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According to Apple, the premiere episode of Masters of the Air, the "sequel" to Band of Brothers and The Pacific, was the most-watched debut ever on their streaming platform. Which is proof that there's a robust audience for these technically cutting-edge but dramatically old-fashioned World War Two dramas, produced by Steven Spielberg's Amblin and Tom Hanks' Playtone. It's hard not to see the appeal in a world full of moral equivalence and antiheroes so compromised they'd be called villains in a different era. None of these shows deny that war is hell; they go out of their way (with the...

Dick Higgins, the Bend resident and Pearl Harbor survivor whose public appearances and first-person recollections of that infamous day – Dec. 7, 1941 – became ever more special with every day, week and year, passed away early Tuesday at the age of 102, his grieving yet grateful family announced."Gramps went home to be with Jesus this morning. He was a humble, generous, funny and loving husband, father, grandfather, great grandfather and friend. This community has celebrated and honored him and we are forever grateful for the impact he has made on all of us. At 102 years old, we have...

Thursday, March 21, 2024, shortly after noon, the Battleship New Jersey began traveling down the Delaware River. The ship arrived at Paulsboro Marine Terminal in Paulsboro, New Jersey, just before 4 p.m. for hull preparation. A week later, the historic ship will head to the Philadelphia Navy Yard for historic dry dock maintenance. "This battleship is just a tremendous piece of history," Battleship New Jersey CEO Marshall Spevak said. “This is a once in a generation opportunity really to see the ship move.” When did Battleship NJ depart? The ship left from Camden on March 21 around high tide --...

CAMDEN, N.J. -- Residents in the Philadelphia area are about to see a rare site — a battleship floating down the Delaware River. The USS New Jersey is scheduled to move from its dock in Camden on Thursday, when it will head to the Philadelphia Navy Yard for extensive maintenance work. The vessel, guided by tugboats, will initially head to the Paulsboro Marine Terminal, where it will be balanced to prepare for dry docking, and will then go to the Navy Yard six days later. The maintenance work is expected to take about two months to complete, officials said. Three...

A teenage cook whose heroics onboard a warship helped shorten the Second World War has been honoured in his home town after a public vote. The regenerated centre of North Shields, North Tyneside, has been named after Thomas Brown, who was awarded the George Medal for helping to retrieve codebooks from a sinking German U-boat in October 1942. The books were later used to crack the Enigma code by experts at Bletchley Park, enabling the British to decipher Nazi messages. Two naval men died while searching the stricken submarine but Thomas, a 15-year-old civilian who lied about his age to...

The Best Years of Our Lives is a 1946 American drama film directed by William Wyler and starring Myrna Loy, Fredric March, Dana Andrews, Teresa Wright, Virginia Mayo and Harold Russell. The film is about three United States servicemen re-adjusting to societal changes and civilian life after coming home from World War II. The three men come from different services with different ranks that do not correspond with their civilian social class backgrounds. The film was a critical and commercial success. It won seven Academy Awards: Best Picture, Best Director (William Wyler), Best Actor (Fredric March), Best Supporting Actor...

1947 reports: Arab Nazism & "Palestine" "Arabs With UN Charged With Being Pro-Hitler." The 75-page memorandum accuses the Grand Mufti of Jerusalem, and Wasef Kamal and Emil Ghouri, two of his followers now attending sessions at Lake Success. Arabs With UN Charged With Being Pro-Hitler Herald-Journal May 12, 1947. Nation Editor, Graham of UNC Issue Accusing Memorandum. Lake Success, N. Y., May 11 (UP) . - A pro-Zionist organization charged tonight that former Axis collaborators, saboteurs and spies now sparkplug the Arab delegation to the United Nations meeting on Palestine. The charge came from the Nation Associates, which is headed...

Daytona Beach Morning Journal, May 19, 1947, p. 2 Meet The ArabianazisBy Walter Winchell. For many months now the front pages of the world have- been crowded with the blow by blow description of a struggle which has finally reached the United Nations . . . The problem has been how to find a place under the warm Palestinian sun for the living skeletons who, from 1933, suffered the foul tortures of Hitler's fevered brain. Arrayed against this pitiful group of human beings is a wicked clique of men who, despite their hostility to the Allies, have been granted powerful...

The Department of Veterans Affairs (VA) abandoned plans Tuesday to remove an iconic World War II-era photo from its facilities due to an alleged lack of “inclusivity.” The move came following backlash that emerged immediately after the decision was leaked earlier that day. In a memo issued last Thursday, VA undersecretary RimaAnn Nelson requested agency officials remove the “V-J Day in Times Square” photo from all Veterans Health Administration facilities, in compliance with the VA’s goal of “maintaining a safe, respectful, and trauma-informed environment.” Taken by Alfred Eisenstaedt in 1945, the iconic photograph depicts a Navy sailor kissing a female...

