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VERSAILLES — In a closed-door meeting that historians are only now fully reconstructing, Gen. Walter Bedell Smith confronted Field Marshal Bernard Montgomery in late January 1945 with a blunt warning that his persistent disparagement of American soldiers was corroding the Allied coalition from within, according to a detailed account of the encounter. The meeting, which … Read more

After Japan’s surrender ended the Second World War, the United Nations War Crimes Commission was set up to investigate atrocities committed by the Axis powers. Yet even though the commission’s preliminary findings included both rape and forced prostitution, the crimes against the women euphemistically called “comfort women” were never mentioned at the Tokyo War Crimes … Read more

München, April 1945. In den letzten Tagen des Zweiten Weltkriegs, als das Deutsche Reich nur noch eine geographische Rumpfkonstruktion aus Schutt, Fanatismus und verzweifelter Schierenträgheit war, ereignete sich in einem amerikanischen Kriegsgefangenenlager am Rande Münchens eine Szene, die bis heute fassungslos macht. Zweihundert deutsche Kriegsgefangene der 116. Panzerdivision, der sogenannten Windhunddivision, weigerten sich geschlossen, die … Read more

Washington, D. C. — The United States Congress has quietly passed a law so extraordinary that no equivalent act has ever been repeated in American military history, a special statute known as Public Law 80-35 that granted Admiral Raymond A. Spruance the full four-star salary of a fleet admiral for the rest of his life, … Read more