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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...

Last night, Barack Obama said he had recently read an article about Winston Churchill during the London blitz. "Churchill said, 'We don't torture,' when the entire British -- all of the British people were being subjected to unimaginable risk and threat," Obama said. "And then the reason was that Churchill understood, you start taking short-cuts, over time, that corrodes what's -- what's best in a people. It corrodes the character of a country." It was, perhaps, the most powerful anecdote of the night, and an apparently powerful moral condemnation of President Bush, an admitted admirer of Churchill who kept the...

ROANOKE, Va. - Elisha Ray Nance, the last survivor of a Virginia National Guard company that had high D-Day losses on Omaha Beach, has died. He was 94.

In the summer of 1944, when soldiers of Free France were still fighting alongside the British against the Nazis in Europe, the two colonial powers were engaged in a clandestine struggle in the Middle East. That summer, French intelligence scored a major coup over its British counterpart in the region. The French recruited a Syrian agent who had access to top-secret correspondence between Syrian leaders - among them President Shukri al-Quwatli and Foreign Minister Jamil Mardam (who later became prime minister) - and leaders of neighboring states. French intelligence also obtained reports sent by Syrian diplomats in London, Washington, Moscow,...

JERUSALEM — In the Ukrainian town of Berdichev, Jewish women were forced to swim across a wide river until they drowned. In Telsiai, Lithuania, children were thrown alive into pits filled with their murdered parents. In Liozno, Belarus, Jews were herded into a locked barn where many froze to death. Holocaust deniers aside, the world is not ignorant of the systematic Nazi slaughter of some six million Jews in World War II. People know of Auschwitz and Bergen-Belsen; many have heard of the tens of thousands shot dead in the Ukrainian ravine of Babi Yar. But little has been known...

CHARLESTON, S.C. - The rain fell steadily from an opaque sky, but the Marines stood ramrod straight, eyes fixed ahead. In the historic graveyard, the Rev. Peter Lanzillotta gazed down at the urn. "You served your country with a full measure of your devotion. We shall salute you and say hail and farewell, good and noble Marine."

A jewel in his collection is the German Panzer V Panther tank that the German army sank in a Polish river during World War II to keep it from the advancing Russians. The Panther sat submerged for decades, and Mr. Littlefield acquired it five years ago and began restoring it. "Restoration is very satisfying, especially with something like the Panther," Mr. Littlefield said in a 2007 interview with The Chronicle. "People say: 'You'll never get that thing running again.' Well, it was built once, and we can do it again."

This video series is titled “In Defense of World War II.” I didn’t realize we had to defend it, but regardless of that, here’s an education brought to you by Victor Davis Hanson and Christopher Hitchens.

THE WHITE HOUSE Washington, D.C.IMMEDIATE RELEASE -- August 6, 1945STATEMENT BY THE PRESIDENT OF THE UNITED STATES Sixteen hours ago an American airplane dropped one bomb on Hiroshima, an important Japanese Army base. That bomb had more power than 20,000 tons of T.N.T. It had more than two thousand times the blast power of the British "Grand Slam" which is the largest bomb ever yet used in the history of warfare. It is an atomic bomb. It is a harnessing of the basic power of the universe. The force from which the sun draws its power has been loosed against...

My great uncle was captured in the Philippines by the Japanese during World War II, and died during the Bataan Death March. As far as I remember, I cannot recall anyone in my family saying that he was awarded the Purple Heart. If he was never awarded the Purple Heart, would he be eligible? If he did get it, how can I find out?

MEMBERS of the Greatest Generation - especially those with weak hearts - might want to steer clear of an upcoming PBS documentary that suggests the Allied victory in World War II was "tainted" and questions whether it can even be called a victory. Moreover, the documentary, titled "The War of the World: A New History of the 20th Century," asserts that the war could only be won by forming an unholy alliance with a dictator - Joseph Stalin, who was as brutal as the one they were fighting, Adolf Hitler - and by adopting the same "pitiless" and "remorseless" tactics...

Are you looking for a roller coaster ride of a book - a book you stay awake reading till the wee hours of the morning? Look no further than Rita Kramer's fascinating true story nail-biter, Flames in the Field: The Story of Four SOE Agents in Occupied France. I can guarantee you this: the four agents' riveting and haunting tales will stay with you for a long, long time

Europe, the Mother Continent of Western Man, is today aging and dying, unable to sustain the birth rates needed to keep her alive, or to resist conquest by an immigrant invasion from the Third World. What happened to the nations that only a century ago ruled the world? In “Churchill, Hitler and ‘The Unnecessary War’: How Britain Lost Its Empire and the West Lost the World,” published today, this writer will argue that it was colossal blunders of British statesmen, Winston Churchill foremost among them, that turned two European wars into world wars that may yet prove the mortal wounds...

