Free Republic

Al Bowlly's last recording, from 1941.

Seventy years ago today the United States Marine Corp sent waves of teenaged men onto the black foreboding beaches on a Japanese held island called Iwo Jima. Capturing Iwo Jima was essential to the American war against Japan as it offered a place for battered bombers to safely land and save the lives of hundreds of airmen returning from sorties over Japan in barely flyable planes. The average age of these men was just under nineteen. They knew what was at stake and charged up Iwo’s beaches sometimes straight into enemy machine gun fire that would have stopped lesser soldiers....

Clayton Chipman saw the first flag raising. So did Harvey Kurz. Both were relieved and happy to see Marines had finally scaled Mount Suribachi four days after the Feb. 19, 1945, invasion of the hardscrabble, desolate island in the Pacific Ocean. Each looked at the American flag flapping in the wind and then returned to the business at hand — staying alive.

".....On Thursday, President Obama will designate the plot of land in western Oahu that was the site of the Honouliuli camp as a national monument, White House officials told the Los Angeles Times. The designation is intended to bring greater awareness to it and to Hawaii's distinct role in the World War II-era incarceration of Japanese Americans and what the White House calls "the fragility of civil rights during times of conflict.".......

Winston Churchill credited Mrs Miniver with increasing American support for the war effort. A new programme finds out how the domestic drama changed history. “We will come. We will bomb your cities.” So bristles a character in the film Mrs Miniver. A German pilot who had been shot down in the chocolate box English village of Belham, he momentarily brings the horrors of World War II to what is largely a domestic drama. The movie – released in June 1942, going on to win the best picture Oscar the following year – is credited with consolidating American support for the...

Alex Vraciu, who was just 25 when he reigned as the Navy’s top World War II fighter ace after downing 19 Japanese aircraft and destroying 21 more on the ground in only eight months in 1944, died on Jan. 29 in West Sacramento, Calif. He was 96. (snip) Mr. Vraciu (which rhymes with cashew) accomplished his most spectacular feat in the South Pacific when he shot down six dive bombers within eight minutes in what became known as the “Great Marianas Turkey Shoot” in the Philippine Sea. He called it “a once-in-a-lifetime fighter pilot’s dream.” Two of the aircraft carriers...

Members of the WW2 special forces unit, forerunners of the Navy SEALS, receive a Congressional Gold Medal.

Over 9,000 people died in the Baltic Sea on January 30, 1945, in an attempt to evade the Red Army. The Wilhelm Gustloff was the largest shipwreck in history, but little is known about the catastrophe seven decades on. At around 9 p.m. on January 30, 1945, Adolf Hitler was speaking to the German people. In the packed dining hall of the luxury liner "Wilhelm Gustloff," as in most of the rest of the country, a radio was broadcasting Hitler's address, but the thousands of refugees from Pomerania and East and West Prussia who had struggled onto the ship weren't...

Now that Greece has elected a new prime minister, Alexis Tsipras, he’s announced his first order of business: receive the money owed to them from Germany in part of unpaid World War II reparations, reported The Washington Post. Tsipras is part of the Greek left-wing Syriza party, and, according to the Post, the Syriza party has been “outspoken about the need for Germany to atone for its past in Greece.” In a move symbolic of that sentiment, Tsipras visited the Kaisariani rifle range to honor 200 Greek activists who were murdered by Nazi soldiers in 1944. A two-year-old study estimated...

The "C-word" is, of course, Christ. Anita Dittman survived Hitler and the Nazis. Born Jewish, she became a Christian during the Holocaust. And it's that part of her story which is verboten in public schools today. WND: Jews met their death, gave her cause to reflect once again on life under the Nazis. Her message is different now, she says, much different than when she first went public in 1978 with her experience as a Holocaust survivor. Could it happen here? “When I started speaking in 1978-79, people would ask me, ‘Do you think it could happen here in this...

Recently we marked the 50th anniversary of the January 24, 1965 passing of Winston Churchill. Churchill was not only a courageous leader but an eminent historian and lucid writer who left us with volumes of valuable insight and wisdom. We have been flipping through his, “The Gathering Storm,” which recounts among other parts of history the lead up to World War II, when Churchill stood as a lone voice against Nazi Germany — a threat he so clearly saw while the world dithered. Below are 12 passages from Churchill’s Volume I of “The Gathering Storm,” that look awfully eerie in...

today 26 Jan 1944-"Lieutenant Murphy ordered his men to withdraw to a prepared position in a woods while he remained forward at his command post and continued to give fire directions to the artillery by telephone. Behind him to his right one of our tank destroyers received a direct hit and began to burn. Its crew withdrew to the woods. Lieutenant Murphy continued to direct artillery fire which killed large numbers of the advancing enemy infantry. With the enemy tanks abreast of his position, Lieutenant Murphy climbed on the burning tank destroyer which was in danger of blowing up any...

