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.
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.
In 1859 an American farmer shot a British pig rooting in his potato patch. Within weeks, hundreds of soldiers, a fleet of warships, and 2,000 sailors faced off on a foggy little island – and the only casualty was the pig.
In the freezing early hours of an Australian winter morning in 1944, more than a thousand Japanese prisoners rushed the fences of a POW camp armed with baseball bats and sharpened cutlery. It became the largest prison break of the Second World War.
In April 1944, weeks before D-Day, a rehearsal on a quiet Devon beach turned into a slaughter. At least 749 American servicemen died in a single night — and for decades, almost no one was allowed to know.
