The Passing of The Greatest Generation.

I hope others will add to this thread.

From "The Greatest Generations Foundation" Facebook page:

AMERICA GREATEST HEROES: The last surviving member of the Maryland Chapter of the Pearl Harbor Survivors Association passed away this week.

Clarence Davis, a resident of Charlotte Hall for 33 years, died on Sunday, April 22, at Spring Village of Wildewood Assisted Living at the age of 94.

Davis had been suffering from Alzheimer’s for the last five or so years, his son, Mike Davis of Leonardtown, said.

The United States was attacked at Pearl Harbor by the Japanese on Dec. 7, 1941, which marked the American start of World War II, as more than 2,400 servicemen and civilians were killed.

By 2009, Clarence Davis was the last survivor of Pearl Harbor living in St. Mary’s County. There were only 12 Pearl Harbor survivors in all of Maryland in 2011, he said then.

Davis’ service ‘bookended’ the war

Growing up in Texas, Clarence Davis joined the Navy at the age of 17 on Jan. 24, 1941, months before the Pearl Harbor bombing.

He was ordered to the USS Oglala, a mine-sweeping ship, but when he arrived at Pearl Harbor, the order was changed to the repair ship USS Medusa. Between the two vessels, “I didn’t know the difference,” Clarence Davis said in a 2009 interview.

But the Oglala was one of 18 ships to sink to the bottom of Pearl Harbor.

Clarence Davis was working in the Medusa’s kitchen on the third deck down that Sunday morning.

“All of a sudden, we saw this huge ball of fire go up,” across the water at Ford Island in the center of Pearl Harbor, he said. The USS Utah, which was tied at the spot where the Medusa usually was, had just been hit. Fifty-eight of the Utah’s crew were killed.

“That’s twice — didn’t go to the Oglala and didn’t go over to where the Utah was,” Davis said as he recalled his streak of luck at Pearl Harbor.

From his vantage point aboard the USS Medusa, “when I saw that first bomb, we didn’t know what it was.”

Of its three guns, the Medusa had two anti-aircraft guns, which the crew manned to repel fire. A Japanese plane shot up the Medusa, but the ship’s men shot down two enemy planes in return.

Next to the Medusa in the harbor was the USS Curtis, which was hit by both a bomb and a Japanese plane that crashed into it. The Curtis sank, killing 21.

Clarence Davis remained at Pearl Harbor until April 1943 repairing ships. Aboard the USS Garrard, Davis was there at Tokyo Bay on Sept. 2, 1945, when the Japanese formally surrendered.

“He was aboard one of the many ships anchored in Tokyo Bay when the peace treaty was signed, thus making him one of only a handful of Navy personnel to ‘bookend’ the war,” his obituary said.

Mike Davis said it took a long time for his father to start talking about his experience at Pearl Harbor. His father didn’t join the Pearl Harbor Survivors Association until the 1980s, but once he did, “it gave him a great deal of focus.”

The attack on Pearl Harbor “had an enormous effect because of his age. He was so young when it happened, probably less so than a soldier in a foxhole. He was in a ship, a repair ship nonetheless,” Mike Davis said.

On behalf of TGGF and its members, we salute Mr. Davis for his dedication and service to our freedom.

AMERICA’S GREATEST HEROES: It’s with great sadness we share the news that TGGF member Mr. Darrell Blizzard: A Reluctant Hero of World War II has died. He was 96.

In 1927, when Darrell was five, his hero was Charles Lindbergh. The Christmas gift of a leather helmet and goggles cemented his dream. The circle of life and the power of faith can take you from the Allegheny’s of Pennsylvania to the beaches of Normandy. But with that faith he needed an olive branch. His olive branch came in the form of his superiors who were officers in the Army Air Corps, who gave him the best advice to change his course in life to become a pilot like his hero, Charles Lindbergh. These officers were his adopted brothers who didn’t snub their noses at him or dismiss him. They provided him with the foundation needed to fulfill his dream.

This dream would not come easy or without sacrifices. He had not completed college, he was drafted. He was not an officer, he was enlisted. His faith was not to be shaken. With the power of a mustard seed he dug deep and found his way into two excruciatingly pilot training courses and earned his wings. He stayed the course and accomplished what many said he wouldn’t and couldn’t. They chose him for a pilot’s job in the fledgling Army Air Corps. He listened and made it his. Lindbergh broke the barriers of distance and courage. Darrell’s adventures and journey started in the safety of his classrooms of Pennsylvania State University or Penn State. His head and heart was in the clouds he wanted to be his hero and fly.

He turned twenty-one on his voyage to England on the Queen Elizabeth, already the old man of the sea. From his humble beginnings, he acknowledged and recognized the dismissal of the black soldiers in the hold as he played craps with the white soldiers on deck. Finally, on Easter Sunday in 1945, Darrell Blizzard was able to join the fight for freedom over the skies of Europe. He wouldn’t be there long, just five missions but those experiences would last a lifetime for him. The terror of being the lone ship limping home after leaving in a wall of airplanes of more than five hundred.

Many times during World War II my Appalachian family ate potatoes as their only meal. Darrell met Prisoners of War who survived on loaves of bread made from sawdust and potatoes barely edible, black and rancid. He shared what he had with them and recognized the disparity of how American POW’s were treated as kings and the rest of the world as crap caught on the bottom of one’s shoe. In meeting these men, he realized that war, hate and anger would not be what they would write about in the history books. The truth of war would be left on the battlefields. But thankfully, Darrell Blizzard has survived nine plus decades to tell his story and I as a humble student can relay the truth to you and the world.

Not every family member would live to return to Normandy. Like many others, Darrell’s brother would be killed in a flight accident in Texas. His loss is just as real today as it was for me at the age of nine in 1969 when I first picked up my book to read about these great pilots of WWII. Like many veterans, Darrell came home a hero. No longer an orphan the world stood in awe to acknowledge his accomplishments and say thank you. Darrell and I both became commercial airline pilots. I didn’t see combat and I am grateful he chose to fight for my freedom and the freedom of every American. He faced many daunting mechanical and weather challenges that were easier than the dangers of flak and the Luftwaffe. He brought the same determination to his passengers and his career, like his determination to bring his B-17 crew back from every mission.

In 1945 they had not yet coined the term PTSD. Did he have to deal with the stress of combat upon his return? Yes, he did, he got busy with his goal to earn his degree. He didn’t isolate himself. He doesn’t have the answers to PTSD, but recognizes the challenges that each veteran faces who returns from war. He has missed his brother for the last forty plus years and continues to miss him at the age of ninety-two. His three main beliefs are God, family and country. Those beliefs have sustained him through the darkest and happiest days of his life. He is humbled that the world would give pause to recognize the heroes he left on the battlefield of Normandy to celebrate them. He is even more humbled to have lived long enough to celebrate his brothers as a true American hero.

The people of Cologne will always have a special place in his heart. He will never forget the land destroyed by bombs and the devastation created by hate. May God bless and keep all who served in the name of freedom and humanity for all. God bless Darrell Blizzard.

“Every Day is Memorial Day”
The Greatest GENERATIONS Foundation
Web: www.TGGF.org

NATION REMEMBERS - TRIBUTES have been paid to Normandy "D-Day" veteran Mr. Vernon Jones, who has died aged 94.

Members of the Oxford branch of the Royal Green Jackets Association said they were ‘devastated’ by Mr Jones’ death.

Mr Jones was brought up in South Wales but moved to Abingdon with his family in 1931. He joined the Oxfordshire and Buckinghamshire Light Infantry, based at Cowley Barracks, before joining 2nd Battalion, The Bedfordshire and Hertfordshire Regiment, which took part in the Normandy landings.

Following D-Day Mr Jones fought across France, Belgium and Holland and into Germany but was injured in February 1945.

On behalf of TGGF and its members, we salute Mr. Jones for his dedication and service to our freedom.

“Every Day is Memorial Day”
The Greatest GENERATIONS Foundation
Web: www.TGGF.org

My father was a Pearl Harbor survivor. He passed away in 1984

OUR GREATEST AMERICAN HEROES: It is with heartfelt sorrow we learn that World War II veteran Mr. James Avery has died. He was 96.

James Avery was born December 7, 1921 in Milwaukee, Wisconsin. He served his country in the U.S. Air Corps and was stationed at Lackland Air Force Base in San Antonio, Texas.

James Avery completed pilot training and commanded a B-26 bomber, surviving 44 missions over Germany.

After World War II, he attended the University of Illinois and received a B.F.A. in Industrial Design. He pursued college level teaching, and while at the University of Colorado, he explored jewelry-making techniques.

In the summer of 1954, James Avery started his jewelry business in a two-car garage with about $250 in capital. He built a small workbench, then bought a few hand tools and scraps of silver and copper. It was his desire to create jewelry that had meaning for him and his customers as well as having lasting value.

In 1957, he mailed his first Christian jewelry catalog. It was 16 pages and featured 39 items, all handmade. This was the year he also hired his first employee, Fred Garcia. "I had been doing everything myself - designing, sawing, polishing, finishing and selling. I thought 'what am I going to do? I can't saw that fast!"

The company was incorporated to James Avery Craftsman, Inc. in 1965, and two years later with the help of a modest loan from the SBA, the company headquarters was constructed on 20 acres in the heart of the Texas Hill Country in Kerrville, Texas, not too far from that original garage. In 1988 James Avery received a San Antonio Entrepreneur of the Year award.

Fifty-three years after he first founded the company, James Avery officially stepped down as CEO in May 2007 and passed the reins to his son Chris. He is still involved with the company and many days you can find him pursuing what he loves — creating new design ideas out of his office at the corporate headquarters in Kerrville.

Rest in eternal peace Warrior. Thank you for your service and many sacrifices. We as American citizens have a huge debt that we can never repay to our service members and veterans and your families who have put their lives on hold to serve our great nation, we may never know them all but we truely owe you all. God bless you Sir.

"Every Day is Memorial Day"
The Greatest GENERATIONS Foundation
Web: www.TGGF.org

I had heard of the jewelry line but I didn't know anything about the man who started the business. What a great biography!

OUR GREATEST HEROES: Its with great sadness we learn that one of the last remaining Burma World War II veteran Mr. John Skene has died. He was 99.

John Skene survived malaria, dengue fever and a close shave involving a 600lb shell exploding close to his head during his time in active service.

He served in France with the British Expeditionary Force, before being driven back across the channel by Hitler's forces.

After a short time serving on the Yorkshire coastal defences, with the Royal Welch Fusiliers, Mr Skene found himself sailing out to the war in the Far East - leaving behind his wife Muriel and two-week-old daughter.

The hardest fighting came in 1944, when Field Marshall Bill Slim's troops were taking Kohima back from the Japanese.

Mr Skene's luck finally ran out when a 600lb shell exploded close to his head - he survived, but received head injuries caused him to suffer regular headaches more than seven decades on.

While convalescing in a field hospital he contracted malaria and dengue fever, and was transferred to administrative duties.

Mr Skene was finally sent home in December 1945, and officially de-mobbed in February 1946 where he returned to civilian life.

Mr Skene was born in Kingswood in 1919. His father was an engineer and his mother worked in a shoe factory.

Aged just a few months old he moved to Cardiff with his family. Sadly his mother passed away when he was just five and due to his father being busy with work, he moved back to Kingswood where he was cared for by his grandparents.

He moved back with his father and his new family when he was 11 and left school at 14, where he worked in his dad's bicycle and radio shop with his brother Billie for pocket money.

In his later years he enjoyed holidaying in the Mediterranean, dancing, driving, day trips, listening to jazz, photography and charity work.

He spent a lot of his time at car boot sales and selling items through auctions to help raise money for a fishing for the disabled scheme set up by his wife.

He also travelled to India and Burma to visit the graves of his fallen war comrades where he presented a plaque in their memory in a local cathedral.

Rest in eternal peace Warrior. Thank you for your service and many sacrifices. We as American citizens have a huge debt to you and your brothers that we can never repay to our service members and veterans and your families who have put their lives on hold to serve our great nation, we may never know them all but we truely owe you all. God bless you Sir.

"Every Day is Memorial Day"
The Greatest GENERATIONS Foundation
Web: www.TGGF.org

WE REMEMBER A TRUE WORLD WAR II HERO: It is with a heavy heart that we learn the news that BATTLE OF THE CORAL SEA veteran, Mr. GORDON JOHNSON has died. He was 96.

Mr. Johnson was a telegrapher aboard the light cruiser HMAS Hobart during the famous battle of the Coral Sea, which saw ships from the United States and Australian fleets take on the mighty Japanese.

Many aboard the ships were just teenagers, wide-eyed and crazy-brave. They signed up to serve their respected nations, mostly for the adventure, only to find that in May 1942 they would be thrown together — from two continents — to fight the most important naval battle in World War II history.

The men who fought in the Battle of the Coral Sea may not be as well known in our history as veterans of Normandy, Kokoda or Iwo Jima, but there are few people to whom this country owes more thanks than the US and Australian sailors and airmen who, across two days that May, halted the Japanese advance south towards Australia and, in the process, helped to turn the tide of the Pacific War.

It was the first aircraft carrier battle ever fought, and the first in which the opposing ships never fired at each other - all attacks were carried out by aircraft with the US losing three ships in the battle, including the fleet carrier USS Lexington, while the Japanese lost five ships, including the light carrier Shoho.

While the Japanese claimed a tactical success, the strategic victory belonged to the Allies, who destroyed the Japanese carriers at the Battle of Midway the following month.

Mr. Johnson and the Hobart survived the battle and was present in Tokyo Bay when the Japanese instrument of surrender was signed in September 1945.

On behalf of TGGF and its members, thank you for your service and many sacrifices. We as American citizens have a huge debt that we can never repay to our veterans and the families who have put their lives on hold to serve our great nations, we may never know them all, but we truly owe it to you. Rest in eternal peace Mr. Gordon Johnson.

Lest We Forget.

"Every Day is Memorial Day"
The Greatest GENERATIONS Foundation
Web: www.TGGF.org

OUR GREATEST AMERICAN HEROES: Its with great sadness we learn the news that World War II Navajo Code Talker Roy Hawthorne, who used his native language as an uncrackable code during World War II, died Saturday.

At 92, he was one of the last surviving Code Talkers.

Hawthorne was 17 when he enlisted in the U.S. Marine Corps and became part of a famed group of Native Americans who encoded hundreds of messages in the Navajo language to keep them safe from the Japanese. Hawthorne served in the 1st Marine Division in the Pacific Theatre and was promoted to corporal.

The code was never broken.

“The longer we live, the more we realize the importance of what we did, but we’re still not heroes — not in my mind,” Roy Hawthorne said in 2015.

But Hawthorne's son, Regan Hawthorne, said Monday his father leaves a proud legacy.

"They went in out of a sense of duty and a spirit of responsibility to their country," Regan Hawthorne said, adding he didn't know about his father's military service until he was in his 20s.

"I grew up not knowing my dad was a Code Talker. He never talked about it, didn't see the need to talk about it," he said.

The Code Talkers believed they were just doing their job, he said, and shied away from receiving accolades for their service.

"When we read about the effect the Navajo Code had on shortening the war because of its effectiveness, we think about the guys who did that," Regan Hawthorne said. "(But) they're simply humble men who performed what they sensed to be a duty to protect all they cherished."

He said his father and other Code Talkers returned home from the war and "simply came back to work and went back to making a life."

On behalf of TGGF and its members, thank you for your service and many sacrifices made to this great nation. We as American citizens have a huge debt that we can never repay our veterans and the families who have put their lives on hold to serve our great nations, we may never know them all, but we truly owe it to you.

Rest in eternal peace Mr. Hawthorne.

"Every Day is Memorial Day"
The Greatest GENERATIONS Foundation
Web: www.TGGF.org

My Grandfather a veteran of the pacific theater and US Army is still here at 93, but looking older every month now instead of year. It will be a sad day when these fine people are no longer with us at all. Now my dad, a Vietnam Vet is the Grandpa but really at 70 hes old enough to be a great grandpa. Time sure does go by fast.

I respect these men very much. My father served all over Europe during WWII, in Intel. Were he still alive, he would be 99. One of my best friends is 88 and spent most of his career, in an engineering battalion, rebuilding the airfields in Europe. I visit my father's grave, in Arlington Cemetery, every year and am constantly reminded (looking at the other headstones) that many people, both big and small, did so much for so many.

They were all great men and we own them a debt that can never be repaid.

My father was RAF ground crew based in the Pacific and Indian Oceans mainly. Used to service B-24s bombing the Japanese in the (then) Dutch East Indies. He died in 2003.

And my father , who is 98 , is now in bad shape , weakening day after day , family believe he would not pass the month, hoping he can regain some strength.

He saw action on the Italian theater in spring/summer 44', then in the battle of Provence and was WIA on august, the 22th 1944 in suburbs of Marseilles, as an infantry corporal (Tirailleur=Rifleman) in the 3rd Algerian Infantry Division (colonial troops).



7th RTA/ 3ème DIA.

AMERICA’S GREATEST HEROES: The last Pearl Harbor survivor from Nebraska, Mr. Ludwig "Lou" Radil. Has died, he was 98.

In Ludwig "Lou" Radil's six eventful years as a Navy yeoman, he witnessed both the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor and the earliest post-World War II nuclear tests in the South Pacific.

"He enjoyed being in the Navy. He had seen so much," said his son, Larry Radil of Papillion.

Lou Radil, an Omaha native, was one of the last remaining Pearl Harbor survivors in Nebraska, having escaped from the battleship USS California after it was torpedoed in the Japanese attack.

Radil grew up in the Brown Park neighborhood, and attended Omaha South High School, one of six children. Before World War II, he worked in a meat-packing plant and for a soft-drink bottler.

In 1941, Radil, 22, joined the Navy and arrived at Pearl Harbor in August. He became the ship's librarian aboard the California.

The morning of Dec. 7, he and two other sailors were setting up deck chairs for church services when the first Japanese planes flew over, Radil told a World-Herald reporter in 2001. Then bombs began to fall on nearby Ford Island.

"We got a torpedo hit, and then another, and then a bomb hit," Radil said in an account reprinted in a 2011 World-Herald book about Nebraskans in World War II. "We started listing to one side. We got word that the ship was sinking and might capsize. So the captain ordered a call to abandon ship."

He jumped into the water, dodging a burning oil slick. Radil swam about 200 yards to Ford Island, soaked with oil but unharmed. The next day, he helped remove the bodies of the nearly 100 sailors who were killed.

"Even thinking about it gets tears in my eyes," Radil said in 2001.

Radil remained at Pearl Harbor, but his son said he knows little about Lou Radil's service during the rest of the war. But after World War II ended, he was assigned to the USS Cumberland Sound, a seaplane tender. The ship traveled to the Bikini Atoll in the spring of 1946, where the crew observed the first two postwar tests of nuclear weapons.

Radil left the Navy in 1947 and returned to the meat-packing industry. Later he became a federal food inspector. He married in 1949 and had two sons. His wife died in the mid-1960s.

Larry said his father enjoyed fishing, camping and playing baseball.

"He was very friendly, enjoyed life," Larry Radil said. "He'd make friends with anybody."

"Every Day is Memorial Day"
The Greatest GENERATIONS Foundation
Web: www.TGGF.org

Honestly...

The BEST memorial we could leave for theses folks is to make sure their kids do not have to do it again.

OUR GREATEST AMERICAN HEROES: Battle of Iwo Jima veteran Mr. Robert Lee. Mell III has died. He was 93.

Born on July 13, 1924 in McConnelsville, Ohio, Mr. Mell enlisted in the Marines at age 16 with his mother’s permission. He served in the Marine Corps and Marine Corps Reserves for 31 years and also fought in the Korean War, and served in the Navy and Naval Reserves for six years.

Robert Lee Mell III could recall exactly where he was and what was happening the day the United States raised its flag on Mount Suribachi during the Battle of Iwo Jima in World War II.

A sergeant in the Marines, Mr. Mell recounted the uncomfortable and unnerving experience of navigating Iwo Jima’s Pacific beaches in an excerpt he wrote as part of Veterans History Project with the Library of Congress:

The sand was deep black in color and very hot. You wrapped into a pancho at night and become soaking wet. You could bury a can of water in the sand it came out very hot.

On February 23rd the flag was raised on Mt. Suribachi. Ships in the harbor blew horns and whistles and all the men cheered. It was quite the occasion.

In civilian life, he worked for U.S. Steel’s wheel and axle division in McKees Rocks for 35 years up until his retirement. He also owned and operated a bar and restaurant with his wife and brother-in-law for 18 years, the Jackman Inn in Avalon.

On behalf of TGGF and its members, those who served, and those who continue to serve in the Army, Navy, Air Force, Marines, and Coast Guard took an oath to uphold and protect the Constitution against all enemies foreign and domestic, and we can never forget the importance of their commitment to our Nation. RIP Mr. Robert Lee. Mell III

"Every Day is Memorial Day"
The Greatest GENERATIONS Foundation
Web: www.TGGF.org

My dad passed away last week . He had been awarded the Legion d'Honneur, Croix de Guerre, Médaille Militaire, Volunteer Cross, Italy, France and WW2 campaigns medals, WIA red star medal. About the action he has been wounded in, he told me last year:" I even did not hesitate, no time for hesitation nor fear, I did it automatically and I would do it again now if necessary without any problem." PTSD anyone ?

I Salute your Dad KAA,,And that's not PTSD quite a few Vets would feel the same We went for own reasons and beliefs..I took and oath to Defend my country and nobody has released me from that..

I’m very sorry for your loss kaa. RIP to your gallant father.

+1

Thank you for your kind words, very appreciated !

Floyd Carter Sr., one of the remaining Tuskegee Airmen and NYPD veteran, dies at 95


Floyd Carter Sr., one of the last of the Tuskegee Airmen, dedicated his remarkable life to serving his country and his city.

The decorated veteran of three wars and 27 years with the NYPD died Thursday at age 95, leaving a long legacy as a groundbreaking hero pilot and a city police detective.

Carter, who simultaneously rose through the ranks of the U.S. Air Force Reserves and the police, was honored in 2007 with the Congressional Gold Medal by President Bush for breaking the color barrier in Tuskegee.

"We mourn the loss of a true American hero," read a tweet from the 47th Precinct in his adopted home of the Bronx. "Our community & nation has lost a giant."

Carter rose to the rank of Air Force lieutenant colonel years after joining the group of African-American pilots at Tuskegee University.

He met his wife Atherine there, where the Alabama native was working as part of an all-female repair crew.

Carter wooed his bride-to-be on several dates in his plane, and they were married at the air base in 1945.

In 2012, Carter joined "Star Wars" filmmaker George Lucas for a screening of his film "Red Tails" about the Tuskegee Airmen — the first black aviators in the U.S. military, trained in Alabama as a segregated unit.

In addition to serving during World War II, Carter flew during the Korean and Vietnam wars and led the first squadron of supply-laden planes into Berlin during the famed Cold War airlift of 1948-49.

During the Tet Offensive, Carter flew U.S. troops and supplies into South Vietnam.

His NYPD duties included work as a bodyguard for visiting heads of state, and Carter spent time with Cuban leader Fidel Castro and Soviet head Nikita Khrushchev, recalled his son Floyd Jr.

He earned a half-dozen citations for his outstanding police work, and survived a number of shootouts with armed bandits.

"He's got a little history," said Floyd Jr. "We were blessed, we sure were. He went from what I call the outhouse to the fine house. The Lord blessed him."

The Yorktown, Va., native joined the Army Air Corps in 1944, and was commissioned a year later as a 2nd lt. bombardier navigator.

In 1946, he received his pilot wings and transferred a year later to the Air Force Reserves. By the end of his tenure in 1974, he was commander of the 732nd Military Airlift Squadron at McGuire Air Force Base in New Jersey.

Carter joined the NYPD in 1953, earned his detective's gold shield within three years, and retired in 1980.

He once recalled talking politics with Castro, and believed the federal government needed to open a dialogue with the bearded Communist.

Oddly enough, Carter was called up for active duty during the 1962 Cuban Missile Crisis.

Carter remained active into his 90s, serving in November 2015 as the grand marshal of the annual Veterans Day Parade in the Bronx. He was honored by ex-Congressman Charles Rangel in 2005 with a proclamation for his lifelong achievements.

Carter was survived by his wife of more than seven decades and their two children, Floyd Jr. and Rozalind, along with grandchildren and great-grandchildren. Funeral arrangements were not yet finalized.

OUR GREATEST AMERICAN HEROES: It’s with a heavy heart that we learn the news that World War II veteran Robert Smith known to the world as the 'Singing Grandpa' has died. He was 100.

World War II veteran Robert Smith was affectionately known as "the singing grandpa." He celebrated his 100th birthday with national recognition in February.

Born and raised in Cincinnati, Smith could be called the Queen City's No. 1 fan. He's a big fan of Skyline Chili, Frisch's, Graeter's Ice Cream and Montgomery Inn barbecue, to name a few. He's been in singing groups since high school, family members said, earning him his endearing title.

Smith, a rifleman, served in Germany during the Berlin occupation, and later moved across the river to Kentucky.

Just months after becoming a centenarian, Smith's family said he died peacefully at his home this week. They said they are all heartbroken.

On behalf of TGGF and its members, we salute Mr. Smith for his dedication and service to our FREEDOM.

“Every Day is Memorial Day”
The Greatest GENERATIONS Foundation
Web: www.TGGF.org

Yes a well deserved Salute !!! to both Lt.Col.Carter and Robert Smith

OUR GREATEST AMERICAN HEROES: World War II Veteran and Navajo Code Talker Samuel Tom Holiday Dies at Age 94.

ST. GEORGE, Utah — Samuel Tom Holiday, one of the last surviving Navajo Code Talkers, died in southern Utah Monday surrounded by family members.

Holiday was among hundreds of Navajos who used a code based on their native language to transmit messages in World War II. The Japanese never broke it.

He was 19 when he joined the Marine Corps and became a part of operations in several locations across the Pacific during the war, according to The Spectrum. A mortar explosion left him with hearing loss, but he would later tell family that he always felt safe during battle because of a pouch around his neck holding sacred stones and yellow corn pollen.

He received a Congressional Silver Medal, a Purple Heart and other recognition for his action during the conflict.

“Where Every Day is Memorial Day”
The Greatest GENERATIONS Foundation
Web: www.TGGF.org

https://youtu.be/E3mxNeEhakA

OUR GREATEST AMERICAN HEROES: Band of Brothers veteran and Paratrooper of the famed 101st Airborne Division, Mr. Alvin Richard Henderson has died. He was 94.

Mr. Henderson was a Paratrooper with the 101st Airborne Screaming Eagles 501st Parachute Infantry Regiment during DDAY in Normandy and in Holland during Operation Market Garden. It was in Holland when he was captured while helping a fellow soldier who had been shot outside the island.

He was a Prisoner of War for 9 months. He received the Purple Heart, Bronze Star, Combat Infantry Badge, POW medal, and the Presidential Citation.

At the end of WWII he returned home and earned his economics and accounting degree from Susquehanna University in Pennsylvania. He married the love of his life, Bonnie Manning, in 1952. They have lived in Pickens, SC since 1954.

Throughout the years, Mr. Handerson made several returns back to the battlefields with The Greatest GENERATIONS Foundation.

