Group items tagged

Downed WWII bomber found in Pacific 72 years later

As World War II raged in 1944, an American bomber took off on a mission with three crew members on board.

For 72 years, the TBM-1C Avenger lay on the ocean floor and with it, the remains of the crew.

Women like Nancy Wake, who was parachuted into France and worked for the French resistance undermining the German occupation.

The Gestapo codenamed her The White Mouse, she was given the George Medal at the end of the war in recognition of the lives she saved and the risks she took

Here at home. A lady in Kent who, a farmhouse nearby was just razed to the ground, what did she do? She got children out from underneath that rubble. Another lady who is living in Wales at the present time was driving petrol in the East End of London, given to fire brigades so that their punts could still function and take care of fires. And the doodlebugs were coming down! Women in Coventry did a splendid job, Liverpool, all over the country. Some in uniform, as I say, a lot who were not.

Secretary of the Interior Harold L. Ickes was livid. On February 19, 1942, 74 days after the Japanese bombing of Pearl Harbor, his boss, President Franklin D. Roosevelt, signed Executive Order 9066, which authorized the internment of more than 120,000 Japanese Americans, 62% of whom were American born.

To drive his dissent home, Ickes soon had four Japanese-American men and three women transferred from a relocation camp in Arizona to his home in Olney, Maryland.

Donald Trump has defended his call to stop all Muslims from entering America, approvingly invoking FDR's mistaken action of 1942 as his benchmark. FDR, in my opinion, was the greatest president in U.S. history. But EO 9066 was his biggest mistake.

Alice Tanaka Hikido clearly remembers the bewilderment and sense of violation she felt 74 years ago when FBI agents rifled through her family's Juneau home, then arrested her father before he was sent to Japanese internment camps, including a little-known camp in pre-statehood Alaska.

The 83-year-old Campbell, California, woman recently attended a ceremony where participants unveiled a study of the short-lived internment camp at what is now Joint Base Elmendorf-Richardson in Anchorage.

Her father eventually joined his family in Idaho in 1944. They spent more than a year there together before the war ended and they returned to Juneau.

Since so many people lost friends and family in the 1945 firebombing by the United States, it is one of the most retold stories in oral histories, with accounts of spectacular flames and the apocalyptic aftermath of a city reduced to ashes and panoramic vistas over smoldering ruins. But outside of Japan this is one of the forgotten horrors of WWII. Sand writes, “This traumatic irruption in the everyday world of Shitamachi residents […] took roughly one hundred thousand lives in the course of two hours.”

Incendiaries dropped on Tokyo’s tinderbox housing combined with powerful spring winds to whip up a deadly conflagration. Oddly enough, there is no state memorial to this tragedy, and, in 1964, Emperor Showa actually bestowed an award on General Curtis LeMay, the man who was in charge of firebombing 66 of Japan’s cities, including Tokyo. He ordered a delay in the Tokyo firebombing and timed the raid to coincide with strong winds to maximize the devastation.

As the head of the vast column reached Red Square, the marchers were joined by Russian President Vladimir Putin, who held a photograph of his late father in his naval uniform.

The march of the so-called Immortal Regiment was part of Saturday's commemorations of the 70th anniversary of the victory over Nazi Germany.

Earlier in the day, 16,500 troops took part in a military parade on Red Square.

Berg, who lived in Columbia, Calif., in the foothills of the Sierra Nevada, was the last known survivor of the Abraham Lincoln Brigade, as the several units of American volunteers who fought in the Spanish Civil War came to be called

One of the last, killed a year and a half later, was James Lardner, a 24-year-old from a famous literary family, who traveled to Spain as a New York Herald Tribune correspondent and then decided to fight.

World War II has largely pushed that conflict out of our collective memory, but it was momentous for the people of Spain, and for the 40,000 volunteers from more than 50 countries, 2,800 of them American, who fought in it. Eighty years ago this July, a large group of right-wing army officers staged a coup against the democratically elected government of the Spanish Republic.

