Free Republic

Professional historians working under the Soviet Union found themselves in a pinch. Early on, authorities proved adept at seizing control of history and deploying it as propaganda drenched in Communist ideology. Scholars were given little space to challenge official versions of the past. So what was a historian to do? “People who cared about academic integrity almost never [studied] the Soviet Union,” says Maria Lipman, a scholar at the Carnegie Moscow Center. “They would pick something medieval. Or, you know, ancient Rome.” History, the old dictum goes, has a way of repeating itself. Early this month, Russian President Vladimir Putin...

For the Boys of Pointe du Hoc Wide white cliffs arose before us In the smoke and bleak of dawn, Steel shells raining death down on The beaches where we died. Into the fast and foreign swells We swept our souls and kept Our faith with those left far behind The day our worlds fled time. While they who ventured on and climbed And beat against the shores Would carry forth our names as if They'd always been their own. The sand, once soiled by life exposed The sea, its secrets bared Now rest the same in soft repose As...

Flipping through the channels, I stopped at the program showing D-day remembrance at Normandy beach. President of France is giving speech, remembering the D-day, sacrifices and thanking veterans for their contribution to freedom. World dignitaries are sitting in the audience along with remaining veterans, Queen of England with her husband and other heads of states. Among them camera swings to our Barak Hussein Obama, President of the USA - CHEWING FREAKIN' GUM! Another example of his "respect" for non-muslim warriors.

New Yorkers flocked to Liberty Island for a stunning D-Day anniversary tribute in which 1 million red rose petals rained down on the Statue of Liberty on Friday. A crowd of more than 200 — war veterans, students and tourists among them — gazed in awe as helicopters showered the statue with petals in honor of the 70th anniversary of the invasion. Mike Roper, 74, a history teacher at York Prep, said he came to teach his students that surviving vets are living history. ... Staged by the group The French Will Never Forget, the ceremony featured a band and...

World War II veteran Nick Gozik says that the bravest soldier he encountered during two years of combat was the one he saw executed for desertion. That soldier proved to be the only one of more than 20,000 convicted deserters during that war to suffer the death penalty. The last deserter to be executed had been during the Civil War. There have been no others.

General Dwight D. Eisenhower arrived in London to command Supreme Headquarters Allied Expeditionary Force (SHAEF) for the last five months of planning for D-Day. During that time he achieved much more than the oft repeated portrayal of managing a political/military alliance. Though he never led troops in combat, his leadership sustained many unprecedented initiatives for the successful Normandy landings. The air assault exemplifies the frightful uncertainties plaguing this “Day of Days”. The night before D-Day, 20,400 American and British paratroopers dropped behind the Normandy beaches from 1,250 C-47 aircraft plus gliders. This massive assault was attempted just 17 years after...

by Jason DeWitt | Top Right NewsA group of World War II veterans got a sweet surprise on Wednesday, when a gate agent at the Detroit airport serenaded them with a beautiful rendition of the national anthem over the loudspeaker.The moving moment came on Monday, when the agent at DTW, Anna Marie Barile, started to sing over the PA system for passengers waiting for Delta flight 98 from Detroit to Paris.There were 12 WWII veterans on this particular flight, which was headed to Omaha Beach to recognize the 70th anniversary of D-Day. When it was announced over the PA system...

Watch this awesome video of our President's Address at the Ceremony Commemorating the Anniversary of the Normandy Invasion, D-day at Point-du-Hoc. President Commemorates Anniversary of Normandy Invasion

Battles such as Anzio, Salerno, and Monte Cassino would be burned into the history books. The fighting cost some 300,000 American and British casualties and would not cease until the formal end of WWII in May of 1945. Pictured, British troops scramble through the rubble in Catania, August 1943.

In late December 1941, Navy Secretary Frank Knox and FDR met and selected Chester Nimitz to command the Pacific Fleet, which at that time the public perceived as residing at the bottom of Pearl Harbor. Roosevelt said, “Tell Nimitz to get the hell out to Pearl and stay there until the war is won”. Knox informed Nimitz by saying, “You’re going to take command of the Pacific Fleet, and I think you will be gone a long time”. On Christmas Day 1941 Admiral Chester Nimitz arrived by Catalina flying boat to take command. When the door opened he was assailed...

