Sublime

In November 1943, Rear Admiral John Hall took command of the 11th Amphibious Force and assumed the responsibility for depositing the Army’s Fifth Corps on the landing site designated as Omaha Beach—nothing less than the most important operation in American history.

It was at the bar of White’s, one of the most exclusive gentleman’s clubs in London, that Stirling first learned about a form of soldiering that seemed much closer to the adventure and excitement he had in mind: a crack new commando unit intended to hit important enemy targets with maximum impact. Stirling’s cousin Lord Lovat had been among the fir

FDR gave Admiral King a direct order to transfer sixty B-24 Liberator bombers from the Pacific theater to the Atlantic to combat German U-boats. Until that time, the Navy had resisted the transfer and the U-boats had gone largely unchallenged. After the transfer, the Battle of the Atlantic was quickly won.

De Long tried to hug the floes but not too closely, for they often had sharp tongues projecting underwater that could ground the boats—or rip a hull apart. The waves constantly gnawed at the ice, honeycombing it with tunnels and hidden voids. “The ice was very much wasted,” De Long wrote, “and had numerous holes extending through to the sea.” Melvi

The five members of MI(R)c were hard at work on the afternoon of 10 November when Jefferis’s telephone rang unexpectedly. The caller did not identify himself and nor did he give any indication as to why he was phoning. He simply ordered Jefferis to attend an important meeting in Whitehall. When Jefferis pressed for further information, he was told

The pinch of the Abwehr Enigma machine in Algiers filled in another piece of the ISOS jigsaw and completely vindicated the IAU’s existence. After it was flown from Blida airfield to Gibraltar and then back to England, it yielded the reading of six weeks’ back-traffic from an unknown Vichy link, which pleased both Dilly Knox of Bletchley Park and Ia

It was an interesting sight, too, to see our noble ship, dismantled of all her top-hamper of long tapering masts and yards, and boom pointed with spear-head, which ornamented her in port; and all that canvas, which a few days before had covered her like a cloud, from the truck to the water's edge, spreading far out beyond her hull on either side, n

Using notes from Captain Frederick Bailey, a British secret agent who’d stumbled across a hidden valley in Tibet in the 1930s while reconnoitering with rebel groups in Asia, Fisher helped locate the fabled Kintup Falls, a thundering cascade that conceals the entrance to the deepest canyon on the planet. From there, Fisher moled his way into lost wo