Christmas Eve, 1944. The war is supposed to be turning in the Allies’ favor. The lights of France are visible from the deck. Home feels close enough to imagine. Then a single torpedo reminds everyone that war does not care about calendars, carols, or confidence.

Tonight on Dave Does History, we are telling the story of the SS Léopoldville, a troopship sunk just five and a half miles from safety, taking nearly eight hundred American soldiers with it. This is not a tale of heroism neatly wrapped in victory. It is a story of confusion, bad assumptions, language barriers, and systems that failed when they were needed most. It is also a story that was deliberately buried for decades, leaving families with silence instead of answers.

The Léopoldville disaster matters because it was preventable, forgotten, and human. And because history does not only fail on battlefields. Sometimes it fails quietly, in the dark, while everyone assumes someone else is paying attention.