Trusted Writing on History, Travel, and American Culture Since 1949
Germany
After World War I, Army Intelligence officers collected statements from German soldiers and citizens.
After the War, American intelligence officers combed through interrogation records and intercepted letters to compile a report about what Germans thought of their former enemies.
American volunteers distributing food to starving Belgians witnessed the dramatic deportations, when an estimated 120,000 men were taken to factories in Germany.
Our common history isn’t all pleasant, but seeing it firsthand is deeply moving.
In a hard war, theirs may have been the hardest job of all. Along with Army doctors and nurses, they worked something very close to a miracle in the European theater.
It wasn’t any different getting killed in World War II than in the Civil War, but if the shrapnel, bullet, or tree limb wounded a GI without killing him, his experience as a casualty was infinitely better.
American self-interest was involved, of course, but the Marshall Plan remains what some have referred to as a rare example of “power used to its best end.”
It took a long time for the truth about Nazi Germany to sink in. And when it did, she learned the wrong lesson.
The only complaint Martha Dodd had about her father as she grew up was that, sometimes, he’d start going on and on to the family about the Bible and history and economics, politics, and social problems. Too boring.
Donald Kagan, a historian of the ancient world believes that, in every era, people have reacted to the demands of waging war in surprisingly similar ways, and that, to protect our national interests today, Americans must understand the choices that soldiers and statesmen made hundreds and even thousands of years ago.
In an exchange of letters, a man who had an immeasurable impact on how the great struggle of our times was waged looks back on how it began.
He spent his tour of duty bombing German cities and made it home only to discover he could never leave the war behind him. Then, a lifetime later, he found a way to make peace.
My story begins in 1925. I was the youngest of nine children born to Frank and Leata Clark, factory workers in southern Wisconsin who were hit hard by the Depression. My father died when I was 13.
For a century and a half, Germans have been deeply ambivalent about the United States, and their contradictory feelings say much about their future in Europe and the world.
In 1989, the Berlin wall came down. A year later the unimaginable had become a reality: Germany, divided in 1945, was reunified, and it was beginning to raise a major voice not only in Europe but also in world politics.
As the war was coming to an end, we asked the German guards if we could hold a ceremony in Roosevelt’s honor.
The heavy cannonading in the east told the American POWs in Kommando 64/VI that the war was almost over. We had survived the brutally cold Baltic winter in this satellite labor camp of a German stalag and were now enjoying the first tenuous rays of the spring sun.
Justice served nearly 50 years ago in a wrecked German city still casts its light and shadow over much of the world.
A SENSATION OF PARALLEL TIME, of one eye fixed on the present and the other focused on the past, of one ear hearing the moment and the other distant echoes, was there from the beginning of the project. Nuremberg 1945, San Miguel de Allende 1991.
At a press conference in Berlin shortly after World War II, General Lucius D. Clay, director of the military government of the American sector of defeated Germany, announced, “We are not here as carpetbaggers.”
In 1941, the president understood better than many Americans the man who was running Germany, and Hitler understood Roosevelt and his country better than we knew.
In the summer of 1940, the fate of the world depended on the duel between two men: Adolf Hitler and Winston Churchill. It was a duel of nerves, and of wills. Churchill carried it off, because Hitler finally chose not to invade Britain.
The mysterious thing that happened to Lieutenant Colonel Brown over Bremen in 1943 sent the pilot off on a quest that lasted his entire life. Finally, he found the answer. It had been worth waiting for.
In December 1943, Captain Charles L. Brown flew his first mission over Germany as aircraft commander of a battle-weary B-17. What happened that day is an extraordinary untold story of World War II.
Americans have always sympathized with the Eastern European countries in their struggles for democracy, but, for two centuries, we haven’t been able to help much. Do we have a chance now? A distinguished expatriate looks at the odds.
Even in these days of nine-hour airplane journeys and instant telephony, the United States and Eastern Europe are very far apart.
An American soldier would never forget encountering the German with an icy smile. He would later discover that the blood of innocent millions dripped from Eichmann's manicured hands.
It was the second of May, 1945, six days before the end of the war in Europe.
In 1929, Germany announced that the mighty new dirigible Graf Zeppelin would fly around the world.
Early in the century, a young American accurately predicted Japan’s imperialism and China’s and Russia’s rise. Then, he set out to become China’s soldier-leader.
In October 1941, Clare Boothe Luce, the playwright, journalist, politician, and wife of the magazine tycoon Henry Luce, had dinner with half a dozen army officers in their quarters on top of an ancient Spanish fort beside the harbor of Manila.
In a conflict that saw saturation-bombing, Auschwitz, and the atom bomb, poison gas was never used in the field. What prevented it?
Forty years ago, on August 6 and 9, 1945, American B-29s dropped two atomic bombs on Japan, killing at least 110,000 and possibly 250,000 Japanese, and speeding that nation’s surrender.
40 years ago, a tangle of chaotic events led to the death of Hitler, the surrender of the Nazis, and the end of World War II in Europe.
The last time Grand Admiral Karl Doenitz saw his Führer was on April 20, 1945, Adolf Hitler’s 56th birthday.
America has won more Nobel Prizes in medicine than any other nation: it’s easy when you have the money, the technology, and people from every other nation
In 1977 the sociologist Harriet Zuckerman published a comprehensive study of the American Nobel laureates in science called Scientific Elite .
Forty years ago it was Nazis, not communists, we wanted to keep out of Latin America. A veteran of that propaganda war recalls our efforts to bring American values to a bewildered Ecuador.
BECAUSE THE Japanese bombed Pearl Harbor in December 1941, I found myself soon after flying down with a technical mission to the province of El Oro in Ecuador, a province I had never before heard of, in a land of which I knew nothing, except that it straddle
An Interview With Gen. Albert C. Wedemeyer
An extraordinary World War I naval operation is recounted by the commander of a decaying coastal steamer crammed with a terrifying new explosive
When my father, Rear Adm. D. Pratt Mannix 3rd, died in 1957, he had served as a midshipman on a square-rigger and lived to see the atomic bomb dropped on Japan.
The victors divided the Germans into three groups: black (Nazi), white (innocent), and gray—that vast, vast area in between
I was one of these moralists in khaki.
The most influential economist in the United States talks about prudence, productivity, and the pursuit of liquidity in the light of the past
TWENTY YEARS AGO , the American economy hummed like a well-oiled machine. We actually exported automobiles and oil.
An insider’s account of a startling— and still controversial—investigation of the Allied bombing of Germany
In his reassessment of a tragic World War II battle, General Gavin concludes that, for the Germans, holding the Huertgen Forest was Phase One of the Battle of the Bulge. For the Americans, trying to occupy the forest was a ghastly mistake.
The Battle of the Bulge came to an end in the closing days of January, 1945.
The American Experience With Foreign Aid
Imagine a person of great wealth with a habit of giving away vast sums and lending more. In order to understand his character, we should examine how the money is dispensed and why. Who are the recipients? What does the donor expect of them in return?
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