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The 62nd Army's Last 67 Men
At the conclusion of the Battle of Stalingrad, the Soviet 62nd Army — which had held the city against impossible odds — was reduced to 67 surviving officers and 239 soldiers. General Chuikov, the army commander, was evac...
The Kamikaze Who Missed on Purpose
On October 25, 1944, during the Battle of the Leyte Gulf, Ensign Masajiro Miyashita flew his Zero toward the USS Kaloli, then pulled up at the last second and deliberately flew past the carrier without attacking, landing...
The Man Who Sabotaged the Nazi Nuclear Program with One Wrench
Werner Heisenberg's Copenhagen visit in September 1941 was one of the most consequential diplomatic failures of the war. But the real sabotage of the German atomic bomb project was more mundane and more heroic: in 1942, ...
Virginia Hall: The Allied Spy the Gestapo Called 'the Limping Lady'
Virginia Hall was an American who worked for the Office of Strategic Services (OSS) in occupied France. After escaping to Spain in 1942 following a Gestapo raid, she was declared "the most dangerous of all aliens" by the...
The Small Town That Survived 7 Nazi Divisions
The town of Gorodnya in eastern Belarus survived German occupation for 887 days. What made it remarkable: it was surrounded by seven Nazi divisions during the peak of Operation Barbarossa, cut off from all resupply. The ...
Nancy Wake: The Woman Who Smuggled 2,600 Prisoners Out of France
Nancy Wake was born in New Zealand and became one of the most decorated women of WWII. As a resistance organizer in France, she helped spirit away 2,600 people — including hundreds of downed Allied airmen — through the P...
The Nuremberg Prosecutor Who Refused to Prosecute
Sir Hartley Shawcross, the British chief prosecutor at the Nuremberg Trials, refused to prosecute field marshal Erich von Manstein on charges of war crimes. Shawcross publicly stated in his closing argument that the enti...
The Last Stand of Pavlov's House
During the Battle of Stalingrad, a Soviet platoon led by Sergeant Yakov Pavlov fortified a four-story apartment building that became known as Pavlov's House. The building wasn't strategically important — it just happened...
Operation Market Garden's Forgotten Bridge
Most people know about Arnhem and the bridge too far. But the critical battle was at Nijmegen — the Waal River bridge — where a group of American paratroopers from the 82nd Airborne executed one of the most audacious day...
The Holocaust Survivor Who Built the World's First Computer
Stanislaw Ulam was a Polish-Jewish mathematician who survived the Holocaust and emigrated to the United States, where he worked at Los Alamos on the Manhattan Project. He is the co-inventor of the Monte Carlo method (wit...
The Soviet Women's Night Witches
The 588th Night Bomber Regiment of the Soviet Air Force, known as the "Night Witches" (Nachthexen) by the Germans, was composed almost entirely of women between the ages of 17 and 26. They flew canvas-covered Polikarpov ...
The Women Who Mapped Normandy for D-Day
Before D-Day, the US Army's 8th Photographic Reconnaissance Squadron, staffed almost entirely by women, created the most detailed aerial maps of Normandy ever produced. Working from RAF bases in England, they analyzed th...
The Bletchley Park Codebreakers Who Were Forbidden to Drink Water
The Bletchley Park codebreakers worked in conditions of extreme secrecy — the building was surrounded by barbed wire, guards checked all outgoing mail, and staff were forbidden from discussing their work, even with their...