On behalf of TGGF and its members, we salute Mr. Henderson for his dedication and service to our freedom.

“Every Day is Memorial Day”
The Greatest GENERATIONS Foundation
Web: www.TGGF.org

OUR GREATEST AMERICAN HEROES: It’s with a heavy heart that we learn the news that Pearl Harbor Survivor and World War II veteran, Mr. Arnhold Schwichtenberg has passed away due to injuries sustained in a car accident on May 27, 2018. He was 96 when he passed.

Arnie was born on July 16, 1921 in Bayonne, NJ was a Chief machinist on the USS Trever. He served six years in the Navy and later in the war was aboard the USS Steele DE-8 in the South Pacific.

Once leaving the service, his family relocated to Oakdale California where he raised his family and farmed almonds. Arnie worked as a machinist, tool and die maker for Norris Industries and Gallo Winery.

Arnie was an active member in the Pearl Harbor Survivor Association and served as president of numerous chapters. Arnie truly lived life to the fullest and enjoyed traveling all around the world, he loved golf, food, music, teaching younger generations about Pearl Harbor by speaking at local schools, and veteran's associations. After retirement, Arnie and Lilly moved to Barefoot Bay Florida near the Atlantic coast. The Schwichtenberg's are a close family and Arnie spent the majority of his time surrounded by them and many people he loved.

Arnie and Lilly were married for a total of 52 years and "Mamma" was his entire world. Arnie was a dedicated patriot who loved this country. He showcased this best when reciting the Pledge of Allegiance and giving his Flag Salute speech, where he proudly described the meaning of Old Glory.

On behalf of TGGF and its members, our condolences to his family and friends. We salute Mr. Schwichtenberg for his dedication and service to our FREEDOM.

Photo Caption: Pearl Harbor survivors Arnold Schwichtenberg, (left), with good friend Mr. Charlie Boswell (right) salute during the Pearl Harbor Day ceremony.

“Every Day is Memorial Day”
The Greatest GENERATIONS Foundation
Web: www.TGGF.org

OUR GREATEST AMERICAN HEROES: It’s with a heavy heart that we learn the news that World War II veteran, Mr. William “Jimmy” Phillips has passed away. He was 92.

In November 1946, PFC William “Jimmy” Phillips was discharged from an 11-month stint in the U.S. Army after World War II.

Phillips, 20 at the time, had a choice — stay at Fort Dix, N.J. where he was being separated and receive his service medals or catch a train back to Middletown and re-start his life. He opted to go home.

World War II veteran William “Jimmy” Phillips gives a fist pump after receiving his long-awaited war medals during a ceremony earlier this year at Woodlands of Middletown Assisted Living facility. Phillips has waited nearly 70 years since his discharge to receive his medals.

He was awarded the Army Good Conduct Medal, Europe-Africa Middle Eastern Campaign Medal, World War II Victory Medal and the Army of Occupation Medal during the ceremony.

On behalf of TGGF and its members, our condolences to his family and friends. We salute Mr. Phillips for his dedication and service to our FREEDOM.

“Every Day is Memorial Day”
The Greatest GENERATIONS Foundation
Web: www.TGGF.org

Salute Mr.Phillips It saddens me to see these gentlemen pass Think i'll re-read Tom Brokaws book just to remember what they were

OUR GREATEST AMERICAN HEROES: Mr. Paul McKenzie Llufrio Sr., a decorated World War II veteran who survived being a prisoner of war has died. He was 95.

Born in Baltimore and raised on South Poppleton Street, he was the son of William Llufrio, a United Railways streetcar conductor, and his wife, Lena Carolyn Seibert.

He was the 12th of 15 children born to his parents. After completing the eighth grade at the old St. Peter the Apostle School, he began working at a neighborhood grocery store, where his parents had an account.

He learned to cut meat and did other jobs. He later became a bellman at the Lord Baltimore Hotel. He later told family members it was a favorite job — he met visiting celebrities, and he would go fishing with pals from the hotel.

In 1943 he enlisted in the Army and was assigned to the 3rd Infantry Division. He was trained as a heavy machine gunner and sent to North Africa. He later participated in three amphibious landings: at Salerno in Sicily, at Anzio in Italy and at a beach near Marseilles in France. He fought in heavy combat during these operations but was never struck by fire.

Mr. Llufrio was present when Rome was liberated in June 1944. He and his company were received by Pope Pius XII, who gave Mr. Llufrio a papal blessing.

He was sent to France and fought in the Rhone Valley as a part of Operation Dragoon. He was in a campaign to open a second front in France that would bring needed supplies to Allied forces after the invasion at Normandy.

While fighting in Alsace in 1945, he was captured by enemy forces after a farmer’s wife — who was of German descent — turned him in as he took cover in a barn. He spent the last three months of the war in prison camps, including one outside Frankfurt. He also recalled surviving a bombing of Munich, when he and others were not allowed to take cover in an air raid bunker.

He was liberated in May 1945 by his 3rd Division. He was transported to a French hospital for treatment and later recuperated in Miami at the Hotel Poincianna. He weighed 114 pounds and was down to a 27-inch waist. His normal weight had been 145 pounds.

Mr. Llufrio was awarded the Bronze Star, the French Croix de Guerre and the French Fourragère, a unit decoration.

"Every Day is Memorial Day"
The Greatest GENERATIONS Foundation
Web: www.TGGF.org

ROLL CALL: It is with an heavy heart, we learn the news that World War II veteran Mr. Gene Stephens, the last original member of the Military Police Corps, a branch of the Army officially formed in 1941, has died, five weeks after he turned 100.

Born in Edinburg, Texas, Stephens was in his early 20s when he was drafted into the Army in 1941 during World War II.

He witnessed history during his service, which ended in 1945. Stephens escorted Gen. Dwight Eisenhower frequently at Eisenhower’s Bushy Park camp in London. He escorted President Franklin D. Roosevelt in Algeria when the former president was on his way to meet Winston Churchill and Joseph Stalin in Tehran.

While in London, Stephens once pulled over a sedan going over the speed limit only to find out he accidentally pulled over the general himself.

In 2016, Stephens received the association’s Order of Marechaussee award at the 75th anniversary of the military police’s formation. At the association’s ball, held in Fort Leonard Wood, Missouri, a general awarded Stephens the medals he received during his service in a ceremony that wasn’t performed in the ’40s.

You will be remembered and revered always for you were part of something truly incredible. You stood in the path of one of the most significant forces of evil this world has ever seen, and you and your brothers in arms said, "this far, no further." And with God on your side, you men stopped the onslaught. This world owes you all a debt of gratitude.

RIP Mr. Stephens.

"Where Every Day is Memorial Day"
The Greatest GENERATIONS Foundation
Web: www.TGGF.org
Email: info@tggf.org

From: Patriots Point Naval & Maritime Museum, Charleston, SC

It is with very heavy hearts that we share the recent death of yet another one of our volunteers, Mr. Marvin Veronee. A 12-year volunteer at our museum, Marvin went ashore with 70,000 Marines at Iwo Jima as a Navy gunfire officer and served there for 36 days. The then 19-year old called in fire from warships stationed off the coast. While on Iwo Jima, he escaped a Japanese banzai charge (suicide attack) and saw the original raising of the American flag on Mount Surabachi that created the iconic photograph.

Mr. Veronee was frequently found here at the information desk on the USS Yorktown, graciously sharing the stories of his service with our guests. A native sea islander from the Charleston area, Marvin will be remembered at a service this weekend, August 26, at Camp St. Christopher in Johns Island, SC.

AMERICA REMEMBERS: It's with great sadness, we learn the news that World War II veteran Mr. Ed “Doc” Pepping of the famed 101st Airborne Division, made famous by the HBO mini-series Band of Brothers has died.

As a boy, Ed Pepping was fascinated with tales of King Arthur and the Knights of the Round Table, who he described as, "extraordinary warriors who lived with service, honor, and valor." He adopted their creed.

Ed joined the paratroops, and at Toccoa, GA passed the tests to become a medic and a founding member of Easy Company, assigned to 3rd platoon under Lt. Fred "Moose" Heyliger.

Ed jumped on D-Day and received a Bronze Star for Valor after just one day in Normandy, on June 7, 1944. Col. Bill Turner, the CO of the 1st Battalion of the 506th, directed a tank's fire against a German gun emplacement. Behind his tank was a line of six others, waiting to enter the fight. A German sniper shot Turner in the head, causing him to fall into the turret of the lead tank. Ed ran to his aid and pulled him from the tank, but Turner died in his arms. Ed's Bronze Star award reads:

"Acting without regard for his own life or safety, he attempted to save the life of a battalion commander who had fallen critically wounded on top of the tank commander, not only halting the advance of the six-tank column but making the whole column potential targets for destruction by the enemy as well."

Days later, Ed was himself wounded, probably by artillery, in Carentan. He awoke with his leg in a cast. Though he then went AWOL to rejoin Easy Company, his wounds prevented him from future combat.

On behalf of TGGF and its members, we salute Mr. Pepping for his devotion of service to our freedom.

"Every Day is Memorial Day"
The Greatest Generations Foundation
Web: www.TGGF.org

We were saddened to hear of the passing of WWII Veteran Warren Schmitt this morning. Mr Schmitt was part of the group from Forever Young Senior Veterans of Alabama that took part in our WWII Heritage Days event earlier this year. During the war, Warren was assigned to the 456th Bomber Group of the 15th Air Force in Foggia, Italy, where he was part of 13 missions to targets in Northern Italy, Czechoslovakia, Yugoslavia, Germany and Austria. He was injured on one of those missions and received the Purple Heart. Interestingly, he also survived a mid-air collision with another B-24 during training in Nevada. We are so glad he was able to attend the event and go up in the B-17 as our guest during the veterans flight. Today we remember his service to his country, his infection smile, and the impression he made on all of us in such a short period of time! Photo by John Willhoff during his ride in the CAF Gulf Coast Wing's B-17 Texas Raiders at WWII HD 2018.

http://wwiidays.org/

Sad to see these men slip into eternity. Godspeed.

Ferrill A. Purdy, 96, died Wednesday, Oct. 17, 2018, surrounded by his family.

Services will be held at Bach-Yager Funeral Chapel with visitation at 10 a.m. Saturday, Oct. 20, 2018, and funeral services following at 11 a.m. Burial will be at Columbia Cemetery.

Ferrill was born June 5, 1922, in Bosworth, Missouri, to Floyd Roschel Purdy and Mable Alexia (Winfrey) Purdy, and they preceded him in death. He was a 1940 graduate of Bosworth High School and entered into the United States Navy in 1941. He became commissioned as a United States Marine Fighter Pilot in 1943 and served until 1946. He joined the USMC-R from 1946-64. He graduated from William Jewel College and the University of Missouri before being asked to become a member of the faculty and teach pharmacology and physiology for 38 years before retiring. He really enjoyed teaching his students. He also loved fishing and hunting.

He married El Loise Jennings on Feb. 28, 1954, and she survives. They have two children, who also survive, Gayla Maier (Roger) and Greg Purdy, both of Columbia; and a niece and nephew. Ferrill is also survived by his adopted families, the Sprys, the Crewses and the Adamses.

He is also preceded in death by one brother, Edmond Dale Purdy.

In lieu of flowers, donations are suggested to Planes of Fame Air Museum, 14998 Cal Aero Drive, Chino, California, 91710 and all donations will go specifically to the plane he flew during World War II so they can keep it flying. (Please put “Purdy or Corsair” in the memo line of your check.) You can also send a donation to the University of Missouri Cardiology Department, c/o Bach-Yager Funeral Chapel, 1610 N. Garth Ave., Columbia, MO 65202.

https://www.columbiamissourian.com/...9cf2be-d2f4-11e8-a170-072e30a3f2e7.html?



His aircraft:

http://simhq.com/forum/ubbthreads.p...um-s-corsair-proved-to-be-combat-veteran

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Wheels

Oldest surviving veteran of Pearl Harbor dies at 106


Ray Chavez, the oldest surviving veteran of Pearl Harbor, died Wednesday in California at the age of 106.

“Ray was the epitome of the greatest generation,” said Richard Rovsek, a trustee of the nonprofit Spirit of Liberty Foundation in Rancho Santa Fe, The San Diego Union-Tribune reported. “He was always proud to be an American and proud of the military.”

Kathleen Chavez, who had been her father’s live-in caregiver for more than 20 years, said Ray who'd been in hospice care, asked to be buried at Miramar National Cemetery in San Diego.

He was born in San Bernardino in 1911 and grew up in San Diego’s Old Town and Logan Heights communities; his large family ran a wholesale flower business, the news outlet said.

At 27, in 1938, he joined the Navy and was stationed with the minesweeper Condor at Pearl Harbor. On Dec. 7, 1941, he was a seaman first class; after the attack, he spent the next nine days on continuous duty in and around Pearl Harbor, the paper said.

He once said the horrors he saw at Pearl Harbor left deep trauma.

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Yesterday I went the funeral of the wife of my old friend Doug from the Royal Navy. She was almost 90 and had been married to Doug almost 70 years. Her grandson gave a tribute that ended by reading a letter that Doug had written to her in 1943 while at sea. They don't know where he was at the time. It was very poignant and ended with " it is hard being away from you for such a long time. We will be together soon "

They are together now forever.

100-year-old Bugler Albert Madden Laid to Rest in Massachusetts

Albert Madden played taps countless times at military funerals during the past century.

On Friday afternoon, the solemn melody was played for him during a funeral with full military honors and a three-volley salute at Massachusetts National Cemetery.

Madden, 100, a U.S. Army veteran who served during World War II, the Korean War and Vietnam War, died at his Hyannis home on Nov. 25.

"I think he would have been proud of the ceremony," said his son, David Madden, of East Sandwich. "The military played a very big role in his life."

In addition to his service to the country, the elder Madden leaves behind a musical legacy that began as a child playing the bugle, trumpet and coronet and lasted a lifetime.

He played throughout the world as a member of the Army's 9th Infantry Division Band, and back home with the Barnstable Town Band.

While he could certainly play the pop tunes of the big band era and beyond, it was his rendition of taps at veterans observances, memorials and funerals for which he will be most remembered.

At the age of 92, he was invited by the Pentagon to play taps on arguably the melancholy bugle call's biggest stage: Arlington National Cemetery.

"I'll be the oldest bugler, using the oldest horn, to ever play taps at the Arlington cemetery," he told a Times reporter in 2010.

He even played the horn at his own 100th birthday earlier this year, according to his son.

World War II veteran John Kelley, 92, braved the late-November chill to bid farewell to Madden.

"He was a very dedicated man," Kelley said. "He played at every single veteran's memorial event on Cape Cod."

The honor of playing taps at Madden's funeral went to longtime friend Daniel LePage, who drove him to the engagement at Arlington eight years ago.

Like Madden, LePage played the tune live during the ceremony, a tradition that has become less common in recent years, with many services now featuring recorded versions.

Madden, realizing in his later years that playing taps was becoming a lost art, would don his military uniform and play at veterans' funerals upon request, his son said.

Madden's daughter-in-law Debra addressed the nearly 50 mourners who gathered for the committal ceremony.

"As we speak, he is probably conducting a band of angels," she said. "Let's not mourn his death, let's celebrate his life. One hundred years is a lot to celebrate."

Another Man has passed https://www.military.com/daily-news...est-massachusetts.html?ESRC=eb_181203.nl
SALUTE !

AMERICA REMEMBERS: It is with great sadness that we learn the news that World War II veteran Mr. Karl E. Petersen, has died. He was 96.

Petersen was born March 11, 1922, in Warren, Pennsylvania to Danish parents, Karl and Olga Petersen. As the oldest of four siblings, Petersen grew up in Warren and graduated from Warren High School in 1940.

He enlisted in the United States Army in 1942 and served for three years in Europe during World War II as a communication technician in the 461st Anti-Aircraft Battalion, 69th Infantry Division.

Landing on Omaha Beach, France, on D-Day plus 7 – June 13, 1944 – it moved all the way to the Elbe River by April 25, 1945, distinguishing itself in many historic battles.

In May 1945, his unit was stationed near a hospital in Leipzig, Germany where he met a German nurse named Anita. The two spent time communicating for six weeks with the help from Petersen’s German-English dictionary until his unit was shipped back to the states, according to his daughter. Petersen and Anita wrote to each other for two years until she agreed to marry him.

In December 1948, he paid Anita’s fare to travel to the United States and were soon married on Jan. 15, 1949 in Warren, Pennsylvania. Years later, they drove across the country with their three daughters Judy, Christa, and Karlene after Petersen transferred his mail carrier job to the Newhall, California post office in 1964.

Soon after, Petersen purchased a home in Saugus where he lived with his family until he passed away.

On behalf of TGGF and its members, we salute Mr. Karl E. Petersen for his dedication and service to our freedom. You will never be forgotten.

"Every Day is Memorial Day"
The Greatest Generations Foundation
Web: www.TGGF.org

A 99-year-old Normandy World War II veteran has died and there's an appeal to invite people to his funeral.

Mr. Alfred Smith will be laid to rest at St Laurence and All Saints in Southend on Wednesday, December 19, and an appeal for mourners has since been launched.

Mr. Smith joined the Royal Army Service Corps during World War II, where he was evacuated from Dunkirk and went on to take part in the D-Day landings before being hospitalised by a shrapnel injury.

Mr. Smith then spent around six to seven months at a hospital in Brussels, where he was unable to stand or walk, before being transferred to a hospital in Stratford-Upon-Avon.

In 2015, Mr. Smith was awarded the Legion of d’Honneaur for his bravery- the highest honour a soldier can receive from the French Military. Mr. Smith also obtained the French and German Star, the Battle of Britain, the Defence Medal and War Medal 1939-1945.

He sadly passed away peacefully and will be honoured by his community. However, the local community are also invited to pay their respects to the war hero.

Next June marks the 75th anniversary of the D-Day Landings and the Battle of Normandy, which will be commemorated with a pilgrimage to the landing sites, one that Mr. Alfred planned to attend.

The event is due to be attended by veterans, serving military, as well as world leaders and politicians to pay tribute to those who fought and lost their lives in the conflict.

Michelle Turner-Everett, who runs the SSAFA Southend Lunch Club for veterans every Thursday, said: “It’s always incredibly sad to lose a treasured member of our local veteran community – but I hope that our send-off does him proud. "Aside from serving our country, Mr. Alfred was a wonderful man and we are lucky to have known him.”

His funeral service will be held at St Laurence and All Saints, Eastwood, on December 19 at 1.00pm – those wishing to pay their respects are welcome.

To any veteran in the local area wishing to attend the SSAFA Southend Lunch Club – get in touch with Michelle on: Chel.Turner-Everett@Essex.ssafa.org.uk

"Everyday is Memorial Day"
The Greatest GENERATIONS Foundation
Web: www.TGGF.org

AMERICA REMEMBERS: It's with great sadness that we learn the news that Harold Garrish, a survivor of Pearl Harbor has died. He was 100. Harold Garrish was a lieutenant commander in the Navy. According to Garrish’s family and friends, he led a full life after the war, including going to a ballroom dance class five days a week until he died, and skydiving when he was 97.

Thank you for your service and sacrifice to our nation.

"Every Day is Memorial Day"
The Greatest Generations Foundation

They will live a long time, these men of the South Pacific. They had an American quality. They, like their victories, will be remembered as long
as our generation lives. After that, like the men of the Confederacy, they
will become strangers. Longer and longer shadows will obcure them until
their Guadalcanal sounds distant on the ear like Shiloh and Valley Forge.

James Mitchener.... Tales of The South Pacific

Guadalcanal may already "sound distant on the ear", but while distance is
inevitable, inmortality is not.

AMERICA REMEMBERS: Its with great sadness, our nation lost a true American hero today Technical Sergeant Wilber (Bill) Brunger, proud member of the U.S. Army 289th Regiment, 75th Infantry Division. He was 95.

Born on 25 Apr 1923 in Denver, Colorado and graduated from South High School in Denver, Class of 1940, Mr. Brunger was a platoon Sgt and entered combat with Company B, 1st Battalion, 289th Regiment, 75th Infantry Division on 24 December 1944 during the Battle of the Bulge in the Ardennes-Alsace campaign.

Mr. Brunger significant military awards include the Combat Infantry Badge, Bronze Star with V and three clusters, Good Conduct, American Campaign European-African-Middle East with three battle stars, World War II Victory and French Campaign Croix de la Campagne Rhin et Danube.

With Respect, Honor, and Gratitude. Your sacrifice will never be forgotten Bill.

"Every Day is Memorial Day"
The Greatest GENERATIONS Foundation
Web: www.TGGF.org

AMERICA REMEMBERS: World War II veteran Mr. Roy Carter who survived the attack on Pearl Harbor — and was a candidate for the Congressional Medal of Honor for his actions that saved the lives of eight men on the USS Oklahoma that day — has died. Roy D. Carter was 98.

Mr. Carter, who retired from the U.S. Navy at the rank of lieutenant commander, escaped the sinking battleship USS Oklahoma after torpedoes tore through the heart of the ship Dec. 7, 1941.

Carter, like everyone else on board and in the Pacific fleet, said he had no clue about the incoming Japanese invasion.

While he was three decks below in the carpenter shop, he heard an alert: “Air attack! No Sh—! All hands man your battle stations. Set conditions zed!”

Said Carter, in a 2010 interview: “These were the last words we heard in the damage control section.”

Carter said his battle station was to lock down a watertight door with eight handles and a watertight hatch that could only be opened from the third deck.

Torpedoes hit while Carter locked the door, and the Oklahoma began tipping. He felt the thumps as the bombs barraged the middle of the ship.

“You could feel every impact,” he said. “If there was an explosion sound, I didn’t hear it because it was far from my mind.”

The attack took out the ship’s lights and communications, but the worst part, he recalled, was that by locking down the door he sealed eight quartermasters into their stations below him.

Knowing his only option was to leave, Carter began climbing out on his hands and knees as water and oil drenched him from head to foot. Somehow none of the doors above him had been sealed and he climbed out before the ship turned over and pulled him under.

“If I had taken one more minute and the men above me had closed the watertight hatches, I’d be dead,” Carter recalled.

He later discovered that the eight men below him were saved by his efforts. After the ship flipped, the quartermasters were trapped for 30 hours but were safe from that rising water and oil that the door kept out. They banged and hammered the hull and pipes to let people know they were inside and eventually they were cut free.

“I felt I saved eight guys that day,” Carter said.

All told, 429 souls — Navy men and Marines — lost their life on the USS Oklahoma in the attack.

“I don’t know the amount that were killed by torpedoes but there were a lot who starved to death or drowned while trapped,” he said.

While swimming to a nearby ship, high-altitude bombers dropped bombs within 100 yards but somehow none went off, he said.

Years later, Carter was reintroduced to one of the eight quartermasters, Bud Kennedy, who lived in Port Angeles until his death.

An Iowa boy, Carter was 18 years old when he joined the U.S. Navy. After boot camp, Carter and three buddies from Company 19 were assigned to the battleship USS Oklahoma, which was stationed in Bremerton.

Eventually Carter was promoted to senior damage control man in the rear portion of the ship.

Following his service on the Oklahoma, he served for three months on the USS Pelias, a submarine support craft, before being offered flight training.

Carter was commissioned as a naval aviator and served on active duty for seven years, mostly in Europe. He flew a B-24 that carried special weapons such as depth charges and torpedoes.

Following his duty, he stayed in the naval reserves for 13 years. Carter said he was most proud of receiving his flight wings and being commissioned as an officer.

"Every Day is Memorial Day"
The Greatest GENERATIONS Foundation
Web: www.TGGF.org

NEVER FORGET: ONE of the last remaining veterans of the Dunkirk evacuation has died aged 98.

Arthur Taylor, of Christchurch, was one of the 330,000 men rescued from the beaches of the French town after spending nearly two days being shot at and shelled by the Germans.

The RAF radio operator witnessed comrades stood next to him cut down by machine gun fire from Nazi planes.

He queued for 36 hours before getting on a ‘little ship’ that took him back to England in May 1940.

Arthur channelled the famous ‘Dunkirk spirit’ to rejoin the war effort and played his part in the crucial Battle of Britain three months later.

In his latter years he was heavily involved with the Association of Dunkirk Little Ships organisation and led the veterans’ parade in Dunkirk for the 75th anniversary of Operation Dynamo in 2015.

He also described in harrowing detail the evacuation to director Christopher Nolan, which helped him produce his 2017 movie Dunkirk. Arthur was a VIP guest for the film’s premiere in London.

After Dunkirk, he was then posted to RAF Hawkinge and RAF Lympne in Kent during the Battle of Britain where he worked as ground crew on Spitfires.

After the war he was demobbed but rejoined the RAF six months later as he couldn’t settle into civilian life. He served for 36 more years, including in Hong Kong, Kenya and Singapore during the Malayan Emergency in the 1950s.

Arthur had six children, 13 grandchildren and 12 great grandchildren.

On Behalf of TGGF and its members, we salute Mr. Taylor for his dedication and service to our freedom.

"Every Day is Memorial Day"
The Greatest Generations Foundation
Web: www.TGGF.org

CHICAGO — World War II African-American fighter pilot John Lyle, a Tuskegee Airman, is dead at age 98.

Lyle's wife, Eunice, says he died Saturday at his home on Chicago's South Side. He had been battling prostate cancer.

The members of the nation's first black fighter squadron won acclaim for their aerial prowess and bravery, despite a military that imposed segregation on its African American recruits while respecting the rights of German prisoners. In 2007, President George W. Bush and Congress bestowed the Congressional Gold Medal on members of the squadron.

Lyle, who named his plane "Natalie" after his first wife, was credited with shooting down a German Messerschmitt.

After the war, Lyle worked for the Chicago Park District and founded a tree-trimming company.

In addition to his wife, Lyle is survived by three step-children.

WE REMEMBER: Its great sadness that we learn the news that World War II Heroe Mr. Fred Sutherland, one of two surviving members of Squadron 617, known later as the Dambusters has died.

The legendary unit dropped new high-tech "bouncing bombs" in 1943 on a German dam that was a key part of Adolf Hitler's industrial war machine.

In an interview last spring, Sutherland said that day stuck in his mind for 75 years.

"I was scared, I was really scared," he said. "But you can't say, 'Oh, I want to go home now.' You made up your mind and you can't let the crew down."

Fifty-three of the 133 airmen were killed. At least 1,300 others on the ground died from the bombings and subsequent floods.

Sutherland, a front gunner, was honoured for his bravery in April 2018 with a portrait by renowned painter Dan Llywelyn Hall. It was donated to the Bomber Command Museum of Canada in Nanton.

he Dambusters raid was considered a critical morale booster on the homefront, heavily damaging Hitler's dams. But the legacy was complicated due to the civilian deaths, and the fact that the war continued.

That wasn't lost on Sutherland, who was only 20 years old at the time of the raid.

"If you think something's right, you're going to fight for it," he said at the portrait unveiling. "I don't know the answer, but I know I'd do it again, even knowing what it was like."

In a later operation, Sutherland bailed out of a bomber and spent three months trying to escape Nazi-occupied Europe.

Following the war, he went on to study forestry. He then worked in that field in Rocky Mountain House, far south of his hometown of Peace River.

He was married to his wife Margaret for 73 years until her death in 2017. They had three children.

