Free Republic

This International Holocaust Remembrance Day, take time to remember the victims, remember the survivors, and remember Carl Lutz, the man responsible for the largest civilian rescue mission of the entire Holocaust.As the world observes International Holocaust Remembrance Day Jan. 27, victims and survivors will be honored with incredible stories of bravery and sacrifice. This year marks the 75th anniversary of liberation and the end of the Second World War, plus the 125th anniversary of the birth of Carl Lutz, a man whose story remains mostly lost to history. LutzÂ’s actions toward the end of the war make him responsible for...

In the pre-dawn hours of 30 December, Ensign Frank M. "Fuzzy" Fisler and his crew made their way through a blacked-out Pearl Harbor to the seaplane base. Their briefed flight plan was to take their PBY-5 Catalina out 500 miles on a heading of 258 degrees, turn right 90 degrees and fly 50 miles, then head home. Weather was forecasted to be rough with a winter storm passing through, churning up 30 to 40-foot seas. [...] By 1300 hours, the crew had finished their 50-mile cross-leg and made their turn for home when one of the men saw a smoke...

snip The Battle of the Bulge has a special resonance for me, because my father almost died in it. He was a college student when World War II broke out. He graduated, then enlisted in the Army. He was sent to one of the big Army bases in the South for basic training. In those days, they gave every enlistee an IQ test; maybe they still do. My father’s performance on the test was good enough that he was pulled out of the ranks and sent to graduate school to become an engineer. (Drill Sergeant, with privates lined up: “Hinderaker!...

The Bulge, Day One, December 16th, 1944.

When Japanese bombers appeared in the skies over Pearl Harbor on the morning of December 7, 1941, the U.S. military was completely unprepared for the devastating surprise attack, which dramatically altered the course of World War II, especially in the Pacific theater. But there were several key reasons for the bombing that, in hindsight, make it seem almost inevitable. Tensions Began During the Great Depression Before the Pearl Harbor attack, tensions between Japan and the United States had been mounting for the better part of a decade. The island nation of Japan, isolated from the rest of the world for...

In one of the largest operations of its kind ever undertaken in the United States, a salvage contractor working with federal and state agencies has removed 476,000 gallons of oil from a leaking tanker sunk off Long Island by a German U-boat during World War II.

When the battleship USS Oklahoma turned over just 15 minutes after being hit by the first Japanese torpedo on 7 December 1941, 429 sailors and Marines were either already dead -- or soon would be. Men that somehow survived the initial nightmare of torpedoes, bombs, shrapnel, bullets, and fire had to swim through another level of hell to reach the relative safety of land. Those that remained inside the flooding ship would spend days in pitch-black darkness with no food, water, and what breathable air they had was being slowly used up while they hoped for rescue. 78 years later,...

The newly-released movie Midway has generated some interest and a 150-post Freeper thread yesterday: http://freerepublic.com/focus/f-news/3793171/postsIn the video below a professor at the US Navy War College hits key info helping an viewer who choses to see this great movie. A key one that I'd read long ago but had not fully embraced: US damage control was considerably better than that of Japan. When Japanese pilots hit the USS Yorktown, they returned to their carriers joyous, "We have sunk a US carrier..!" Yet inside of an hour or so US damage control had bent Heaven & Earth to save her; the...

Explorers find long-lost USS Grayback submarine after 75-year mystery Nicholas Sakelaris Nov. 11 (UPI) -- Undersea explorers said they have found a long-lost U.S. submarine off the coast of Japan that sank during World War II. The USS Grayback was carrying 80 U.S. sailors when it sank in the waters south of Okinawa in February 1944. The ship is credited with sinking 14 enemy ships before it was torpedoed. Private explorers Tim Taylor and Christine Dennison found the Grayback in June and made the announcement Monday, on Veterans Day. The search ended when they spotted an anomaly on the ocean...

A World War II Navy submarine missing for 75 years has finally been found off the coast of Japan.

