Some quick book news. Operation Catapult now has an official release date – March 17, 2026 – and I’m excited to be able to share the cover (see down below).

I also want to share some historical nuggets of information that I gathered during my research phase. During that time, I spent a couple of months immersed in copies of the New York Times from the spring and summer of 1940. Thanks to the TimesMachine feature on the New York Times website, which provides digitized scans of every page of every issue from 1851 to 2002, I was able to do all of this from home. By that time, my book was pretty well mapped out, but the Times was a valuable resource for the “fine brushstrokes” and “flecks of gold” that historian Rick Atkinson often refers to.

The best bits of information made it into my book. In keeping with my affinity for odd, offbeat, and off-track info, I also captured screen-prints of way too many flecks of dust, including:

May 1, 1940
Headline: $1,000,000 for Capture of Hitler ‘Alive and Unhurt’ is Offered here.
A group in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, headed by S.H. Church, announced a $1,000,000 reward (worth $23 million today) for the capture of Adolph Hitler by the end of the month. The group’s intent was to have the Fuehrer tried before a world court for “Crimes Against Peace.”

Newspaper clipping of NYT story about million dollar reward for capture of Hitler “alive and unhurt.”

May 7, 1940
“The Grapes of Wrath” by John Steinbeck was awarded the Pulitzer Prize for the most distinguished novel during 1939. Carl Sandberg’s “Abraham Lincoln: The War Years” won in the History category.

May 14, 1940
Headline: Nazi Reprisal Set at 10 Lives for One
After several German parachutists were shot and killed while gliding to the earth, the German High Command warned the Allies that they would henceforth kill ten French prisoners for every German victim.

May 19, 1940
It was reported that German troops had been ordered to avoid fighting near the town of Doorn in The Netherlands, where the former Kaiser Wilhelm had sought refuge since the end of the First World War. “A detachment of the Elite Guards was reported sent to be a guard of honor in front of Castle Doorn.”

May 20, 1940
In a radio address, Charles Lindbergh decried the fears of some Americans about a potential foreign invasion, unless “American peoples bring it on” by meddling in the affairs of foreign nations. He declared that the U.S. must stay out of the war in Europe.

May 26, 1940
Morris Sheppard, chairman of the U.S. Senate’s Military Affairs Committee, disclosed that his committee had received a number of creative suggestions to improve national defense, including: Magic Grease, which would be put into the barrels of rifles and cannon, enabling bullets and shells to travel twenty times faster and twenty times farther, and Liquid Cement, which when sprayed on attacking enemy troops, would harden at once, stopping them in their tracks.

June 1, 1940
The opportunity to make one million dollars by kidnapping Hitler ended at midnight. Whether or not any one made a serious attempt to get the money is known only to Dr. Church, who refused comment as his offer concluded.

June 4, 1940
Italy postpones 1942 World’s Fair

June 7, 1940
Thomas J. Watson, president of IBM, returned to Chancellor Adolf Hitler the Merit Cross of the German Eagle, with star, awarded him in Berlin in 1937 in recognition of his efforts for world peace and trade. In a letter addressed to Hitler, Mr. Watson explained that he took the action because “the present policies of your government are contrary to the causes for which I have been working and for which I received the decoration.”

June 8, 1940
Bertrand Russell, life-long British pacifist and philosopher, now teaching at the University of California at Los Angeles, told the magazine New Statesman in a letter that “If I were young enough to fight I would do so. Since the war began, I have felt that I could not go on being a pacifist. If I were young enough to fight, I would do so, but it is difficult for me to urge others to do so.”

June 10, 1940
After Germany attacked Poland, Sir Arnold Wilson, a member of Parliament, who had previously held an “unremitting admiration of Hitlerism,” humbly submitted that he had been wrong. Remarkably, to tangibly atone for his previous praise, he applied for a job as a rear gunner in the Royal Air Force at the age of 55. He died in combat when his plane was shot down over northern France in early June.

June 12, 1940
Two days after Italy joined the war at Germany’s side, a newspaper columnist in Panama offered a reward to the first Allied aviator who shot down either Bruno or Vittorio Mussolini, the Fascist dictator’s sons.

June 15, 1940
The French declaration that Paris was an “open city” and would not be defended was the ninth surrender of Paris since 52 B.C. The most recent previous occasion was in January 1871, when the victorious Germans marched into the French capital toward the end of the The Franco-Prussian War.

July 5, 1940
Headline: Churchill is Assailed as the “Greatest Criminal in All History.”
After the Royal Navy attacked French ships at Mers-el-Kebir, a German news service called Winston Churchill “the greatest criminal in history,” and suggested, “It would not surprise us if the English people were to turn their reflections inward and, recognizing the terrible nature of their decline and making short shift of the matter, were to hang Winston Churchill in the gallows facing the Nelson Statue on Trafalgar Square.”

July 8, 1940
Headline: Dying Nazi’s Good News
The widow of General Delof von Winterfeldt, who signed the Compiegne armistice for German in 1918, revealed today that he had died with the knowledge that the agreement had been supplanted by a new one. She disclosed that shortly before his death, her husband had received telegrams from Col. Gen. Wilhelm Keitel, and Col. Gen. Walther von Brauchitsch, informing him that the Compiegne agreement of 1918 had been “atoned for” and wishing him a speedy recovery. (This was not entirely correct. General von Winterfeldt lived until November 1940).

July 10, 1940
King George VI awarded the Medal of the Order of the British Empire to Mrs. Norman Cardwell, who disarmed and arrested a German flier who had landed near her house in a crippled airplane that had been damaged during an attack the previous day. “Because she had been told that members of the Women’s Volunteer Service, of which she is the local leader, had to use their initiative, she walked up to the armed air man, who was 6 feet 3 inches tall, told him to put up his hands and took his pistol.”

July 16, 1940
Headline: Italians Ask France To Give Up ‘Mona Lisa’
The University of Rome through its official organ, Fascista, demanded that France return all of the art works “looted” from Italy by Napoleon, including Leonardo da Vinci’s priceless Mona Lisa.

July 19, 1940
German troops returning from the conquest of France to a victory celebration today were told by Propaganda Minister Joseph Goebbels that “you have just one more battle to win; then the bells of peace will ring.” When the imminent invasion of the British Isles brings its reward of a final Nazi triumph, Dr. Goebbels said, then “we will build a better Europe.”

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Oh yeah, my book! I’m excited to share the cover of my book. As mentioned above, it will be released on March 17, 2026. Even with seven-plus months to go before publication, it is already available or presale on the websites of Amazon, Barnes and Noble, the U.S. Naval Institute, and Aaron’s Books, my local independent bookseller.

Thanks for reading,
Bill

Odds (Very) and Ends, plus a peek at my book cover