Don Fida, of Syracuse, visits the small boomerang-shaped Pacific island in his sleep. He remembers the way 22,000 soldiers of the 7th Infantry Division emptied a ship onto Kwajalein and worked their way across the 2.5-mile island, killing close to 5,000 Japanese and losing 177 of their own. He can picture the way a Japanese soldier crawled out of a bunker waving the underwear of a young American nurse who had been held, "worse than hostage," as he puts it. Fida said his unit rescued the woman, draped her with the clothes of a dead soldier and escorted her onto...

Tonight on AHC (American Heroes Channel)will show Schindler's List at 8 pm. In addition AHC and Discovery will simulcast the one hour documentary ONE DAY IN AUSCHWITZ on Sunday, January 25 at 12 PM ET.

Memorial held for World War II era dictator Ante Pavelić, whose fascist regime was allied with Nazi Germany.Ante Pavelić. (photo credit:Wikimedia Commons) Hundreds of Croatians attended a memorial mass in Zagreb on Sunday for World War II-era dictator Ante Pavelić, local media reported. Pavelić’s fascist regime was allied with Nazi Germany and was responsible for the murder of tens of thousands of Jews. Hundreds of thousands of ethnic Serbs were also murdered under his rule. Protesters yelling “Oppose the glorification of fascism” and other anti-fascist slogans pushed against police, who blocked them from entering the church. In a video of...

The Polish Mission to the UN hosted a special event on Wednesday marking the 70th anniversary of the liberation of Auschwitz from the Germans titled “Why have we failed at preventing genocide and how to change that?” Speakers at Wednesday’s conference included four out of the five permanent members of the UN Security Council (China was the only no-show), the Polish ambassador, as well as the ambassadors from Israel, Rwanda, Germany, and several distinguished historians and NGO heads, including a presentation from Professor Piotr Cywi´nski on what Auschwitz looks like today. Israel’s ambassador Ron Prosor opened his address invoking the...

'More than a thousand mourners attended the funeral of an RAF veteran who died without any family or friends. Keith Ingham Nutbrown, 83, passed away at Treflys care home in Llandudno, North Wales recently and it was expected that nobody would attend his funeral. But crowds of well-wishers descended on Chester Crematorium today to pay their respects at the service. Servicemen and ex-servicemen lined the entrance to the crematorium while members of the RAF performed a fly-past before the service started. So many people turned up at the funeral that some were forced to listen to the service from outside....

Seven decades after thousands of “balloon bombs” were let loose by the Imperial Japanese Army to wreak havoc on their enemies across the Pacific, two forestry workers found one half-buried in the mountains of eastern British Columbia. A navy bomb disposal team was called and arrived at the site Friday in the Monashee Mountains near Lumby, B.C. “They confirmed without a doubt that it is a Japanese balloon bomb,” said RCMP Cpl. Henry Proce. “This thing has been in the dirt for 70 years .... There was still some metal debris in the area (but) nothing left of the balloon...

A Japanese submarine that was preparing to attack the Panama Canal during World War Two has been discovered off the coast of Hawaii. The 400-foot (122-meter) ‘Sen-Toku’ class vessel - among the largest pre-nuclear submarines ever built - was found by chance in August off the southwest coast of Oahu. It has been missing since 1946 according to scientists at the University of Hawaii at Manoa. The I-400 and its sister ship, the I-401, which was found off Oahu in 2005, were able to travel one and a half times around the world without refuelling.

The surviving members of a legendary force of Canadian and U.S. soldiers will be honoured in Washington for their courage and bravery -- and the rough-and-tough tactics that helped win the Second World War. Known as the Devil's Brigade, the elite fighting force was made up of roughly 1,800 Canadians and Americans, many of them lumberjacks, miners and rural tough guys with survival skills. They were tasked with getting behind enemy lines and waging unconventional warfare against the enemy. The surviving veterans will be presented with a Congressional Gold Medal on Feb. 2, by leaders of the U.S. House and...