Free Republic

An American soldier who is credited with saving the lives of 200 Jewish comrades in a prisoner of war camp in Germany during World War II will receive the U.S. military’s highest decoration, the Medal of Honor. The award to Roddie Edmonds, who died in 1985, was announced last week. It comes more than a decade after Israel’s Holocaust memorial, Yad Vashem, recognized him as a “Righteous Among the Nations” for his bravery and six years after President Donald Trump recounted his heroism during a Veterans Day parade. Edmonds, a sergeant from Knoxville, Tennessee, was the highest-ranking soldier among a...

True love never gets old — especially for 102-year-old WWII vet Harold Terens and his 98-year-old bride, Jeanne Swerlin. The lovebirds, who tied the knot in 2024 and still gush that they feel like teenagers together, had some Valentine’s Day advice for the lovelorn. “Never give up.” “It’s never too late to find love, especially a great love — look at us,” Swerlin, a New York native who lives in Florida, told The Post. “You have to be open — love will find you.” Terens is among the last of the Greatest Generation, surviving a series of harrowing series of...

When I was growing up in the 1980s, I often saw old war movies on TV, and in many appeared a certain German actor usually playing a Nazi villain, from 'Where Eagles Dare' to 'Escape to Victory'. I recently discovered that this star, Anton Diffring, is buried only 9 miles from my childhood home, so I decided to make a pilgrimage and find his largely forgotten last resting place and thank him for so many great performances.

Awhile back, I covered U-166. A submarine rather famous for her sinking in the Gulf of Mexico. And, of course, the way her wreck is so deeply buried on the bottom. Today, we'll be looking at another U-Boat lost off the American coast. This time the East Coast, in the form of U-576. A much smaller Type VII boat, though far more intact than her larger cousin. This submarine was sunk in...strange circumstances, to say the least. Leaving a mostly intact wreck on the bottom, in the modern day. One with all the features of her class still recognizable, at...

“I approached this bastard and in my hands I had my old Remington Model 11 autoloader crammed with 00 buckshot. Frank Pachmayr had put an extension on the magazine which ran right out to the muzzle and this gave me a reserve of fire which sometimes proved quite advantageous.

According to unconfirmed reports, General Zhang Youxia, China’s vice-chairman of the Central Military Commission (CMC), sent a company of troops (over a hundred or more) to the government’s Yingxi Hotel in western Beijing on 18 January. Their mission was to arrest Xi Jinping. A few hours before, the Chinese president – alerted by an informant – set in motion countermeasures. Troops under the command of Cao Qi, head of Xi’s Central Guards Bureau, ambushed Zhang’s soldiers. In the ensuing gunfight at Yangxi Hotel, nine guards were reportedly killed along with dozens of Zhang Youxia’s soldiers. Throughout China, military movements have...

The Belgian troopship SS Léopoldville had just slipped beneath the English Channel after being hit by a torpedo. Gerald Howard went down with the ship. The 23-year-old rifleman nearly drowned under the frigid water like hundreds of his comrades. He fought his way back to the surface. "I was on the ship until it went down," Howard recalled decades later. "It pulled me down, and when I came up I saw a life raft. They said 'You can't get on.' I said, 'Like hell I can't.'" Howard woke up around midnight in a hospital in Cherbourg, France. He was among...

Denmark’s foreign minister had the top U.S. diplomat in the country summoned for talks after the main national broadcaster reported Wednesday that at least three people with connections to President Donald Trump have been carrying out covert influence operations in Greenland. Trump has repeatedly said he seeks U.S. jurisdiction over Greenland, a vast, semi-autonomous territory of Denmark. He has not ruled out military force to take control of the mineral-rich, strategically located Arctic island. Denmark, a NATO ally of the U.S., and Greenland have said the island is not for sale and condemned reports of the U.S. gathering intelligence there.

U.S. President Donald Trump on Wednesday spoke for more than an hour at the 2026 World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland. While his meandering remarks touched on multiple familiar topics, including windmills—a longtime personal pet peeve—the state of the U.S. economy, and his long-running 2020 U.S. presidential election denialism, Trump spoke at length about his desire to acquire Greenland from Denmark. He also strongly criticized NATO and said other members of the Western military alliance have taken advantage of U.S. generosity over the years. The following is an excerpt from his remarks focusing on Greenland, Denmark, NATO, and U.S. military...

First, the country was a Nazi ally; then it became a NATO stooge. The latest allegation: It’s a reckless Russia-basher that deserves a ruthless response from the Kremlin. Who said Finland was boring? Amid all the focus on Russia’s war against Ukraine, it is easy to overlook another prime target of Moscow’s imperialist ire. Russia has long used a skewed interpretation of history as a weapon to attack and delegitimize its neighbors—and, if the Kremlin’s latest rhetorical escalation is any guide, it now has Finland in its gunsights. The Finns are understandably nervous, given recent precedent: In 2021, Russian leader...