"Every Day is Memorial Day"
The Greatest Generations Foundation
Web: www.TGGF.org

AMERICA REMEMBERS: It is with a heavy heart we learn the news that Mr. Albert A. Circelli, the man who prepared the table for the Japanese surrender in Tokyo Bay has passed away. He was 93

Born to Crescenzo and Antoinette Pastorelli Circelli on October 19, 1925, in Utica. Mr. Circelli joined the “CCC” Civilian Conservation Corps., right out of high school and subsequently began his work career with the Topper Beer Co, Balayntine Beer Co. and had a long and enjoyable career with the West End Brewery, until his retirement. Mr. Circelli was proud of his Italian Heritage and was an American Patriot through and through.

Mr. Circelli proudly served his country in the US Navy and was a veteran of World War II and the Korean War. He served aboard the USS Missouri and was present on the ship when they announced the Japanese would sign the surrender to America.

Mr. Circelli carried his military service with him, and every Veterans Day would always speak to the school children, about the significance of the war.

He married the love of his life Rose Marie Gaetano in 1948, a blessed union of 70 years. Mr. Circelli's life revolved around his family never missing one of his wife’s meals, and always attending his children, grandchildren and great-grandchildren’s events. His stories will never be forgotten, from the bean fields and shacks to the streets of his beloved Utica, to the Military.

On behalf of TGGF and its members, we salute Mr. Circelli for his devotion and service to our great nation.

"Every Day is Memorial Day"
The Greatest Generations Foundation
Web: www.TGGF.org

AMERICA REMEMBERS: It is with great sadness we learned the news of Mr. Robert Anderson Sr, a top turret gunner on B-24 aircraft has gone before us. He was 93.

He was born in Chicago in 1925 and grew up in Harvey. His father died before he went to high school. While he was attending Thornton Township High School, he worked night jobs in factories because of the wartime manpower shortage.

Family members said Anderson was drafted soon after high school to join the Army Air Forces. He was a top turret gunner on B-24 aircraft with the Eighth Air Force based in Great Britain and flying bombing missions over Europe, his daughter said.

Anderson credited the GI Bill with making possible his education after high school and for his successful business career. He earned an undergraduate degree in science from DePaul University and then got an MBA from the University of Chicago.

On behalf of TGGF and its members, we salute you for your dedication and service to our freedom.

"Every Day is Memorial Day"
The Greatest Generations Foundation
Web: www.TGGF.org

AMERICA REMEMBERS: Saying ‘goodbye’ to a legend behind the chair. Hall of Fame barber and Marine from World War II Mr. Marty Buffano has passed away after battling cancer. He was 92.

In this fast-paced ever-changing world, a world that shows no signs of slowing down, there is one place on Midlothian Turnpike where you'll find consistency, serenity and a whole lot of style.

92-year-old Marty Bufano has been cutting hair since FDR lived in the White House. Marty learned the trade from an old barber in his hometown of Scranton in 1938.

“I was 13 years old when I became an apprentice,” says Marty. “I looked at him and said, ‘Angelo, What is an apprentice?’”

Then Uncle Sam beckoned at the outbreak of WWII.

“Then when I was 17 I joined the Marines. I wanted to be a Marine.” During the war Marty cut his fellow Marine’s hair in the South Pacific.

“Even then I was fussy about how I cut their hair. But It really didn’t matter but That is just me,” says Marty.

After the war Marty shaped quite a reputation in 1961 when he was named National Barber of the Year. To this day, Marty prefers the Roffler technique using a straight razor instead of scissors.

Customer Bill Lyle appreciates Marty’s attention to detail. “Next thing I know he grabs a razor and I thought ‘Wow. That is cool.”

Marty does not believe in a quick haircut. Bill who is a 30-year customer always allots an hour with Marty.

“It is kind of like visiting a friend and getting a haircut on the side,” says Marty.

Marty prefers the traditional looking cut unlike one particular world leader.

“You know I think has the goofiest haircut of all? This guy from North Korea. Oh God. He must think he looks cute with that haircut. It’s so bad.”

This former U.S. Marine is making up for lost time. This senior veteran decided he needed a new look. Marty got U.S. Marine tattoos on both arms. His tattoo obsession hasn’t stopped.

Marty is survived by his wife, four children, several grandchildren and great-grandchildren.

"Every Day is Memorial Day
The Greatest Gnerations Foundation
Web: www.TGGF.org

Thanks for posting these new entries F4U. Those men are certainly very special and inspiring.

Yes F4 thank you very moving stories..Made my eyes a bit damp..I'm not ashamed to admit to that..

AMERICA REMEMBERS: Its with great sadness, we learn the news that Mr. David B. Evans, a World War II veteran of famous battle of Kasserine Pass has died. He was 98.

Evans enlisted in the Army on his 23 birthday — March 30, 1942. After attending basic training in Massachusetts, he joined the 9th Infantry Regiment at Fort Bragg, North Carolina.

On Christmas Eve 1942, he arrived in North Africa at Casablanca. A few weeks later he found himself an escort for President Franklin D. Roosevelt as he headed to the Casablanca Conference, where he would announce that the Western Allies would accept nothing less than “unconditional surrender” from the Axis Powers.

Following the conference, Evans fought in the Tunisian Campaign from February to May of 1943, and actively participated in the disastrous battle at Kasserine Pass, where he was injured and sent to Italy to recover.

For most people, June 6, 1944, is D-Day, the beginning of the invasion of Normandy and the Western Allied effort to liberate mainland Europe from Nazi Germany.

For Evans, it was the day he found out he would be sent back to the U.S. after 18 months serving overseas in World War II. He spent the rest of his service in the South, serving, much to his dismay, in Brooklyn, Miss., not Brooklyn, N.Y. He was honorably discharged as a staff sergeant.

"Every Day is Memorial Day"
The Greatest Generations Foundation
Web: www.TGGF.org

Whenever I think of Kasserine Pass I think of the movie "Patton". Sure, at the time the battle was as tactical victory for the Germans and it was played up in both the Allied and Axis press but in retrospect that battle had no bearing on the outcome of the war in Europe or even the campaign in North Africa.

AMERICA REMEMBERS - It's with a heavy heart we announce the news that American Hero of World War II Mr. Alfonso Villa has died. He was 96.

Born and raised in Firestone, and joined the United States Army in 1943. Mr. Villa initially served with the 237th Combat Engineers Battalion and was in the 4th wave to hit Utah Beach on D-Day.

Mr. Villa made it through that day, but as the fighting moved inland, where he sustained wounds from a mortar receiving a head injury and quickly evacuated back to England.

After recovering in a hospital but still bandaged, he was returned to the front, serving this time with the 554th Engineers Heavy Pontoon Battalion finghting in the Battle of the Bulge and all the way to just outside Berlin when the war ended.

For his service in World War II, Mr. Villa received a Bronze Star and Purple Heart while serving his country in Normandy, Northern France; Rhineland; Ardennes-Alsace; Central Europe campaigns.

After the war, Mr. Villa worked for U.S. Mint, Postal Service and Union Pacific before capping it all off with a 25-year career with Western Paving. He has 11 children, 33 grandchildren, 37 great-grandchildren, and two great-great-grandchildren."

On behalf of TGGF and its members, we salute Mr. Alfonso Villa for his dedication and service to our freedom. RIP dear friend. We will never forget you.

"Every Day is Memorial Day"
The Greatest GENERATIONS Foundation
Web: www.TGGF.org

Salute Mr. Alfonso Villa Thank you for your service

My father was RAF and although a conscript he gave top dollar. He died in 2003, I still miss him. Ground crew largely servicing B-24s bombing the Japanese in the old Dutch East Indies. How the world has changed. I was born in 1945, but I was 18 months old before he came home and saw me for the first time.

Rear Admiral Edgar Keats, World War II veteran and oldest Naval Academy graduate, dies at 104

Retired Rear Admiral Edgar Keats, a decorated World War II veteran who served in the Pacific and was the Naval Academy’s oldest graduate, died of complications of a fall Saturday at Gilchrist Hospice Care. He was 104 and had lived in Guilford and Lutherville.

“He was an indomitable man. He was fearless and had the courtly manners of that era. He was such a gentleman,” said a daughter, Suzi Keats Cordish of Lutherville. “He was an unfailing optimist and often said, ‘Things are going to work out.’”

Born in Chicago, he was the son of Maxwell Keats, an advertising executive, and his wife, Clara, a homemaker who volunteered with charities. He was active in the Boy Scouts and achieved the rank of Eagle Scout at age 13. A Chicago Tribune article said he was the youngest Eagle in the area.

An Illinois congressman, Morton Hull, conducted an examination for candidates to the Naval Academy. Mr. Keats took the test, placed highest and at age 16 won his appointment to Annapolis. He entered the military academy in June 1931 as a member of the class of 1935. He won the Academy’s history prize awarded at his graduation.

RIP sir

He won his appointment to Annapolis at age 16!

No doubt this man was special. RIP

AMERICA REMEMBERS - Pearl Harbor survivor better known 'Uncle Al' died Sunday at the age of 99.

Al Rodrigues was one of the few remaining living veterans who survived the attack on Oahu more than 77 years ago.

He was posted at a station at Bishop Point on the mouth of Pearl Harbor — now a part of Joint Base Pearl Harbor-Hickam — as a chief storekeeper.

He was on watch duty on the Sunday morning of the surprise attack and saw firsthand the USS Ward dropping depth charges on a Japanese mini-sub that had attempted to enter Pearl Harbor before the attack commenced. USS Ward is regarded as the first U.S. ship to fire a shot in the Pacific during World War II.

He went on to serve at multiple locations during the war and in 1943 was transferred to the battleship USS Washington. The ship was responsible for sinking the Japanese battleship Kirishima and seriously damaging the destroyer Ayanami.

Rodrigues had nine children, nine grandchildren and three great-grand children.

“Every Day is Memorial Day”
The Greatest Generations Foundation

Jack Hinton , Typhoon pilot, gone to his eternal reward at 99. RIP sir.

https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/calg...-vqvqNCXSpEu5Baa7LcYTnmAF0Vs6u5QYp_ORAtM

AMERICA REMEMBERS - Marie Kemper, an Army nurse who lived through the horrors of war in the South Pacific during World War II, was proud of her service and committed to equal rights for women.

“She made it clear that women were as strong and powerful and as capable as men,” recalled her son Dr. Craig Kemper of Austin, Texas. “All of us kids had that attitude. She passed it on to her children.”

Marie Kemper of Anoka, and formerly St. Anthony, died Jan. 26 at the age of 97. Born near Wessington, S.D., she grew up in the Depression era and graduated from St. Mary’s School of Nursing in Pierre, S.D.

“We were all poor,” recalled Marcella LeBeau, 99, of Eagle Butte, S.D., who became a good friend of Marie’s. “We were recovering from the Depression. We wore the same pair of white leather shoes through the three years of nursing training.”

As WWII accelerated, Kemper and LeBeau volunteered for the Army Nurse Corps, Kemper wrote in a self-published autobiography, “The Springtime of Life.”

Kemper became a second lieutenant and was stationed in New Guinea and the Philippines where the Army set up field hospitals near the front lines. When the field hospital in the Philippines was shelled by the Japanese, the nurses, including Kemper, would climb on top of the patients to shield them from the artillery, Craig Kemper said.

For her bravery, Marie Kemper was awarded the Bronze Star. She later told family and friends that because they were short on medical supplies, the nurses would walk down a row of beds, using the same needle to inject 10 patients with penicillin, cleaning the needle each time with alcohol.

“Every Day is Memorial Day”
The Greatest Generations Foundation
Web: www.TGGF.org

AMERICA REMEMBERS - World War II veteran involved in The Great Escape dies aged 101.

RAF pilot Jack Lyon captured by the Nazis and taken to a prisoner of war camp.

In 1941 Jack Lyon's bomber plane was struck by flak near Dusseldorf in Germany. All of the bomber's crew survived the crash-landing, only to be captured by the Nazis and taken to prisoner of war camps.

Mr Lyon, who was a flight lieutenant, ended up in the Stalag Luft III camp, where he was recruited by other prisoners to carry out surveillance of the compound ahead of the famed 1944 breakout which inspired the classic 1963 film The Great Escape, starring Steve McQueen.

The plot was uncovered by guards before Mr Lyon, who died on Friday, was able to make his escape.

In what is believed to be his last interview, which he did with the RAF Benevolent Fund in October ahead of the 75th anniversary of the Great Escape, he branded the mission "a success, but at great cost".

There was a "terrible aftermath" to the breakout because 50 prisoners were shot, he said.

Mr Lyon, who joined the air force aged 23, added: "We were allocated a position and told not to move until called. It was going to be a long night.

"After an hour or so of this, air raid sirens sounded and all the camp lights went out.

"We were left in total darkness until I heard a single shot.

"We guessed that probably meant the tunnel had been discovered so we did everything we could to destroy anything incriminating - there were maps, documents."

The odds of successfully breaking out of the camp were "slim", according to Mr Lyon.

He said: "In a mass breakout, with nationwide hue and cry and bad weather, I would say they were virtually nil.

"Well I suppose I was lucky."

Air Vice-Marshal David Murray, chief executive of the RAF Benevolent Fund, said: "Jack belonged to a generation of servicemen we are sadly losing as time goes on.

"His legacy and those of his brave comrades who planned and took part in the audacious Great Escape breakout are the freedoms we enjoy today.

"Their tenacity and determination spoke volumes about the values and bravery of the entire RAF, in helping to win the fight against the Nazis."

Mr Lyon, who lived in Bexhill-on-Sea in East Sussex, died shortly before the 75th anniversary of the breakout, which is on March 24.

“Every Day is Memorial Day”
The Greatest Generations Foundation
Web: www.TGGF.org

AMERICA REMEMBERS - Domingo Los Banos, a well-known Hawaii educator, World War II veteran and advocate for fellow Filipinos who fought in the war, died Friday morning at age 93, family said.

Born in Wahiawa, Los Banos was one of five brothers who served in the U.S. Army. He went to the University of Hawaii for a year before following his brother Alfred into the service.

Three of the Los Banos brothers served in World War II, one in Korea and another in Vietnam, said his son, Todd.

Domingo Los Banos, then 19, was sent to the Philippines with 300 other recruits from Hawaii as part of the 1st and 2nd Filipino Infantry Regiments.

He faced Japanese soldiers in jungle combat late in the war — at one point topping a hill and coming face to face with an enemy soldier. Los Banos shot first and lived.

Todd Los Banos said his father’s greatest purpose was to promote recognition of Filipino World War II service.

“My Dad was constant ‘go,’ and he had many projects that he’s done through his life,” the son said.

On March 9 he was at Waipahu Elementary School for its 120th anniversary, Todd Los Banos said. The same day, he met friends at the Waipahu Cultural Garden Park.

Serving in 1945 in the Philippines during mopping-up operations, Domingo Los Banos made a promise.

“I said, ‘God, get me out of harm’s way and I’ll become a teacher,’” he recalled in 2018. The bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki ended the war, “so I said, ‘Well, I better keep my commitment,’” he said.

Los Banos attended Springfield College in Massachusetts — where he sang with fellow student Don Ho. Todd Los Banos said his father was a Fulbright scholar and spent part of his time in Thailand coaching a Thai basketball team and interacting with the Thai royal family.

Springfield College’s logo included the words “spirit,” “mind” and “body” in a triangle.

“So that’s where I get my guidance about a good life — a balance between your spirit, your mind and your body,” Domingo Los Banos said in 2018.

He took his first teaching job at Waimea Elementary on Kauai, where the family had moved when he was a preteen. He became a principal and eventually a district superintendent in the Leeward area on Oahu.

More than 260,000 Filipino and Filipino-American soldiers responded to President Franklin Roosevelt’s call to duty and fought under the American flag during World War II, including more than 57,000 who died.

“Every Day is Memorial Day”
The Greatest GENERATIONS Foundation
Web: www.TGGF.org

Fort Worth’s last member of elite black Tuskegee Airmen dies at 96

Fort Worth’s last surviving member of the Tuskegee Airmen died Tuesday at the age of 96.

Robert T McDaniel was one of the elite black airmen who flew combat aircraft in World War II at a time when the military was segregated.

McDaniel, along with about 330 other surviving Tuskegee Airmen, were invited to Barack Obama’s inauguration in 2009. The group was also commemorated in the George Lucas movie “Red Tails” in 2012.

“He is the last of the Mohicans if you will,” said Sarah Walker, president of Tarrant County Black Historical and Genealogical Society.

Walker said McDaniel was one of her teachers at I.M. Terrell Elementary School.

McDaniel joined the war at a time when black men were not welcomed into service. At the first screening of “Red Tails,” McDaniel spoke at the reception about the squadron he served in 75 years ago.

“There were no blacks at all in the Air Corps. None. Didn’t want them there. They said, ‘They don’t have the dexterity to work these planes,’” he said at the screening in 2012.

McDaniel was valedictorian and president of his 1940 class at I.M. Terrell High School and was drafted in 1943. He was one of the 922 pilots trained in Tuskegee, Alabama, between 1941 and 1946.

“It created a sense of pride in the community,” Walker said. “It created a sense of a young man giving back, giving his life really, to all of America.”

In 2007 while Obama served Illinois in the U.S. Senate, he thanked the airmen when the group received the Congressional Gold Medal.

“My career in public service was made possible by the path heroes like the Tuskegee Airmen trail-blazed,” Obama said in a statement at the time, according to the New York Times.

However, Walker said McDaniel never bragged about his service and few people even knew he was a Tuskegee airman until the group’s story was shared in an exhibit at the Lenora Rolla Heritage Center Museum in 2013.

“They weren’t seeking pride. It was just a thing they knew they had to do,” Walker said about the airmen.

A wake will be held March 27 at Saint Peter Presbyterian in Fort Worth from 6 p.m. to 8 p.m. Funeral services, handled by Baker Funeral Home, will be on March 28 at 11 a.m. at Shiloh Missionary Baptist Church in Fort Worth.

As of September 2018, the Tuskegee Airmen society estimated 13 of the 355 single engine pilots who served in the Mediterranean theater operation during WWII were still alive.

Canada's longest serving soldier dies, https://www.msn.com/en-ca/news/cana...-soldier-dies/ar-BBVsdfH?ocid=spartandhp

MONTREAL - Honorary Col. David Lloyd Hart, a decorated Second World War veteran who was the Canadian Army's oldest and longest-serving officer, has died at age 101.
The Canadian Armed Forces announced that Hart died March 27 in Montreal.
Hart served for more than 80 years in the army in various roles, including as a young communications operator in England and France during the Second World War. A sergeant at the time, Hart went on to receive a military medal for bravery for his actions during the ill-fated Allied raid on Dieppe in 1942, when he insisted on briefly going off-air to locate two brigades and pass on an order to withdraw.
Born in July 1917 in Montreal, Hart enlisted in the reserves in 1937 with the Fourth Signal Regiment and was called to active duty in 1939.

Wow, an 80 year career in the army! That's mind blowing.

AMERICA REMEMBERS: One of the last Army Rangers involved in the D-Day Invasion at Normandy has died.

Relatives say Charles Ryan died Sunday in his St. Louis home. He was 96.

Mr. Charles Ryan was a standout youth athlete who qualified for the 1940 Winter Olympics in speed skating. Those Olympics were canceled due to World War II.

On June 6, 1944 at Normandy, he was among 225 Rangers who helped neutralize enemy artillery that was attacking landing allied troops. Fifty of 65 men in his company were killed. Mr. Ryan was wounded but recovered and later fought in the Battle of the Bulge.

After the war, Mr. Ryan founded several aerospace engineering companies.

Mr. Ryan is survived by his wife of 68 years, Joan, six children, nine grandchildren and two great-grandchildren.

"Every Day is Memorial Day"
The Greatest GENERATIONS Foundation
Web: www.TGGF.org

AMERICA REMEMBERS: Its with great sadness that we learn the news that one of the last surviving member of the Tuskegee Airmen, Robert T. McDaniel has died at the age of 96.

Mr. Robert T. McDaniel was a member of the Tuskegee Airmen, the elite African-American pilots who flew during World War II. He was drafted into the U.S. Army in 1943 and trained as a pilot and bombardier at the Tuskegee Institute, going on to serve as a flight officer with the 477th bombardier group.

After the war, Mr. McDaniel became a math teacher, later serving as a school counselor, vice principal, and principal.

As of March 2019, the Tuskegee Airmen Organization estimated 7 of the 355 single engine pilots who served in the Mediterranean theater operation during World War II were still alive.

"Every Day is Memorial Day"
The Greatest GENERATIONS Foundation
Web: www.TGGF.org

AMERICA REMEMBERS - It’s with great sadness we learn that Normandy “D-DAY” veteran Mr. Barran Eugene Tucker, has died. He was 94.

Born on October 30, 1924 to Estelle and Alvin Tucker in Spiro, Oklahoma. He was drafted into the Army during his senior year of high school at Spiro.

He served in the 29th Division, 175th , Company G and landed on the unsecured Omaha Beach on the morning of June 07.

After the 175th Infantry Regiment pushed inland, the soldiers liberated Isigny. Next, they pushed on to Saint-Lô and the regiment attacked a bridge along the Vire River on June 13. But the Americans were outnumbered by the Germans.

“They weren’t about to give it up,” said Tucker.

“We never did capture it. We assaulted it three times and they wiped us out. There was a lot more enemy and artillery up there than they estimated. How I survived, I don’t know. I was in the thick of it. I came within inches of getting killed there. But they missed me.”

After running out of ammunition and suffering severe casualties, Col. Paul Goode, commanding officer of the 175th Infantry Regiment, made the decision to surrender to the 17th SS Panzergrenadier Division.

“Our regimental commander had so many wounded, he surrendered to save lives,” said Tucker.

“We fought all day long, so we ran out of ammunition and we had so many wounded.”

The Germans took the captured soldiers to a POW camp in Mooseport, Germany and were forced to work as slave labor in a sugar beet factory. In December 1944, Tucker escaped back into France with two other soldiers.

A French family fed the soldiers and told them they could sleep in their barn. However, the family notified the SS and Tucker was captured that night. The Germans took Tucker to a POW camp in Zeitz, Germany.

In April 1945, a rumor spread around the camp that Adolf Hitler had ordered the execution of all American POWs. So Tucker escaped and was rescued by American soldiers. When he made it home to the U.S., he weighed only 77 pounds.

Mr. Tyler was the last known survivor of company G.

“Every Day is Memorial Day”
The Greatest Generations Foundation
Web: www.TGGF.org

AMERICA REMEMBERS - It’s with sadness we learn the news that World War II veteran Edgar Kuhlow of Sheboygan Falls has died. He was 100.

Over the years, the Sheboygan Falls resident shared stories of his time in the war and as a prisoner of war in Germany for over seven months.

Kuhlow was drafted at age 24 and served in the 45th Infantry, fighting in the front lines of battle, including at the January 1944 Battle of Anzio in Italy.

Months after that invasion, on Sept. 28, 1944, Kuhlow and a squad of six men were sent out on reconnaissance when the group was captured in France, about 100 miles from the German border.

"They lined us up on the road," Kuhlow said. "I thought for sure they're going to shoot us."

In the months that followed, Kuhlow and other prisoners were marched from camp to camp throughout Germany, each one no better than the last with little food, chilling temperatures and either bunks full of lice and fleas or the cold, hard ground with only one small blanket to share among three soldiers.

"I was never beaten or anything like that, but conditions were so poor," Kuhlow said. "The food — we never got enough to eat. I'm only about 140 pounds to start with and ... I lost 50 pounds."

Kuhlow's liberation came with the end of the war. In mid-February 1945, with the Russians' "big guns in the east" audible, the Germans forced Kuhlow and other POWs to march west, following the Baltic Sea coastline to avoid capture. Kuhlow estimates they covered some 200 miles in a three-week period.

Kuhlow, who had malaria and was too weak to walk, traveled in a wagon. He and others who were sick were eventually dumped at a camp at Greifswald, where they stayed for two months.

At the end of April, he and the others again were forced to march away from the approaching Russians to Barth, near the Baltic Sea. This time, it was only a two-day trial, however, and the group arrived in the German town at the beginning of May 1945, days away from the end of the war.

The morning after they arrived in Barth, Kuhlow recalls he was astonished to find all of the German guards had pulled out during the night and headed west to surrender to the Americans.

Although free from German watch, the group stayed there for another week or so, until an English B17 bomber picked them up at a nearby air field.

"It was the 12 of May," Kuhlow said. "It was a beautiful evening."

A day later, the group arrived in Reims, France, and Kuhlow, who was battling yet another bout of malaria, was treated at a hospital there.

The first thing the former prisoners of war did was shed all of their clothes, which were rags at that point, Kuhlow said. That was followed by a hot shower, a haircut, shave, another shower and then a noontime meal.

"Then, I felt like an American again," Kuhlow said.

“Every Day is Memorial Day”
The Greatest Generations Foundation

AMERICA REMEMBERS - Its with sadness we receive the news the World War II pilot, Darrel Shumard has died. He was 97.

Fully 74 years after his fighter-bomber tumbled from the sky over war-plagued Europe and he was seized by German soldiers, Darrel Shumard just four weeks ago took off from Sonoma County’s airport in a Cessna with a pilot a generation younger beside him.

At age 97, the taciturn and modest Shumard, long one of the region’s most revered veterans of World War II, took the controls of the sporty, six-seat plane and headed off for Amador County.

“He flew the thing all the way over and all the way back,” marveled his pal, Lynn Hunt, a pilot and restorer of the sorts of warplanes that Shumard flew as a young U.S. Army Corps captain.

Shumard was born Dec. 2, 1921, in Galesburg, Illinois. He wasn’t yet school-aged when hard times pushed his parents to California in search of work.

When he was 10 and 11 years old and the Great Depression was on, Shumard and his folks became “fruit tramps,” granddaughter Michelle Grady of Rohnert Park recalls. They moved from orchard to orchard in the Monterey-Salinas area, picking produce.

Shumard graduated from high school in Turlock. He had studied at Modesto Junior College for a year and worked briefly at Lockheed Aircraft Co.’s factory in Burbank when, not long after the Japanese Imperial Navy attacked Pearl Harbor on Dec. 7, 1941, he went to war.

He trained to fly the Curtiss P-40 Warhawk fighter, then the P-47. He flew missions against Germany in the Battle of the Bulge, Hitler’s attempt to disrupt the Allies’ advance that began with the D-Day invasion of Nazi-occupied France.

Early in 1945, 23-year-old 1st Lt. Shumard was flying out of France with the 404th Fighter Squadron, 371st Fighter Group, 9th Air Force. On Valentine’s Day, while flying in formation on his second mission of the day, the wings of his plane and a second one accidentally touched.

Damaged, both planes went out of control and both pilots bailed out, descending beneath parachutes near the French-German border.

Shumard always considered himself lucky, but that day his boots touched down in the midst of German soldiers while the second pilot came down among Americans.

Shumard was imprisoned at a POW camp. As the Allies approached, the prisoners were forced to march many miles to a second camp.

Close friend and fellow pilot Bill Canavan recalled Shumard telling how he was walking the camp’s perimeter fence one day, just for something to do, and he came upon a familiar face — that of a former Turlock neighbor and high-school buddy.