<p>Veterans Affairs Secretary Denis McDonough is overruling plans to ban the famous Times Square kiss photo marking the end of World War II from all department health care facilities, a move criticized as political correctness run amok.</p><p>The ban was announced internally at VA medical facilities late last month in a memo from RimaAnn Nelson, the Veterans Health Administration’s top operations official. Employees were instructed to “promptly” remove any depictions of the famous photo and replace it with imagery deemed more appropriate.</p>

Brig. Gen. Paul Tibbets, better known as the man who piloted the Enola Gay during the bombing of Hiroshima, became a well-known figure in the United States at the end of the Second World War. Despite his fame, Tibbets asked that upon his death he receive no funeral or gravestone. Paul Tibbets started his career as an abdominal surgeon before enlisting in the US Army Air Corps. He initially served for three years, qualifying as a pilot in 1938, and opted to stay on active duty when the US entered the Second World War. While he is best known for...

Pathfinder. vol. 47. United States: Farm Journal, Incorporated, 1940, p. 4. * *(p. 3: "NEAR EAST - A Possible Locale for Act II in the War"). ...Troubled Palestine. • British - Mandated Palestine and Transjordan, likewise former parts of the Ottoman Empire, are contrasts. Transjordan gives the British so little trouble that its 34,740 square desert miles are policed by less than 1,600 men. Palestine, on the other hand, in its 10,492 square miles (slightly larger than Vermont) packs more concentrated hatred than any other section of the Near East. This hatred exists between the Arabs and Jews and springs...

... The Russian president argued that Poland was to blame for Hitler's decision to invade, claiming the Warsaw "went too far" by balking at the annexation of part of its territory. Polish Foreign Minister Radosław Sikorski suggested in a post to X, formerly Twitter, on Friday that Putin was "paranoid" and called it "shocking" that Carlson "enabled" the Russian president by giving him a platform to spread his false claims and rhetoric. Sikorski .. also noted that Hitler was joined in invading Poland by the Soviet Union, which was an ally to Nazi Germany for nearly the first two years...

The detectorists were conducting a survey to find relics from WW2, in particular, traces of the Battle of Szczec, fought between the Soviet Red Army and the Wehrmacht...According to a press announcement by PAP, Detectorists from the Szczecin Search Group Association have found 70 coins deposited in a heavily corroded metal can buried at a depth of approximately 15 to 20 cm’s. The total discovery has been estimated to be worth 100,000 zloty, which is over 24,000 US dollars based on current conversion rates.A preliminary study of the coins has already identified a Liberty Head double eagle, also known as...

@fasc1nate Major Dick Winters led perhaps the most storied U.S. Army unit in all of World War II. On D-Day, he and his "band of brothers" in Easy Company defeated a far larger German force and allowed the Allied advance to continue. At the Dachau concentration camp, they liberated scores of Holocaust prisoners who'd endured months, if not years, of hell. And as the war in Europe drew to a close, they captured Hitler's personal mountaintop retreat in southern Germany — then kicked back on his terrace in triumph while sipping champagne from his wine cellar.⁠ ⁠ But for decades,...

The Navy is about to name a ship in honor of Omaha’s World War II “Hero of the Solomons.” Navy Secretary Carlos Del Toro announced last week that one of the next new Arleigh Burke-class destroyers (DDG 142) will be named for Petty Officer 1st Class Charles Jackson French, who was born in Arkansas in 1919 but was raised by his sister in Omaha after his parents died. The Navy traditionally names its destroyers after Navy and Marine Corps heroes. Other ships in the Arleigh Burke class have been named for Revolutionary War Capt. John Paul Jones and Civil War...

While federal authorities did not bring legal charges against the black press for the balance of the war, that doesn't mean they shifted to a hands-off approach. Instead, they ratcheted up both intense monitoring and informal pressure. In the first half of 1942, FBI agents visited leading black newspapers that had carried critical stories about the federal government. Moreover, postal inspectors admonished two leading papers that the "benefits of citizenship" carried an obligation not to "'play up' isolated and rare instances in such a fashion as to obstruct recruiting and in other ways hamper the war effort."

Dated May 25 and delivered by plane while the Yorktown was about a hundred miles from Oahu, the report that Nimitz read was sobering...One day ahead of schedule, on May 27, the Yorktown limped into Pearl Harbor. The next morning, after Nimitz had cut orders voiding the safety rule of spending a day purging her tanks of stored aviation fuel, the Yorktown eased into Drydock Number One. The caissons closed behind her, and pumps began draining out the water. With at least a foot of water still remaining in the drydock, men in waders gathered to inspect the hull. One...

A World War II and Korean War veteran who received a Purple Heart celebrated his 101st birthday at Hooters — and has vowed to return there every year until he dies. Harry Perez Cerezo, a retiree from Texas, was joined by his family, friends, and the Veterans of Foreign Wars organization when he rang in his milestone birthday at the chain's El Paso location on January 5. The centenarian was serenaded by the Hooters girls and gifted a signed Hooters hat 'I have never seen him cry, and we saw him cry there. His tears just came rolling down,' Harry...

World War II depth charges, smoke floats and munition cases are among the latest eerie relics to be discovered on a deep-water survey ten miles off the coast of LA. High–resolution cameras found a massive dumping ground of munitions from the Pacific War which were tossed overboard warships before they could endanger the ports they were returning to. A team from the University of California's San Diego Scripps Institution of Oceanography found the objects up to 3,000ft down between LA and Catalina Island, in the same area where thousands of barrels of the outlawed pesticide DDT were discovered three years...