Free Republic

Most people today assume that our understanding of WWII is largely complete, thanks to the enormous quantity of books, TV series such as ITV’s classic 1970s documentary The World at War, the myriad of documentaries that aired in the early days of the History Channel cable TV network, and the unending series of movies produced by Hollywood, particularly when compared to its predecessor, WWI. But classicist historian and fellow PJM columnist Victor Davis Hanson does yeoman’s work unpacking the events of 1939-1945. Starting with the plurality in the title, Hanson’s 2017 book, The Second World Wars: How the First Global...

A Polish war veteran is leading a British poll for the greatest Second World War Spitfire pilot by hundreds of thousands of votes. Franciszek Kornicki, 100, the last surviving Second World War Polish squadron commander, leads the online survey by a whopping 300,000 votes following a viral social media campaign by the UK's Polish community. A member of the high-scoring 303 Squadron during World War II, the war hero famously escorted a group of British bombers over northern France, where he led a daring attack on Nazi warplanes.

Exactly a year after being named after a volcano in the Cascade Mountains in Oregon, the USS Mount Hood was lying at berth off Manus island in the Admiralty Islands north of New Guinea. With around 4000 tons of different types of ammunition aboard, USS Mount Hood had travelled from Norfolk, Virginia via the Panama Canal to the Pacific, bringing munitions for ships that would be supporting the Philippines campaign. She was busy this morning, men were in the process of moving ammunition in all five of her holds, but there was time to run 18 men into shore at...

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?