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On May 14, 1944, an A-20 havoc (serial number 42-86768), with a crew of three and one passenger, departed Momote Airfield, Los Negros Island, for a courier flight to Nadzab Airfield, New Guinea. For unknown reasons, this plane was forced to ditch in the ocean off the north coast of New Guinea. Both engines failed at low altitude, and the aircraft's nose hit the water hard. Three men failed to emerge from the sinking wreck and were lost in the crash. One crew member survived and was rescued by a passing barge. An aerial search the next day found no...

April 16, 1947, was the hanging-date of Auschwitz commandant Rudolf Höss. Not to be confused with the Rudolf Hess, the Nazi party defector held by the British in lonely confinement in Spandau until 1987, Höss was true to the swastika from beginning to end. A World War I survivor, our guy joined the right-wing Freikorps paramilitaries and scored NSDAP party number no. 3240 in 1922 — soon thereafter proving a willingness to shed blood for the cause by murdering a teacher suspected of betraying to the French the Nazi martyr figure Albert Leo Schlageter. Höss served only a year in...

A principal goal of Stark Realities is to “expose fundamental myths across the political spectrum” — and few myths are as universally embraced as the notion that US participation in World War II lifted the American economy out of the Great Depression. This myth is dangerous not only because it leads citizens and politicians to see a bright side of war that doesn’t really exist, but also because it helps foster a belief that government spending is essential to countering economic downturns. That belief, in turn, has helped propel us to a point where the national debt now exceeds $34.6...

David Walker from Norfolk, Va., was 19 years old when Japanese torpedoes sunk his battleship at Pearl Harbor in 1941. Walker was presumed dead following the attack on the Hawaii naval base, but his body was never recovered — that is, until recently. Officials announced on Thursday that Walker's remains were finally accounted for, thanks to scientists at the Defense POW/MIA Accounting Agency (DPAA) whose mission is to recover and return missing service members from past conflicts. In a news release, the DPAA said that in 2018, military officials exhumed the unidentified remains of 25 people who were from Walker's...

A teenage cook whose heroics onboard a warship helped shorten the Second World War has been honoured in his home town after a public vote. The regenerated centre of North Shields, North Tyneside, has been named after Thomas Brown, who was awarded the George Medal for helping to retrieve codebooks from a sinking German U-boat in October 1942. The books were later used to crack the Enigma code by experts at Bletchley Park, enabling the British to decipher Nazi messages. Two naval men died while searching the stricken submarine but Thomas, a 15-year-old civilian who lied about his age to...

WASHINGTON (AP) — The Veterans Affairs secretary has reversed a department memo that aimed to ban VA displays of the iconic “V-J Day in Times Square” photograph of a Navy sailor kissing a strange woman on the streets of New York at the end of World War II. Secretary Denis McDonough acted hours after a copy of a memo from a VA assistant undersecretary requesting the photo’s removal from all VA health facilities was shared on social media. The memo had said the photo “depicts a non-consensual act” and is inconsistent with the department’s sexual harassment policy. McDonough on Tuesday...

On March 4, the world´s oldest person, Maria Branyas Morera, celebrated her 117th birthday in Catalonia. Morera was born in San Francisco, USA, but returned to Spain with her family at the age of eight, spending the rest of her life in Catalonia. For the past 23 years, she has stayed in the nursing home, Residencia Santa Maria del Tura. “Order, tranquillity, good connection with family and friends, contact with nature, emotional stability, no worries, no regrets, lots of positivity and staying away from toxic people” is what Morera credits her health and longevity to. Morera´s family arrived in Barcelona...

Granada Relocation Center, Amache, Colorado. Image credit: U.S. National Archives and Records Administration ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~ The US officially has a new national park. Amache National Historic Site near Granada, Colorado, has officially joined the likes of Yellowstone and Yosemite, the National Park Service announced last week. Amache – also known as the Granada Relocation Center – has a dark past, having been one of 10 incarceration sites established by the War Relocation Authority during World War II to imprison Japanese Americans. Over 10,000 people, mostly American citizens, were detained at Amache from 1942 to 1945. At its peak, the site housed...

North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) Secretary General Jens Stoltenberg is complaining that "former President Donald Trump's statement that he wouldn't help defend members of NATO who refuse to pay their fair share for their own defense undermines our security. This is a complete reversal of what the US did when Franklin Roosevelt was president in the 1940s. He told the American people that he was lending us money and equipment to fight the Nazis, but the US never made us pay them back. On top of this the US did send troops after Hitler declared war on them." "Currently, President...

... The Russian president argued that Poland was to blame for Hitler's decision to invade, claiming the Warsaw "went too far" by balking at the annexation of part of its territory. Polish Foreign Minister Radosław Sikorski suggested in a post to X, formerly Twitter, on Friday that Putin was "paranoid" and called it "shocking" that Carlson "enabled" the Russian president by giving him a platform to spread his false claims and rhetoric. Sikorski .. also noted that Hitler was joined in invading Poland by the Soviet Union, which was an ally to Nazi Germany for nearly the first two years...

