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PARIS — On the day Paris was liberated from the Nazis in 1944, a young American soldier nabbed a souvenir of epic proportions: He took home the French flag that hung from the Arc de Triomphe, a symbol of the end of four years of struggle and shame. Six and a half decades later, the aging veteran has given the flag back to the city of Paris. Officials from Paris City Hall took possession of the 12-meter (13-yard) tricolor flag Saturday in a ceremony in southern France, a step in its unusual journey from New York state back home to...

Nazi Germany landed eight saboteurs in America on a secret mission to destroy targets across the U.S., a documentary has revealed. U-boats dropped the men off the beaches of Long Island and Florida at the height of the Second World War. The first group of four men - carrying armfuls of weapons, explosives and primers - came ashore near Manhattan on June 13, 1942.

Japan Premier Apologizes at WWII Ceremony TOKYO—Japan's new liberal prime minister shunned a visit to a shrine that has outraged Asian neighbors for honoring war criminals, breaking from past governments' tradition and instead apologizing Sunday for the suffering World War II caused. Members of the now-opposition Liberal Democratic Party, which ruled Japan nearly continuously since the end of the war, made a point by carrying out their own trip to Yasukuni Shrine in Tokyo on the 65th anniversary of the end of World War II. Japanese Prime Minister Naoto Kan bowed to offer prayers for the war dead at Budokan...

For the first time since the United States dropped the atomic bomb on Japan 65 years ago, today the U.S. ambassador to Japan will attend the official commemoration ceremony at the Hiroshima Peace Memorial. The U.S. ambassador has always declined the annual invitation, but this year is different. President Barack Obama decided to acknowledge the event with the presence of a high-level dignitary. As State Department spokesman Philip Crowley explained, Ambassador John Roos will be there "to express respect for all the victims of World War II." Gene Tibbets—the son of Brig. Gen. Paul W. Tibbets Jr., the pilot who...

A James Bond-style gun that is disguised as a pencil and was given as a gift to Lord Mountbatten is coming up for auction. The gold-plated item has a concealed trigger and a 2 3/4ins barrel that forms a .22 pistol and was presented to the last Viceroy of India by a Maharaja. The 'pencil pistol' makes up part of the personal sidearms that belonged to Lord Mountbatten, a World War II hero who was blown up by the IRA in 1979. He used some of them in World War II and they reputedly helped to preserve his life. Bill...

In the end, it was only time from which he could not escape. Jack Harrison, the last of those involved in the 'Great Escape', has passed away, peacefully and quietly, at the age of 97. It has been 66 years since the dark night when he waited with bated breath, preparing to crawl through ‘Harry’ and under the wire of Stalag Luft III. Many years after the war the former RAF pilot, and his brave and resourceful comrades, would be immortalised by the iconic 1963 film - starring Richard Attenborough and Steve McQueen - which remains the staple fare of...

....These attacks, orchestrated by Japan’s infamous Unit 731 between 1932 and 1945, are the only documented mass use of germ weapons in modern times. Scholars say that we will never know exactly how many were killed. Sheldon H. Harris, the late American historian, estimated in a pioneering work that between 10,000 and 12,000 Chinese prisoners perished in the bloodcurdling experiments that Unit 731 performed in Japanese-occupied Manchuria. Another 300,000 to 500,000 civilians died, he wrote, as a result of Japan’s massive germ assaults on more than 70 Chinese cities and towns. China itself has disclosed no official tally. In fact,...

An image of the Shroud of Turin. Rome, Italy, Apr 8, 2010 / 10:27 am (CNA/EWTN News).- The Holy Shroud was transferred from Turin during World War II to keep it out of reach of Adolph Hitler, according to a Benedictine priest in a southern Italian abbey. Monks in Avellino, Italy stored the relic until 1946 "officially to protect it from bombs, in reality to hide it from the Fuhrer, who was obsessed with it," the monk said. Sensing the dangers posed by German officials' interest in the Shroud during a visit from Hitler to Italy in 1938, the...