A group of 14 Holocaust survivors from Hungary have filed a class action lawsuit in the US against the Hungarian government and its national train company for their cooperation with the Nazis, their complicity in deporting over half a million Jews in the Holocaust and the massive confiscation of their property.

Hungary is the only state that has not yet reached a compensation settlement with Holocaust survivors or their heirs. The Hungarian government also has never been prosecuted for collaboration with the Nazis

"We did not establish a sum, but in actuality it will amount to billons of dollars

The commander of American forces in South Korea warned Wednesday that a conflict with North Korea could resemble the scale of World War II.

Describing what the confrontation might look like, Gen. Curtis Scaparrrotti said that, "Given the size of the forces and the the weaponry involved, this would be more akin to the Korean War and World War II -- very complex, probably high casualty."

The U.S. military suffered 405,399 fatalities in World War II and 36,574 during the Korean War of 1950-1953. Korean casualties were in the millions.

The United States receives the most credit for defeating Adolf Hitler's Germany during World War Two, according to a YouGov poll

While the USSR trailed significantly in many of the countries sampled, the Soviets suffered the greatest losses of any of the Allies.

According to a new poll, however, most other countries look to the United States as the country that did the most to vanquish Adolf Hitler

He said he worries today about a newly assertive Russia and what he sees as the reluctance of many in Europe to understand that “it is not a stable world” and that peace is not guaranteed. “It ought to be obvious to people that peace and freedom have to be fought for,” he said. “Politicians seem to have forgotten this.”

New Year’s message to highlight the country’s current fight in Syria while

The recorded message was being televised just before midnight Thursday in each of Russia’s nine time zones.

our servicemen who are fighting international terrorism, making a stand for Russia’s national interests,

The Japanese national narrative is that the bomb gave Japan a mission for peace in the world. The bomb doesn’t end the war: It starts the postwar mission for peace. The American narrative is that the bomb ended the war and saved American lives. That’s the story.

the critique some people make is that Japan’s understanding of the war hasn’t changed at all, on any front, and that the country still sees itself as a victim rather than an aggressor.

It has a victim narrative, but that is true with every country, including Germany, which saw itself as a victim of its leaders. But Japanese victims’ narratives lasted a lot longer than others. There are several reasons for that, but probably the most important was the United States, which conspired in creating that narrative in the first few months after the American occupation. To achieve the goals of the American occupation, it was important to see the Japanese aggression and atrocities as something that was brought about by bad leaders, so that these leaders—but not the people—were held responsible. That was a good grounding for reforms. This narrative sat well with the Japanese but it was a co-created narrative.

When the European war began in earnest on September 1, 1939, with the German invasion of Poland, the U.S. Army ranked seventeenth among armies of the world in size and combat power, just behind Romania. It numbered 190,000 soldiers. (It would grow to 8.3 million in 1945, a 44-fold increase.

At the time of Pearl Harbor, in December 1941, only one American division was on a full war footing.

Obviously a lot happened to get from an army of 190,000 to an army of almost 8.5 million. A total of 16 million Americans served in uniform in WWII; virtually every family had someone in harm’s way, virtually every American had an emotional investment in our Army.

She also harked back to her first speech to the public ever, when she was only 14 and still a princess.“It reminds me of the very first broadcast I made, in 1940, helped by my sister,” she said, as an archive photo of the girls appeared on-screen. “We as children spoke from here at Windsor [Castle] to children who had been evacuated from their homes and sent away for their own safety.”

The wave of child evacuations had begun the year before, on Sept. 1, 1939 — the same day Nazi Germany invaded Poland and only two days before Britain’s prime minister declared war. Fearing civilian casualties if British cities were bombed, officials urged parents to send their children to the countryside to live with strangers who volunteered to provide space for them.

Evacuation of children was voluntary, according to the Imperial War Museum, but since urban schools had been shut down, the decision was made easier.