throughout the western regions, and reconnaissance reports from coalition aircraft conducting surveillance flights across the desert. American commanders reading this intelligence in their operation center with its large…
But here is the truly extraordinary part. Here is the part that defies all logic, all sanity, and all basic human self-awareness. You wake up the very next morning, iron your uniform, pin on your medals, walk into a polished office, and continue to govern an empire that no longer exists. This is not fiction….
They had been taught that America was soft, mongrel, decadent, racially divided, and spiritually weak. They had been taught that democracy was a noisy mask for disorder, that abundance made men inferior, and that hardship alone made nations worthy of history. Some had been told American cities were already burning under Luftwaffe attack. Others imagined…
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