Free Republic

Beware a Desert Fox when he’s cornered. It was North Africa, in the winter of 1943, and American soldiers were feeling cocky as they prepared for their first ground battle against the Germans in World War II. So far, it hadn’t been a bad war for the U.S. Army. The GIs were well fed, well paid and well equipped, especially compared to their threadbare and envious British allies. Even better, their baptism by fire had been to splash ashore in Algeria and Morocco in November 1942, where the defenders had been unmotivated Vichy French soldiers who soon capitulated. Maybe defeating...

Human fossils, an amber room and a Raphael masterpiece all went missing during WWII.War has always brought chaos, and with it an opportunity for pillage and plunder. This was especially true during World War II, when countless pieces of priceless art, artifacts and other treasure were destroyed and spirited away from both Europe and the Asia Pacific. Nazis, in particular, systematically looted cultural property from museums, private homes and royal palaces, some of it to help Adolf Hitler build his proposed Führermuseum, but other armies carried away their own spoils as well. When the war ended, tales of real and...

Today is the anniversary of the denouement of the nearly-forgotten "20th of July" plot in 1944, when a courageous, but incredibly quixotic, group of old-fashioned German patriots under the leadership of Army officer Count Claus von Stauffenberg sought to achieve a compromise end to World War II in Europe by assassinating Adolf Hitler in his headquarters at Rastenburg, East Prussia, preparatory to opening peace negotiations with the western allies (i.e., excluding Russia). The conspiracy involved a number of high-ranking officers, including Generals Ludwig Beck and Friedrich Obert, but collapsed when a bomb placed by Stauffenberg himself failed to kill Hitler,...

Erwin Rommel, probably the best-known German soldier of the Second World War, was considered to be a chivalrous and humane general, even by the Allied forces who fought him. But a new exhibition in Stuttgart calls into question the true nature of the man known as the "Desert Fox". "The Rommel Myth" strips away the legends that surround the man who faced off against Britain's Desert Rats in North Africa and who committed suicide after being implicated in a plot to kill Adolf Hitler, the Daily Mail reports. A spokesman for the History House, the foundation which is staging the...

Dear Jon, So “America (the Book)” was named Book of the Year by Publishers Weekly. More than successful, it’s a cultural phenomenon. I had to see what the shouting’s about. If your goal was money and self-promotion, congratulations. If you had a higher goal, close but no cigar. Begin with the Foreword “by” Thos. Jefferson. Ol’ Tom was one of the greatest political thinkers in history. I’m not going to pick on deliberate falsehoods or fake quotes. Nor brevity, nor attempts at humor. Just flat-out, factual errors. You have Jefferson say “we” composed “the Declaration and the Constitution.” You credit...