Free Republic

<p>Veterans Affairs Secretary Denis McDonough is overruling plans to ban the famous Times Square kiss photo marking the end of World War II from all department health care facilities, a move criticized as political correctness run amok.</p><p>The ban was announced internally at VA medical facilities late last month in a memo from RimaAnn Nelson, the Veterans Health Administration’s top operations official. Employees were instructed to “promptly” remove any depictions of the famous photo and replace it with imagery deemed more appropriate.</p>

Brig. Gen. Paul Tibbets, better known as the man who piloted the Enola Gay during the bombing of Hiroshima, became a well-known figure in the United States at the end of the Second World War. Despite his fame, Tibbets asked that upon his death he receive no funeral or gravestone. Paul Tibbets started his career as an abdominal surgeon before enlisting in the US Army Air Corps. He initially served for three years, qualifying as a pilot in 1938, and opted to stay on active duty when the US entered the Second World War. While he is best known for...

Pathfinder. vol. 47. United States: Farm Journal, Incorporated, 1940, p. 4. * *(p. 3: "NEAR EAST - A Possible Locale for Act II in the War"). ...Troubled Palestine. • British - Mandated Palestine and Transjordan, likewise former parts of the Ottoman Empire, are contrasts. Transjordan gives the British so little trouble that its 34,740 square desert miles are policed by less than 1,600 men. Palestine, on the other hand, in its 10,492 square miles (slightly larger than Vermont) packs more concentrated hatred than any other section of the Near East. This hatred exists between the Arabs and Jews and springs...

... 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...

The detectorists were conducting a survey to find relics from WW2, in particular, traces of the Battle of Szczec, fought between the Soviet Red Army and the Wehrmacht...According to a press announcement by PAP, Detectorists from the Szczecin Search Group Association have found 70 coins deposited in a heavily corroded metal can buried at a depth of approximately 15 to 20 cm’s. The total discovery has been estimated to be worth 100,000 zloty, which is over 24,000 US dollars based on current conversion rates.A preliminary study of the coins has already identified a Liberty Head double eagle, also known as...

@fasc1nate Major Dick Winters led perhaps the most storied U.S. Army unit in all of World War II. On D-Day, he and his "band of brothers" in Easy Company defeated a far larger German force and allowed the Allied advance to continue. At the Dachau concentration camp, they liberated scores of Holocaust prisoners who'd endured months, if not years, of hell. And as the war in Europe drew to a close, they captured Hitler's personal mountaintop retreat in southern Germany — then kicked back on his terrace in triumph while sipping champagne from his wine cellar.⁠ ⁠ But for decades,...

The Navy is about to name a ship in honor of Omaha’s World War II “Hero of the Solomons.” Navy Secretary Carlos Del Toro announced last week that one of the next new Arleigh Burke-class destroyers (DDG 142) will be named for Petty Officer 1st Class Charles Jackson French, who was born in Arkansas in 1919 but was raised by his sister in Omaha after his parents died. The Navy traditionally names its destroyers after Navy and Marine Corps heroes. Other ships in the Arleigh Burke class have been named for Revolutionary War Capt. John Paul Jones and Civil War...

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...

A World War II and Korean War veteran who received a Purple Heart celebrated his 101st birthday at Hooters — and has vowed to return there every year until he dies. Harry Perez Cerezo, a retiree from Texas, was joined by his family, friends, and the Veterans of Foreign Wars organization when he rang in his milestone birthday at the chain's El Paso location on January 5. The centenarian was serenaded by the Hooters girls and gifted a signed Hooters hat 'I have never seen him cry, and we saw him cry there. His tears just came rolling down,' Harry...

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...

He was the last surviving founding member of the SAS and the last survivor of the Long Range Desert Group (LDRG), a reconnaissance unit based in the North African desert. Major Sadler joined the SAS in 1941 and became a navigator who used the skies to find his way across the Libyan desert. In December of that year, he was part of the first successful SAS raid on Wadi Tamet where his team destroyed 24 aircraft and a fuel dump. He fought with the SAS in Italy and France after his time in the desert. He was later parachuted into...

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...

Into the Death Factory of the Hürtgen ForestThose of us who have been here awhile may remember an infamous poster with the handle "Deep_in_the_Hürtgen_Forest. Here is a bit of history about the Hürtgen Forest.

The years immediately after World War Two did not turn on a dime into the long decade of postwar prosperity in America and the West. There were labour problems, political battles, the problem of turning soldiers back into civilians and a war economy back into a peacetime one. And there was the vast social unease and trauma after a war that confirmed that we were capable of anything, including the worst things imaginable. My previous Christmas movie columns have been romances alternating with comedy or drama – pictures like Holiday Affair (1949) and Remember the Night (1940), where the holidays...

79th Anniversary of the best response to a demand to surrender demand... ever.

The remains of an Arkansas World War II soldier are finally home. The US Army Air Force veteran traveled 170 miles before receiving a hero's welcome. Roller-McNutt Funeral Home brought home 2nd Lt. Kenyon Brindley was escorted by the Army from the Memphis Airport to Conway. Lt. Brindley served in the 703rd Bombardment Squadron, 445th Bombardment Group, 8th Air Force in the European Theater.

In 2005, a group of ice climbers stumbled upon a frozen body buried in the ice. The body wore military clothes, making experts wonder if the soldier was on a secret mission at his demise.A World War 2 Soldier Was Found Frozen in Ice! | Secrets In the Ice | 8:54Science Channel | 4.64M subscribers | 3,249,007 views | April 20, 2023

A newly-opened museum in India houses the remains of American planes that crashed in the Himalayas during World War Two. The BBC's Soutik Biswas recounts an audaciously risky aerial operation that took place when the global war arrived in India. Since 2009, Indian and American teams have scoured the mountains in India's north-eastern state of Arunachal Pradesh, looking for the wreckage and remains of lost crews of hundreds of planes that crashed here over 80 years ago. Some 600 American transport planes are estimated to have crashed in the remote region, killing at least 1,500 airmen and passengers during a...

The last remaining survivor of Pearl Harbor's USS Arizona has recalled the 'awful destruction' inflicted by the Japanese attack that killed 1,177 of his shipmates. Louis A. Conter, now aged 102, was just 20 years old when Japan's warplanes entered the sky above the US naval base in Hawaii on December 7, 1941. 'Aloha. There's one thing you've got to remember and that's to remember Pearl Harbor,' he said on Thursday in a taped message used to commemorate the 'Day of Infamy's' anniversary. A 1,760-pound armor-piecing bomb struck the USS Arizona leaving nearly 1,200 dead when the ship sank. The...