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'Hunched over a wireless set, alone in a safe house in a Parisian suburb on a rainy morning in July 1944, Didi Nearne tapped out a Morse Code message. It contained urgent information from the leader of her Resistance network to intelligence chiefs back in London. The average SOE wireless operator in Occupied France lasted for just six weeks before being arrested. Didi, 21, had survived for five months, making an astonishing 105 transmissions. The questioning began. What was she doing with a wireless set? Didi had her answer ready: she was a simple French girl and had been sending...

Work begins on Friday to raise a unique World War II aircraft from the floor of the English Channel just off the Kent coast. The Dornier 17 aircraft is the last of its kind, and lies in 50ft of water on the Goodwin Sands. The salvage is just the start of a two-year restoration project by the RAF Museum in Hendon. Summer 1940 and Britain stands alone in Europe against seemingly unstoppable German military success. For weeks on end, wave after wave of German aircraft cross the English coast, under orders to destroy the RAF and pave the way for...

A man says he walks his neighborhood with a World War II rifle to pick up garbage and keep the area safe. WCNC reports.

BERLIN — They were feasts of sublime asparagus — laced with fear. And for more than half a century, Margot Woelk kept her secret hidden from the world, even from her husband. Then, a few months after her 95th birthday, she revealed the truth about her wartime role: Adolf Hitler's food taster. Woelk, then in her mid-twenties, spent two and a half years as one of 15 young women who sampled Hitler's food to make sure it wasn't poisoned before it was served to the Nazi leader in his "Wolf's Lair," the heavily guarded command center in what is now...

Alan Wood, a World War II veteran credited with providing the flag in the famous flag-raising on Iwo Jima, has died. He was 90. Wood died April 18 of natural causes at his Sierra Madre home, his son Steven Wood said Saturday. Wood was a 22-year-old Navy officer in charge of communications on a landing ship on Iwo Jima's shores Feb. 23, 1945 when a Marine asked him for the biggest flag that he could find. After five days of fighting to capture the Japanese-held island, U.S. forces had managed to scale Mount Suribachi to hoist an American flag. Wood...

Interrupted Lives: Catholic Sisters Under European CommunismSat. Apr. 27 at 5 PM ET Documentary exploring the plight of Eastern-rite and Latin-rite Sisters under Soviet domination - who lived out their religious vocations underground from the end of WWII to the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989. BACKGROUND INFORMATION FROM THE USCCB WASHINGTON—Some were nurses. Many were educators. Still others cared for orphans, the elderly, the mentally ill. But all were women religious enduring the communist regime in Eastern Europe after World War II.Their story is told in “Interrupted Lives: Catholic Sisters Under European Communism,” a one-hour documentary. Interrupted...

Former British Prime Minister Sir Winston Churchill will be featured on a British banknote set to begin circulation in 2016, the Bank of England said. A portrait of Churchill, adapted from a Dec. 30, 1941, photograph taken by Yousuf Karsh, and his famous declaration "I have nothing to offer but blood, toil, tears and sweat" will be featured on the five-pound banknote, the BBC reported Friday. Churchill will replace social reformer Elizabeth Fry on the banknote. Bank of England Gov. Sir Mervyn King announced the new banknote from Churchill's former home of Chartwell, in Westerham, Kent. "Our banknotes acknowledge the...

Bob and Sarah Fisher were checking their daughter's homework last week when a social studies assignment caught their attention – it criticized the United States for dropping the atomic bomb during World War Two."Both of our grandfathers were in World War Two and this worksheet makes it seem as if they were the bad guys," Fisher told Fox News.The Fishers have a daughter in eighth grade at Victory Junior High School in New York. They said the anti-American slant in the homework assignment was shocking."As if somehow the Japanese were the victims and that the United States had no right...

The US navy started WW-II with leftover destroyers. The destroyers we were building towards the end of WW-II were vastly more powerful. Two or three of them in groups would amount to something like the secondary (5") battery of an Iowa class battleship. This was with radar, radar fire control, and significant AA capabilities, along with torpedoes and depth charges. In the middle of the campaign to retake the Phillipines, there occurred one of the more astonishing stories I've ever read or heard, in which three such ships basically sailed into Ormoc Bay, and essentially fired off their entire ammo...

A newly released memo revealed that President Roosevelt was warned that Tokyo was focused on Hawaii days before the attack on Pearl Harbor. Washington Whispers reported: Three days before the Dec. 7, 1941 Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor, President Roosevelt was warned in a memo from naval intelligence that Tokyo’s military and spy network was focused on Hawaii, a new and eerie reminder of FDR’s failure to act on a basket load of tips that war was near. In the newly revealed 20-page memo from FDR’s declassified FBI file, the Office of Naval Intelligence on December 4 warned, “In anticipation...

