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Back on the bombing run: One of the last two flying Lancasters pays tribute to the 55,000 Bomber Boys who never returned with flight on the route thousands of sorties took to target the Nazis MailOnline was granted exclusive access to film while flying alongside the Canadian Lancaster bomber Stunning footage shows the iconic aircraft soaring above the UK in what will be one of its final ever flights Video was shot while flying in a small aircraft just feet away from the world's second only airworthy Lancaster

My uncle Robert Kuhle, 95, died yesterday in Huntington Beach, CA. He was a kind, unassuming man, who derived his greatest pleasure in being around children. After WWII, he became an elementary school teacher in Southern CA, and all his students followed him like following the pied piper. He was even invited to weddings of his former elementary school students. In WWII, he was a carrier pilot on the USS Wake Island, an escort carrier, piloting the Grumman TBF Avenger, in the South Pacific. He related one story, in sadness, of being in the takeoff row, and the Avenger taking...

Opening scene from Andrez Wajda's classic film. World War 2 has just ended in Poland. The Germans are gone, but now Poland faces the prospect of life under the USSR. Commissars are being sent even now to take control of local government. A handful of Polish resistance fighters are determined to prevent that for as long possible. In Polish, with English subtitles.

NEW DELHI: On April 2, 1946, the Reuters correspondent in Melbourne, Australia, cabled a short message, which was carried by all newspapers a day later, including The Times of India. It read: "The Japanese Lieutenant Hisata Tomiyasu found guilty of the murder of 14 Indian soldiers and of cannibalism at Wewak (New Guinea) in 1944 has been sentenced to death by hanging, it is learned from Rabaul." The nationalist narrative has long projected the Second World War as a clash between the patriots of the Indian National Army (INA), supported by the Japanese Empire, and the evil British Empire. The...

This week's offering is a gripping combination of war film and spy thriller based on a real life Allied program to recruit German POW's to spy for them behind German lines. Richard Basehart, Gary Merill, and Oskar Werner star. In English with Spanish subtitles.

In the first minutes of the writer-director David Ayer’s “Fury,” about American soldiers slogging through Europe in the final days of World War II, Brad Pitt, as the tanker Don Collier, slides his knife behind the eye of a German lieutenant.“Piercing his brainpan with a CRACK,” is how Mr. Ayer’s screenplay describes the move. (In Dolby Digital sound, it will be a very loud crack.) Mr. Pitt, our hero, then calmly wipes his blade clean on the German’s uniform.The Good War this is not.In what promises to be one of the most daring studio movies in an awards season that...

97-year-old ukulele player evicted from retirement home By Rob Roth KTVU.com NAPA, Calif. — Ninety-seven-year-old Jim Farrell likes to sing and play his ukulele. He says he's a veteran of three wars. But most recently he’s found himself homeless. He had been living independently at the Redwood Retirement Residence in Napa, until eleven days ago, when he was ordered to leave. He says he was told he wasn't keeping his room clean enough. So when the residence charged him a $1500 cleaning bill, Farrell says he couldn't afford the next month's rent. He had to go. "Absolutely devastating. Devastating. Horrible,"...

........[The] SS Robert E. Lee was carrying survivors from sister ships torpedoed in the Gulf, from Trinidad to New Orleans. On the June 30,1942, as it reached just 25 miles from the mouth of the Mississippi River, a German torpedo hit. According to historical accounts, a lookout spotted the torpedo coming in and alerted the steamer's escort, the American submarine chaser USS PC-566. The sub immediately began dropping depth charges. The German U-boat, U-166, which launched the attack, was sunk with no survivors. Its wreck cannot be disturbed, now protected as a war grave for the 52 crew lost. On...

Dozens of Rialto eighth-graders questioned whether the Holocaust occurred in essays written for an in-class assignment this spring. Rialto Unified School District administrators, besieged by criticism after the assignment became public in May, claimed at the time that none of the students who completed the assignment questioned or denied the Holocaust, but a survey of the students’ work by this news organization found numerous examples of students expressing doubt or flatly denying that the Holocaust occurred. :snip: “Students got high praise and grades for writing that the Holocaust was a hoax. I’m sick about that, I’m sick about that,” said...

Ed Holton was 21 years old when he found himself face-to-face with Reichsmarschall Hermann Goering, Adolf Hitler's second-in-command. It went nothing like what he'd expected. Holton was a U.S. Army intelligence officer interrogating the imprisoned Nazi in preparation for the postwar Nuremberg trials, but Goering wasn't cracking loose about his slave labor programs or how many Jews he'd ordered gassed.

