He was a stubby-tailed stray of no particular breed, wandering a college football field in 1917 when a young soldier gave him a scrap of food. Eighteen months later that same dog had survived seventeen battles on the Western Front, warned his regiment of gas attacks, single-handedly captured a German soldier, and come home the most decorated war dog in American history. This is the story of Sergeant Stubby.
She was a history student from Kyiv who had never meant to be a soldier. By the age of twenty-five she had killed 309 enemy soldiers with a rifle, survived the two worst sieges on the Eastern Front, and stood before a room of American reporters to ask them, coldly, how long they intended to hide behind her back. This is the story of Lyudmila Pavlichenko, the deadliest woman ever to carry a gun to war.
A chicken farmer from Barcelona talked his way into Nazi intelligence, invented a spy ring of twenty-seven people who never existed, and on D-Day used it to convince Hitler the real invasion was still to come. He is the only man to win medals from both Britain and Germany for the same work.
Before dawn on May 13, 1862, an enslaved harbor pilot named Robert Smalls put on the captain’s hat, gave the secret whistle signal at every Confederate fort in Charleston, and sailed a rebel warship straight out to the Union fleet — carrying his family, his crew, and a cannon meant to keep them in chains.
In September 1788, a vast Austrian army marched out to fight the Ottoman Turks and, in a single confused night, tore itself apart instead — no enemy required. It is remembered as one of history’s strangest self-inflicted defeats.
For a few frozen hours in December 1914, soldiers who had been killing each other climbed out of their trenches to sing carols, bury their dead, and shake hands in no man’s land. It happened only once at that scale, and the generals made sure of it.
A 1,100-man unit of artists, ad men and sound engineers fought World War II with rubber tanks, recorded noise and pure theatre. Their secret held for half a century.
On a dark night in New York Harbor in 1776, a single volunteer sealed himself inside a wooden sphere the size of a barrel, sank beneath the waves, and hand-cranked his way toward the flagship of the most powerful navy on Earth. His mission: to screw a keg of gunpowder into the hull of a British warship. The machine was called the Turtle, and it was the first submarine ever taken into battle.
In 1943 British intelligence dressed a dead tramp as a Royal Marine officer, chained a briefcase of fake secrets to his wrist, and floated him toward the Spanish coast. Hitler believed every word — and moved his armies to defend the wrong country.
In the final week of World War II, a handful of American GIs, a band of anti-Nazi German soldiers, and a castle full of France’s imprisoned elite made a stand together against the Waffen-SS. It is remembered as the strangest battle of the war — and the only time Americans and Germans are known to have fought as allies.