Shumard learned the man, Art Peterson, had become a pilot of a Martin B-26 Marauder bomber. “They couldn’t believe they found each other,” Canavan said.

Shumard and his fellow POWs were liberated April 29, just days before Germany’s surrender. Shumard was back in California and an honorably discharged veteran when the war ended with Japan’s surrender on Aug. 15.

Again a civilian, he went to work for a Southern California construction firm that paved streets and parking lots and such. In 1953, he fell in love with Madeline Hood, a descendant of Roger Williams, founder of the Rhode Island colony.

“Every Day is Memorial Day”
The Greatest Generations Foundation
Web: www.TGGF.org

AMERICA REMEMBERS - Normandy Veteran of the battle La Fiere dies. Mr. Fred B. Morgan Jr. of Martha’s Vineyard, was 97.

Mr. Morgan Jr. didn’t talk about World War II for over 50 years, and when he did, no story was quite as harrowing as his memory of treating a badly wounded soldier along a road in Normandy, France, while a Nazi tank approached during the small hamlet Battle at La Fiere.

“He kept saying ‘Get outta here Morgan, they’re gonna kill us,’ ”

As the tank bore down on them, Mr. Morgan didn’t budge: “No way I could have ever lived with myself if I left him in a ditch bleeding.”

Morgan was a member of the 82nd Airborne’s 505th Parachute Infantry Regiment, and a veteran of combat jumps in Sicily, Holland, the Battle of the Bulge, and Normandy.

For his own war injuries, he received a Purple Heart and was awarded a Bronze Star as well.

The oldest of three siblings, Fred Baxter Morgan Jr. was born in Edgartown in 1921, a son of Fred B. Morgan Sr., who skippered vessels, and Doris Howland Taylor.

Mr. Morgan, known as Ted, who became an Edgartown selectman for more than 30 years, was 97 when he died on Martha’s Vineyard Hospital.

“Every Day is Memorial Day”
The Greatest Generations Foundation
Web: www.TGGF.org

AMERICA REMEMBERS - Its with great sadness, we have been informed that Normandy World War II veteran Mr. Eddie Price, known for his patriotism and devotion to veteran causes has died. He was 94.

Many veterans knew him as the man who drove them to the Veterans Affairs hospital in Durham.

His wife, Evelyn, knew him as a man who helped everybody. She said Sunday that she will remember him “for the love he showed me and his fellow man.”

A Lucama native, Price was drafted into the U.S. Army during World War II. He completed basic training in 1943 and was sent to England in April 1944 as a rifleman with the 29th Infantry Division. He was part of Operation Overlord at Normandy.

Price told The Wilson Times in 2000 that he spent that first night in France in a foxhole and watched German and American planes overhead and listened to the sound of artillery fire.

After serving in combat, Price spent a year as a military police officer in England, France and Belgium. He never advanced beyond private first class — “that’s as high a rank as I got because I was drafted for that one job,”

Over the years, Price served as chairman of the Wilson Committee on Patriotism and was an active member of the DAV as well as American Legion Post 13 and Veterans of Foreign Wars.

The Greatest GENERATIONS Foundation
“Where Every Day is Memorial Day”

AMERICA REMEMBERS - World War II Marine whose book about grueling jungle combat during WWII became a basis for the HBO miniseries "The Pacific" has died at his home in Texas.

Burgin was born to Joseph Harmon Burgin and Beulah May Burgin in Jewett, Texas.

Mr. Burgin joined the United States Marine Corps on November 13, 1942, during World War II and was assigned to the 9th Replacement Battalion. He soon became a mortarman in K-Company, 3rd Battalion, 5th Marines, 1st Marine Division, and fought in the Pacific War at Cape Gloucester, then alongside his friend, Eugene Sledge, on Peleliu, and Okinawa where he was promoted to the rank of sergeant upon reaching Okinawa.

Burgin was the author of the memoir Islands of the Damned: A Marine at War in the Pacific (with William Marvel). He was awarded a Bronze Star for his actions in the Battle of Okinawa on 2 May 1945, when he destroyed a Japanese machine gun emplacement that had his company pinned down.

After the war, he went to work for the United States Post Office. While in Melbourne, Burgin met an Australian woman, named Florence Risely. They married in Dallas on January 29, 1947. The couple had four daughters. Burgin is portrayed in the HBO miniseries The Pacific by Martin McCann. Burgin himself appears in documentary footage during the miniseries.

On behalf of TGGF and its members, we salute Mr. Burgin for his dedication and service to our freedom.

"Every Day is Memorial Day"
The Greatest Generations Foundation
Website: www.TGGF.org

So sad to see the Heroes passing ..SALUTE !!

RIP to the fallen heroes.


Wheels

AMERICA REMEMBERS - It’s with great sadness to learn the news that Pearl Harbor survivor Ray Garland has died. He was 96.

Garland enlisted in the Marines at 19, and was on the deck of the USS Tennessee when the attack on Pearl Harbor started.

The Coeur d’Alene resident was the last Pearl Harbor survivor living in the Inland Northwest region.

Garland returned to Pearl Harbor for the first time to attend the 73rd Anniversary with The Greatest GENERATIONS Foundation.

Garland went on to fight in same of the famous battles in the Pacific.

The Marines then recalled Garland in 1950 when the Korean War broke out, and he was injured in a firefight.

He will be greatly missed by so many, but his legacy will continue on for many generations to come. RIP

“Every Day is Memorial Day”
The Greatest GENERATIONS Foundation
Web: www.TGGF.org

Another to add, with respect, Bob Graham age 97. RIP

https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/us/h...t-living-relatives/ar-BBWkaxe?li=BBnb7Kz

WE REMEMBER - World War II veteran Donald Brancaccio a true HERO will be missed. Brancaccio was 93.

Donald Brancaccio was a true Windsor boy. He was born and raised in Windsor. He was called up in 1944 – Canada had overseas conscription near the end of the war – and became an infantry private in the Essex Scottish Regiment.

The local Essex Scottish participated two years earlier in the 1942 Dieppe Raid with heavy casualties. In 1954, The Essex Scottish and The Kent Regiment, which did not serve overseas during the Second World War, were amalgamated to form The Essex and Kent Scottish.

He and hundreds of other soldiers left Halifax to head overseas and as the transport ship approached Britain, the ship got word the German U-boats were after them, his son said. The ship was rerouted to Glasgow, Scotland in an alarming welcome to the war.

Mr. Brancaccio had more training in Britain before heading to Antwerp, Belgium. He never got to the front lines but served in the field of battle in Belgium and Holland, his son said. At the end of the war he was repositioned to Hamburg, Germany to help transport military equipment back to Allied bases.

He died Monday about a week away from his 94th birthday on May 1.

As his family went through hundreds of photographs Tuesday, it was evident in the pictures of baptisms and graduations how much he loved his large family. He had a big heart, a strong work effort and was super polite, his son said. “Thank you kindly. That was one of his favourite sayings.”

“He was always proud to be, number one, a Windsor resident and number two, a Canadian.”

"Every Day is Memorial Day"
The Greatest Generations Foundation
Web: www.TGGF.org

AMERICA REMEMBERS: World War II Veteran Gino Marchetti, Baltimore Colts legend and Pro Football Hall of Famer, dies at 93.

Marchetti was born in Smithers, West Virginia, the son of Italian immigrants Ernesto and Maria. He enlisted in the U.S. Army after graduating high school in Antioch, California, and fought in the Battle of the Bulge as a machine gunner during World War II.

Upon returning home to California after the war, he attended Modesto Junior College for a year before joining the football program at the University of San Francisco, where his team enjoyed an undefeated season in 1951.

He was selected in the second round of the 1952 NFL draft (14th overall) by the New York Yanks. In 2004, Marchetti was voted to the East-West Shrine Game Hall of Fame.

"Where Every Day is Memorial Day"
The Greatest Generations Foundation
Web: www.TGGF.org

WE REMEMBER - Bernard Dargols, only French Soldier to fight at Omaha Beach in World War II, dies at 98.

Former soldier, whose family has Jewish origins, left France in 1938 for an internship in the United States and enlisted after seeing France’s Vichy leader shake hands with Adolf Hitler.

Bernard Dargols, the only French soldier to fight in an American uniform as Allied forces stormed the coast of Normandy at Omaha Beach in a battle heralding the end of World War II, has died aged 98, the Caen Memorial war museum said Tuesday.

“We are deeply saddened by Bernard’s passing… surrounded by his loved ones, a few days from his 99th birthday. We will miss him terribly,” the museum said on Twitter.

His death comes just a few weeks before France is hosting ceremonies to mark the 75th anniversary of the D-Day landings, which are to be attended by US President Donald Trump.

Dargols had left France in 1938 for an internship in the United States, and after seeing France’s Vichy leader Philippe Petain shake hands with Adolf Hitler, he enlisted in the US Army, later obtaining joint French-American citizenship.

He was just 24 when he crossed the Channel from England to France on June 8, 1944, two days after Operation Overlord was launched to help wrest back France from Germany.

“Some GIs were killed in the water. By what miracle was I going to make these last few meters” to the beach, he recalled in a 2012 memoir written with a grand-daughter.

“If the Liberty Ship had been able to quickly go into reverse, I think I would have asked them to do it,” he said.

A jeep named Bastille

A few hours later, aboard a jeep nicknamed “La Bastille,” he found himself surrounded by his fellow Frenchmen who couldn’t believe their ears.

“What a feeling to hear French spoken, to be taken in the arms of all these people older than me, calling me their liberator,” he recalled.

“If I had kept all the bottles of calvados brandy they were giving me, I think I could have opened my own specialist shop!”

Dargols, whose family had Jewish origins, had an aunt and uncle who were deported to the Nazi death camps where they died, though his mother managed to remain in Paris during France’s occupation.

After the war he took over his father’s sewing machine shop, but he often spoke about the bloodshed he witnessed, giving interviews to ensure younger generations never forgot the high price paid.

“Today we’re seeing the signs of anti-Semitism,” he told AFP in a 2014 interview.

“I want young people to fight back against it.”

"Every Day is Memorial Day"
The Greatest GENERATIONS Foundation
Web: www.TGGF.org

AMERICA REMEMBERS - Jim Coley, World War II and Merchant Marine veteran, dies at 96.

A native of Meadville, Mississippi, Coley served on three U.S. Merchant Marine ships during WWII, including one of the first allowed into Manila Harbor in 1945 during the fight to recapture the city. Coley served in his ships’ galleys, working his way up from waiting tables to chief cook.

A fleet of civilian-owned vessels that became a Navy auxiliary during the war, the Merchant Marine played a critical role, carrying troops, supplies and equipment around the globe. Its ships were often targeted because of their vital cargo, and the Merchant Marine suffered a greater percentage of war-related deaths than any other U.S. service.

Coley and other merchant mariners had to wait a long time to be recognized as veterans. They were finally granted that status in 1988, thanks to a federal court ruling.

After the war, Coley returned to Louisiana and worked for oil drilling operations, including 21 years off-shore for Chevron.

In 1969, he survived Hurricane Camille, losing everything “except the clothes I had on.” Camille still ranks among the most devastating storms in recorded history.

Coley moved to the Tulsa area in 1981, working as a state field superintendent for Sterling Oil Co.

Survivors include his wife, Ella Jane Coley; daughters, Crystal Theriot, Marcy Dowler and Myra Wood; and 14 grandchildren.

"Every Day is Memorial Day"
The Greatest GENERATIONS Foundation
Web: www.TGGF.org

AMERICA REMEMBERS - World War II veteran, POW William Connell dies at 95.

William "Bill" Connell's first bombing mission in 1944 would also be his last. Shot down over an island in the Pacific Ocean, he would endure over a year in Japanese prison camps.

Connell was liberated at the end of World War II and lived a long life as a husband, father, naval officer and insurance salesman. A longtime resident of Edina and Bloomington, he died on April 25 at age 95.

William Laughlin Connell grew up in Seattle and enlisted in the Navy soon after graduating from high school in 1942. He trained stateside as a naval aviator for nearly two years before joining a divebombing squadron on an aircraft carrier.

At the controls of a Curtiss SB2C Helldiver, Connell took off from the USS Hornet before dawn on July 4, aiming to destroy a radio transmitter on the Japanese island of Chichijima, about 600 miles south of Tokyo. He and his rear gunner came under heavy fire, a shell exploding close to their aircraft.

"It blew the plane right in half, so that me and the front end of the airplane went one direction, and my rear seat man and the tail went a different direction," Connell said in a 2004 interview

The gunner was never heard from again. Connell managed to deploy his parachute, descending into Chichijima's harbor while accosted by tracer bullets. He was taken ashore and then hung from a tree by his arms – tied behind his back – for 12 hours.

For many months, Connell would be interrogated and beaten occasionally and would sleep on a board. When the war ended in August 1945, Connell was down to 110 pounds – 55 pounds less than when he'd been shot down – and his lower legs were swollen from beriberi because of a nutritional deficiency.

Back in Seattle with the Navy after the war, Connell met Mary Jane Bolstad, a Minneapolis native. They married and moved to the Twin Cities in the late 1950s when he took a post at the Naval Air Station in Minneapolis. Connell retired from the Navy in 1964 as a lieutenant commander.

He then started a career as an insurance salesman, working for State Farm in Bloomington for 23 years. Even after retiring from that job, Connell worked part-time until the mid-1990s in the pro shop at the Minnesota Valley Country Club in Bloomington.

"Every Day is Memorial Day"
The Greatest GENERATIONS Foundation

AMERICA REMEMBERS - The Navajo Nation has announced that World War II Navajo Code Talker, Fleming Begaye Sr. died Friday in Chinle, Arizona. He was 97.

He was born in Red Valley, a small, unincorporated community in Apache County roughly one mile west of the New Mexico border in 1921.

Begaye was among hundreds of Navajos who served in the Marine Corps, using a code based on their native language to outsmart the Japanese.

According to the Navajo Nation, Begaye served as a Code Talker from 1943 to 1945 and fought in the Battle of Tarawa and the Batter of Tinian. He spent a year in a naval hospital after being wounded.

Aftre the war, Mr. Begaye later ran a general store in Chinle.

"Every Day is Memorial Day"
The Greatest Generations Foundation

AMERICA REMEMBERS - 101st Airborne Paratrooper Ralph K. Manley, who parachuted into Normandy during D-Day in World War II died Monday afternoon at the age of 95.

Whenever Ralph Manley was around, there was always laughter, fun, and his trademark jump for joy as he never lost that spring in his step even as he reached the age of 95.

In the early part of this century Manley returned to France with his fellow World War II soldiers as they paid an emotional visit to the Beaches of Normandy where Manley was a member of the 101st Airborne Division on D-Day, jumping out of a burning plane just before it crashed.

Manley survived while 13 of his buddies died. He would go on to fight in the Battle of the Bulge while his twin brother Roland was killed during the war from friendly fire over the Mediterranean Sea.

Manley spent the rest of his life passing along his passion for living to others.

Manley returned to Normandy in 2005, and and again in 2007 with The Greatest Generations Foundation. He will be missed by so many.

“Every Day is Memorial Day”
The Greatest GENERATIONS Foundation
Web:www.TGGF.org

AMERICA REMEMBERS - World War II veteran Bob Maxwell, the nation’s oldest Medal of Honor recipient, has died in Oregon more than seven decades after grabbing a blanket and throwing himself on a German hand grenade in France to save his squad mates. He was 98.

Born on Oct. 26, 1920, in Boise, Idaho, Maxwell was drafted into the U.S. Army during World War II. Though he was a Quaker, he declined conscientious objector status and entered the service in Colorado.

Maxwell earned the nation's highest military honor while fighting in Besancon, France, on Sept. 7, 1944, the newspaper reported. The bomb severely injured him, but the blanket saved his life by absorbing some of the impact.

He was also awarded two Silver Stars, two Purple Hearts, a Bronze Star and two French combat awards — the French Croix de Guerre and the Legion d'Honneur — for his service in World War II.

"Every Day is Memorial Day"
The Greatest Generations Foundation
Web: www.TGGF. org

AMERICA REMEMBERS – Its with great sadness, we learn the news that World War II Hero Mr. Van K. Mefford has died. He was 94.

He was among the Greatest Generation, serving in the “Stalwart and Strong” 87th Acorn Infantry Division of General George Patton’s 3rd Army, during World War II.

When he enlisted at the age of 19, he promised that the sacrifices he made would never be in vain. Whenever in his presence, you knew you were surrounded by integrity and strength. It wasn’t until later in his life that he was willing to share the experiences that made him this way.

Van and his unit, the 345th Infantry Brigade, were involved in combat operations throughout Europe, precisely the costliest action the US fought, the Battle of the Bulge. Van was wounded while crossing the Rhine River on March 24, 1945. According to Van’s account, “We were caught in the crossfire for over five hours; an officer and an enlisted man were killed.

I was one of six wounded.” Van received the Purple Heart for his valor. He also received the Bronze Star, a Combat Infantry Badge, the European Theatre Medal Badge, the Army of Occupation (Germany) medal, World War II Victory Medal, Marksman Medals in Machine Gun, Rifle, and Pistol as well as the US Army Good Conduct Medal.

After returning from the war, Van enrolled at the University of Illinois via the GI Bill. He earned a degree in Mechanical Engineering and retired from Borg-Warner 30 years later. Van enjoyed retirement by continuously traveling and volunteering for others. Van had a passion for motorcycles and was active through various motorcycle organizations, including the American Motorcycle Association and the Antique Motorcycle Club of America.

Thankfully, Van was an avid writer and records keeper. His letters and notes are preserved and stand as witness to atrocities of war and the Holocaust. He listed the names of every one of his buddies he lost and truly dedicated all his good deeds in life to them.

He often would say, “Who gave their lives so that we may live.” In 2000 Van also recorded himself sharing his entire World War II story on tape. He leaves behind a loving family of 6 children, 16 grandchildren, and 14 great-grandchildren. Van is buried at the Rock Island National Cemetery.

The Greatest GENERATIONS Foundation
“Where Every Day is Memorial Day”
Web: www.TGGF.org

AMERICA REMEMBERS - Stanley Hwalek, believed to be the last survivor of the attack on Pearl Harbor in the Rochester area, died earlier this month at age 99, 77 years after his brush with death on the deck of the USS Nevada.

Hwalek was born in 1920 and enlisted in the Navy in September 1938 after graduating from Benjamin Franklin High School. Three years later he had what must have seemed like a plum assignment as a coxswain on a ship stationed in Hawaii.

For the rest of his life, Hwalek would recount the story of Dec. 7, 1941: he was on deck reading a newspaper after breakfast when he noticed smoke coming from nearby Ford Island.

At first, he thought it was a training exercise. Then the call went out for all hands to battle stations. He tucked into a small turret on the ship's starboard side and listened, shocked, in the darkness, as the Japanese war planes blasted away.

He remained in the Navy through the end of the war, escorting convoys and seeking out German submarines in the Atlantic Ocean on the USS Card before returning home in 1945 to the Polish community in northeast Rochester where he'd grown up. He married Gertrude Wroblewska in 1948 and went to work for DuPont for 36 years before retiring in 1982.

“Every Day is Memorial Day”
The Greatest Generations Foundation

AMERICA REMEMBERS: It is with great sadness, we learn the news that Melvin "Bud" Kennedy, Nebraska's last Pearl Harbor survivor has died. He was 95.

The 95-year-old was a native of Cedar Rapids, Nebraska and spent much of his life in Grand Island. He joined the Navy at 17 and was at Pearl Harbor when the Japanese attacked in 1941. Kennedy described the attack as the worst day of his life. He told Local4 last December that he spent much of that day helping pull fellow sailors from water encased in oil.

Bud was discharged in 1947, returning to Nebraska to work as a farmer, gas station owner and quality control inspector at New Holland. He was employed as a mechanic for Carl Anderson in Grand Island until his retirement in 1988.

On behalf of TGGF and its members, we salute Melvin "Bud" Kennedy for his dedication and service to our freedom. You will never be forgotten.

"Every Day is Memorial Day"
The Greatest GENERATIONS Foundation
Web: www.TGGF.org

AMERICA REMEMBERS - BAND OF BROTHERS ALBERT MAMPRE DIES AT 97

It is with great sadness that we learn the news of Staff Sergeant Albert Mampre (born May 5, 1922) was a non-commissioned officer with Easy Company, 2nd Battalion, 506th Parachute Infantry Regiment, in the 101st Airborne Division of the United States Army during World War II has died. He was 97.

Going down in the sun, we will remember them.

“Everyday is Memorial Day”
The Greatest GENERATIONS Foundation
Web: www.TGGF.org

https://www.nratv.com/videos/albert-mapre-the-band-of-brothers

Charles C. "Buck" Pattillo (1924-2019) Charles C. Pattillo, Lt. Gen. USAF (ret), known to all as "Buck", passed away on May 20, 2019, at his home with his loving wife of 66 years by his side, in Spotsylvania, Virginia. He was 94. He was well known in the aviation community for his good humor, as an avid historian and as a pioneer in jet aerobatic demonstration teams. He is a highly decorated United States Air Force combat fighter pilot. He and his identical twin brother, Cuthbert A. (Bill), were born on June 3, 1924, the youngest of six siblings, to Joseph W. and Pearl (Stubbs) Pattillo in Atlanta, Georgia. In 1942 the twins enlisted in the Army Air Corps and served together in the 352nd Fighter Group in the European Theater, flying fighter escort for B-17 bombing raids over Germany. Buck and Bill led parallel careers in the Air Force for over 35 years and were often stationed together at the same base or in the same region. The Pattillo twins were founding members of the impromptu "Skyblazers" aerobatic team from 1949 to 1952, which gained official recognition and toured post-war Europe to demonstrate the capabilities of newly developed fighter jets. In 1953 and 1954, they flew left and right wing positions in the first USAF "Thunderbird" precision flying team. In the course of his career, he had the privilege of flying many aircraft, including the P-40, P-47, F-80, F-84, F-86, T-33, F-100 and F-4 Phantom. He was a combat veteran with 37 combat missions in the P-51 during World War II and 120 combat missions in the F-4 in South East Asia. His favorite aircraft was the plane he flew in World War II: the iconic P-51 Mustang that was named and inscribed "Little Rebel." He earned a bachelor's degree in mathematics from the University of Colorado at Boulder in 1962, attended the Army War College in 1965 and received a master's degree in international affairs from George Washington University. A command pilot with more than 5,500 flying hours, his military decorations include the Distinguished Service Medal with Oak Leaf Cluster, Legion of Merit (thrice), Distinguished Flying Cross (with Oak Leaf Cluster), Air Medal with 10 Oak Leaf Clusters and the French Croix De Guerre with Palm. He and Bill were inducted into the Georgia Aviation Hall of Fame in 2000. Buck married his beautiful, loving wife (also a pilot), Bobbie Brown in 1952. Married for 66 years, they raised four children. He is survived by his wife, Bobbie of Spotsylvania Virginia, his children Deborah A. Jones, Cheri L. Robertson, Jon S. Pattillo (wife Elaine), Charles 'Chuck' Pattillo, Jr., and 10 grandchildren. As part of the "Greatest Generation", his love for family and Country along with his good witted humor will be dearly missed. His life stands as an inspiration to those who knew him and to those who learn from his legacy. A memorial service will be held on June 29, 2019 at 12:00 PM at Wilderness Community Church in Spotsylvania, VA. In lieu of flowers, contributions may be made to a favorite charity. Inurnment will be at Arlington National Cemetery at a later date.

https://www.fredericksburg.com/obit...41306d4-faf5-5d2b-8599-2fd1e641e1e1.html

Retired US Air Force Lt. Col. Robert Friend, one of the last surviving members of the legendary Tuskegee Airmen during World War II, has died, his daughter said. He was 99.

Friend's daughter told CNN affiliate KCBS her father was surrounded by friends and family when he died Friday in California. The cause of death was sepsis, Karen Crumlich, Friend's daughter, said.

"...We called the chaplain and we did a prayer," Crumlich said. "And during the prayer, right when we said amen, he took his last breath."

https://www.google.com/amp/s/amp.cn...end-tuskegee-airmen-obit-trnd/index.html

RIP

This thread has been a very sobering read.

And it contains only a small fraction of the 400 or so WWII veterans we loose every day in just the US.

AMERICA REMEMBERS -- It is with great sadness, we have learned that WWII Veteran George Haines, one of Rochester's most visible and vocal World War II veterans, has died. He was 94.

Haines, who lived in Greece, was among the veterans of Rochester's that have been involved with The Greatest Generations Foundation programs in recent years.

He served in the U.S. Army 24th Division in the Pacific and saw two years of combat. His story was recorded and now sits in the Library of Congress.

"I saw a lot, and we just...it's something you don't tell spread out, but it's in your mind all your life," Haines said.

Known for his ability to live vivaciously and always have many irons in the fire, his service to our country and creation of cross-stitched flags that he gave away.

Family members said fellow WWII veteran and TGGF Ambassador Pete DuPre was at Haines' bedside Wednesday night, playing hymns on his harmonica as his friend passed away.

"Every Day is Memorial Day"
The Greatest GENERATIONS Foundation
Web. www.TGGF.org

LIFE REMEMBERED: William Tully Brown, one of the last Navajo Code Talkers, dies at 96, leaving only five living Navajo Code Talkers.

Brown was born in Black Mountain, Ariz., on the Navajo Nation and enlisted in the Marine Corps in 1944. He served at the battles of Iwo Jima and Guadalcanal, and received several commendations including the American Campaign and World War Two Victory medals. He was honorably discharged two years later.

The Code Talkers used their native language to create an unbreakable code that stumped the Japanese and helped turn the tide in the Pacific during World War II.

Brown is the third Navajo Code Talker to die in the past month following New Mexico State Sen. Jonn Pinto.

”Every Day is Memorial Day”
The Greatest GENERATIONS Foundation
Web: www.TGGF.org

LIFE REMEMBERED: ROY M.HANNA, JR., World War II veteran, Member of the famed 82nd Airborne Division has passed away. Mr. Hanna was 102.

Raised on a dairy farm in central Pennsylvania, Mr. Hanna attended Penn State University where he was a member of Sigma Chi and the Penn State Boxing Team, winning the Intercollegiate Golden Glove championship in the Light Weight Division in 1939. In 1940 he volunteered for military service.

During World War II, First Lt. Roy Hanna was a platoon leader in the 3rd Battalion, 504th Parachute Infantry, 82nd Airborne Infantry Division. In addition to the Distinguished Service Cross, Hanna went on to receive 10 other citations for his service in the Second World War. After leaving the Army, Hanna had a successful career in the dairy industry. A Pennsylvania native and centenarian, Hanna’s called Pinehurst home now for 36 years.

In 2009, Mr. Hanna made the return back to Holland for the 65th Anniversary of Operation Market Garden with The Greatest Generations Foundation. Hie will be remembered by so many. RIP Mr. Hanna.

The Greatest GENERATIONS Foundation
“Where Every Day is Memorial Day”

AMERICA REMEMBERS: World War II veteran Mr. Joseph Iscovitz, one of few remaining Pearl Harbor survivors has died. He was 103.

On the morning of December 07, 1941, Joseph Iscovitz picked up a machine gun to defend his country against attacking Japanese planes on a date that lives in infamy. It was still a defining moment in his 103-year life when he died Tuesday.

