Secretariat winning the 1973 Belmont Stakes by 31 lengths A Day in History - 9th June 1973 At the 105th running of the Belmont Stakes, a bumper crowd of 69,138 witnessed something they would never forget. Secretariat didn't just win - he romped to victory by an improbable margin of 31 lengths, crossing the wire at 2.24, a course record that still stands. It was the final leg of a sweep through the Kentucky Derby and the Preakness Stakes, making Secretariat the first Triple Cr

Schloss Itter, 1945 A Day in History - 5th May 1945 It's 5th May 1945, Hitler has been dead for five days, Germany has been overrun on both fronts, and the war in Europe is almost over. A small medieval castle in the Austrian Tyrol is about to become the backdrop of one of the last and most unlikely battles of the Second World War. Schloss Itter, seized by the German SS in 1943, was established to hold high-profile French prisoners of potential value to the German Reich. The

Kriegsmarine postcard of a high-speed torpedo attack by S-boot (Schnellboot) during Exercise Tiger. Image: Author’s collection A Day in History - 28th April 1944 On 28 April 1944, a large-scale rehearsal for the Allied invasion of Nazi-occupied Europe turned into one of the deadliest training disasters of the Second World War. The operation, known as Exercise Tiger, took place at Slapton Sands, South Devon and was intended to simulate the conditions of the forthcoming D-Day