On Dec. 3, 1943, a B-24D Liberator bomber with two Army airmen from Massachusetts flew a stealth mission to destroy Japanese war vessels in the Bismarck Sea. The mission turned out to be a success. The crew found a Japanese convoy and bombed it.

NEW DELHI (Reuters) - The United States will search for remains of several World War Two aircraft and airmen lost over the forested mountains of India's northeast, a U.S. commander said on Wednesday. The U.S. military says it lost some 430 Americans in 90 planes in India while they were on missions to resupply China's besieged army in the city of Kunming, desperately trying to hold out against the invading Japanese during World War Two. The wreckage of six U.S. planes have been found in the jungles of India's Arunachal Pradesh state, giving the U.S. Joint Prisoners of War/Missing in...

When Woodrow Wilson went to Congress to ask for a declaration of war in 1917, the U.S. Army was ranked 17th in the world, behind Portugal. On Armistice Day, 19 months later, there were 2 million doughboys in France, where they had helped to break the back of Gen. Ludendorff's theretofore invincible army in its final offensive, and 2 million more in the United States ready to march on Berlin. No other nation could have done that. After Japan attacked Pearl Harbor in 1941, FDR demanded that a disarmed America "build 50,000 planes" -- a seemingly impossible number, but one...

WASHINGTON - During the final allied offensive of the Korean War, Master Sgt. Woodrow Wilson Keeble risked his life to save his fellow Soldiers. Almost six decades after his gallant actions and 26 years after his death, Keeble will be the first full-blooded Sioux Indian to receive the Medal of Honor. The White House announced this morning that Keeble will receive the Medal of Honor posthumously in a ceremony scheduled for 2:30 p.m. March 3. Keeble is one of the most decorated Soldiers in North Dakota history. A veteran of World War II and the Korean War, he was born...

REDDING, Calif. - Raymond Jacobs, believed to be the last surviving member of the group of Marines photographed during the original U.S. flag-raising on Iwo Jima during World War II, has died at age 82. Jacobs died Jan. 29 of natural causes at a Redding hospital, his daughter, Nancy Jacobs, told The Associated Press. Jacobs had spent his later years working to prove that he was the radio operator photographed looking up at an American flag as it was being raised by other Marines on Mount Suribachi on Feb. 23, 1945. Newspaper accounts from the time show he was on...

Not sure if I'm doing this right, dupe thread, but I feel it's important

I began by asking myself the question linked inevitably to the survival of the United States as a trusted nation in the 21st century: Why can't America admit defeat? What is it in the American psyche that seems to dictate the necessity to be proven not only right, but superior in dealings with the outside world? I have lived the better part of 40 years in Japan, a country whose nationalistic ardor and patriotic zeal once easily matched that of the U.S. If the Japanese government has not sufficiently apologized for the utter brutality their nation inflicted in Asia and...

Would anyone like a free dinner at Golden Corral? Well, there is an easy way if you are an American military veteran. Golden Corral just announced this year’s Military Appreciation Monday will be November 12, 2007, from 5 to 9 pm. For the past 6 years, Golden Corral has been honoring the US Military with a free “thank you” dinner and beverage at any Golden Corral restaurant on Military Appreciation Monday (first Monday after Veteran’s Day), to honor any person who has ever served in the United States Military. In the past the only requirement to receive the free meal...

Remembering Kristallnacht, the 'Night of Broken Glass' By Hilda Pierce November 9, 2007 Crystal Night is a beautiful name for an evil event that took place in Austria and Germany on the night of Nov. 9, 1938. It was orchestrated on the orders of Adolph Hitler's minister of propaganda, Josef Goebbels. Adolf Eichmann also had a part in organizing the “Night of Broken Glass,” the night of burning synagogues, smashing windows of Jewish stores, looting, killing or torturing Jews on the streets and in their homes, 69 years ago today. It is a historical date because it was also the...

Japan's War Crimes http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Japanese_war_crimes Sex Slaves of Japan's Imperial Army http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comfort_women The perpetrators of some of the worst atrocities of the Second World War remain alive and unpunished in Japan according to a damning new book.Painstaking research by British historian Mark Felton reveals that the wartime behaviour of the Japanese Navy was far worse than their counterparts in Hitler's Kriegsmarine. According to Felton, officers of the Imperial Japanese Navy ordered the deliberately sadistic murders of more than 20,000 Allied seamen and countless civilians in cold-blooded defiance of the Geneva Convention. "Many of the Japanese sailors who committed such terrible deeds...