Joseph Iscovitz was among the oldest survivors of the Pearl Harbor attack that brought the United States into World War II, a 25-year-old Army Air Corps sergeant stationed at Fort Shafter on the island the morning of the surprise attack, reports the Sun Sentinel.

"Every Day is Memorial Day"
The Greatest GENERATIONS Foundation
Web: www.TGGF.org

LIFE REMEMBERED: Dorothy Dwyer, who worked for Gen. Dwight Eisenhower as one of the first women shipped overseas during World War II, has died. She was 98.

Dwyer’s family will remember her for her loving, adventurous and humorous spirit, as well as for her love for gardening and serving her country.

In an recent interview, Dwyer shared a few of her photographs and memories from her military service, including a snapshot of Winston Churchill and the time she literally ran into French Gen. Charles de Gaulle in a hallway.

Dwyer was part of the first step in the offensive against Hitler’s European fortress, when the Allies moved their forces into North Africa in 1943.

At that point, she was working in the nerve center of the Allied effort in Europe and Africa.

“Churchill was there a lot to meet with Eisenhower,” she told The Columbian. “I was going around a corner and walked into the stomach of Gen. de Gaulle,” who stood about 6-foot-5.

“I saluted and left.”

Back then, she was Dorothy Grassby, and had enlisted Oct. 1, 1942, in the Women’s Army Auxiliary Corps — forerunner of the Women’s Army Corps (WACs).

Dwyer was previously part of the Boston area’s aircraft warning system, where she would listen for airplane engines and report anything that didn’t sound like an American plane. She also registered military-aged men for the draft. That’s when she started thinking about joining herself.

“I was four months short of 21, but they needed us,” she said in 2009. “Dad said it was too dangerous. I went anyway.”

She completed basic training at a former Army cavalry post, Fort Des Moines, Iowa. In the summer of 1943, Dwyer’s unit boarded the SS Santa Rosa, an ocean liner that had been converted into a troop ship. They landed at the Mediterranean port of Oran, Algeria, on Aug. 21, 1943, then boarded a train for Algiers.

Later in her career, Dwyer joined the staff of Gen. Benjamin Chidlaw, deputy commanding general of the 12th Tactical Air Command. Her job was to write letters home to the families of people killed or missing in action.

“No two letters could be the same,” she remembered. “It was a hard job. Another GI and I did that.”

Dwyer served until June 1945, according to her family.

May God welcome you into your Eternal Rest, Mrs. Dorothy Dwyer, we humbly thank you for your bravery, dedication and leadership during your service in World War II. The world owes you a great debt of gratitude.

R.I.P., Mrs. Dwyer. Truly one of Our Greatest Generation.

The Greatest GENERATIONS Foundation
“Where Every Day is MEMORIAL DAY”
Web: www.TGGF.org

AMERICA REMEMBERS: World War II veteran Mr. Edward Haight has died at age 94.

A Chicago native, Haight enlisted in the Navy in October 1942 at age 19. On D-Day — June 6, 1944 — he was stationed on the flying bridge of the minesweeper USS Raven off Utah Beach as it provided support for landing craft that invaded France to attack Axis troops.

Haight gathered sonar readings and called out instructions to others aboard the 220-foot vessel, a role that earned him the nickname “Ping.”

Last month, Haight recalled that the D-Day invasion was postponed one day because Gen. Dwight D. Eisenhower, the Allied commander in Europe, determined that rough weather made crossing the English Channel too risky. Haight said the weather improved only slightly the next day, and he battled severe seasickness to carry out his duties on June 6.

On 5 June Raven proceeded to her assigned area off Normandy and participated in the sweep of the fire control area for Utah Beach. From this time until August she was active in clearing approach channels to the Normandy beachheads.

In August 1944 she sailed to Oran, thence to Naples, Italy. From then until June 1945 she performed sweeping and patrol duty in the Straits of Bonifacio, clearing the way for ships en route to the invasion of southern France, and sweeping off the French Riviera and Italian Riviera and off Corsica. During the entire European operation, including D-Day, Raven swept 21 German and Italian naval mines.

Asked if he incurred any injuries, Haight said, “I got hit a few times, but I didn’t get hurt. You can’t be where all that crap is and not get hit.”

Haight returned to Chicago after the war and operated a gas station for a time. He moved to Florida after his first marriage ended, and he married Geri Westphal, a former Cypress Gardens skier, in 1989.

Haight had a career as a salesman of plumbing parts and continued working until age 93. He received a Legion of Honor medal in 2011 from French military officers during a ceremony.

The Greatest GENERATIONS Foundation
“Where Every Day is Memorial Day”

LIFE REMEMBERED - Australian World War II fighter pilot hero Mr. Ron Cundy has died aged 97.

Mr Cundy served in both the RAAF and the RAF, was mentioned in Dispatches and was awarded the Distinguished Flying Cross and Distinguished Flying Medal for gallantry and devotion to duty in bombing operations over Tobruk and the Middle East in 1943.

He was born William Ronald Cundy at Moonan Flat, 60km north-east of Scone, NSW in 1922.

According the Spitfire Association website, Mr Cundy was determined to become a pilot after viewing the landing of an aircraft with two pilots at Moonan Flat, when he was just six years old.

"At eighteen years of age, he attempted to persuade his parents to join the RAAF. It was only after some months that they accepted, and he was then allowed to enlist on the 19th October 1940 as an aircrew trainee under the Empire Air Training Scheme," the Spitfire Association's website states.

He trained on Tiger Moths at Narrandera and at 19 went to Canada to train on North American Harvards where he was awarded his wings and became a Sergeant Pilot. He was then sent to England for operational training on Hurricanes and posted to 135 Squadron RAF stationed at Honiley near Coventry.

During WWII he flew with RAF's 260 Squadron (part of Desert Air Force), and RAAF's 452 Squadron (defence of Darwin, 1943-1945).

In September, 1942, by chance, he and his father, George, who was then serving as a Captain with the 9th Division AIF met up in Alexandria for a very brief catch-up. George was a World War I veteran of Gallipoli/1st Light Horse and rejoined for World War II.

During his World War II service, Ron Cundy flew Tomahawks, Kittyhawks and Spitfires, plus several (captured) German aircraft, including an Me109 (Messerschmitt Bf-109F), Heinkel 111 during time serving with the Desert Air Force (North Africa, 1941-1943).

He was awarded the DFC (Distinguished Flying Cross), DCM (Distinguished Conduct Medal) and was MID (Mentioned in Despatches).

His DFM citation reads: "In the course of numerous operational sorties over enemy territory, Flight-Lieut. Cundy has shown fine qualities of leadership, keenness and determination."

He is credited as an "Ace" with five-and-a-half enemy aircraft shot down. The 'half' was shared with another pilot.

He met Gwen Walsh, from Coogee in early 1942 and they married on September 30, 1944. Gwen passed away three months ago, on April 21.

After the war, Mr Cundy worked at the Register General's Department, among other areas, and eventually as State Electoral Commissioner for NSW, retiring in 1982.

He belonged to the Spitfire Association.

Mr Cundy is survived by his daughters Karen and Pam, nine grandchildren and 16 great-grandchildren. His funeral will be held at St. Paul's Church of England Church, Menai at 11am Monday, August 5.

”Every Day is Memorial Day”
The Greatest GENERATIONS Foundation
Web: www.TGGF.org

AMERICA REMEMBERS: Auschwitz: Kazimierz Albin the last known survivor of the first convoy to Auschwitz has died. He was 96.

Born in 1922 in Krakow, 70 kilometers (43 miles) east of the infamous death camp where he would later end up, Albin was captured by the Nazis in January 1940 in Slovakia. He had fled Poland the year before in the wake of Germany's invasion of the country.

Albin's intention was to join the Polish Army in France to fight the Nazis but he was thwarted in his mission and ultimately sent to Auschwitz.

He was one of approximately 150,000 non-Jewish Polish prisoners in Auschwitz and survived after escaping on February 27, 1943, along with six other inmates.

Albin recalled that winter's night in a 2015 interview with news agency AFP. "It was a starry night, around minus 8 or minus 10 degrees Celsius (17 or 14 Fahrenheit) outside," he said.

"We took our clothes off and were half way across the Sola River when I heard the siren... ice floes surrounded us," he said. Of around 1.3 million people sent to the death camp, only 802 attempted to escape, according to estimates from the Auschwitz Museum. Of that number, 144 avoided being caught.

After his escape, Albin joined the armed Polish resistance and fought for the liberation of his home country, as well as the concentration camp. His brother remained imprisoned within Auschwitz and was subsequently tortured.

When the war was over, Albin returned to his hometown to study engineering at Krakow Polytechnic School.
He was a member of the International Auschwitz Council, an advisory body to the Polish government that looks after the memorial site.

Following news of Albin's passing, the International Auschwitz Committee's executive vice president, Christoph Heubner, paid tribute to Albin's life.

"Kazimierz Albin saw it as his most important duty and task to speak about Auschwitz and his murdered fellow inmates: He wrote books, he spoke, he traveled and spoke with young people in many countries."

"Every Day is MEMORIAL Day"
The Greatest GENERATIONS Foundation
Web: www.TGGF.org

AMERICA REMEMBERS -- WORLD WAR II VETERAN ROBERT MORGENTHAU FOUGHT IN THE BATTLE THE MEDITERRANEAN & IWO JIMA HAS DIED. HE WAS 99.

Robert Morris Morgenthau was born in Manhattan on July 31, 1919, into a family formerly of German-Jewish stock whose roots in America reached back to the 1860s.

His grandfather, the real estate tycoon Henry Morgenthau Sr., was President Wilson’s ambassador to the Ottoman Empire in World War I and a prominent voice against Armenian genocide.

Robert’s father, Henry Jr., was Roosevelt’s treasury secretary from 1934 to 1945, and his mother, Elinor (Fatman) Morgenthau, was a niece of Herbert H. Lehman, the New York Democratic governor and United States senator.

Robert grew up with his brother, Henry III, and his sister, Joan, in New York City, on the family’s farm in upstate East Fishkill, N.Y., and in a privileged world of estates, private schools and social connections, notably with the Kennedys of Boston and Hyannis Port, Mass., and the Roosevelts of Hyde Park, N.Y. He attended the Lincoln School in Manhattan and graduated from the Deerfield Academy in Massachusetts in 1937 and from Amherst College in 1941 with high honors and a political science degree.

As a young man, he raced sailboats with Jack Kennedy off Cape Cod, spent memorable New Year’s Eves at the White House with his father, and in 1939 roasted hot dogs for King George VI and Queen Elizabeth of Britain at the home of his Hudson Valley friends Franklin and Eleanor Roosevelt.

On leave from the Navy during World War II, he served mint juleps to Winston Churchill and F.D.R. on the lawn of his family’s apple farm.

While studying at Amherst, Mr. Morgenthau met Martha Pattridge, a Smith College student. They were married in 1943 and had five children. His first wife died in 1972. In 1977 he married Ms. Franks, a Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist. They had two children.

Besides his wife, he is survived by the children of his first marriage, Jenny Morgenthau, Anne Morgenthau Grand, Elinor Morgenthau, Robert P. Morgenthau, and Barbara Morgenthau Lee; the children of his second marriage, Joshua Franks Morgenthau and Amy Elinor Morgenthau; and by six grandchildren and three great-grandchildren.

In 2014, Ms. Franks published a memoir, “Timeless: Love, Morgenthau, and Me,” that focused on her long and passionate union with a man almost 30 years her senior.

Mr. Morgenthau had been in the Naval Reserve in college, and after graduation, he went on active duty as an ensign. He passed his physical exam by concealing the near-deafness in his right ear from a boyhood mastoid infection. An officer aboard three destroyers and a minesweeper during World War II, he survived enemy attacks and won decorations for bravery under fire.

During World War II, his destroyer, the U.S.S. Lansdale, was attacked by Nazi torpedo bombers in the Mediterranean off Algiers on April 20, 1944. Cut by explosions, the ship went down with a heavy loss of life. Lieutenant Morgenthau, the executive officer, saved several shipmates, leapt into the water and swam for three hours in the darkness until he and others were picked up by an American warship. In 1945 his ship, the USS. Harry F. Bauer, was hit by a Japanese kamikaze plane off Iwo Jima, but its 550-pound bomb did not explode.

Mustering out after the war as a lieutenant commander, he enrolled in Yale Law School, finished a three-year course in two years and graduated in 1948. He soon joined the New York law firm Patterson, Belknap & Webb and became the personal assistant to the senior partner, Robert P. Patterson, who had been President Harry S. Truman’s secretary of war.

Mr. Patterson died in a plane crash in 1952. Mr. Morgenthau was supposed to have been on the flight — he had accompanied his boss on every other trip — but stayed behind to write a brief. Mr. Morgenthau was a partner in the firm from 1954 to 1961.

"Every Day is Memorial Day"
The Greatest GENERATIONS Foundation
Web: www.TGGF.org

AMERICA REMEMBERS -- Pilot Who Was a Daredevil Flier with WASPs During WWII Dies at 103.

Dorothy Eleanor Olsen was part of the Women Airforce Service Pilots (WASP) -- a group of civilian volunteers who moved planes across the country, hauled targets for shooting practice and performed other flying duties. She was stationed at Long Beach Army Air Base, California, from 1942 to 1944 and was awarded the Congressional Gold Medal in 2009.

During her time as a WASP pilot, Olsen flew about 60 missions as part of the 6th Ferry Group, often alone, according to a report from the Chinook Observer in 2011. She also flew about 29 different aircraft. Her favorite was the P-51.

"Mom said the P-38 was an old woman's plane. She said anybody could fly that," Stranburg said. "She said that the P-51, you had to stay on top of that."

She also didn't care much for the bomber planes. Debbie Jennings, friends with Olsen since about 2003 and developer of a WASP exhibit at the Museum of Flight in Seattle, said her friend preferred the fighter plane because she was by herself and could do whatever she wanted.

Jennings said Olsen would get a kick out of scaring farmers on their tractors and fly right behind them. She would do the same at railroad stations just because.

Stranburg said her mom got chewed out by ranking officers for flying like that and once got reprimanded for using her landing gear at high speeds. One time, she flew upside down and a piece of the plane fell off -- but the landing crew never said a word, and Olsen's son, Kim Olsen, has the piece to this day.

"She was like nobody I've ever known. So determined to do whatever she wanted to do," Jennings said.

At the time, women and people of color were fighting for respect in the military.

According to NPR, during the last WASP training class, Henry "Hap" Arnold, the commanding general of the U.S. Army Air Forces, said when the program began he wasn't sure "whether a slip of a girl could fight the controls of a B-17 in heavy weather."

"Now in 1944, it is on the record that women can fly as well as men," Arnold said.

Jennings said some of the male pilots were jealous of how many different planes Olsen was able to fly.

On two occasions, Olsen received v-mail, or victory mail, postcards from male pilots who had found Olsen's name and address in the cockpit of a plane she ferried. In the last line of the postcard, one pilot from Italy wrote, "Despite the fact that a woman once flew it, it appears to perform perfectly," Jennings said.

"They were the first women to fly military aircraft for the United States," Jennings said. "The women had to jump into any aircraft that needed to be moved, whether it was for training or for combat, and know how to fly it and fly it wherever it needed to go."

WASPs were not recognized as veterans until 1977 under President Jimmy Carter.

Olsen grew up reading about World War I planes and flying in Woodburn, Oregon, in the 1920s, according to a report from The Seattle Times. She was inspired to pursue flight after reading 'The Red Knight of Germany" by Floyd Gibbons.

As she pursued her pilot's license, Olsen taught tap dance and continued to teach after receiving her certification. She was one of three women to get her private flying license in the Portland area by 1939, according to the Chinook Observer.

Once she joined the WASPs, she kept a pair of black DeLiso Debs and socks underneath her seat in every plane she flew, Stranburg said.

"She'd date a new man every night and go dancing, dump them and take off on her next plane," Stranburg said.

When the WASPs disbanded in 1944, Olsen had to pay her own way from Long Beach back home.

Stranburg said Olsen got a job flying war-weary planes after the war -- aircraft deemed no longer safe for combat missions. She once worked with two other men and flew planes to Wyoming.

"They got into a snowstorm and were low on fuel," Stranburg said. "The men wanted to turn back and Mom said, 'No, you're taught never turn back.'"

She said they knew the airport was near, but weren't sure where. The townspeople heard them flying over head and directed the pilots to the landing strip using car headlights.

"She had so many close brushes with death but managed to slide by so many times," Stranburg said.

Olsen later married Harold W. Olsen, a Washington State trooper, and settled down in University Place.

Stranburg said her mom was always fair, particularly when Stranburg and her brother Kim would fight growing up. One time, Olsen told her kids to clean up dog vomit in the kitchen, but neither wanted to.

"She walked up there, took her hand, and [split it in half]. 'You clean that, and you clean that,'" Stranburg said.

Stranburg said her mom didn't fly after she and her brother were born and didn't even think of flying commercial or private planes.

"She said, 'Why would I want to fly a Cessna when I've flown a P-51?'" Stranburg said.

Olsen never lost her flying spirit, though. She often "drove with authority," neighbor Duncan Foley said with a chuckle. "She drove like she was driving a fighter jet."

According to her memorial obituary on the Edwards Memorial website, that spirit landed her a speeding ticket in her 1965 poppy orange Mustang.

Stranburg said flying was the highlight of her mom's life, and that she loved to look at clouds and remember flying through them.

"Every sunny day when you see clouds, think of mom," Stranburg said. "She's up there doing slow rolls in a P-38."

Before Olsen was laid to rest, Jennings read the poem "Celestial Flight" by WASP Elizabeth MacKethan Magid, which is "now required reading at all WASP departures."

The first verse is:
"She is not dead --
But only flying higher,
Higher than she's flown before,
And earthly limitations will hinder her no more.

”Every Day is Memorial Day”
The Greatest Generations Foundation

Archie McInnes death: Battle of Britain hero dies hours after celebrating his 100th birthday

Tributes were being paid today to a Battle of Britain veteran who died surrounded by friends and family hours after celebrating his 100th birthday.

The death of Archie McInnes takes the number of surviving members of The Few to five, his biographer has said.

Mr McInnes, who flew Hurricanes during the battle in the skies over southern England, completed his pilot training aged 21 and was commissioned the next day.

He died hours after celebrating his 100th birthday on Wednesday.

His biographer and friend Jonny Cracknell wrote on Twitter: "It is with a heavy heart and incredible sadness to advise the tragic news that Battle of Britain hero Archie McInnes sadly passed away last night, just hours after celebrating his 100th birthday amongst friends and family.

As I said in another thread. My dad was a spook and didn't do half of what some of these men did during the war (as far as I know). I only wish he had lived as long as some of these fine men.

RIP to a fellow Victory Division soldier. First to Fight!

My mom got me Tom Brokaw’s book “The Greatest Generation,” as soon as I finish my current book I’m going to read it. There aren’t many days in which I don’t think about what these men (and women), or men & women from the days of the Continental Army until today, have done and sacrificed for their country.

AMERICA REMEMBERS: Well-known Pearl Harbor Survivor Everett Hyland dies at 96.

On Dec. 7, 1941, Hyland was a crew member of the battleship USS Pennsylvania, the flagship of the Pacific Fleet, and immediately reported to his battle station when the attack began.

“If we ever go to war, the last place in the world I wanted to be trapped was down in the bowels of the ship,” the longtime Honolulu resident said in a Navy interview. “I wanted to be top side, so if something happened, I could get off it. So I volunteered for antenna repair squad. I was with the radio division.”

When general quarters sounded, he realized there was nothing to be done at his battle station, so he and others began collecting ammo for a 3-inch 50-caliber anti-aircraft gun. The “Pennsy” was in Drydock No. 1 at the time.

“We took one hit. The one that hit our ship just happened to be where we were,” Hyland recalled.

The 18-year-old was so badly wounded by the aerial bomb that his own friends did not recognize him, the park service said. Flash burns covered his body. He had an ankle wound, a chipped bone in his right leg, his right hand was ripped open, he had a bullet hole through his right thigh, five pieces of shrapnel in his left leg, a chunk blown out of his left thigh — among other injuries.

"At the going down of the sun and in the morning, we will remember them."

"Every Day is Memorial Day"
The Greatest GENERATIONS Foundation

AMERICA REMEMBERS: Its with great sadness, we learn the news that World War II Normandy Ranger Mr. Sheldon “Shel” Bare, of Altoona has died. He was 96.

Sheldon is a U.S. Army veteran of World War II, who served with honor, valor, and distinction with the 2nd Ranger Battalion-D Company. He participated in the Allied invasion of Normandy on June 6, 1944, assaulting the cliffs at Point du Hoc where he was where he was awarded one of his two purple hearts.

For his service he was awarded: 3 Bronze Stars, a Purple Heart with Oak Leaf cluster, Combat infantry badge, Good conduct medal, National Defense Service Medal, Presidential Unit citation with arrowhead, American Campaign Medal, WW II victory medal, the ETO medal, Battle of the Buldge medal, D-Day Medal, Combat Service Medal, and The European-African-Middle Eastern Service Medal. He was also awarded the Unit French Crux Querrie, and in 2011, was awarded the Legion of Honor from the French Government, France’s highest order that recognizes military and civilians alike for their bravery or honorable service to the country.

After WW II, he served with the 772nd Military Police Battalion, Fort George C. Mende, Maryland. Prior to WWII, Sheldon worked with the PA Railroad, after the war he worked with the PA Association for the Blind where he retired in 1988.

He was a member of the Juniata VFW-Fort Apache, the Bavarian Aid Society, the Newburg Fire Hall, and served on the Board of Directors for the PA Association for the Blind and Physically Handicapped.

Sheldon enjoyed reading, John Wayne movies, sports of all kinds, telling stories and the camaraderie of his fellow veterans.

"Every Day is Memorial Day"
The Greatest GENERATIONS Foundation
Web: www.TGGF.org

AMERICA REMEMBERS: Its with great sadness, we learn the news that World War II veteran Mr. Ralph Mayville, one of orginal members of the 'Black Devil' commandos, has died. He was 97.

He was one of Canada’s first commandos in the Second World War, tormenting the Germans behind enemy lines in Italy as part of the secretive and deadly effective Devil’s Brigade.

Mayville, who grew up in Amherstburg but later lived in Windsor, died on Friday, two weeks shy of his 98th birthday.

As part of the Canadian-American First Special Service Force — predecessor to such elite units as the U.S. Navy SEALs — Mayville and his comrades, who only gained recognition and fame for their daring wartime exploits decades later, received the U.S. Congressional Gold Medal in 2015.

A member of the Essex Scottish Regiment stationed in England (and, unknowingly to the troops, preparing for D-Day), Mayville transferred to the Royal Canadian Regiment and volunteered for the Devil’s Brigade in order to join the action sooner, enticed also in part by the extra 75 cents a day paid to paratroopers.

Activated in 1942 as a commando unit of 1,800 Americans and Canadians, the special force was tasked with penetrating deep behind enemy lines at the combat front in near-suicide missions designed to sow terror in the enemy ranks.

Dubbed the Black Devils by their foes, Mayville said they would sneak over silently with blackened faces — “slitting a couple of throats” — and return before dawn. On “aggressive patrols,” they’d place playing cards on the sleeping Germans, with morale-busting warnings that “the worst has yet to come.”

Given his paratrooper wings even though he missed parachute training ahead of being deployed to Anzio beachhead, where the Devil’s Brigade fought for 99 days straight, Mayville refused to wear the insignia until he actually got his chance to jump out of an aircraft. That opportunity to earn his set of silver wings came in 2014, when, at the age of 92, the great-grandfather signed all the required legal documents and parachuted from a height of 14,000 feet near Niagara Falls.

The old soldier made one concession to his age, agreeing to a tandem descent. “I would’ve liked to jump by myself, but that’s the way it is,” he told the Star at the time.

Mayville, predeceased by his wife, had two children, four grandchildren and numerous great-grandchildren.

"Every Day is Memorial Day"
The Greatest GENERATIONS Foundation
Web: www.TGGF.org

AMERICA REMEMBERS: Its with great sadness, we learn the news that Pearl Harbor survivor Mr. Lonnie Cook, one of the last members of USS Arizona’s surviving crew at Pearl Harbor, has died at the age of 98.

Cook was inside one of the USS Arizona's turrets on Dec. 7, 1941, according to officials with the memorial. Officials said 1,177 of his USS Arizona shipmates died as a result of the attack.

Cook, a Morris, Oklahoma, native, went on to fight in World War II, and was later recognized for his service. Over the course of his eight year career, he fought in 12 battles, served on seven ships, and received many medals and awards. He retired from the Navy in 1948, and went on to a 20 year career as a welder, working on various areas around the Central Coast, including the Moss Landing Smoke Stacks. He was also an avid trap shooter, hunter and fisherman.

In 1968, 27 years after the attack on Pearl Harbor, Cook returned for the first time with his wife and daughter by his side. Cunanan says, "We went out and went onto the memorial. He had goose bumps. Not verbal, just staring off into space. Seeing everything again is what it looked like to me." That was one of three visits back to Pearl Harbor for Cook. His final trip was for the 70th Anniversary in 2011.

There are now only four remaining USS Arizona survivors: Don Stratton, Lauren Bruner, Lou Conter and Ken Potts.

"Every Day is Memorial Day"
The Greatest GENERATIONS Foundation
Web: www.TGGF.org

AMERICA REMEMBERS: Normandy World War II Veteran Mr. Ralph Ticcioni who parachuted into Normandy on D-Day has died. He was 96.

Before June 6, 1944, Ticcioni had made three practice jumps in England. D-Day was his first taste of combat.

On the night of June 5, he sat in the back of a transport plane, weighed down with around 80 pounds of gear, his face darkened with charcoal, and waited for the light on the wall to turn yellow.

When it did, he stood up with the rest of his 82nd Airborne unit and clipped his static line hook to a wire overhead. He checked the man in front of him while the soldier behind Ticcioni checked to ensure his static line hook was secure.

Then the light turned green.

"Of all places, I landed on top of a barn. The barns in this area of Normandy were thatch, so it was a soft landing. My parachute was caught on a weather vane," Ticcioni recalled in 2016. "I hung there for a while and got my thoughts together, got out my knife and cut myself down. I slid down into some horse manure."

Ticcioni fought his way across Europe, helping to liberate a continent devastated by war. Then he returned home to Milwaukee and got a job at a dairy, working his way up to plant manager and retiring after 40 years. After his first wife died, he remarried. His second wife died nine years ago.

"Every Day is MEMORIAL DAY"
The Greatest GENERATIONS Foundation
Web: www.TGGF.org

AMERICA REMEMBERS: Its with great sadness, we learn the news that Pearl Harbor Survivor Mr. Raymond "Papa Ray" Richmond, of Serra Mesa, CA has died. He was 99.

On December 07, 1941 -- Ray Richmond, was below deck on the battleship Oklahoma, shaving his face, when bombs and torpedoes hit all those mornings ago. As the ship rolled onto its side, Richmond made his way free. But he shattered his hip in the escape and then had to swim through water aflame with burning oil. He spent almost a year in the hospital.