Divers from the U.S. Navy will visit the World War II graveyard of the "Galloping Ghost of the Java Coast” — the sunken USS Houston — later this month in a bid to determine what remains of the ship, which went down with more than 700 sailors off the coast of Indonesia. The wreck of the Northampton-class heavy cruiser, which was sunk by the Japanese during the World War II battle of Sunda Strait on Feb. 28, 1942, will be surveyed by Navy divers working with their counterparts from Indonesia. The ship lies about 125 feet deep, near Java, Indonesia,...

This past weekend British artists Jamie Wardley and Andy Moss accompanied by numerous volunteers, took to the beaches of Normandy with rakes and stencils in hand to etch 9,000 silhouettes representing fallen people into the sand. Titled The Fallen 9000, the piece is meant as a stark visual reminder of the civilians, Germans and allied forces who died during the D-Day beach landings at Arromanches on June 6th, 1944 during WWII. The original team consisted of 60 volunteers, but as word spread nearly 500 additional local residents arrived to help with the temporary installation that lasted only a few hours...

At the beginning of the Second World War, Doohan joined the Royal Canadian Artillery. He was commissioned a lieutenant in the 13th Field Artillery Regiment of the 3rd Canadian Infantry Division. Doohan went to England in 1940 for training. His first combat was the invasion of Normandy at Juno Beach on D-Day. Shooting two snipers, Doohan led his men to higher ground through a field of anti-tank mines, where they took defensive positions for the night. Crossing between command posts at 11:30 that night, Doohan was hit by six rounds fired from a Bren gun by a nervous Canadian...

Normandy:Surviving D-Day(full documentary)HD Battlefield S1/E5 - The Battle of Normandy The Battle for Normandy WW2: Breakout from Normandy (Operation Cobra) D-Day to Germany, 1944 The True Story Of The D Day Spies BBC Documentary DZ Normandy: The D-Day Airborne Invasion 6/6/1944 (Restored) D-day landing (History Channel Dangerous mission documentary) Oral account by Jerry W. Eades of his experiences and memories of landing on Omaha Beach Ch4 D-Day: As It Happens Part 1 of 2 Ch4 D-Day: As It Happens Part 2 of 2 Most are 380p and watchable. All are over 30 minutes in length. Links to other documentaries can...

On 6 June 1944, President Franklin D Roosevelt solemnly declared, “You don’t just walk to Berlin”. He was speaking at a White House press conference, where he had just announced that Allied troops had landed in northern France. The gathering was a homely affair, with none of the bombast associated with similar events today. In fact, it was an occasion of masterly understatement. What he could have said was that the largest naval invasion in the history of the world was finally under way. ~snip~ The long-awaited amphibious invasion of France was not a secret, and it came as no...

On June 6, the 70th anniversary of D-Day, Canada will welcome the only remaining original and complete Hawker Typhoon WWII fighter-bomber to the Ottawa aviation museum — on loan from the RAF Museum at Hendon in England. The Typhoon was a significant weapon in the D-Day battle, and in the lengthy battle for Normandy that followed. The Typhoon originally was intended to be a fighter — the successor to the Hawker Hurricane, but almost twice as heavy, much larger, and with two 20mm cannons on each wing. Its Napier Sabre sleeve-valve engine, with 24 cylinders in H-formation, produced over 2,200...

Wikipedia/American troops  As  I write, we are approaching 70 years after D-Day as well as may other anniversaries marking the end of World War Two.  [reference:  D-Day 70th anniversary - 2014 - Normandy commemorations]Many of my readers may have had relatives that fought in that war.  Those in their their 80s or older may be veterans of this war. Likewise, my father-in-law had fought in World War II and had served in the Army during Korea and Vietnam.  But he first saw action in the North African theater.  And he may have witnessed many of the events as shown...

Did you know that the Communists stormed the Winter Palace and overthrew the Czar? If you are right now screaming at your computer screen in anger, congratulations. That means you are more informed on the subject of history than the entire History channel. The error cited above is but one of the many that the History Channel included in their three part series, "The World Wars," this week. The amazing thing is that not only a particular History Channel writer made these errors but that nobody at the History Channel spotted them. Are they so involved in the "history" of...

During the second world war, the US Army Airforce had bases across Suffolk and Norfolk. In their spare time, some servicemen painted murals. Some have been saved but many are neglected and deteriorating. Photographer Si Barber has been documenting them for posterity

Wing Commander Tom Neil DFC & Bar, AFC and AE recounts his days as a RAF pilot during WWII and his experiences during the Battle of Britain For the first time, the RAF Museum brings you this video in one complete, uninterrupted, video.