Free Republic

A decorated WWII veteran, who never fired a shot while overseas, won a battle with a robber half his age on Saturday.   The hand to hand combat lasted until Arthur M. Lewis and the robber were both exhausted.   Lewis had shot the robber six times, four times in the chest, once in the arm and once in the wrist and leg.  Lewis himself was wounded with a graze to his left arm. Lewis' girlfriend says that people think of him as frail, but he is anything but frail. The alleged robber, Lennard Patrick Jervis, has been arrested...

George Tate George Tate was in the US Army in World War II. He served in a unit that was establishing communication lines across the Himalayas.George’s son, Sid is a parishioner, he said about his Dad, “His plane was riddled with enemy gunfire going in, and as I understand it his job was conducted in an active combat zone. He received the Bronze Star, which was the military’s 4th highest award: Awarded to ‘any person whom while serving in with the United States military after 6 December 1941, that distinguished himself or herself apart from his or her comrades...

The USS Houston sank during World War II after being hit by the Japanese, killing 700 sailors and Marines. Now, more than 70 years later, U.S. and Indonesian divers have confirmed that a sunken vessel in the Java Sea was the wreck of the ship dubbed "The Galloping Ghost of the Java Coast."The Houston was carrying 1,068 crewmen when it was hit on Feb. 28, 1942, during the Battle of Sunda Strait. Only 291 sailors and Marines survived the sinking and their later use as slave labor by the Japanese. The vessel's commanding officer, Capt. Albert H. Rooks, was posthumously...

We now mark the 69th anniversary of VJ-Day preceded by dropping atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki to end WW II. The generations which made the decisions for World War II have passed away. The generation which faced the tragic violence required for carrying out those decisions is rapidly leaving us. As this personal knowledge becomes ever rarer, we must increasingly listen without response to revisionist contra-factual analyses expounding about what a needless, tragic and profoundly immoral decision the United States had made. The arguments advanced display a pleasing, deliberate ignorance which burnishes this peculiar new morality. However, these views...

A World War II veteran cried today as he said good-bye to his buddy - a 3-year-old boy who became his pal, but is moving away with this family. “It’s going to be tough,” Erling Kindem, 89, said between tears while speaking to ABC News today. Kindem's friendship with his next door neighbor Emmett Rychner, 3, in Farmington, Minnesota, became a heartwarming story that went viral. But the boy is moving today to Northfield, Minnesota, and the veteran is moving with his ailing wife to a retirement center next month.

In the summer of '45, the United States concluded a war that had come to be seen by some as unwinnable after the carnage at Iwo Jima with a bang. ~~snip~~ The two bombs stand in stark contrast to our endless nation-building exercises in which nothing is ever finished until we give up. Instead Truman cut the Gordian Knot and avoided a long campaign that would have depopulated Japan and destroyed the lives of a generation of American soldiers.

Aleksandra's Note: ...Lt. Col. Milton Friend of the USAF, a Halyard Mission veteran that I met in person in Chicago in 1994 for the 50th anniversary celebration of the Halyard Mission Rescue Operation, got in touch with me in 2009. I had wondered if he was still living. Indeed he was, and he had a story to tell. When I searched for him on the internet, I discovered that he was not featured anywhere that I could find. I told him that his story needs to be made public and be given wide exposure, and it is my absolute pleasure...

I have lived near by, for the last 2 weeks: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zollverein_Coal_Mine_Industrial_Complex This is an extraordinary museum, that you need to visit, one of the best in Europe, IMHO. The Zollverein Coal Mine Industrial Complex (German Zeche Zollverein) is a large former industrial site in the city of Essen, North Rhine-Westphalia, Germany. Zollverein survived the Second World War with only minor damages and by 1953 again placed on top of all German mines with an output of 2.4 million tons. Why was this extraordinary place not bombed out out of existence during WW2? From coal to coke to pig iron to...

The man believed to be Britain's oldest surviving prisoner of war, who was held captive at the camp immortalized in The Great Escape, has died five days after turning 100. Sergeant Reginald Drake was one of the few remaining British survivors of the infamous Stalag Luft III camp in Zagan, Poland, where 76 men attempted to escape to their freedom in 1944. The airman was based there for 11 months, during the four years he was held captive by Germans during the Second World War. Sgt Drake was captured in August 1941, after his bomber was shot down and crash-landed...

