Free Republic

Earlier this year, an event happened that did not receive wide notice. The last of the Von Trapp Family Singers, the last of the children—the real ones—died. Her name was Maria—not to be confused with the lady played by Julie Andrews, Maria Augusta Trapp, who died in 1987. Maria Von Trapp’s death in February 2014 marks the end of an era. The Sound of Music deserves its accolades as the Movie of the Year (1965) and one of the finest films ever made. Even my one-year-old granddaughter is mesmerized by the puppet scene. As a film it is an icon....

Designers competing to create an aircraft that could directly support troops on the battlefield were hampered by the weight of the ‘flying tank’, low air speed and flimsy protection. The Il-2 was the answer to these challenges. One of the key lessons of the First World War was that the airplane had a crucial role to play in effective military campaigns in the new era. With this in mind, in the 1920s and 1930s Europe’s leading nations expended significant efforts and resources on developing new aircraft that could be used to provide support for infantry and tanks. The Soviet Union...

Mario Patruno, a 93 year old World War Two veteran, formerly of the 101st Airborne Division, is featured in this documentary on Operation Market Garden. The short film, produced by the USAF 86th Airlift Wing at Ramstein Air Base, Germany, mixes rarely seen documentary footage with contemporary coverage of the 70th anniversary celebration and jump recreation by combined U.S. and Dutch airborne troops. Private Patruno jumped at Normandy and Eindhoven with the 101st, and was wounded in both operations. He fought in house to house battles with Nazi troops, and was shot in the face, but survived to tell his...

Leroy Williamson, 93, has seen relations between the United States and Russia during good times and bad, and has some advice for the countries: "We have to get along," he told ABC News. "We don't need a patriotic war or a World War III." The Texan was in Russia this week to share his appreciation for the Soviet soldiers who liberated his Nazi prisoner-of-war camp on May 1, 1945. He met with a Russian general for lunch, visited with veterans, and placed a wreath at Moscow's memorial to the Great Patriotic War, as World War II is known in the...

Three Teutonic battle axes from the late Middle Ages have been found by engineers who remove World War II artillery shells left the forests in the Forest District Wipsowo (Warmia and Mazury). Historic weapons will be donated to the museum. Engineers stumbled upon the historic axes by chance, while searching the woods metal detectors. The weapons have been initially identified by an archaeologist as late-medieval Teutonic battle axes. Iron axes were close to each other, shallow underground, among the roots of trees. "It can be assumed that this is a deposit that someone left for better times. Perhaps the person...

Gas chambers at Sobibor death camp uncovered in archaeological dig Some 250,000 Jews murdered at camp in Poland which Nazis bulldozed and covered up with trees to conceal their crimes; personal effects of victims, including wedding rings found near gas chambers. An archaeological dig in Poland has revealed the location of the gas chambers at the Sobibor death camp, Yad Vashem announced on Wednesday. Some 250,000 Jews were murdered at Sobibor, but on October 14, 1943, about 600 prisoners revolted and briefly escaped. Between 100 and 120 prisoners survived the revolt, and 60 of those survived the war. After the...

Ken Burns is at it again. The Left’s favorite propagandist has put together a 7 part series on the two Roosevelt presidents. Leaving aside what he is likely to show about Teddy Roosevelt, without seeing a minute of this presentation I’ll go out on a short strong limb and guess what will not be shown about Franklin Delano Roosevelt. Even a very superficial study of FDR shows he was a consummate phony. He preached “There is nothing to fear but fear itself,” but everything he did was presented as a fearful crisis that could only be handled by giving him...

Fr Rutler, a parish priest in Manhattan, New York and a well-known essayist, has taken his title from the famous quotation in St Paul’s Letter to the Ephesians. This is in part because of he wishes to show the larger forces at work during WWII and also because an old friend and fellow priest had bequeathed to him a pile of newspapers, journals and radio transcripts for this particular year. Growing up after the war, Rutler sees his book as “a feeble act of thanks from my generation” for the previous one that had endured so many sacrifices on behalf...

On this day, 75 years ago, World War II began. It was started by some European megalomaniac who was trying to regain some of the land areas that his country had previously lost, but he felt those lands should be part of his country permanently again. And, we have James Earl Obama and Neville Kerry in charge of foreign affairs. Food for thought....

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...