It was 1944. Martin Gelb, an orthodox Jew from Brooklyn, was behind Nazi lines with a .45 and a Tommy gun. “I was asked to do a lot of strange things, but you follow orders. It did get a little crazy,” the 100-year-old OSS veteran from Hudson, N.H., told the Herald last week. He was part of William “Wild Bill” Donovan’s small crew of intelligence operatives working with the French resistance, hunting down German scientists and rounding up war criminals. He was an expert radio operator who knew Morse code and International Morse code who slipped into France and Germany...

... an intriguing side story: "Navy Had Word of Jap Plan to Strike at Sea."It was a fascinating, and detailed, description of much of what American intelligence knew beforehand of the enemy's fleet and plans. Indeed, it was too detailed. The report - 14 paragraphs long - suggested a secret U.S. intelligence coup, and became one of the biggest and potentially damaging news leaks of World War II. "This is the only time in American history that the United States government has ... taken steps toward prosecuting a member of the media under the Espionage Act," The story went on...

President Barack Obama arrived on Midway Atoll today, paying homage to the men killed in a critical World War II battle and stressing the importance of protecting the planet and all its inhabitants from the effects of climate change. Obama emerged from Air Force One and greeted the roughly 40 inhabitants of Midway who had come out to welcome him. “We are going to have a great time,” he told them.

“Midway” is so square, so old-school and old-fashioned, it almost feels avant-garde. Ambiguity is not its goal, nor is nihilism its motivating philosophy. It aims to celebrate heroism, sacrifice, determination and grit, and if you don’t like that it really does not care. Though it’s appearing some 70 years after the epochal World War II battle it re-creates — and more than 40 years after a Hollywood film with the same name on the same subject — this “Midway,” as directed by Roland Emmerich and written by Wes Tooke, pays no attention to the notion that times have changed...

Imagine, you know someone who doesn’t know anything about WW2, and you had to explain how the US was attacked at Pearl Harbor, the significance of Doolittle’s raid, the odds the US was up against the Japanese, how Intel helped us win the battle of Midway, and just how crazy, non-politically correct, and determined the Greatest Generation was - all in 2 hours. That’s the movie Midway in a nutshell.

Very will done and presented. Was kind of disappointed the they didn't cover the Sinking of the USS Yorktown very much. Didn't really demonize any side (US OR Japanese) just showed Military Men doing their jobs. All in all at great movie. Really showed what war is really like.

Is so(or Not) Why?

LONDON — It was certainly not what the captured Nazi generals expected — or deserved. As historian Helen Fry describes in her new book, “The Walls Have Ears: The Greatest Intelligence Operation of World War II,” Trent Park, the stately country house in north London to which the prisoners were confined, rather resembled a gentleman’s club. The most senior generals had their own rooms, with adjoining sitting rooms. There was a room for playing billiards, table-tennis and cards. And, after afternoon tea on Christmas Eve, a festive dinner was laid out for them. There was even an appropriately deferential welcome...

On the morning of 7 December 1941, nine Japanese torpedoes struck the battleship USS Oklahoma, anchored on Battleship Row during the surprise attack on Pearl Harbor. The massive ship capsized in just 15 minutes, trapping hundreds of sailors and Marines inside. Crews worked feverishly to rescue the survivors, which could be heard tapping the inside of the ship's hull for the next three days. Unsung heroes like civilian dock worker Julio DeCastro raced against the clock, cutting through sections of the hull to pull out dozens of men. Two Oklahoma sailors earned the Medal of Honor: Seaman James Ward and...

VALLETTA (Reuters) - The wreck of a British submarine, which vanished at the height of World War Two, has been discovered lying at the bottom of the sea off Malta, university marine archaeologists said on Thursday. HMS Urge had been based with other submarines in Malta and had carried out several deadly missions when the British navy ordered it and rest of the flotilla to redeploy to Egypt because of a relentless German siege of the Mediterranean island. Urge set sail on April 27, 1942, carrying a 32-strong crew, 11 other naval personnel and a journalist. However, it failed to...