The USS Oklahoma lost 429 men in the bombing, more than any other ship outside of USS Arizona when waves of Japanese planes launched from aircraft carriers caught the Pacific Fleet unawares on a sleepy Sunday morning. They destroyed ships and airplanes, killed 2,400 Americans, and pushed the United States into World War II — and from there onto a perch as the globe’s preeminent political and cultural power.

“When someone you love becomes a memory, the memory becomes a treasure.” RIP Ray Richmond.

"Every Day is MEMORIAL Day"
The Greatest GENERATIONS Foundation
Web: www.TGGF.org

AMERICA REMEMBERS -- It's with great sadness, we learn the news that Normandy World War II veteran Mr. Raymond Rutt, 3820 Quartermaster Gas Supply Company has died. He was 101.

Born to George and Anna Elizabeth Rutt on February 12, 1918, Raymond was the youngest of 14 children and attended the Campbell School through the 10th grade.

Before the outbreak of World War II, Raymond worked for Maxon's Construction Company at the Naval Ammunition Depot. Raymond also worked for Cafferty & Tipton Construction in Grand Island where he was the grease foreman on Caterpillar Tractors.

PFC. Raymond Rutt served in the United States Army from December 28, 1942, to January 13, 1946. He served in France, England, Belgium, Germany during the Normandy Northern-Frances and Rhineland campaigns with the 3820 Quartermaster Gas Supply Company as a truck driver.

Raymond worked with the Quartermaster GS Company on Omaha Beach at Normandy shortly after the main seaborne invasion into France. He received the Good Conduct Medal, Distinguished Unit Badge, Bronze Service Arrowhead, and Carbine Marksman for his service during World War II.

After the war, Raymond worked in Lexington for Luther-Rutt Gravel Pit pumping gravel and ran a corn picker for Luther. On August 9, 1947, Raymond married Kathryn Elizabeth Mohrlang and lived in Broken Bow and ran a Grade A Dairy in partnership with Dan Thomas. They moved to Mason City to form an alliance with Buss Luther and run a Herford Ranch until retirement in 1981. Raymond was a lifetime member of the Veterans of Foreign Wars.

"Every Day is MEMORIAL Day"
The Greatest GENERATIONS Foundation
Web: www.TGGF.org

AMERICA REMEMBERS - World War II veteran Mr. Jean DeCurtins, the last surviving member of a Stillwater-area war veterans club, has died. He was 100.

For the last two and a half years, the bachelor was the lone survivor of the A&D Last Man’s Club, a social group born of the 180 Stillwater-area infantrymen who shipped out with the National Guard months before World War II.

An Army private first class with the heavy-weapons Company D, DeCurtins served through six battles and 14 engagements in North Africa and Italy. He spent three months in a hospital after a exploded mortar shell left shrapnel in his head. He returned to battlefield and later was awarded a Purple Heart.

Until his brother, John, died in 2018, the two men shared a two-bedroom home, a half-mile from the Stillwater Public Library, which DeCurtins visited twice a day to read five newspapers.

With no family of his own, DeCurtins found friendship in the library staff. After he moved to the senior living center, librarian Lori Houston would visit him daily with the Pioneer Press in hand.

“Every Day is MEMORIAL Day”
The Greatest GENERATIONS Foundation
Web: www.TGGF.org

AMERICA REMEMBERS - Normandy World War II veteran Mr. Norman Duncan, member of the 29th Division has died. He was 100.

Centenarian, World War II veteran of the famed 29th Division, former chairman of the International Caregivers Association Board, and founder of Labor of Love weekend in Loudoun Norman Duncan died Friday.

Duncan was a longtime advocate for caregivers. He was his wife Elsie’s primary caregiver as she lived with Alzheimer’s until her death in 2015. Labor of Love weekend, observed in Loudoun each Labor Day weekend, honors and calls attention to the work of caregivers.

He remained active in Loudoun until the end of his life, serving on the board of the Loudoun Symphony and in the American Legion, as well as on a number of county government committees including the Transit Advisory Board and the Economic Development Advisory Commission.

Among his many accolades, Duncan was last year bestowed the rank of Knight of the French Legion of Honor at a ceremony at the French Embassy in Washington, DC, in recognition of the services he provided during military campaigns throughout France during the war. It is the highest French Order of Merit for military and civilian individuals, and was established in 1802 by Napoleon Bonaparte.

Duncan served with the 29th Infantry Division and supported the allied troops storming the beaches of Normandy in 1944 as a U.S. Army master supply sergeant.

“Every Day is MEMORIAL Day”
The Greatest GENERATIONS Foundation
Web: www.TGGF.org

AMERICA REMEMBERS - Mr. Rodney Ebersviller, wounded and captured in WWII, dies at age 94.

In early 1945, Rodney Ebersviller was walking with other American prisoners of war and their guards from one German camp to another when they encountered a farm woman as she pulled a fresh loaf of rye bread from an outdoor oven.

Ebersviller was cold and hungry. He and the other Allied soldiers were on the brink of starvation. The German woman offered every prisoner and guard a warm slice. Nothing had ever tasted so good and nothing ever would match it, he told his children many years later. He spent the rest of his life seeking the perfect sauerkraut rye bread recipe and its comforting effect.

Born in Pelican Rapids, Minn., on Oct. 8, 1924, one of five children to Alwine and William Ebersviller. He graduated from Fergus Falls High School in 1942 and enlisted in the Army in 1943. On his way to basic training, he met his future wife, Barbara — or Bobbie — on a train. She was heading back home to St. Louis after her first year at Carleton College in Northfield.

Once deployed, it didn’t take long for Ebersviller to see combat. He was a staff sergeant when his machine-gun squad was outflanked by a German tank squadron during the Battle of the Bulge in December 1944. Ebersviller was wounded and captured. After a brief stay in a German hospital, he spent the rest of the war in prison camps.

His final camp near Hammelburg was liberated by U.S. soldiers in April 1945, according to U.S. National Archives records. Ebersviller was awarded the Purple Heart upon discharge that year.

Despite this harrowing experience, or maybe because of it, he rarely talked about the war as a young man, said Ann Pederson, his daughter.

“When I was growing up, I had no idea he was in the war. I came home from high school one day and was talking about what I had learned about POWs in the war, and that’s when my mom told me he had been one,” Pederson said.

“Over the years, maybe he just became OK with it. He became very active in local veterans organizations the last 20 years of his life,” she said.

After the war, Ebersviller attended the University of Minnesota, where he was reunited with Bobbie, who had transferred there. They married in 1948 and moved to Fergus Falls so he could join his father in running the family-owned John Deere Implement business. The next year, he and Bobbie moved to Rothsay, Minn., to open a farm equipment dealership. There, the couple raised four children.

He ended his career back at work at the Ebersviller Implement store in Fergus Falls before selling the business and retiring in 1982.

“Every Day is Memorial Day”
The Greatest GENERATIONS Foundation
Web: www.TGGF.org

Thank you F4U for keeping this thread active. Sometimes I just can't find the words to describe what these veterans have done for our great country.

AMERICA REMEMBERS: It is with great sadness, we learn the news that Paratrooper of the 101st Airborne Division Mr. Raymond Pierre "Frenchy" Defer, has died. He was 96.

Born in St. Jean de Losne, France, on June 3, 1923, Ray Defer immigrated to the United States when he was 15 years old. He joined the United States Army at the age of 19 and eventually became a medic with 502nd Infantry Regiment, 101st Airborne Division.

According to his Military DD-214 military discharge papers, he experienced combat in Normandy, Holland, Belgium and the Central European Pocket.

On June 06, 1944 Raymond Defer landed near Liesville-sur-Douve (near Carentan) on D-Day in Normandy where he was wounded with shrapnel shortly after that.

Raymond Defer then jumped in Holland at Best during Operation Market Garden to help seize the small highway bridge over the Dommel river north of St. Oedenrode and the railroad and road bridges over the Wilhelmina Canal at Best. Defer was wounded a second time during a patrol through the Zonsche forest, trying to move toward the town of Best and the bridge.

During the Germans major offensive west through the Ardennes Forest, Defer and the 502nd held positions on the north and northwest portion of the surrounded city of Bastogne.

Raymond Defer was the recipient of two Bronze Stars, Purple Heart, good conduct medal, presidential service ribbon and later was a recipient of the French Legion of Honour.

After returning home, he became self-employed and opened Frenchy's Appliance Service.

On behalf of TGGF and its members, we salute Mr. Defer for his dedication and service to our freedom.

"Every Day is Memorial Day"
The Greatest GENERATIONS Foundation
web: www.TGGF.org

Pearl Harbor Survivor James R. Leavelle, Detective at Lee Harvey Oswald’s Side, Dies at 99.

James R. Leavelle, the big man in the white Stetson who epitomized the horrors of the assassination of President John F. Kennedy in one of the most famous photographs of all time — the killing of Lee Harvey Oswald by Jack Ruby — died on Thursday at a hospital in Denver. He was 99.

His death was confirmed by his daughter, Karla Leavelle.

Mr. Leavelle, a veteran Dallas homicide detective who had survived the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor in 1941, was handcuffed to Mr. Oswald and was leading him through a police station basement on Nov. 24, 1963, when Mr. Ruby, a nightclub owner, stepped out of the crowd and pumped a fatal bullet into the prisoner. The shooting, with Mr. Oswald’s pained grimace and Detective Leavelle’s stricken glower, was chillingly captured by Robert H. Jackson of The Dallas Times Herald in an iconic photograph that won the Pulitzer Prize the following year.

Moments earlier, he and Mr. Oswald had had an eerie exchange, Mr. Leavelle often later recounted. “Lee,” he recalled saying, “if anybody shoots at you, I hope they are as good a shot as you.”

To which, he said, Mr. Oswald replied: “You’re being melodramatic.”

At the time, two days after President Kennedy had been gunned down in a motorcade through downtown Dallas, Mr. Oswald was a suspect in the killing of a Dallas police officer, J.D. Tippit, and had yet to be conclusively tied to the assassination. But after Detective Leavelle asked him whether he had shot the police officer, Mr. Oswald aroused the detective’s suspicions by insisting, “I didn’t shoot anybody,” as if, Mr. Leavelle later recounted, there had been another shooting as well.

In the decades that followed, Mr. Leavelle was in constant demand as a speaker, invariably asked to recall the fateful moment. “I saw him, he was standing in the middle of the driveway,” he said of Mr. Ruby in an interview with The New York Times in 2006.

“He had a pistol by his side, I saw out of the corner of my eye,” Mr. Leavelle continued. “I jerked back on Oswald to get him behind me. I had my hand through his belt. All I succeeded in doing, I turned him so instead of dead center the bullet hit four inches to the left of his navel and two inches above.”

Another detective, L.C. Graves, on Mr. Oswald’s other side, grabbed Mr. Ruby’s pistol around the cylinder, preventing another shot, Mr. Leavelle recalled. “I could see Ruby’s fingers flexing on the trigger, trying to fire,” he said. He knocked Mr. Oswald to the floor, removed the handcuffs and got him loaded into an ambulance. “I tried to take his pulse but I never could detect any pulse,” Mr. Leavelle said. He remembered hearing a groan and sigh in the ambulance, which he said he later took as the moment of Mr. Oswald’s expiration, although he was pronounced dead at Parkland Hospital, where President Kennedy had been pronounced dead two days earlier.

Mr. Leavelle joined the Dallas Police Department in 1950, but his life had hardly lacked drama before then. The son of farm parents, James Robert Leavelle was born on Aug. 23, 1920, and grew up in northeast Texas near Texarkana. He joined the Navy out of high school in 1939 and was stationed at Pearl Harbor. He was on a destroyer tender that carried supplies to other ships when the Japanese bombed the fleet about a mile away on Dec. 7, 1941. He was unhurt in the attack, but while at sea in the Pacific during a severe storm in 1942, he fell off a ship’s ladder and had to be evacuated to a naval hospital in California.

There he met a nurse who became his wife, Taimi, who died in 2014. They had three children, Karla, Tanya Evers and James Craig. His son died in 2009. He is survived by his daughters, three grandchildren and a great-grandchild.

Unable to return to the fighting, Mr. Leavelle became a civilian employee of the Army Air Force, running a military warehouse in Riverside, Calif. He then became an auditor for the federal government, investigating colleges receiving money under the G.I. Bill.

He spent his first six years on the Dallas force in patrol before making detective in 1956, and worked his way up from the burglary and theft squad to homicide, where he was working when President Kennedy was assassinated on Nov. 22, 1963. Mr. Leavelle retired in 1976 and founded a polygraph business, which he turned over to his daughter Karla in 1980. He underwent triple-bypass heart surgery in 2004.

Mr. Leavelle, who remained active into his late 90s, traveled with the help of a Dallas police officer to the National Law Enforcement Museum in Washington in late 2018 to rerecord an oral history he had made several years earlier before the museum’s opening in October.

“Every Day is Memorial Day”
The Greatest Generations Foundation
Web: www.TGGF.org

AMERICA REMEMBERS: World War II veteran 'Screaming Eagle' Henry Ochsner, 321st Glider Artillery Battalion of the 101st Airborne Division on D-Day has died. He was 96.

Henry ‘Len” Ochsner was born in Hell Gate Montana in February of 1923 at the west end of the Missoula Valley in Missoula County Montana. It is now a ghost town.

On D-Day June 6th 1944, then 21 year old Private Henry L. Ochsner belonged to the 321st Glider Artillery Battalion that would go on to provide fire support for the “Screaming Eagle” paratroopers of the 506th Parachute Infantry Regiment outside Sainte Marie du Mont near Utah Beach for their part of Operation Overlord.

They launched from Upottery Airbase in Devon England, and dropped into Normandy France in the early morning hours before the allied landings. Henry was 21 years old at that time.

Private Ochsner next himself in Bastogne during the Battle of the Bulge no less in that famous stand the 101st Abn. made there telling their German counterparts “Nuts” when asked to surrender. They held out until General Patton came and relieved them in that bitter cold winter battle that lasted from December 1944 through January 1945. The members of the 321st Glider Artillery Battalion held out with no winter clothes and little rations and ammunition and were awarded a unit citation for holding Bastogne.

Private Henry L. Ochsner’s significant decorations include the French Croix de Guerre, the Belgian Fourragere, the Presidential Unit Citation and the EAME Campaign Medal with four battle stars. He can now add to that the National Order of The Legion of Honor in the rank of Chevalier (Knight). This is the highest honor France bestows.

“Every Day is MEMORIAL Day”
The Greatest GENERATIONS Foundation
Web: www.TGGF.org

AMERICA REMEMBERS: It is with great sadness, we learn the death of World War II veteran Mr. Lauren Bruner, survivor of USS Arizona attack during Pearl Harbor. He was 98.

His passing means just three surviving crewmembers who were aboard the Arizona that day remain: Don Stratton, 97, Lou Conter, 98, and Ken Potts, 98.

“Lauren was always quick with a laugh and had a smile that would brighten an entire room,” Stratton wrote on Facebook Wednesday. “We are beyond heartbroken.”

Bruner regularly attended the annual commemorations of the attack held each Dec. 7 at the Pearl Harbor National Memorial.

During a news conference there in 2014, Bruner announced that he had finally decided to have the urn that would hold his cremated remains interred in the sunken hull of the Arizona.

“Well, I studied it for a long time,” Bruner explained with his characteristic humor. “All my family and friends have been buried in various places, cemeteries. But it seems like after a while, nobody pays attention to them anymore after about five years. I hope that a lot of people will still be coming to the Arizona. I would be glad to see them.”

Daniel Martinez, chief historian for the Pearl Harbor National Memorial, which manages the USS Arizona Memorial, said in a tweet that discussions with the family regarding the placement of Bruner’s ashes aboard the ship will be forthcoming.

Bruner chronicled his experience of the attack in “Second to the Last to Leave USS Arizona,” a book he co-authored in 2017.

Bruner was born Nov. 4, 1920, and enlisted in the Navy 1938. The following year, he was assigned to the USS Arizona as a fire controlman in charge of the ship’s .50-caliber guns.

In a 2014 interview with Arizona Public Radio, Bruner recalled that, on the morning of Dec. 7, 1941, he raced up from below the ship's deck when the attack began. There, he saw a Japanese plane fly by so closely that he could see the pilot’s face with “a big old grin on his face, mouth wide open.”

“I could see all those teeth,” he said. “You wanted to reach and bust him one.”

Bruner raced for his battle station, but a Japanese Zero fixed its sights on him, fellow survivor Stratton recalled in his memoir, “All the Gallant Men.”

“A blast from its guns, and bullets bit metal,” Stratton wrote. “One of those shots struck flesh, hitting the back of Lauren’s lower leg. He limped onto the sky platform, a trail of blood following him.”

The Arizona was hit with four bombs, one of them crashing through three levels of the ship and into a powder magazine.

“It blew the heck out of everything, just lifted the bow about 30 feet off the water,” Bruner said in the 2014 interview. “It had one hell of a fire.”

Bruner, Stratton and four others were stranded amid the smoke and fire that quickly consumed the Arizona.

The men escaped death by grappling hand-over-hand for 70 feet on a rope to a nearby repair ship, the USS Vestal. Bruner had burns on over 70% of his body.

He was taken to the hospital ship USS Solace and transferred to a mainland hospital after the turn of the year.

After he recovered, Bruner was assigned to the USS Coghlan, participating in eight major engagements in the Aleutian Islands and seven operation in the South Pacific operations.

He retired from the Navy in 1947.

The Dec. 7 attack left Bruner traumatized, and he suffered decades of “nightmares, visions of dead bodies and memories of the stench of burning human flesh,” according to the preface of his book.

He made a last request with its publication: “I do not want to further discuss or answer any questions concerning the actual attack,” Bruner wrote. “As you read these chapters, know they were real and that it was truly Hell on Earth. The horrors of what I witnessed on that morning have kept me from sleep for many years after.

“I chose to face the future and not let my past dictate what might be ahead.”

"Every Day is Mmeorial Day"
The Greatest GENERATIONS Foundation

Francis Currey, one of three remaining WWII Medal of Honor recipients, dies at 94

Francis Currey, one of the three living World War II Medal of Honor recipients and whose likeness was used to create Medal of Honor G.I. Joe in 1998, died on Tuesday. He was 94.


Currey, a native of Selkirk, New York, joined the U.S. Army when he was just 17. He was in Belgium during the Battle of the Bulge in 1944 as an automatic rifleman with the 3rd Platoon.

On Dec. 21, 1944, as German tanks approached Currey and his company while they were guarding a bridge crossing, Currey found a bazooka in a nearby factory. He crossed the street to secure rockets during an intense fight from enemy tanks and infantrymen. With the help of a companion, Currey knocked out a tank with one shot.

Moving to another position, Currey killed or wounded three German soldiers standing in the doorway of an enemy-held house. He emerged from cover and alone advanced to within 50 yards of the house. He ended up rescuing five Americas who were trapped and taking fire inside a building.

According to his biography on the Congressional Medal of Honor website, "Sgt. Currey was greatly responsible for inflicting heavy losses in men and material on the enemy, for rescuing 5 comrades, 2 of whom were wounded, and for stemming an attack which threatened to flank his battalion's position."

Currey received the Medal of Honor near Reims, France, on July 27, 1945, when he was 20 years old.

After being discharged from the Army in 1946, he served as a counselor in the Veterans Administration. He also owned a landscaping business.

AMERICA REMEMBERS -- Its with great sadness, we have received the news that World War II veteran Mr. Willard (Bill) Davison, who was wounded when he fought in Normandy and the Battle of the Bulge, has died. He was 95.

A hero to many, Mr. Davison in June recalled his days during the war in Europe as the world acknowledged the 75th anniversary of D-Day, perhaps the most famous invasion in history that changed the course of the war in the Allies’ favor.

He was a 19-year-old paratrooper with the 82nd Airborne when he landed in a swamp outside the French city of Sainte-Mère-Église during the fire day of Operation Overlord, as the invasion was officially known. He then fought in the Battle of the Bulge and was shot, hit by shrapnel and suffered frostbite in the process.

“He was a true patriot,” said his son, Michael B. Davison. “He was proud of the service he gave to our country. And we followed in his footsteps.”

Michael and his twin brother, David, joined the Army and fought in Vietnam. They said his father’s bravery was an inspiration to join the Army during a time of war.

“He was the main reason that I enlisted in the 82nd Airborne,” David said. “He was influential not only in our lives, but all of his kids’ lives. He left a legacy behind with his children and grandchildren.”

In June Mr. Davison said during an interview with The Monroe News that despite the decades that have passed, he remembered well his time in Europe and his many dangerous missions, including escaping capture in a hail of Germans gunfire.

He discussed the many close calls during his time in the war. He was shot in the thigh while in the Belgian town of St. Vith, was wounded in the leg by shrapnel and suffered severe frostbite. He helped the French Resistance blow up bridges, served as an anti-aircraft gunner and helped shoot down the last airplane of the war in Europe. By himself he took 14 Germans inside that plane as prisoners.

He was proud of his service, but the effects of the war were not easily overcome.

“I remember it well,” Mr. Davison said in June. “It stuck with me a long time. But soon it wore out.”

After the war, he worked 55 years in the gas and oil pipeline industry while helping to raise six children: the late Cindy Napolitan; Michael (Gwen); David (Gretchen); Mark (Yvonne); Chris (Lynn) and Daniel (Mary). He also had 19 grandchildren, 9 great-grandchildren and one great-great grandchild.

"Every Day is Memorial Day"
The Greatest GENERATIONS Foundation
Web: www.TGGF.org

AMERICA REMEMBERS -- Last member of Pearl Harbor survivors association from Virginia dies at 97.

The Japanese didn’t get Paul J. Moore when they attacked Pearl Harbor, even though he was on a battleship as it sank that day. And enemy ships didn’t get him when he served on a destroyer in the Pacific theater.

Moore was a Navy sailor aboard the USS West Virginia, one of several moored in Pearl Harbor’s battleship row that took the brunt of the fateful Dec. 7, 1941, Japanese attack.

As a survivor, Moore would go on to join an official survivors association that boasted a couple hundred members in the Tidewater region. By the time of his death, he was the last one.

“We just lost a great man,” Rountree said.

Moore was born and grew up in Portsmouth. After the war, he went on to work at the Naval Regional Medical Center and Maryview Hospital. Since 1954, he lived in a home he built in Chesapeake.

He had a daily routine each morning. He got up at 6 a.m., grabbed the morning newspaper from the porch to read the day’s news and then said all of his prayers. Rountree, who lives in a home next to her father, would go over every morning to visit.

Last Wednesday, she went over and the paper was still on the porch, the doors still locked. She found her father inside.

The emergency medical technicians told her he died of a heart attack, she said. His wife of nearly 72 years, Mildred “Honey” Kilpatrick Moore died over the summer.

Rountree says her dad died of a broken heart.

Much of Moore’s Pearl Harbor memorabilia surrounded him in his home. A tattered 20-dollar bill, all that remained of his last prewar paycheck given to him two days before the Japanese attacked. A wristwatch stopped at 8:01, six minutes after the attack began. A photo album.

All those items spent six months underwater after the West Virginia sank.

Moore was 20 years old at the time, a fire controlman in the Navy. He had just gotten off duty and was showering when the attack began, Rountree said.

As his battleship sank, he was able to jump over the side and swim for his life, leaving all of his belongings in his locker onboard. He found refuge — and some clothing — at a house back on shore.

Moore didn’t talk much about that day other than to say he almost lost his life eight different times, Rountree said.
He always talked about the friends he lost.

“I can’t forget it,” Moore told reporters last year during the Navy’s remembrance of the attacks at Joint Expeditionary Base Little Creek-Fort Story.

“I’m telling you I missed many a buddy."

The Pearl Harbor Survivors Association officially disbanded in 2011 due to the ages and health of its 2,700 members.

The Tidewater chapter at its peak had roughly 200 members back in the 1970s, said Gerald Chebetar, a Chesapeake resident whose father, Frank, was a survivor and the chapter’s longtime president.

A very informal group from the chapter has been gathering for monthly lunches at Gus and George’s restaurant in Virginia Beach. The group had three widows of survivors, but all three are in their 90s and are currently hospitalized or bedridden, Chebetar said.

Moore is remembered by the Navy as a “gentle giant of a man” whose calming smile was infectious to all around him.
“Mr. Paul Moore, as with many other World War II veterans who are quickly fading, was a quiet, unassuming American hero,” said Capt. Joey Frantzen, commander at Joint Expeditionary Base Little Creek-Fort Story.

“They were ordinary people, yet extraordinary people, who helped lead this country through sheer tragedy to resounding victory following the Dec. 7, 1941, attack on Pearl Harbor.”

The West Virginia did not stay underwater for long. In the spring of 1942, it was brought up and eventually put back in service. By then, Moore was on a destroyer in the Pacific.
He couldn’t remember exactly when or how, but the Navy returned his belongings to him sometime later.

“My dad was loved a lot,” Rountree said. Every Saturday night when he went to church, she said, a man would salute Moore as he walked in.

“He was a wonderful man,” she said. “He was a great provider.”

After his death, Rountree’s sons lowered a flag on a pole in his yard to half-staff. As of this week, the flag remained there in place.

"Every Day is Memorial Day"
The Greatest GENERATIONS Foundation
Web: www.TGGF.org

AMERICA REMEMBERS -- It is with great sadness; we learned the news that Ray Salvadore Marcello Sr, a member of the famed 390th Bomb Group during World War II.

Ray Marcello has always had a heart to serve. It could even be said that it began with his childhood in the church as an altar boy. Coming from a very close-knit family, Marcello’s owned Quality Furniture Store, on the corner of Levron Street and Main Street, serving as one of the first furniture stores in Houma in 1945. Ray and brother, Curtis, primarily ran Quality Furniture.The Marcello brothers were no strangers to hard work and helping others.

Ray set out on a new path and at 19 years old, joined the U.S. Army Air Corps. On July 13, 1944, Ray’s B17 plane was shot down by the German Military. Deploying his parachute, Ray was brought to the ground and captured along with the rest of the soldiers on board the plane.

They were then ordered, along with many other Prisoners of War to take part in the “death march” across Poland for 86 days, described by Ray as, “The coldest winter ever in Poland and Germany at that time.” A POW Doctor wrote about the horrid conditions stating that “We marched, starved, froze, marched, scratched our lice, suffered disease, and marched some more. We laid in filth, slept in barns or fields, and dodged aerial strafing’s.”

Hundreds have been said to collapse from malnutrition, trench foot, exhaustion, pneumonia, and other diseases. During the interrogation process, Ray was placed in solitary confinement for two weeks with low rations of food but survived on bread and water. This quarantine process was meant to “soften” the prisoner and get him to talk. The methods of mistreatment varied between the camps.

It was common for German soldiers to use scare tactics such as firing their machine guns and rifles from their guard towers to the center of the PW compounds, endangering the prisoners from ricocheting bullets.

Ray documented his time spent in The Barracks in a notebook that he still has to this day. His journal is complete with sketches and diary-like entries of the day to day activities and struggles faced there. Although it is hard to consider yourself fortunate during such an unpleasant situation, Ray says it could have been much worse. The tent he was residing in held mass regularly, and when it comes to faith, Ray’s remained unbroken.