Last Monday was a maddening day. The swimming pool heater was not working right and when I wanted to get my nightly swimming exercise before bed, the water was a bit cool. Plus, the water heater was broken and my shower was barely tepid. I lay in bed sulking and then turned on the TV. Ken Burns's magnificent epic about American participation in World War II came on. There were American children being starved in Japanese prison camps in the Philippines. American Marines getting blown to pieces by Japanese shells on Iwo Jima. American soldiers fighting and freezing at the...

'You know," drawled Fred Thompson at a recent rally in Des Moines, Iowa, "you look back over our history and it doesn't take you long to realize that our people have shed more blood for other people's liberty than any other combination of nations in the history of the world." This is an interesting statement, and not only because Fred Thompson has a good shot at being the Republican nominee for president in 2008, and an outside chance of winning. It's also interesting because of who Thompson is. Fred Thompson is a Washington lobbyist. That's not what his campaign highlights,...

They lived in the Philippines, but they were members of the U.S. armed forces. More than 200,000 of them fought during World War II. Tens of thousands died before the final hard-won triumph over Japan. But in the decades following the war, the title of U.S. veteran -- and resulting compensation -- has eluded them.  Now, Filipino-American World War II veterans, aided by their adult children, have stepped up a decades-long fight to get Congress to recognize them as bona fide U.S. veterans – a move that would qualify them for VA benefits."Our community has been lobbying for this...

Four top-tier presidential candidates have accepted invitations to speak to the 108th National Convention of the Veterans of Foreign Wars of the U.S., which starts Aug. 18 in the hometown of the VFW's national headquarters, Kansas City, Mo. Sens. Hillary Rodham Clinton (D-NY) and John McCain (R-AZ) are scheduled to speak Aug. 20, and former Sen. Fred Thompson (R-TN) and Sen. Barack Obama (D-IL) will speak Aug. 21. "This is the candidates' opportunity to address the national convention of America's oldest and largest organization of combat veterans," said VFW Commander-in-Chief Gary Kurpius, from Anchorage, Alaska. "In our audience will be...

1945 : Japanese sink the USS Indianapolis On this day in 1945, Japanese warships sink the American cruiser Indianapolis, killing 883 seamen in the worst loss in the history of the U.S. navy. As a prelude to a proposed invasion of the Japanese mainland, scheduled for November 1, U.S. forces bombed the Japanese home islands from sea and air, as well as blowing Japanese warships out of the water. The end was near for Imperial Japan, but it was determined to go down fighting. Just before midnight of the 29th, the Indianapolis, an American cruiser that was the flagship of...

1945 : United States conducts first test of the atomic bomb The United States conducts the first test of the atomic bomb at its research facility in Los Alamos, New Mexico. The terrifying new weapon would quickly become a focal point in the Cold War between the United States and the Soviet Union. The official U.S. development of the atomic bomb began with the establishment of the Manhattan Project in August 1942. The project brought together scientists from the United States, Great Britain, and Canada to study the feasibility of building an atomic bomb capable of unimaginable destructive power. The...

It is not often that servicemen have to fight a double war - one on the home front and one overseas. Training at the Tuskegee Airfield in Alabama was segregated But this is exactly what America's legendary Tuskegee Airmen did, more than 60 years ago. While they were fighting the Nazis abroad, they were battling racism at home. Their double victory has been honoured by Congress, which has presented the survivors of America's first black air squadron with the Congressional Gold Medal. The medal, which is the highest civilian award bestowed by Congress, can also be awarded to military...

Did Hirohito play an active part in planning and conducting the war? Japanese emperor Hirohito expressed doubts about going to war with China in the 1930s and 40s, extracts from a diary of one of his advisers reveal. They show Hirohito was afraid the Soviet Union would intervene. The diary by Kuraji Ogura, who worked as a chamberlain to Hirohito in World War II, was found recently and parts have been published in Japan's media. The full text may help solve the debate about how much responsibility the emperor had for Japan's wartime action. South Pacific visit The document...

After more than 60 years of silence, World War II's most enduring and horrible secret is being nudged into the light of day. One by one the participants, white-haired and mildmannered, line up to tell their dreadful stories before they die. Akira Makino is a frail widower living near Osaka in Japan. His only unusual habit is to regularly visit an obscure little town in the southern Philippines, where he gives clothes to poor children and has set up war memorials. Mr Makino was stationed there during the war. What he never told anybody, including his wife, was that during...