Maybe they should form a book club. Hillary Clinton, New York Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, and AOC's chief of staff Saikat Chakrabarti all need to read more 20th century history. It's either that, or Chakrabarti idolizes ethnocentric fascist totalitarianism. Below, see the recent photos which show AOC's chief of staff in a T-shirt homage to Subhas Chandra Bose. Bose was not a very good guy. Indeed, in Bose's devoted allegiance to Nazi Germany and then Imperial Japan, one might suggest that to wear Bose's face is far more ludicrous than wearing that of Che Guevara. Before we get into Bose's life,...

While the Islanders blanked the Rangers on Saturday night, the real highlight came before the game, when 104-year-old Dominick Critelli, a World War II veteran, performed the national anthem on his saxophone prior to the game at UBS Arena. Critelli, a Staff Sergeant in the Army who was born in 1921, hit every note of the anthem on Saturday, with the Long Island crowd chanting “USA” as he was led onto the ice in an Islanders jersey emblazoned with 104 on it, and again when he finished the flawless version of the song. He saluted the enthusiastic crowd after he...

There are no documented survivors of Unit 731, the covert department of the Imperial Japanese army that conducted lethal experiments on thousands of civilians in occupied China. As it sought to develop chemical and nuclear weapons, the unit subjected its mostly Chinese victims to a catalogue of horrors beyond the human imagination between 1936 to 1945, when the Empire of Japan surrendered. Civilians were dissected alive without without anesthesia, infected with bubonic plague, typhus and cholera and used as human guinea-pigs for frost-bite treatments in spine-chilling torture laboratories. A new Chinese film called 'Evil Unbound' has brought to life the...

SIXTY-EIGHT years ago tomorrow, Japan attacked the American naval base at Pearl Harbor. In the brutal Pacific war that would follow, millions of soldiers and civilians were killed. My father — one of the famous flag raisers on Iwo Jima — was among the young men who went off to the Pacific to fight for his country. So the war naturally fascinated me. But I always wondered, why did we fight in the Pacific? Yes, there was Pearl Harbor, but why did the Japanese attack us in the first place? ... The one who had the greater effect on Japan’s...

World War II Navy veteran Ira “Ike” Schab, one of the dwindling number of survivors of the 1941 Japanese bombing of Pearl Harbor, has died. He was 105. Daughter Kimberlee Heinrichs told The Associated Press that Schab died at home early Saturday in the presence of her and her husband. With his passing, there remain only about a dozen survivors of the surprise attack, which killed just over 2,400 troops and propelled the United States into the war. Schab was a sailor of just 21 at the time of the attack, and for decades he rarely spoke about the experience....

MANNHEIM, Germany – Eighty years after his death, the legacy of Gen. George S. Patton Jr. endures, yet his life was cut short not by a final, glorious battle, but by a mundane traffic accident on a wintry German road. Patton, the celebrated and feared commander of the U.S. Third Army, succumbed to a blood clot while paralyzed, passing away in his sleep at the age of 60 in Heidelberg, Germany, on Dec. 21, 1945. The paralysis and subsequent complications were the result of a car accident 12 days prior. On Dec. 9th, for the first time, at the intersection...

The United States, according to the New York Times, has a Maginot Line problem. In the first in a series of articles castigating the 21st century U.S. military for allegedly failing to adapt to modern military technology, the editorial board raises the specter of Monsieur Maginot’s infamous namesake fortification. “It is an ancient and familiar pattern,” the editorial board laments. The French in 1940, ensconced safely—so they thought—behind their elaborate frontier wall, utterly failed, unlike the Germans, to pay attention to the new verities of armored warfare and airpower and paid the penalty in a catastrophic six-week defeat. The image...

Maria and the family fled Villa Trapp in Austria not by foot over the mountains – that would have taken them to Germany, not Switzerland – but by train to Italy (formerly Croatia), where Georg had grown up and earned a military pension

THE LEGACY OF THE WWII GENERATION Every day, memories of World War II are disappearing from living history. The men and women who fought and won this great conflict are now in their 90s or older; according to US Department of Veterans Affairs statistics, 45,418 of the 16.4 million Americans who served in World War II are alive as of 2025.

PARIS, Dec 3 (Reuters) - Charles Norman Shay, a Native American veteran who was a 19-year-old U.S. Army medic when he landed off the Normandy coast on D-Day and helped save lives, died at age 101 on Wednesday. Shay died at his home near Caen in France’s Normandy region, his carer Marie-Pascale Legrand said.