Even when he did get bitter, his negative attitude didn’t last long. When the war finally ended, they were liberated by the British Army on April 16, 1945. Ray was found in The Barracks, weighing a staggering 84 pounds. He spent two and a half weeks in Churchill Hospital in London, England, to regain his health and was finally sent home on June 19, 1945.

When he returned to Houma, it was a shock and surprise to his family to see that he was alive and recovering. In the months that followed, Ray reconnected with his friend, Gloria Daigle, and the two were married in 1947.

Together, they had four children, and for 66 years, their marriage thrived until her passing in 2012.

"Every Day is Memorial Day"
The Greatest GENERATIONS Foundation
Web: www.TGGF.org

AMERICA REMEMBERS -- It is with great sadness, we have learned the news that Mr. Carmen J. 'Carl' Covino, World War II veteran, fought in Battle of the Bulge has died. He was 102.

Born in Lackawanna, he attended Lackawanna High School and served in the Army in Europe as a machine-gunner with the First and Third Armies during World War II.

He landed at Utah Beach six days after the D-Day Invasion and fought in the Battle of the Bulge. He attained the rank of corporal and received the Silver Star and the French Legion of Honor Medal.

He began working at Bethlehem Steel in 1933. An overhead crane operator for 20 years and a stock shear man for 25 years, he retired in 1978.

Mr. Covino was the last surviving founding member of the Galanti Athletic Association in Hamburg. He also was a member of the Town of Hamburg Seniors and the Blasdell Lilly House Seniors.

He and his wife, the former Anastasia “Sally” Hawrylczak, were honored for their military service on Hometown Hero banners displayed on Buffalo Street in Hamburg in 2016.

Mr. Covino told Buffalo News reporter Barbara O’Brien that they had begun dating before the war and he did not want her to join the Army.

“Her brothers were in, so she went in,” he said. She served stateside in the Women’s Army Corps as a supply clerk. They were married in 1946.

"Every Day is Memorial Day"
The Greatest GENERATIONS Foundation
Web: www.TGGF.org

AMERICA REMEMBERS -- It is with great sadness, we learn the news that World War II veteran and TGGF Ambassador Mr. Glenn Angle has died. He was 99.

Born on Dec. 27, 1919, Glenn Angle was a real American who volunteered so he could join the Army Air Corps. He had his civilian pilot's license, however, the US. Army had other plans for him, and he was assigned to the US. Army 608th tank destroyer battalion.

It was two years before he succeeded in transferring to the air corps. Trained to fly a C-46 with a glider in tow, he was two weeks away from taking paratroopers and infantry to the Pacific Theater when the atomic bomb was dropped on Hiroshima.

Mr. Angle, on behalf of everyone at TGGF and its members, we thank you for your sacrifice, your bravery, and the example you set for us all. God be with you.

"Every Day is Memorial Day"
The Greatest Generations Foundation
Web: www.TGGF.org

AMERICA REMEMBERS -- It is with great sadness, we announce the passing of S/Sgt. Irvin W. "Butch" Johnson proud member of the legendary 345th Infantry. 87th Division. Butch was 95.

He was born April 15, 1924, in Cumberland, Maryland, and upon graduating high school, Butch was drafted into the United States Army, where he rapidly advanced to the rank of Sgt. at 19 years old with Company K, 345 Infantry Regiment, 87th Division.

When the division arrived in France on November 28, 1944, they were assigned to spearhead General Patton US. Third Army across France and where they experienced significant combat during the Battle of the Bulge and beyond during three major battle campaigns.

On February 6 in the battle's aftermath, Johnson, who had been promoted to staff-sergeant, was leading his men near the German border town of Kobscheid when his squad was pinned down by an entrenched German machine gun nest. Ordered to take the bunker, Butch directed his men to provide covering fire while he fought his way up the hill and climbed up and on top of the concrete pillbox from behind.

"It was hideous," he remembered. "I crawled up there and you could hear the 'ping, ping' of bullets flying by and see the sparks where they hit the cement in front of you." Chunks of flying concrete sprayed his face as he crawled to the edge of the bunker, seeing one of the Germans firing at his men below. Thinking quickly, he pulled the pin on a hand grenade, counted to two, and dropped it inside.

"I felt like I was going to be sick," Johnson said, but moments after the explosion, a German lieutenant in full dress uniform stepped over his fallen comrade with his hands in the air and presented Johnson with his weapon.

It was months later, in a hospital in Paris, when Johnson learned he had been awarded a Silver Star for his actions that day. "I'd gotten shot by a sniper in Germany later that month," Johnson recalled, "and they sent me back to Paris. And then one day, I was lying there in bed, and a colonel comes by and pins this thing to my pajamas and tells me he doesn't have the paperwork for it."

There would be a formal ceremony to present him with the Army's third-highest award for valor at a later date, he was told. But that day never came. On April 30, Hitler would shoot himself in his Berlin bunker, and eight days later, the Allies would accept Germany's unconditional surrender. "I just figured they had the wrong Johnson," Butch said.

When Johnson finally returned home, the journey took twice as long – 14 days versus the seven he spent on Queen Elizabeth. "But, boy, is it a great feeling when you stand on that deck and see that lady holding her torch in New York harbor."

After a few months assigned to Fort Meade near Baltimore, Johnson got his discharge papers in November 1945 and traveled back over the mountains to Cumberland.

"I started looking for a job," he said, "and they had an event for returning veterans downtown where a fella came up to me and said, 'You want to be an electrician?' and I said, 'Well, yeah.' So they had me go down to the post office and take an examination.

"When I came out, I handed in this occupational test, and the guy says to me, 'Are you sure you want to be an electrician? Every answer to this thing says you want to be in a band.' And I said, 'I don't want to be in a band,' so he sends me back in and says, 'Every time this thing asks you what you want to do, you better put down' electrician.' And that's how I got involved with our Local 307."

Within a few months, Johnson was working for Sterling Electric, a signatory contractor in Cumberland, wiring commercial buildings, schools and responding to residential service calls. "No matter what you wanted to do, I had the tools in my truck," he said.

It was at Sterling in 1952 that he met George Smith, another veteran, who had served in North Africa during the war. The two men struck up a quick friendship, and where you saw one, the other was sure to follow. "We were like brothers," Johnson said, "even more than I was with my actual brothers."

The two were so close, in fact, that they married sisters, Marian and Virginia, two lovely locals who just happened to be the boss's daughters. Their status cemented at Sterling, Butch and George went on to work for the company side by side for the next 30 years.

"I never missed a day's work," Johnson recalled with pride. "We cared about what we did, and we wanted to do the job right." When he would get house calls to the stately homes on a ridge overlooking the town, Johnson remembers slipping thick woolen socks over his muddy boots to protect the rugs.

"It got to where the ladies up there would call Sterling and say, 'Send Butch over, I need a light bulb.' I think they liked me because I swept up after myself," he said, laughing.

"We talk a lot about the Code of Excellence at the IBEW," said Jim Combs, who retired as the senior executive assistant to the international secretary-treasurer in 2008 and was the business manager of Local 307 when Johnson and Smith retired in the late 80s. "But guys like Butch and George lived it long before we ever thought to write it down."

On behalf of TGGF and its members, we salute S/Sgt. Irvin W. "Butch" Johnson for he dedication and service to our freedom.

"Every Day is Memorial Day"
The Greatest GENERATIONS Foundation
Web: www.TGGF.org

AMERICA REMEMBERS: It is with great sadness, we learn the news that World War II veteran from the Battle of the Bulge -- Mr. Lonnie Ray Preslar, has died. He was 95.

Preslar fought in the Battle of the Bulge, after which he was hospitalized England, recovering from frostbite.

“I thought my recovery went very well, but the Army nurses kept telling me to stay in bed,” he recalled in an Oct. 8 interview. “I told them I would rather be back at the front than staying in bed all time, so they obliged me.

“My hospital time was more stressful to the folks back home than it was to me — the Army misplaced my records and notified my parents I was missing in action.”

Not too long after returning to the front, Preslar was wounded in the face by shrapnel. “Medics covered half my face with a large white bandage, which I thought gave the enemy a nice target to shoot at,” he said.

After the Battle of the Bulge, he said, “we started advancing, taking prisoners, and kept the Germans on the run.”

After one skirmish, Preslar was ordered to take 12 newly captured prisoners to a holding area behind the lines. “I had misgivings about that, thinking that was too many prisoners for one man to keep up with — especially given the language difference,” he recalled. “I waved my rifle at them, and shouted, ‘I will mow you down if you get out of line!’ They knew enough English to understand that.”

All eyes were on Berlin as V-E Day — marking the Allied victory in Europe in 1945 — approached, Preslar said. “We were driven to get there before the Russians, even if it meant we had to walk until our legs gave way.”

Preslar’s 134th Infantry Regiment of the 35th Infantry Division dashed 295 miles in two days to reach the Elbe River before the Russians could, military records show.

Even so, permission to take Berlin was given to the Russians by higher authorities.

The 35th Infantry Division switched to occupation duties and mopping-up German strongholds that had been bypassed.

With a Bronze Star, two Purple Hearts, three campaign stars and a combat infantryman’s badge (which authorized an additional Bronze Star), Preslar had more than enough points for a speedy return to the States.

Preslar grew up on a farm in the Polkton community in Anson County with three brothers and four sisters.

“We grew cotton, corn and soybeans, plus we always had a large vegetable garden,” Preslar recalled. An older brother was already serving in the Army when Preslar was drafted at 19 in 1944.

After the war, Preslar settled in High Point, found a job and a wife. He married Donna Sink on Nov. 15, 1947. She died in 2000 after 53 years of marriage. From this union came three daughters — Debbie, Nancy and Tammy — four grandsons and five great-grandchildren.

"Every Day is Memorial Day"
The Greatest GENERATIONS Foundation
Web: www.TGGF.org

AMERICA REMEMBERS: On this beautiful Sunday evening, we kindly ask for your thoughts and prayers for the family of Dr. E. Bruce Heilman, Chancellor of the University of Richmond, World War II combat veteran and survivor, great grandfather, book author, National Spokesman of The Greatest GENERATIONS Foundation and perhaps the most well-traveled 90+ year old Harley rider in the world.

He made his Heavenly journey on October 20, 2019 at the age of 93.

Widely known for his active leadership, constant optimism, contagious enthusiasm, and untiring determination, E. Bruce Heilman had a transforming effect on everything with which he was associated. He was President and then Chancellor of the University of Richmond, and President of Meredith College in North Carolina.

Born on July 16, 1926 into the family of a tenant farmer in Kentucky, Heilman learned to live on hard work, faith, and frugality. An uninspired student who dreamed of becoming a truck driver, he interrupted his farming life when, at age 17, he dropped-out of high school and enlisted in the Marines to serve in World War II.

Compared to his daily schedule of farm and school activities, Boot Camp was good for him – he grew 4 inches and gained 35 pounds in his first four months in the service. Time "on the ground" in Okinawa was not as easy, as he saw countless friends and patriots give their lives for his country. The Marine Corps broadened his horizons, increased his confidence, and transformed his ambitions.

After an honorable discharge from the Marines Heilman embraced the GI Bill and restarted his education, ultimately pursuing a career in higher education administration. He advanced rapidly and was named President of Meredith College in North Carolina at the age of 40. Five years later the University of Richmond persuaded him to become their fifth president and help implement the $50 million gift recently made by E. Claiborne Robins of the A.H. Robins Pharmaceutical Company. Even though the largest capital campaign in the University’s history was just $1.7 million, Heilman challenged the board of Trustees to support a $50 million campaign, saying that “We should all be able to do collectively, what Claiborne Robins did individually.” That bold leadership defined Heilman’s tenure.

Dr. Heilman was admired and appreciated for his fund-raising capabilities. Not only did he put Meredith College and the University of Richmond on solid financial footing, he was a major fund raiser and fund raising advisor for the Marine Military Academy in Harlingen, TX, the Marine Corps Museum in Quantico, VA, Campbellsville University in Kentucky, and many other small colleges throughout the U.S. As a result of his efforts, he has three buildings named in his honor at three universities: a dormitory at Meredith College, a dining center at the University of Richmond, and a student center complex at his alma mater, Campbellsville University. There are an additional two buildings at Campbellsville named in honor of his late wife, Betty.

A man of action in everything he chose to pursue, Heilman’s greatest efforts and results were reserved for the University of Richmond. Before arriving in 1971, his predecessor had warned that the University was in danger of folding or being absorbed into another Virginia school. At that time UR’s endowment was just $7 million.

Sixteen years of tireless effort later, the University was vibrant with a growing national reputation, glistening new facilities, and a strong financial position. Today, Richmond has an endowment of $2.5 billion and ranks 10th in endowment per capita of all U.S. universities with over 3,000 students.

Even at the age of 93, Dr. Heilman was a sought-after speaker. He was tireless in his preparation of speeches which incorporated poetry, humor, and a rapid-fire delivery that kept audiences engaged and inspired. One of his most satisfying roles was that of the national spokesperson for The Greatest Generations Foundation, where he traveled the globe to spread the history and lessons that shaped those in the Greatest Generation.

Heilman thought that exposure to other peoples and other cultures was an essential part of being well-educated. Soon after becoming President of Meredith he initiated a summer travel adventure, first inviting students, then friends and college supporters, and ultimately his family to join him as he traipsed the world and visited 145 countries.

At age 71 and looking for a new challenge, Heilman’s wife Betty gifted him a Harley Davidson which he proceeded to ride and enjoy for the next 22 years. He took his Harley across the country multiple times and traversed all 50 states, including a solo trip to Alaska from Richmond at age 88. Along the way he picked up a new group of friends, all admiring his winsome spunk and ability to safely handle an 800 lb. two-wheeled “Hog”.

Heilman was married to Betty June Dobbins for 65 years before she passed away in 2013. Preceded in death by his parents, Earl and Nellie Heilman, brothers Roland and Bob Heilman and sister, Nancy Ruth. He is survived by daughters Bobbie Murphy (Mike), Nancy Cale (Fred), Terry Sylvester (David) and Sandy Kuehl (Fred) and son, Tim as well as his 11 grandchildren, Chris Hudgins (Sarah), Matt Hudgins, Dylan Davis (Melissa), Morgan Davis (Allie), Whitney Christopoulos (Brett), Hilary Disher (Justin), Natalie Foy (Nick), Carly Parsons (Luke), Nick van der Meer, Corey Heilman, and Patrick Heilman. He is also survived by his 11 great grandchildren.

He is the author of An Interruption that Lasted a Lifetime, an autobiography about his first 80 years. He loved his family deeply.

"Every Day is Memorial Day"
The Greatest GENERATIONS Foundation
Web: www.TGGF.org

AMERICA REMEMBERS: It is with great sadness, we learn the news that WWII veteran, and Iwo Jima survivor Mr. John Moon has died. He was 102.

Born in Macomb on April 3, 1916, Moon was a graduate of Western Illinois University before enlisting into the Marine Corps where he serves with the 5th Marine Division which served in the Pacific Theater and saw major action during the battle of Iwo Jima.

Western Illinois University officials state that after graduating from WIU and returning from the war, Moon first opened and operated the S & J Café on the Macomb Square for nearly 20 years, followed by a candy store on the square for 20 more years.

He finished his career as a driver’s ed teacher for Macomb High School in the 1980s.

Moon was 103 and is believed to be the oldest surviving Marine from the battle of Iwo Jima.

“Every Day is Memorial Day”
The Greatest GENERATIONS Foundation
Web: www.TGGF.org

thanks for posting these amazing stories.

+1 Coasty

It's been a very sobering experience reading about the lives of these veterans.

AMERICA REMEMBERS: One of the last Massachusetts survivor of the attack on Pearl Harbor has died of natural causes on Tuesday, leaving Massachusetts with one known living veteran left of the deadliest foreign attacks to ever take place on American soil.

Born on Oct. 14, 1921, George Hursey grew up with nine siblings on a farm near Durham, North Carolina. They lived in a log cabin and ate homegrown vegetables and livestock raised by their parents, he later told his children.

Hursey excelled as a high school athlete, captaining the football, basketball and baseball teams in his senior year, but failed to secure an athletic scholarship to attend college because of his lanky frame, according to Hursey's son Dennis, a star athlete in his own right.

Weighing in at 150 pounds despite being 5 feet 10 inches tall, Hursey joined the Army in 1939, after a year of struggling to find work following his graduation from high school. Hursey told The Enterprise in 2016 that the Army paid $21 a month, a high wage for someone with his background.

Hursey was eating breakfast one morning in 1941 after his deployment to Honolulu when the roar of low-flying airplanes startled him. He ran outside to find a harbor full of burning ships.

His unit scrambled to move artillery guns into place, but managed to shoot only at the last wave of Japanese bombers leaving Pearl Harbor.

Hursey went on to fight in numerous battles in the Pacific, including a stint on Guadalcanal.

"As bad as Pearl Harbor was, he said Guadalcanal was 100 times worse," Dennis Hursey recalled.

Hursey told his son that when his Army unit first arrived on the island's shore, the water had turned red with blood from Marines who'd stormed the beach earlier in the day.

Hursey passed out during a battle there after an explosion sent metal shrapnel into his arm. He woke up on an aircraft carrier, and returned to the United States by ship in 1944, passing under the Golden Gate Bridge before arriving in San Francisco.

"I'd never seen something so beautiful," he told an Enterprise reporter last year.

Upon his return, Hursey, who'd reached the rank of staff sergeant, was reassigned to an air force base on Cape Cod to train artillery men. On weekends, G.I.'s stationed at the base traveled up the South Shore to Brockton to enjoy the city's then-bustling night life.

It was there that George Hursey met Mary Gulla, a Brockton native born to Italian garment workers who would soon become his wife of 73 years.

Hursey, raised in the Protestant faith, converted to Catholicism during their two-year courtship.

Hursey made numerous career changes as they settled into a home on Kenwood Street in the city's Campello neighborhood. Initially, he found work as a custodian and maintenance man at one of the city's shoe factories. He later joined the U.S. Postal Service, from which he retired at age 58.

Hursey then drove buses for the Brockton Public Schools. When he retired at age 83, his bosses conducted a nationwide search and determined he was the oldest school bus driver in America.

During his free time, Hursey worked as a football scout for Duke University, securing scholarships to the prestigious college for numerous Brockton-area athletes.

“Every Day is Memorial Day”
The Greatest GENERATIONS Foundation
Web: www.TGGF.org

AMERICA REMEMBERS -- A DDay groom last year, survivor the bloody battle of Okinawa, HERO of World War II has died at age 93.

Kalman Adolph Leichtman, born Nov. 12, 1925, in New York City. He was a proud American, a proud Jew, and a proud United States Navy veteran of the D-Day Invasion of Normandy, the Invasion of Southern France, the pre-invasion of Okinawa, and the Invasion of Okinawa.

Kalman Leichtman joined the Navy at 17, survived the 1944 invasion of Normandy, than Southern France in August 1944, and in 1945, he experienced his last battle near the island of Okinawa.

Kalman Leichtman, then 81, talked about his harrowing experiences while he was a radio operator and part of a gun crew aboard the USS Butler. The destroyer-minesweeper was an escort involved in the invasion of Okinawa, the largest amphibious assault in the war’s Pacific Theater.

On May 25, 1945, nine men aboard the Butler died when a 500-pound bomb from a kamikaze warplane exploded under the ship’s keel. All power aboard was lost, and another U.S. ship came to the rescue.

During the intense battle, 75 Japanese planes were shot down, five by the USS Butler’s gun crews. “In that hour and a half we were in fierce combat — it seemed like many months,” Leichtman said in 2008. He described himself as “a cocky 18-year-old” at the time.

So young during World War II, Kalman Leichtman became an elderly groom last year when he married Marilyn Ogden on the 74th anniversary of D-Day.

On behalf of TGGF and its members, we salute you Kalman Leichtman for your dedication and service to our freedom.

"Every Day is Memorial Day"
The Greatest Generations Foundation
Web: www.TGGF.org

AMERICA REMEMBERS -- The beautiful Ellan Levitsky-Orkin, a nurse during World War II has died at the age of 99.

Ellan J. Levitsky Orkin, 99, of Milford, DE, passed away peacefully on Wednesday, November 20, 2019, in her home.

She was born on December 27, 1919, in Woodstown, NJ, the daughter of the late Isidor and Fanny (Freihon) Levitsky. Ellan attended Salem High School and graduated in 1937. She attended Northeastern Hospital School of Nursing in Philadelphia, PA, and graduated in 1941.

During World War II, Ellan served in the Army Nurse Corp during the Normandy campaign and attained the rank of 1st Lieutenant. Following the war, Ellan worked at Milford Memorial Hospital for 20 years as a private nurse. Ellan was awarded the French Legion of Honor medal, which is the highest distinction for service in France.

Ellan married Benjamin Orkin on November 11, 1946. He preceded her in death in 1995. She is also preceded in death by two sisters, Molly Levitsky and Dorothy Levitsky Sinner, and her beloved cat Mademoiselle.

On behalf of TGGF and it members, we salute you for your dedication and service to our freedom.

“Every Day is Memorial Day”
The Greatest GENERATIONS Foundation
Web: www.TGGF.org

It is with great sadness that the Naval Historical Foundation announces the passing of Admiral James L. Holloway III, the 20th Chief of Naval Operations, a true Navy legend, son of a Four-Star Admiral, and former Chairman of the Naval Historical Foundation. The NHF is humbled to pay homage to this incredible warrior and public servant. Admiral Holloway’s life was an inspiration, full of heroic accomplishments and achievements to which many might aspire, but few achieve. Admiral Holloway’s life was one of exemplary service, dedication, sacrifice, leadership, and honor.

Admiral Holloway served as the President, and subsequently Chairman, of the Naval Historical Foundation for twenty-eight years from 1980 to 2008, for which he was presented the Distinguished Public Service Medal by the Secretary of the Navy and elected Chairman Emeritus. Admiral Holloway’s service to the Foundation followed a storied 36-year career in the United States Navy, during which he served in combat in World War II, Korea, and Vietnam and was appointed as Chief of Naval Operations. His career will forever stand as a shining example of exemplary Naval leadership, dedication, and service to others.

James Lemuel Holloway III was born in Charleston, SC, on February 23, 1922 to James L. Holloway, Jr., and Jean Gordon Hagood. His father was a member of the U.S. Naval Academy Class of 1919, and attained the rank of Admiral, distinguishing them as the only father-son pair in the history of the Navy to achieve that rank during active service.

Admiral Holloway attended Saint James School near Hagerstown, Maryland and upon graduation in 1939, entered the United States Naval Academy, graduating in 1942 as a member of the accelerated Class of 1943 (and where he was a proud member of the wrestling team). He served in both the Atlantic and Pacific theaters during World War II, including North Atlantic convoy duty and in the Western Pacific at Saipan, Tinian, Palau and Leyte Gulf campaigns as gunnery officer of the destroyer USS Bennion (DD-662). During the Battle of Surigao Strait in October 1944, the Bennion was heavily engaged and helped sink the battleship Yamashiro with torpedoes, in addition to shooting down three Japanese aircraft. For his actions during the battle, Admiral Holloway received the Bronze Star Medal, the Navy Commendation Medal, and the Philippine Presidential Unit Citation.


Following World War II, Admiral Holloway reported for flight training and was designated a Naval Aviator. During the Korean War, he flew many combat sorties in the Grumman F9F-2 Panther, earning the Distinguished Flying Cross, three Air Medals and the Korean Presidential Unit Citation. Admiral Holloway was a pioneer in this early era of carrier-based jet aviation and completed two tours in the heavily contested warzone. During one particularly challenging time, the Commanding Officer of his squadron, Fighting Squadron 52, was shot down, and Admiral Holloway abruptly found himself in the leadership role as commander. Shortly after the war, he served as a technical expert in the production of the critically acclaimed movie, The Bridges at Toko-Ri, a film which generated much-needed public awareness of the conflict and the sacrifices made during it.

From 1965 to 1967, he commanded USS Enterprise (CVAN-65), the Navy’s first nuclear-powered aircraft carrier. Admiral Holloway was the third Commanding Officer of the ship, but the first to take her into combat. He was subsequently promoted to Rear Admiral and then Vice Admiral in 1970, commanding the U.S. Seventh Fleet through the end of the Vietnam War.


Admiral Holloway served as Chief of Naval Operations from 1974 to 1978 (including periods where he was acting Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff) during a particularly challenging time in the history of our nation. His accomplishments as a flag officer earned him four Navy Distinguished Service Medals and two Defense Distinguished Service Medals. Following his naval service, Admiral Holloway continued in public service and authored Aircraft Carriers at War: A Personal Retrospective of Korea, Vietnam, and the Soviet Confrontation, a testament to his passion for analyzing history in order to better understand the present and future.

Our Navy and our Nation have lost a great hero. The Naval Historical Foundation is forever indebted to Admiral Holloway for his vision, leadership, and accomplishments at the helm of NHF. Fair winds and following seas, Admiral Holloway.



Dr. Dave Winkler’s biography of Admiral Holloway published by the Naval War College

Admiral Holloway’s oral history on the Battle of Surigao Strait at Leyte Gulf in October 1944:


https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=X3sCYEVFRMI

Wow. What an amazing military career and life.

RIP

AMERICA REMEMBERS - THE BEAUTIFUL NORMA LEWIS, VETERAN OF WORLD WAR II WOMAN WHO TRACKED GERMAN SUBS DIES AT 97.

A character of the greatest generation, with a great sense of humor, has died.

Ninety-seven-year-old Norma Lewis, a World War II veteran will be buried next week will full military honors and a 21-gun salute.

Norma joined the U.S. Navy at the age 21 joining 350,000 other women who signed up after the Japanese bombed Pearl Harbor on Dec. 7, 1941.

At her Louisville home, Norma proudly kept her navy uniform.

In 1943, at the age of 21, she joined the Navy. She was stationed in Charleston, South Carolina as part of a mission of tracking German submarines.

After three and a half years as a Naval Intelligence Officer, Norma retired from the Navy.

She came to Louisville in the 1960s as a sign language interpreter, something she picked up around the age of 10 after having been raised by her deaf aunt and uncle in Connecticut.

“Every Day is Memorial Day”
The Greatest Generations Foundation
Web: www.TGGF.org

AMERICA REMEMBERS — It is with great sadness, we learn the news that DDAY veteran Staff Sgt. Don Jakeway, one of the last original paratroopers of the 82nd Airborne Division, has died.

Jakeway, who was dropped behind enemy lines just before the Normandy invasion on June 6, 1944, was part of the 508th Parachute Infantry Regiment of the 82nd Airborne Division.

Jakeway made four jumps while in active combat. The worse was in September 1944, when he was severely wounded in Holland.

He eventually recovered after a hospital stay. After that, he fought in the Battle of the Bulge in December 1944, where he was shot in his lung by a German sniper.

Jakeway made his first return to Normandy in 2014. He visited key areas before saying goodbye to his friends at the American Cemetery on Omaha Beach.

Jakeway was born and raised in Johnstown and graduated from Johnstown-Monroe High School in 1942.

He's married to Roselyn, and they have four adult children, several adult grandchildren, great-grandchildren, and a great-great-grandchild.

Jakeway was a fantastic person. He lived life to the fullest and was always mindful of how lucky he was, and he always wanted to be positive, and he was always a positive light in the room.