We now mark the 69th anniversary of dropping atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki to end WW II. The generations which made the decisions for World War II have passed away. The generation which faced the tragic violence required for carrying out those decisions is rapidly leaving us. As this personal knowledge becomes ever rarer, we must increasingly listen without response to revisionist contra-factual analyses expounding about what a needless, tragic and profoundly immoral decision the United States had made. The arguments advanced display a pleasing, deliberate ignorance which burnishes this peculiar new morality. However, these views can be countered...

We now mark the 69th anniversary of dropping atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki to end WW II. The generations which made the decisions for World War II have passed away. The generation which faced the tragic violence required for carrying out those decisions is rapidly leaving us. As this personal knowledge becomes ever rarer, we must increasingly listen without response to revisionist contra-factual analyses expounding about what a needless, tragic and profoundly immoral decision the United States had made. The arguments advanced display a pleasing, deliberate ignorance which burnishes this peculiar new morality. However, these views can be countered...

Japanese World War II officer Shigeta Kage's written confession, published on Monday, reveals the murder of at least 13 Chinese. According to the original document, available on the State Archives Administration (SAA) website, the Japanese garrison army killed at least five anti-Japanese armed guerrilla soldiers and staff in Liuhe County in May 1937. Kage admitted to killing one of them with a Japanese sword himself, according to the document. The criminal recalled that the Japanese army forced some 6,500 households in Liuhe to move out of their houses to create depopulated zones starting July 1936. During that period, Kage killed...

In the closing days of World War II, torpedoes from a Japanese submarine slammed into the side of USS Indianapolis and doomed the heavy cruiser. The sailors who didn’t drown were left adrift on the open ocean for four days during which they battled the elements, starvation and shark attacks. Fewer than 320 from the ship’s original crew of 1,196 survived.

The last surviving crewman of the Enola Gay, the B-29 that dropped the atomic bomb over Hiroshima, died overnight at his Stone Mountain home. Theodore “Dutch” Van Kirk, 93, was the navigator on the Aug. 6, 1945 flight that dropped the “Little Boy” atomic bomb. With the 2010 death of Morris Jeppson, Van Kirk became the only one of the dozen crew members left. For a number of years, he lived at a retirement community in Stone Mountain where by chance he found himself sharing the place with James Starnes, an Atlantan who had a front-row seat at history. Starnes...

This week marks the 70th anniversary of a plot whose success might well have spared millions of lives, while claiming that of history’s most infamous mass-murderer, Adolf Hitler. The elaborate conspiracy centered on Claus von Stauffenberg was the most well-prepared and organized attempt to put an end to Hitler, but it was scarcely the first. The number of serious attempts on Hitler’s life would fill a book and indeed have; Roger Moorhouse’s Killing Hitler (2006), for example, covers the ground of several such attempts from the moment Hitler came to power in 1933, at which time his security detail...

looking for photographic collections of wwII and wwI There have been some good ones posted in the past, but my bookmarks have all been lost with computer crashes. Sorry for the personal use of the forum.

........[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...

It’s time to take action and do what we can to stop this imperial President. That includes the House doing its job and considering impeachment. I’m taking a stand and hope you will join me. Use your voice; call your Congressman today! We’ll be speaking to you directly more often in the near future like this – stay tuned. Thank you for being in this fight! Together we'll take our country back!Video Here: https://www.facebook.com/photo.php?v=10152565757973588

Louis Zamperini, a former Olympic runner and war hero who survived 47 days at sea and three years in a Japanese POW camp after his plane crashed in the Pacific during World War II, died of pneumonia late Wednesday. He was 97. "After a 40-day long battle for his life, he peacefully passed away in the presence of his entire family, leaving behind a legacy that has touched so many lives," Zamperini's family said in a statement, according to Deadline. "His indomitable courage and fighting spirit were never more apparent than in these last days." The Olean, N.Y., native's astonishing...

KOHIMA: India soldiers died by the dozens, by the hundreds and then by the thousands in a battle here 70 years ago. Two bloody weeks of fighting came down to just a few yards across an asphalt tennis court. Night after night, Japanese troops charged across the court's white lines, only to be killed by almost continuous firing from British and Indian machine guns. The Battle of Kohima and Imphal was the bloodiest of World War II in India, and it cost Japan much of its best army in Burma. But the battle has been largely forgotten in India as...