In the history of the cinema, the German director Veit Harlan occupies an especially ignominious position. It is his name that is attached to “Jew Süss,” perhaps the most notoriously anti-Semitic movie ever made, a box office success in Nazi Germany in 1940 that was so effective that it was made required viewing for all members of the SS. But what motivated Harlan to write and direct such a film? Was he a Nazi true believer, an opportunistic careerist or just a filmmaker too fearful of retribution to say no to Joseph Goebbels, the Nazi propaganda chief? Those are some...

Here is a CNN video report that says Russian officials claim they burned the body of Adolf Hitler in 1970 and threw the ashes in an East German river. In newly released details, the Russians claim they buried the body of Hitler and his wife Eva Braun on an East German Base where they remained until 1970, when the Russians turned the base over to the East Germans. They did not trust the East Germans not to make a shrine out of the graves, so they dug the bodies up and disposed of them. That is the Russian version of...

Amazing collection of photos taken during the WW2 and nowadays. The WW2 photos were taken during the invasion of Normandy on and after D-Day.

WARSAW, Poland (AP) — Marek Edelman, the last surviving leader of WWII Warsaw Ghetto uprising, died Friday in Warsaw at the age of 90. Paula Sawicka told The Associated Press that Edelman died at her family's home at 2 p.m. EDT (1800GMT) of old age. "He died at home, among friends, among his close people," Sawicka said.

Muriel Martin spent four years helping train fighter pilots as a Women's Airforce Service Pilot, or WASP, during WWII.Muriel Martin struggles these days to remember the years she spent as a World War II U.S. Army Air Force pilot. The dates have run together in her mind and the details of her training and experience long ago faded into the background of a life filled with child rearing and community service. But some days, the memories push through and she finds herself back in her 20s and in the cockpit again. “I was flying to Dallas earlier this year and...

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\ Photo: Seizo Yamada (7 km northeast of Hiroshima)

It’s hard for anyone under the age of at least 50 to say they truly understood Ted Kenna, except for his family and perhaps anyone who’s almost died in combat. And Ted was probably easier to understand than others famed or prominent among his World War II generation, a laconic, uncomplicated country guy who happened to have been given a medal called the Victoria Cross. Ted Kenna and his wife Marjorie For valour. It’s the highest honour you can get. But judging by the muted reaction to Ted’s death, at 90, a lot of people didn’t really get what he...

NEARLY 66 years ago, a flotilla of mini-submarines set off to sink or cripple the mighty German battleship Tirpitz. Among the men behind this attack was Max Shean from Perth, a volunteer for one of World War II's most daring and hazardous naval missions. Shean's courage in command of the X-craft submarines in Europe and the Pacific earned him an unrivalled reputation as a leader whose aggressive instincts were always tempered by concern for his crew. He died on June 15, aged 90. Born in July 1918, Shean was in his third year of an engineering degree when news of...

Eloquence and good intentions exempt no one from the truth of the past — President Obama includedIn his speech last week in Cairo, President Obama proclaimed he was a “student of history.” But despite Barack Obama’s image as an Ivy League-educated intellectual, he lacks historical competency, in areas of both facts and interpretation. This first became apparent during the presidential campaign. Candidate Obama proclaimed then that during World War II his great-uncle had helped liberate Auschwitz, and that his grandfather knew fellow American troops that had entered Auschwitz and Treblinka. Both are impossible. The Americans didn’t free either Nazi death...

[Liberal econonomists now assume] that a huge fiscal stimulus, created out of the illusory elements of massive public borrowing and boundless money creation, will provide the ladder that allows us to climb out of today’s economic crisis. To listen to some prominent liberal economists who believe in Keynesian-style “demand management,” the only thing wrong with this confabulated ladder is that it should be even taller. And truly, if money is no object, why not build it right up to the sky? Why stop where we are now—with a federal deficit expected to reach 13.5 percent of GDP under the current...

John Rosenthal writing at Pajamas Media informs us that President Obama will probably make a stop at Dresden while on his second European trip that will climax with a speech in Normandy on June 6 marking the 65th anniversary of D-Day. Rosenthal points out a little misdirection from the administration in that they will also probably schedule a stop at Buchenwald, the notorious concentration camp that Obama believes his uncle helped liberate in 1945. The message Obama intends to send by visiting both sites is clear; while the Germans did bad things during World War II, they were also victims...