Top Secret
On the evening of September 26, 1940, American radio announcer and journalist William L. Shirer noted in his later famous Berlin Diary that the next day Italian Foreign Minister Count Galeazzo Ciano would arrive there from Rome, adding that most people thought it was for the announcement that Francisco Franco’s Spain was entering the war on the side of the Axis. Read more
Top Secret
A man who was close to Adolf Hitler and hardly impartial later saidthat the Führer had “a mood of merriment” for a brief period that day. Read more
Top Secret
To the crews of the Royal Air Force Bomber Stream Droning Toward Germany in the early morning hours of December 3, 1942, this mission seemed indistinguishable from the countless others that had preceded it. Read more
Top Secret
A wily British scientist, a secret weapon, and a daring daytime Bombing raid helped break the back of the deadly German E-boat attacks on the Allied ships that supported the early D-Day landings at Normandy. Read more
Top Secret
After the tumultuous liberation of Paris and the German Army’s eastward flight from France, Allied hopes rose high in the late summer and autumn of 1944. Read more
Top Secret
May 3, 1944: The nondescript army bus slowed to make a turn off the Mount Vernon Memorial Parkway just outside suburban Alexandria, Virginia. Read more
Top Secret
Russian deception, misdirection, and misinformation, as evidenced in ecent years, can be very destructive. But it’s nothing new—it’s the result of hard-earned experience during World War II. Read more
Top Secret
At 10:30 on the night of May 9, 1936, as 400,000 people stood crowded together on Rome’s Palazzo Venezia underneath the most famous balcony in the world, Italian Prime Minister Benito Mussolini, 52, the leader of the country’s ruling Fascist Party, strode forward and began to speak to the silent masses below him. Read more
Top Secret
It was in the early hours of the German invasion of Holland, May 10, 1940, and a Wehrmacht doctor was tending to a soldier wounded during the capture of the key Gennep border bridge. Read more
Top Secret
“If you want to join the banquet, you’ll have to help first in the kitchen,” Hitler cynically told the leader of Hungary after signing an alliance with him. Read more
Top Secret
Several Hollywood stars served proudly in the U.S. Marine Corps during World War II, including Tyrone Power, Louis Hayward, Lee Marvin, Macdonald Carey, Hugh O’Brian, Bill Lundigan, John Russell, Robert Ryan, Brian Keith, and Peter Ortiz. Read more
Top Secret
BACKSTORY: Although for the past 75 years history has had little to say about “Bally’s Project,” an effort to falsify State Department records to remove evidence of gross miscalculations prior to the attack on Pearl Harbor—the author recently discovered a small file of documents in the Frank A. Read more
Top Secret
The five Americans were trapped in a small, dark, empty wine cellar in an isolated French villa on the coast of Algiers. Read more
Top Secret
Along with three comrades, one of the Marine Corps heroes is still remembered in the small town of Centron in southeastern France. Read more
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According to contemporary Soviet news sources, fighter Ace Alexander Pokryshkin was the most famous pilot in the Red Air Force during World War II. Read more
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On March 14, 1988, a solemn ceremony took place at Arlington National Cemetery. Resplendent in their white caps and dress blues, the Marine body bearers laid to rest the ashes of Ernest Cuneo in the Columbarium with full military honors. Read more
Top Secret
It was at the grand banquet given in his honor that General William “Wild Bill” Donovan told his host, General Dai Li, that the OSS intended to work on its own in China and that he wanted no interference from the Chinese. Read more
Top Secret
In September 1941, during the siege of Leningrad, as the Soviets then called St. Petersburg, Nazi troops overran the Tsarskoye Selo Palace, the former summer residence of the czars in the suburban town of Pushkin. Read more
Top Secret
“We were to be terrorists. Our job was to terrorize the Germans,” one former member said dramatically. Read more
Top Secret
In 1960 Twentieth Century Fox released the film Sink the Bismarck! Based on C.S. Forrester’s bestselling book The Last Nine Days of the Bismarck, the documentary-style film tells a gripping and reasonably factual account of the most famous sea chase in history. Read more