One week after Pearl Harbor, President Roosevelt began pressing the U.S. military to immediately strike the Japanese homeland. Desires to bolster moral became more urgent in light of rapid Japanese advances. Victories in Malaya, Philippines, Wake Island, and Dutch East Indies included sinking the British battleships Prince of Wales and Repulse as the Japanese conquered Singapore. Only improbable ideas warranted consideration, because submarines confirmed Japan placed picket boats at extreme carrier aircraft range. One idea even involved launching four engine heavy bombers from China or Outer Mongolia to strike Japan and fly on to Alaska. Captain Francis Law, a submariner,...

Next week, a United States Air Force Academy cadet will once again turn over a cup to signify that another "hero" has passed. 76 cups upside down...4 remaining. This "tradition " has been going on for 71 years and this will be the last time these few brave gentlemen will be together in one place, at one time. For you see, there are now only 4 remaining of the original 80 men who took off on a cold wet April 18th day knowing that they had insufficient fuel to reach a safe destination. Knowing full well that this may be...

At the end of World War II, huge swaths of Europe and Asia had been reduced to ruins. Borders were redrawn and homecomings, expulsions, and burials were under way. But the massive efforts to rebuild had just begun. When the war began in the late 1930s, the world's population was approximately 2 billion. In less than a decade, the war between the Axis the Allied powers had resulted in 80 million deaths -- killing off about 4 percent of the whole world. Allied forces now became occupiers, taking control of Germany, Japan, and much of the territory they had formerly...

Greek newspaper To Vima claims a secret report details millions of euros owed to Athens by Germany for World War Two reparations and unpaid loans. The story has been picked up by the online edition of German newspaper Der Spiegel, who quote Greek organisations calculating the value of loans from Athens to Berlin taken by the Nazis between 1942 and 1944 at 54 billion euros. Der Spiegel also puts the figure owed to Greece for reconstruction after the Second World War at 108 billion euros. Though the details of the report are being kept under wraps by the Greek Finance...

In May 1943, President Franklin Roosevelt met with British Prime Minister Winston Churchill at the White House. It was 17 months after Pearl Harbor and a little more than a year before D-Day. The two Allied leaders reviewed the war effort to date and exchanged thoughts on their plans for the postwar era. At one point in the discussion, FDR offered what he called "the best way to settle the Jewish question." Vice President Henry Wallace, who noted the conversation in his diary, said Roosevelt spoke approvingly of a plan (recommended by geographer and Johns Hopkins University President Isaiah Bowman)...

Many of the Nazi camps in Europe are falling apart, an expert has warned in advance of Holocaust Memorial Day. Florence Eizenberg, who is finishing a doctorate on the topic of Holocaust denial, said that the camps, which provide valuable testimony to Nazi war crimes, are in poor condition. Eizenberg visited camps across Europe as part of her research. …

In 1943, two Hollywood movies were made about the heroic nurses of the Philippines, “Cry ‘Havoc’ ” and “So Proudly We Hail,” but the real-life Angels of Bataan and Corregidor were almost forgotten after they were interned. The letters they wrote to their families in America never arrived and were found after the war in a Manila warehouse. Mrs. Manning later said that the prison camp had no showers, beds or kitchens. A single toilet was used by hundreds of people. Yet somehow she and the nurses persevered. They maintained strict military order among themselves, always wearing their uniforms and...

THIRTEEN years ago, researchers at the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum began the grim task of documenting all the ghettos, slave labor sites, concentration camps and killing factories that the Nazis set up throughout Europe. The researchers have cataloged some 42,500 Nazi ghettos and camps throughout Europe, spanning German-controlled areas from France to Russia and Germany itself, during Hitler’s reign of brutality from 1933 to 1945.

Today it is more clear than ever why Niles doubted FDR genuinely supported Zionism. President Barack Obama has spoken of his deep admiration for Franklin Delano Roosevelt and his desire to emulate FDR’s leadership style. But in the wake of the discovery of new documents detailing FDR’s behind-the-scenes coldness regarding the creation of a Jewish state, many Israelis will be hoping that sentiment does not extend to Roosevelt’s views on Zionism.

Franklin Roosevelt enjoyed the overwhelming support of American Jews during his presidency, and the reasons are clear. In his three-plus terms from 1933 to 1945, he led the war against Hitler, supported a Jewish homeland in Palestine... Starting in the 1960s, a flood of books appeared with self-evident titles like “No Haven for the Oppressed” and “While Six Million Died.” But the most influential account by far was David S. Wyman’s “Abandonment of the Jews,” published in 1984. Wyman considered numerous parties responsible for America’s tepid response to the Holocaust, including a badly divided Jewish community, a nest of virulent...