Leadership Stories
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Reflections on Memorial Day
A rainy morning at Arlington, the quiet men of an earlier generation, and the question the fallen ask the living: will you carry it now?
Memorial Day...A Friend Who Did Not Return
A Memorial Day poem to a friend who didn't come home, and a warning to be slow when the next war is proposed.
Farewell to World War II Veteran, Lt. Edward “Bud” Berthold
WWII B-24 pilot Bud Berthold flew 35 missions, including D-Day. He died at 106. His advice: stay active.
The Coach Who Built a Standard and a Culture that Outlived Him (John Wooden, USA)
John Wooden's first lesson at UCLA was how to put on your socks. The standard he built outlived him. Culture is what you repeat.
What Nine Men Can Do
The Norwegian heavy water sabotage, 1942 to 1944: what a handful of well-trained skiers did to Hitler's atomic ambitions.
The Submarine Captain Who Saved His Enemies (Salvatore Todaro, Italy)
An Italian submarine captain sank an enemy ship, then risked his own boat to save its crew. Twice. Character is what remains.
Would You Have Stayed at Thermopylae?
Before he was the man at the Hot Gates, Leonidas was the brother who stayed, and inherited a mess he didn't make.
The Most Dangerous Man in the KGB
A KGB archivist copied twelve years of Soviet intelligence files by hand and changed what future generations could know.
The Archivist
An evening with Allen Packwood at the Churchill Archives Centre, and why the people who keep records keep a nation's memory.
Incantation
John reads Czesław Miłosz's “Incantation”: a hymn to the part of us that can't be killed, written in a turbulent 1968.
Englandspiel
A missing security check, a quiet choice in London, and fifty SOE agents who never came home from occupied Holland.
Operation Anthropoid
How two Czech paratroopers killed Reinhard Heydrich in Prague, what it cost the village of Lidice, and why their country still remembers.
The Finishing School for Spies
How quiet houses on a Hampshire estate turned 3,000 ordinary men and women into the most dangerous people in Europe.
The Olympic Gold Medalist Who Lied his Way into the Battle of Britain
Billy Fiske had two Olympic golds and an American passport that made him illegal in the RAF. He talked his way in anyway.
The Stone Table
At Audley End, Polish paratroopers swore an oath at a stone table and jumped into a country that wouldn't survive the peace.
The White Rabbit
Chained, tortured, and offered a plane to Lisbon for one name, the White Rabbit said no. He'd been practicing his whole life.
The Secret War on Baker Street
Walking the London high street where SOE hid above the shops and trusted a whole neighborhood to keep quiet.
The White Lady
Day 1 in London, on the anniversary of a death nobody remembers: the Belgian engineer behind a spy network that worked.
Moving a Nation's Fortune Before Hitler Arrived (Operation Fish, UK/Canada)
In 1940 Britain quietly shipped its fortune across a U-boat-infested Atlantic. Protecting the future is leadership.