The last of the 29 Navajos who developed a code that stumped the Japanese during World War II has died. Chester Nez, of Albuquerque, New Mexico, died Wednesday morning of kidney failure, said Judy Avila, who helped Nez write his memoirs. He was 93. Before hundreds of men from the Navajo Nation became Code Talkers, 29 Navajos were recruited to develop the code based on the then-unwritten Navajo language. Nez was in 10th grade when he enlisted, keeping his decision a secret from his family and lying about his age, as did many others. "It's one of the greatest parts...

Polish Occupied Territories in 1941 Note the Radom District, Center Left This story is purely anecdotal.   It was told to me by the principle participant about his actions during WWII when he was a teenager/young man in NAZI occupied Poland.   I believed him when he told it to me; I still believe him.  I doubt that he will write a biography, so I will relate the events here so that they may be preserved. I met the old soldier while I was working for the U.S. Army in Panama.  It was 1986, just before Christmas.  Another friend had brought...

The only known Allied colour footage of World War Two was uncovered in the attic of a Hollywood director by his son. When the warship HMS Belfast fired the shot that launched the D-Day landings, it was carrying an unlikely passenger - Hollywood film director George Stevens. With Allied forces set to storm the Normandy beaches of Nazi-occupied France, Stevens was on-board making a unique 16 millimetre colour film journal.

This Memorial Day Weekend, one of Northern Nevada’s oldest veterans was allegedly robbed and held at gun point in his Carson City home. World War II and Air Force veteran Jim Sorentino lives alone with a caretaker. He’s 101-years-old, and he said in his lifetime, he has never experienced anything like this home invasion. He said it was around 5 a.m. on Sunday when two men kicked in a rear-garage door, and forced their way into Sorentino’s home in a gated community on Canvasback Drive. They held him and his female caretaker at gun point. "The older one, the bigger...

Gun of the week - what is it?See comment for the answer.

Seven decades after ­Allied troops stormed Normandy’s beaches and saved France from the Nazis, the surrender-happy nation is turning its back on hundreds of US veterans who want to return next month to mark the invasion’s 70th anniversary. France has broken its promise to pay for the vets to fly to this year’s commemoration, according to Rep. Michael Grimm. “Our chief-of-staff heard it from the French Embassy in DC — that they would be flown out to France [for free],” said Nick Iacono, a spokesman for the Staten Island congressman. But when The Post contacted the embassy Friday, the French...

October 16, 1943, is engrained in Italy's history as a day of clear and direct anti-semitism. It's the day when Nazi soldiers evacuated Jews from the Roman Ghetto. Now, new details show Pius XII helped Jews in Rome, before the events of the so-called "Black Saturday.” Even before the arrival of the Nazis to the Eternal City. DOMINIEK OVERSTEYNS  L'Opera della Chiesa "By July 9th, a monastery was already taking in Jews, and on July 20, a letter from the Diocese arrived. It read: 'This is Papal territory, please do not enter.' And this happened seven weeks before the German...

JASENOVAC -- A commemoration marking the 69th anniversary of the breakout of prisoners of the Ustasha death camp Jasenovac was held on Sunday [May 4, 2014.](Beta/Hina) Attending the event, Croatian President Ivo Josipović said genocide had occurred at that location and that it should never be forgotten. Josipović called on everyone to protect the memory of the people who had died in that camp, a place that would remain in collective memory forever, the Croatian electronic media reported. "Evil should be called by its real name, opposed and denied any opportunity to happen ever again," he stated. Evil is not...

It was an evening in Manhattan twenty years ago, at the Union League Club, with Fr. George Rutler regaling us with his learning and wit.  At one moment he remarked, in that off-handed way of his, that he was at the keyboard of his piano when suddenly came coursing through his fingers to the keys was. . .the Lithuanian National Anthem.  He would weave together in his talks the most striking leaps and juxtapositions – from St. Anselm to Mark Twain, the Guelphs and the Ghibbelines to the Yankees and the Dodgers. But through it all was a penetrating...

Breathtaking new photographs, including several vivid full-color images, offer a never-before-seen look at the war-weary soldiers in the Battle of the Bulge who fought through the frozen Ardennes Forest in a mountainous region of Belgium in the dead of winter.