A World War II Veteran who claimed he was the first Allied soldier to receive a message that the Nazis had surrendered vowed to keep the historical document in his family despite intense interest from museums. Bernard Morgan — who turns 100 on Wednesday — was working as a codebreaker for the Royal Air Force around May 6, 1945, when he received a world-changing message through his Typex machine. “The German War is now over. At Rheims last night the instrument of surrender was signed which in effect is a surrender of all personnel of the German forces – all...

While federal authorities did not bring legal charges against the black press for the balance of the war, that doesn't mean they shifted to a hands-off approach. Instead, they ratcheted up both intense monitoring and informal pressure. In the first half of 1942, FBI agents visited leading black newspapers that had carried critical stories about the federal government. Moreover, postal inspectors admonished two leading papers that the "benefits of citizenship" carried an obligation not to "'play up' isolated and rare instances in such a fashion as to obstruct recruiting and in other ways hamper the war effort."

Dated May 25 and delivered by plane while the Yorktown was about a hundred miles from Oahu, the report that Nimitz read was sobering...One day ahead of schedule, on May 27, the Yorktown limped into Pearl Harbor. The next morning, after Nimitz had cut orders voiding the safety rule of spending a day purging her tanks of stored aviation fuel, the Yorktown eased into Drydock Number One. The caissons closed behind her, and pumps began draining out the water. With at least a foot of water still remaining in the drydock, men in waders gathered to inspect the hull. One...

The number of births in France has fallen to its lowest level since the Second World War in a grim indicator of Western demographic collapse. Figures released this week from the National Institute of Statistics and Economic Studies (Insee) reported that 678,000 babies were born in France last year, a decline of 48,000 over 2022 and the lowest of any year since 1946. As with other countries in the West, France has long faced a declining birth rate, falling nearly every year since 2010 when 832,799 babies were born in the country, approximately 20 per cent higher than in 2023....

World War II depth charges, smoke floats and munition cases are among the latest eerie relics to be discovered on a deep-water survey ten miles off the coast of LA. High–resolution cameras found a massive dumping ground of munitions from the Pacific War which were tossed overboard warships before they could endanger the ports they were returning to. A team from the University of California's San Diego Scripps Institution of Oceanography found the objects up to 3,000ft down between LA and Catalina Island, in the same area where thousands of barrels of the outlawed pesticide DDT were discovered three years...

On this date in 1946, fascist William Joyce, famous by the nickname “Lord Haw-Haw” for his English-language Nazi propaganda broadcasts, was hanged at Wandsworth Prison for treason. As a pugilistic young anti-Semite with the unusual credential of being a Unionist Irish Catholic, Joyce had been a moving spirit in the interwar British fascist party. (Since audio broadcasts would define Joyce’s life, it seems appropriate to refer the reader for a fuller biography to this recent Oxford biography podcast.) But because time loves a good laugh, it had the guy haranguing his countrymen for insufficient patriotism marked out for the last...

PEARL HARBOR, Hawaii (NNS) -- Commander, U.S. Pacific Fleet declared Oct. 31 that the sunken submarine recently discovered by divers in the Western Pacific is, indeed, the World War II submarine USS Wahoo (SS 238). "After reviewing the records and information, we are certain USS Wahoo has been located," said Adm. Gary Roughead, the U.S. Pacific Fleet commander. “We are grateful for the support of the USS Bowfin Submarine Museum and Park, and appreciate greatly the underwater video footage of the submarine provided by our Russian navy colleagues, which allowed us to make this determination. This brings closure to the...

On this date in 1943, Slovenian student Lojze Grozde was executed by communist partisans. An ardent young Catholic, the 19-year-old Grozde was on his way from boarding school in Ljubljana in Italian-occupied Slovenia* to visit some relatives when he was stopped at a roadblock. Partisans who found the devotional book The Imitation of Christ on his person were a mite hostile, since the Holy See was not exactly at loggerheads with fascism. All of Yugoslavia had become one gigantic dirty war, and though individual Catholics might fall anywhere on the political spectrum, the institutional church did not shy from working...

A painting dated from the 16th century depicting the biblical figures of Adam and Eve, looted from the collection of Dutch-Jewish art dealer Jacques Goudstikker during World War II, has been returned to Goudstikker’s only living heir. The scene, attributed to Dutch artist Cornelis van Haarlem, was returned after being offered for donation by a private collector to Musée Rolin, a museum in Autun, a city in central-eastern France. According to New York law firm Kaye Spiegler, which facilitated the painting’s return, museum officials raised flags internally over the painting’s ownership record after uncovering a label with Goudstikker’s surname on...

She was considered one of the most beautiful women ever to grace the silver screen, but Hedy Lamarr never wanted to be known as just a pretty face. . . . . . She is credited for patenting a technology that is used every day. Hers is a story that is something right out of … well … Hollywood. A Kept Woman Finds Freedom Upon the insistence of her parents, Hedy wed a prominent Austrian munitions tycoon by the name of Fritz Mandl. Mandl took his teenage bride everywhere, including prominent business meetings with his biggest client, the Nazi Party....