Audie Murphy’s overlooked heroics
Audie Murphy became perhaps the most famous American foot soldier of World War II, but the press didn’t catch on to his story until he was done fighting.
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An interview with Adolf Hitler
On June 14, 1940, the day German forces entered Paris to begin more than four years of occupation, an interview with the man responsible for that travesty appeared on dozens of front pages across the United States. A few days earlier, as German forces raced across France, longtime Hearst Newspapers foreign correspondent Karl H. von Wiegand had been granted a
Read moreD-Day: Joan Ellis and the AP’s accidental invasion report
The flash hit the Associated Press wire at 4:39 p.m. Eastern War Time on Saturday, June 3, 1944: FLASH LONDON EISENHOWER’S HEADQUARTERS ANNOUNCED ALLIED LANDINGS IN FRANCE U.S. broadcast news operations had been poised for just such an alert for weeks, and immediately sprang into action. Seconds after the flash hit the wire, CBS broke into the Belmont Stakes broadcast
Read moreLord Haw Haw captured by British forces
Late on the afternoon of May 28, 1945, two British officers gathering firewood north of Flensburg, Germany, near the Danish border, encountered a man in civilian clothes. He stopped to chat, first in German and then in French — his right hand in his pocket the entire time. He then said, in English: “I used to gather firewood myself.” The
Read moreThe Dambusters raid: Guy Gibson and 617 Squadron
On May 16, 1943, the RAF launched one of its most ambitious operations of the war, bombing a pair of dams in Germany’s Ruhr region.
Read moreHenry T. Waskow and the Ernie Pyle tribute that made him famous
By the end of 1943, Ernie Pyle’s dispatches had become the indispensable lens through which Americans on the home front viewed their war. Though he was twice as old as many of the men whose toils he chronicled, Pyle’s humble, in-the-trenches approach endeared him to four-stars and grunts alike. All it took was a glance at a couple of his
Read more‘Nuts!’: Gen. Anthony McAuliffe’s legendary Bastogne rebuff
When retired Gen. Anthony C. McAuliffe died in 1975, both the headline and the first sentence of his New York Times obituary prominently featured perhaps the most famous one-word sentence in United States history: “Nuts!” The fact that McAuliffe rated a lengthy news obituary in the paper of record was attributable mostly to that single word, typed at his direction
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World War II on Deadline 