The Diary of Anne Frank was displayed on the judge's desk A suspected German neo-Nazi has admitted publicly burning a copy of Anne Frank's diary, at the start of his trial with six others.The suspects are accused of inciting racial hatred and disparaging the dead. Prosecutors in the eastern German city of Magdeburg said Lars Konrad, 25, threw the book onto a bonfire during a summer solstice party in June 2006. Anne Frank wrote her diary while she and her family hid from the Nazis in an attic in Amsterdam during World War II. The indictment says the public...

If you look at my home page, you will see that I rank FDR third behind Lincoln and Washington, and ahead of Reagan and TR in my list of our greatest presidents. Now, someone took me to task for that choice on an unrelated thread, which led me to pen this piece that I now throw out there for your review and comments. In my younger, more brash days I would have dismissed FDR because of his socialist policies. And Yalta. And the supreme court-packing try. Sure, he had his faults, like all presidents. Yet he is - along with...

A Few of FR's Finest....Every Day Free Republic made its debut in September, 1996, and the forum was added in early 1997.   Over 100,000 people have registered for posting privileges on Free Republic, and the forum is read daily by tens of thousands of concerned citizens and patriots from all around the country and the world. A Few of FR's Finest....Every Day was introduced on June 24, 2002. It's only a small room in JimRob's house where we can get to know one another a little better; salute and support our military and our leaders; pray for those in...

The cavity magnetron played a decisive role in WWII In the summer of 1940, the war with Germany was at a critical stage. France had recently surrendered and the Luftwaffe was engaged in a concerted bombing campaign against British cities. The United Kingdom was being cut off from the Continent, and without allies to help her, she would soon be near the limit of her productive capacity - particularly in the all important field of electronics. On the morning of 29 August, a small team of the country's top scientists and engineers, under the direction of Sir Henry Tizard...

Abdulwahab heard of a plan to put Jewish women in a brothel Israel's main Holocaust memorial centre has for the first time nominated an Arab to be recognised as a "righteous gentile" for saving Jewish lives.Researchers at Yad Vashem will now examine the life of Khaled Abdulwahab, who died in his native Tunisia in 1997, to see if he is eligible for the award. He is said to have sheltered Jews on his land during the Nazi occupation. The Righteous Gentile award has already been bestowed on about 22,000 non-Jews, including 60 Muslims from the Balkans. The request to...

Calling all WW2 FReeper Vets! Next week there will be a special 2-day Finest thread on WW2 vets and the WW2 memorial in Washington DC .It will be a thread that I believe FR will be proud of. I desire the names of all LIVING & DECEASED(on the wall) Freepers for inclusion in the article. Pictures of course are wanted, but not critical. The actual names will only be used with your permission. Right now I know of one living (Wheelbarrow) and one deceased (Bevlar)… the lar (larry) in name. Freepers. I will have a collage pix with the screennames....

Yesterday (December 16) marked the 62nd anniversary of the start of a German counter-offensive, known in the history books the Battle of the Bulge. It was also the longest fought and costliest battle the United States Army had ever fought, before or since. The details for this offensive were months in the planning by Adolf Hitler and the very highest echelons of the German high command. This plan was so top secret that none of the field commanders had an inkling that there was even one being planned until they were briefed about it six weeks before the scheduled jump...

Germans demand compensation from Poland over war losses A German group has filed claims against Poland with a European court over property lost in the aftermath of World War II, a member said today. The Prussian Claims Society, which represents some Germans who were expelled from Poland after the war ended, filed the complaint with the European Court of Human Rights, the society’s deputy leader Gerwald Stanko said. “Twenty-two individual complaints have gone to the European Court of Human Rights,” Stanko said. He said the aim was to secure either compensation or the return of property. The Prussian Claims Society...

HONOLULU - Sixty-five years ago, Takeshi Maeda and John Rauschkolb tried to kill each other at Pearl Harbor. This week, now both 85, they met face-to-face for the first time — and shook hands. The Japanese veteran gripped Rauschkolb's arm with his left hand and briefly hesitated, as if he was searching for the right words. Then he said, "I'm sorry." On Dec. 7, 1941, Japanese Imperial Navy navigator Maeda guided his Kate bomber to Pearl Harbor and fired a torpedo that helped sink the USS West Virginia. Rauschkolb, a Navy signalman, stood on the West Virginia's port side as...

Marc Deneen has lived in the same two-story brick home in the quiet western Dane County hamlet known as Riley for all of his 81 years - almost. Like so many Americans his age, a little something called World War II interrupted. It was during the war, somewhere on a German tank trail that would hopefully in the weeks ahead lead all the way to Berlin, that a bazooka blast ripped 35 holes in Deneen's body, burned him in several spots and destroyed the hearing in one of his ears. Nevertheless, he was the lucky one. Two of his combat...