On December 20, 1943, over the North Sea near Bremen, Germany, Second Lt. Charles 'Charlie' Brown was flying his B-17 'Ye Olde Pub' back from a bombing mission. His bomber was badly damaged — the tail gunner had been killed, the navigator was dead, the tail was shredded by flak, and two of the four …
On December 20, 1943, near Bremen, German Lt. Franz Stigler spotted a damaged B-17 Ye Olde Pub. Navigator dead, tail gunner killed, two engines out, crew wounded. Stigler recalled his commanders words: I fight soldiers, not children. He escorted the B-17 out of German airspace and saluted. He would …
Polish officer Witold Pilecki deliberately got himself captured in September 1940 to infiltrate Auschwitz. Inside he organized the ZOW resistance with hundreds of inmates. His three intelligence reports described gas chambers, crematoria, and extermination to Allies who ignored him as exaggerations.…
A British Army messenger dog named 'Jet' carried messages between forward positions of the 50th Northumbrian Division across open ground under heavy German fire on Gold Beach on D-Day. Jet's handler was killed in the first minutes of the landing, but Jet, carrying a message pouch, continued across t…
German soldier Friedrich Kellner, stationed on the Atlantic Wall near Saint-Nazaire, kept a detailed diary from 1939-1945. In his final entry before the Allied breakthrough, he wrote: 'If one of the boys reading this diary ever reaches this shore, may he know that his father was not the monster the …
During the march across France after D-Day, a young American sergeant named Eugene Sledge kept a diary written entirely in Morse code in his pocket notebook, so that if he were captured the Germans wouldn't be able to read it. His diary contained not just military observations but deeply personal re…