“Every Day is Memorial Day”
The Greatest Generations Foundation
Web: www.tggf.org

AMERICA REMEMBERS – It is with great sadness; we learn the news that World War II veteran Mr. Irving Burgie, member of an all-black U.S. Army battalion during World War II has died. He was 95.

After World War II, Mr. Burgie used GI Bill funds to pay for music studies. Burgie studied at the Juilliard School of Music, the University of Arizona and the University of Southern California. He became a folk singer using the stage name Lord Burgess and performed the circuit between New York and Chicago, making his New York nightclub debut at the Village Vanguard in 1954.

Mr. Burgie, who helped popularize Caribbean music and co-wrote the enduring Harry Belafonte hit “Day-O (The Banana Boat Song),”

“Day-O,” written in 1952, has been ubiquitous, appearing in everything from the film and Broadway musical “Beetlejuice” to an E-Trade commercial. “Day-O” was also the wake-up call for the astronauts on two space shuttle missions in the 1990s. When a superstar list of music royalty gathered to film the “We Are the World” video in 1985, most burst into a playful version of “Day-O” in between takes. Lil’ Wayne used a sample of “Day-O” in his “6 Foot 7 Foot.”

According to the Songwriters Hall of Fame, Burgie’s songs have sold more than 100 million records throughout the world. Many were recorded by Belafonte, including eight of the 11 songs on Belafonte’s 1956 album, “Calypso,” the first album to sell more than 1 million copies in the U.S. Burgie also penned songs for the Kingston Trio (“The Seine,” “El Matador,” and “The Wanderer”) and for other groups.

His “Jamaica Farewell” has been recorded by Belafonte, Jimmy Buffett, Carly Simon and others. Others who have sung his songs include Mantovani, Miriam Makeba and Julio Iglesias. Burgie’s classic Caribbean standards include such familiar hits as “Island in The Sun,” “Angelina,” and he was co-writer of “Mary’s Boy Child.” He also wrote the 1963 off-Broadway musical “Ballad for Bimshire” that starred Ossie Davis.

“Every Day is Memorial Day”
The Greatest GENERATIONS Foundation
Web: www.tggf.org

HERO OF THE DAY -- Hundreds of people went to the funeral of a WWII veteran after learning that he had no surviving family to attend.

James McCue, of Lawrence, died last week at a health care center in Methuen. He was 97. An obituary said he had outlived his wife and had no other living family members.

News of the serviceman's burial quickly circulated on social media this week after a veterans advocate called on Massachusetts residents to show up to the services. This prompted many veteran groups and others to attend.

“Just another guy down. We’re running out of [WWII] veterans,” said Calvin Perry, an U.S. Air Force veteran from Andover.

“This was one that landed at Normandy and has five battle stars. It’s a worthy day to show up and honor him.”

The closest person to McCue to attend his funeral was Doris Sevigny, 91, who had lived below him in an apartment complex for more than 20 years, according to Sevigny’s niece, Diane Brown.

“He was her eyes because she was legally blind, and she was his health care proxy,” said Brown. “It was nice to see them together. They had happiness together. He was a happy man.”

A few years ago, McCue fell ill and moved to Cedar View Rehabilitation and Healthcare Center in Methuen, said Brown. Sevigny visited him for several years until she too fell ill about three weeks ago and joined him at the nursing home. The two had played bingo the night before McCue died, the niece added.

During the ceremony, military officers gave Sevigny the folded flag from on top of McCue’s casket. Afterwards, Brown asked her aunt what she thought of the service.

“Wonderful, wonderful,” she cried while clutching a picture of McCue.

Many of the servicemen in attendance called McCue an American hero. Some even admired his participation in combat when others had only served stateside. McCue had enlisted in the U.S. Army shortly after the attack on Pearl Harbor and fought in the five major battles, including a landing on Utah Beach on D-Day.

While many former military members were glad to still be alive, several expressed concerns that they too would be forgotten.

“Every time I go to one of these, I'm standing around holding my rifle and I do wonder, when my time comes, if there's gonna be anyone around to do it?” said Peter Tuttle, a Marine Corps veteran who served on the rifle guard for the ceremony.

After the service, David Webster, an Army veteran from New Hampshire, lingered to pay his respects to his two uncles who were also veterans buried in the same cemetery.

Webster said his uncles were lucky to make it home; many of their comrades were less fortunate. However, he also said that many returning military members have little to fall back on when they return home, hoping that the funeral inspired people to support veterans.

“A lot of them come back and have nothing, whether it be finances, loss of family, or whatever it might be,” said Webster. “They deserve our support for putting their lives on the line, so it shouldn't be too much to offer them some support.

“Every Day is Memorial Day”
The Greatest GENERATIONS Foundation
Web: www.TGGF.org

AMERICA REMEMBERS — BELOVED D-DAY VETERAN CLINTON RIDDLE PASSES AWAY PEACEFULLY IN SWEETWATER AT 98

Clinton Riddle, a veteran of the D-Day invasion and combat-wounded East Tennessee soldier who served with the 82nd Airborne during World War II died peacefully on the evening of December 3 in his hometown of Sweetwater, Tennessee.

After being drafted at 21, the Loudon County native was assigned to the 325th Glider Infantry with the newly formed 82nd Airborne Division soon and sent to Casa Blanca, Morocco, for the Army's North Africa campaign.

His unit invaded Italy, liberating parts of Naples and helping the people re-establish a local government. But the men were soon loaded on ships and sent to the United Kingdom for a much larger invasion -- D-Day.

The massive assault in 1944 combined paratroopers, beach landings and scores of gliders towed into the sky by large transport planes and then set loose to crash down behind enemy lines and help move the invasion forward.

His made the Normandy landing in a British-made glider that held 33 men and nearly came to pieces on landing.

For most of the trip gliders floated high enough to be out of range of small arms fire and were pointed toward spots just out of the fighting, so soldiers could exit the aircraft and regroup before patrolling on foot to attack the enemy.

After fighting 33 days and nights, liberating French villages and losing more than a third of the unit's soldiers, the men were sent back to England for an assault on German-occupied Holland. This time the ride was somewhat more comfortable in a smaller American-made glider that held 13 soldiers.

Riddle co-piloted that flight and tore off a piece of the hull upon landing, later writing on it the name of each man aboard. The artifact is framed in his home.

Shortly after the Holland battles wound down Riddle remembers sitting in his foxhole there, reading his New Testament and praying.

"I told the Lord if he let me get home then I'd do what he wanted me to do," Riddle said. "Of course I had to go through the Battle of the Bulge after that."

Like many of his generation, he seldom talked about his war experience until he was asked to return to Europe in 2012. Since then he has spoken to many school groups as he can. He will be missed by so many.

“Every Day is Memorial Day”
The Greatest Generations Foundation
Web: www.TGGF.org

AMERICA REMEMBERS - It is with great sadness, we share the news that 101st Airborne, 502nd PIR veteran of World War II, Capt. Emmett D. Nolan, known as "Rosy," has passed away. He was 94.

Born Emmett Duane Nolan, the youngest of 12 children, Nolan grew up on a farm in Wauhilla, west of Stilwell, Oklahoma. Shortly after his birth, his father was killed in a car accident.

The family grew up with no running water, no electricity, no heating or air conditioning, and very little money. The farm had to be self-sufficient. Nolan and his older brothers learned many different skills and became expert shots with a rifle because food for the table depended on their ability to kill a rabbit, squirrel, or some other wild game. They learn how to be survivors. This kind of education was perfect for them and other soldiers' surviving during World War II.

On July 1944, Rosy arrived into Europe as a replacement soldier assigned to the 101st Airborne Division. After two months of training, he was ready for combat.

During Operation Market Garden, Rosy along with the 101st AB division mission was to secure the fifteen miles of Hell's Highway stretching from Eindhoven north to Veghel.

On December 16, 1944, the Germans launched a major offensive west through the Ardennes Forest, Rosy, and the 101st was ordered to the vitally important town of Bastogne, the central road junction in the Ardennes. The 101st was jammed into trucks for an overnight rush to Bastogne in Belgium on December 18 holding positions on the north and northwest portion of the besieged city.

The winter was harsh, a dozen men of Rosy's squad survived and were cold and hungry, and that is when Rosy found a chicken yard with an old rooster and six hens.

Being a farm boy that had many skills, he stepped forward with the razor-sharp switchblade that he always carried to cut himself out of a parachute and skinned the old rooster and six hens. This was the first step in the making of a good hot meal. Once he cleaned out the sand and snow from his helmet and milked some cows. Every soldier had a warm cup of milk, and that was their Christmas dinner in 1944. He was always scrounging because he knew how.

After the Bulge, the 101st moved to Alsace, France, that is were Rosy ran into high school friend Dale Bean who was in the 82nd Airborne. They made a pack that after the war, they would return to Stilwell, Oklahoma and go to Northeastern State College. Dale Bean was killed shortly after in Belgium, and Rosy was the last person from home to see him alive.

Rosy completed the pack, played football, and graduated from Northeastern State College University in 1949. Rosy became a history teacher and football coach.

The Korean War once again made Rosy a soldier, where he served as Captain in the 45th Division National Guard he saw duty during the Korea War. They joined the United Nations troops on the front lines during the stalemate of the second half of the war, with constant, low-level fighting and trench warfare against the People's Volunteer Army of China that produced little gain for either side. Rosy and the division remained on the front lines in such engagements as Old Baldy Hill and Hill Eerie until the end of the war, returning to the U.S. in 1954.

After the Korean War, he enrolled at the University of Oklahoma to work on a master's degree. Nolan was assigned to Coach Bud Wilkerson as an assistant coach. A big honor since Bud Wilkerson only had six assistants. He made himself a name as a history teacher and coach.

Coach Rosy left Oklahoma for California in 1965 with his family, and they made California their home. He is now a retired educator and reached 94 years of age on 9/11/2019.

The old home place and land near Stilwell, Oklahoma is still in operation and owned by Rosy. A caretaker continues to look after the cattle and upkeep of the ranching operation for Rosy. Both military and sports organizations look to him for speaking engagements and June 2019 was his last engagement with the Youth Leadership at Cal Lutheran University.

"Every Day is Memorial Day"
The Greatest GENERATIONS Foundation
Web: www.TGGF.org

AMERICA REMEMBERS -- On the eve of Christmas, it is with great sadness; we learn the news that Coast Guardsman Mr. George Larsen, who witnessed the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor has died. He was 101.

Mr. Larsen (George) was a radio operator for the U.S. Coast Guard stationed at the Diamond Head Lighthouse when he saw the infamous events of Dec. 7, 1941, that propelled the U.S. into World War II.

On that Sunday morning 78 years ago, George looked toward the sky to see the red circle of the Rising Sun of Japan on the wings of bombers overhead.

“The first thing I saw was three planes flying about 500 feet above me,” George said during a recent interview.

As bombs rained down on the ships in Pearl Harbor and vast plumes of black smoke rose, George held his post. Messages poured in, and it was his job to sift through them, determine which were real and which were bogus, and send the legitimate ones on to officials.

After the bombs dropped, fears mounted that the Japanese were about to invade Hawaii, George said in the same interview.

“I was put on patrol around the lighthouse. I walked around the water’s edge with my .45 revolver cocked and loaded,” George recalls.

“I was expecting to see a landing barge with Japanese soldiers armed to the teeth getting ready to take over the island.”

The invasion didn’t materialize, but 2,403 U.S. personnel were killed.

George was honorably discharged from the service as radioman first class in 1945, after six years of service.

George, who was born in San Francisco and raised in Mill Valley and Fairfax, returned to Marin after the war. He moved to Portland, Ore., a few years before returning to Marin again, and finally making Novato his home for 47 years.

He married Patricia Waterhouse, a former model in the U.S. Women’s Army Corps, and had two children, Tracy Brooks, and Jonathan Larsen.

When he was 92, the Coast Guard promoted him to an honorary chief petty officer for his years of public speaking at Coast Guard units and events, sharing his stories about the attack and the war.

“I share my stories because it is important to help people understand and remember the events and people of Pearl Harbor,” George said.

"Every Day is Memorial Day"
The Greatest GENERATIONS Foundation
Web: www.tggf.org

AMERICA REMEMBERS -- It is with great sadness, we learn the news that Normandy DDAY veteran John Jenkins has died. He was 100.

John Jenkins served as a Platoon Sergeant in the Royal Pioneer Corps and took part in a secret reconnaissance mission to look at the beaches of Normandy for the Allied forces.

Mr. Jenkins landed on Gold Beach at Arromanches – among five D-Day landing points around the French shore – and had been tasked with transferring ammunition ahead from the beach to the front.

The lifelong Portsmouth FC enthusiast also took the Olympic flame from the club Fratton Park floor during training for 2012's summer games in London.

He'd worked as a boardroom steward in his beloved football team, rubbing shoulders with former chairman Milan Mandaric and also the company tycoon's close buddy, footballing legend George Best.

On behalf of TGGF and its members, we salute you, Mr. Jenkins, for your devotion and service to our freedom.

"Every Day is Memorial Day"
The Greatest GENERATIONS Foundation
Web: www.TGGF.org

AMERICA REMEMBERS – On this Christmas Eve: It is with a heavy heart; we announce the passing of American Patriot and combat veteran PAUL K. KRINER who served 517 days of combat over five campaigns in Europe during World War II.

One of his last wishes was to meet a living President of the United States. PAUL K. KRINER was 103.

Born in the generation of President Woodrow Wilson, PAUL K. KRINER grew up on his parent's farm in Williamson, Pennsylvania, the middle child in a family of seven. KRINER father died when he was 15, and he stayed home to help his mother and siblings run the farm but had worked at a Chevrolet garage in Greencastle for a while before enlisting in the National Guard in January 1941 at the age of 24 when the war that would become World War II had its beginnings in Europe.

He had barely started his Guard training at Camp Shelby, Mississippi, when his unit was federalized and became part of the Army. In November 1941, KRINER was sent to Fort Sill, Oklahoma, for advanced training in vehicle maintenance. The next month the Japanese bombed Pearl Harbor.

Over the next year, as the country organized for war, KRINER continues to train until his unit was combat-ready, and in late 1942, his group shipped out to North Africa. After the North African campaign, they were sent to Naples, Italy, then moved north to engage Axis forces, through Rome and as far north as Florence. Before being redeployed to North-Western France, where they would see combat in Northern France, Ardennes, and central European Pocket until the end of the war.

When KRINER came home after the war in Europe, he went back to work on the family farm with his brother, who had taken over the farm's operation. He bought a lot on Stouffer Avenue in Chambersburg and began building a house of his own, then in July 1946 went to work at Letterkenny Army Depot.

"At the time, I wasn't married... I didn't even have a girlfriend," he said. Then he met Geraldine Carr, a Chambersburg native, and fell in love. They were married in November 1947.

His house wasn't finished yet, so the couple lived with Geraldine's parents for nine months until KRINER was able to complete the construction. KRINER still lives in that home today.

After the North Korean invasion of South Korea in June 1950, KRINER joined the National Guard, 28th Division, one of two National Guard divisions that were deployed to Ulm, Germany, in December 1951. KRINER served a total of eleven years in the National Guard and attained the rank of Warrant Officer.

Back home after his release from the Army, KRINER joined the active reserves in Chambersburg, and he and Geraldine settled in to raise their two young daughters, Karen and Kris. KRINER worked at Letterkenny Army Depot for several years, retiring in 1978 as a Quality Control Supervisor. In 1980, he retired from Letterkenny, and the KRINER's began to travel in a motor home they had bought, taking trips to places like the Grand Canyon, Florida and other U.S. destinations.

In early 2019, President of The Greatest GENERATIONS Foundation Timothy DAVIS became aware of PAUL KRINER, and his military service and devotion to our nation.

This information was passed over to the office of the President, and PAUL KRINER wish was granted and he was invited to the Oval Office to be recognized for his military service.

"Regardless of your political opinions, you must always respect the Office of our President," said KRINER.

"I have seen and lived through eighteen Presidents, and now I would like to honor my generation with a visit to the White House." said KRINER.

KRINER was a proud member of the First United Methodist Church in Chambersburg, George Washington Lodge #143, the Waynesboro Shrine Club, Pen Mar Chapter Sojourners, Heroes of 76, the Norland Cemetery Board, and a lifetime member of the VFW Post 1599, the American Legion Post 46, and the VFW Post 1599 Honor Guard. KRINER enjoyed restoring antique automobiles and gardening. Notably, his cars have been sold all over the world.

On behalf of The Greatest GENERATIONS Foundation and its members, we salute Mr. PAUL K. KRINER for his dedication and service to our FREEDOM.

NOTE: Please keep your political opinions off our facebook page.

"Every Day is Memorial Day"
The Greatest GENERATIONS Foundation
Web: www.TGGF.org

AMERICA REMEMBERS -- One of the last known surviving DESERT RATS of World War II Mr. Robert Heath has died just weeks before his 99th birthday.

Mr. Robert Heath served with the 7th Armored Division and saw active combat during World War II, where its exploits in the Western Desert Campaign gained it the Desert Rats nickname.

Heath fought in most significant battles during the Western Desert Campaign in Egypt and Palestine, and later the fight in the Italian Campaign during the early stages of the invasion of Italy. After being combat wounded, Heath, along with the 7th Armored Division, withdrew to the United Kingdom, where it prepared to fight in North-Western Europe. 7th Armored Division began landing in Normandy during the afternoon of D-Day, 6 June 1944, and fought its way across Europe, ending the war in Kiel and Hamburg, Germany.

“The demise of Robert (never Bob, or Bobby), has left an enormous void in wife Gwendolen’s heart and has taken a piece of each of his children, Jacqueline and Martyn.

“The loss of his humor and gentle ways will be felt by the three grandchildren, five great-grandchildren, and all five of the assorted spouses. But more than the obvious loss to the family, and of course to people who knew and liked Robert, his passing is a collective loss to all who love freedom.”

Mr. Heath was one of the last surviving Desert Rats, and Minster village stalwart along with Gwen, his wife of 77 years.

“Every Day is Memorial Day”
The Greatest GENERATIONS Foundation
Web: www.TGGF.org

AMERICA REMEMBERS — It is with great sadness, we share the news that 100-year-old Pearl Harbor survivor and US Marine of WWII and Korea Mr. Joe Walsh has died.

Back in 1987, veteran Joe Walsh co-founded the north San Diego County chapter of the Pearl Harbor Survivors Assn. because he believed the men he served with on that fateful day of Dec. 7, 1941, “deserved to be remembered.”

Now, respects are being paid to Walsh, who died Dec. 21 after a brief illness at the Pacifica Senior Living complex in Vista. He was 100 years old.

Then a Marine in the 3rd Defense Battalion, Walsh was at a color guard ceremony in the Pearl Harbor Navy Yard when the Japanese attack began at 7:55 a.m. He and his fellow Marines manned three anti-aircraft guns, trying to shoot down the invading planes before they could sink the American battleships near the harbor’s entrance.

“I didn’t have time to get scared,” he recalled. “You don’t think about it. You did what you were told to do. You manned your gun and tried to get anyone you could.”

A few weeks after the attack, Walsh was shipped to the desolate Johnston Atoll in the South Pacific to build air defenses. Then, after a brief stint in Navy flight school, he spent the rest of the war in the Marine Corps’ VMO-8 observation squadron.

Walsh served nine years in the Marines, retiring at the rank of gunnery sergeant. During the Korean War, he was called back to active duty to serve as a drill sergeant major at Marine Corps Air Station El Toro.

Although he was proud to have served his country, Walsh never glamorized his military experiences, and he was grateful that his sons never had to fight in a war. He found those years challenging and often harsh, especially the severe deprivation he suffered on Johnston Atoll.

“It was pretty rough,” he said last spring. “All I could think of was how to get the hell out.”

A native of East Orange, N.J., Walsh joined the Marines in 1938 not for the adventure but for the steady income it would provide. It was the Great Depression, and jobs were scarce. Walsh earned $19 a week in the Marines and sent $10 from every paycheck home to his mom, who raised him and his siblings alone after his father abandoned the family when Joe Walsh was 5.

Joe Walsh met his future wife, LaVonne “Bea” Phaneuf, at the wedding of a fellow Marine in 1945. That marriage didn’t last, but the Walshes’ union, sealed in 1946, endured for 73 years and produced six children. Bea was also a Marine veteran, having served in the Aviation Women’s Reserve Squadron 21 at Brown Field in Quantico, Va. She was one of just 23,000 women who enlisted during World War II.

The Greatest GENERATIONS Foundation

WORLD REMEMBERS — A heroic D-Day veteran honoured for helping to liberate French families in the Second World War has died.

Daniel Lyons, who was one of the last surviving Normandy landing veterans, passed away at the age of 94.

He trained with the 6th Airborne Division and landed in Ranville, Normandy – the first French village to be liberated by Allied forces on June 6, 1944.

The great grandfather-of-two, from the Isle of Wight, was praised for his bravery during the invasion and later honoured with the freedom of the community of Ranville.

He remained in the army until 1950 before working as a peacekeeper in the British Mandate for Palestine.

Returning home to the UK, he was stationed in Birmingham where he trained the next generation of army recruits.

London-born Mr Lyons, who joined the Home Guard aged 15 and the army aged 18, retired to the Isle of Wight in 1990 with wife Mary.

Mary died of cancer in 2007 after 62 years of marriage.

Veteran Mr Lyons became a popular member of the Caledonian Scottish Dancers, Medina Mariners and Catholic charity Apostleship of the Sea.

AMERICA REMEMBERS – It is with a heavy heart, we announce the passing of Mr. Charlie Baker, who helped guard flag planted at Iwo Jima, dies at 93.

Charlie Baker, one of the men who helped guard the flag the Marines planted on Iwo Jima, the South Pacific island in the legendary 1945 battle, has died, according to family.

The Kettering, Ohio, man touched many hearts when he participated in Kettering’s Holiday at Home Parade in 2018, according to Edward Koehnen, chairman of the parade, who was saddened upon learning of Baker’s death on Friday as family shared the news with local veterans and community members.

“Charlie received a standing ovation from the crowd when they saw him in the parade,” Koehnen said. “It was an honor to have him in the parade. We owe such a debt of gratitude to Charlie and those who serve our country. They have given so much.”

Baker, 93, grew up on a farm in Jefferson Twp., and said he never dreamed he would end up being a part of F Company at Iwo Jima.

In 1945, U.S. Marines invaded Iwo Jima and engaged enemy forces for nearly a month before the fighting ended and the Pacific island was considered secured. Nearly 7,000 Marines were killed and 20,000 wounded.

Iwo Jima was being used by the Japanese to launch air attacks on American bombers. After capturing it, the U.S. used the island as an emergency landing site for B-29s, which eventually made 2,900 emergency landings there that are estimated to have saved the lives of 24,000 airmen who would have otherwise had to crash at sea.

Baker was a junior in high school in 1943 when he learned that upon turning 18 the next year, he and the rest of his male classmates would be drafted to serve in World War II. In 1944, he found himself on a bus from Cincinnati to Parris Island, S.C., for boot camp.

“You think that they’re probably the meanest men there was,” Baker not-so-fondly recalled of his drill instructors, as he shared his experience in a prior interview. “But after you complete your training, you realize that they have taught you everything you need to know to protect yourself and you think a lot of them.”

He graduated basic training as a .30-caliber machine gunner. Soon after, he was sent to Camp Tawana, Hawaii, where the 5th Division was being formed for the invasion of Iwo Jima. In December 1944, Baker and 256 other Marines departed for the South Pacific.

Baker and F Company landed on the black sands of Iwo Jima on Feb. 19, 1945. For the next 36 days, the Marines fought the Japanese in some of the bloodiest battles of World War II.

Baker and other Marines made their way atop Mount Suribachi that day when six of the Marines hoisted the American flag in victory. The famous photo was captured by Joe Rosenthal of the Associated Press and had lived on as an iconic reminder of the battle.

While fighting on Iwo Jima, 230 of the 257 men in Baker’s division lost their lives. After the war, he returned home and worked at Standard Register in Dayton for 40 years and was as married to his late wife, Lois, for 67 years. Baker has two sons and a daughter.

“You do what you have to do to survive,” Baker said of his service to his country. “I would do it again for the people, the country, and for everyone.”

AMERICA REMEMBERS – It is with great sadness, we learn the news that Pearl Harbor survivor Mr. Will Lehner has died. He leaves behind a legacy of service to God, Country, Community. Will Lehner was 98.

A Portage County Pearl Harbor survivor, whose dream was to keep the memory of those who died fighting for this country and the war in which he served alive, has died.

Lehner was one of Portage County's most well-known veterans and many in the community knew him for his service to veterans and school children. One of his life's works was to help others remember and learn from the sacrifices made by U.S. service members at Pearl Harbor and during World War II.

"He’s given so much to so many of us that I only hope that I can live up to that same kind of standard in my life when my final story is pulled together," said Patty Dreier, who helped Lehner publish his life story in 2019.

Lehner served aboard the USS Ward in WWII, which fired the first shots by the U.S. in the war. The first shots by the Ward came in the early hours of Dec. 7, 1941, when it sunk one of five Japanese miniature submarines heading for the U.S. naval yard at Pearl Harbor.

Lehner put that story and the rest of his life to pen in 2019, publishing a book — titled "Legacy of a Pearl Harbor Survivor: Will Lehner Remembers" — about his experiences at war, how he coped after the war, how he settled down in the Stevens Point area and what he thought his legacy was.

"I don’t deserve recognition for being any kind of hero. I am not a hero. The heroes didn’t come home. My legacy is to have served, to have done my duty, to have kept my promises, to have kept their memories alive. I wanted to make sure their story of what happened at Pearl Harbor was as complete as possible and will never be forgotten. I guess some people just want to make a difference and I’m one of those," Lehner wrote in the book when reflecting on his legacy.

Dreier said formulating Lehner's legacy statement took multiple interview sessions and remembers him tearing up when they finally figured it out.

"That was a moment I will never forget," she said.

The book released on the 78th anniversary of the attacks on Pearl Harbor. Lehner and his family held a signing on Dec. 7, 2019, at the Plover Veterans of Foreign Wars Post 10262. The 400 books the family had printed sold out in about half an hour, and they have ordered another 1,100 books, Adamski said.

In hindsight, Adamski said the book signing felt like a memorial for her father.

A line of several hundred people stretched out the side of the Plover VFW hall and spilled onto Hickory Drive and to the intersection of Post Road. Inside, families waited in line to meet Lehner and pose for pictures with him next to a Christmas tree.

"He got to see all those people who were interested in what he had written," Adamski said.

Dreier said she wants Lehner’s story to serve as motivation for people to record the stories of not only veterans but others who hold an important place in their lives.

"If you got somebody in your life that has a story to tell other people, help them get it down. Help them write it, capture it for everybody’s sake," she said. "I hope we can use Will’s example as a call to action to step up in our communities."

Lehner spoke before several thousand children across Wisconsin about Pearl Harbor and WWII throughout his life. His classroom visits helped him keep the memory of those who died in people's minds and to cope with his own post-traumatic stress disorder, he told the Stevens Point Journal in December.

Adamski said her father's legacy also includes his love of food and appreciation of the outdoors.

He served as a Whiting Village Board supervisor and worked at the Worth Company as a linotype printer operator for 34 years before retiring. Lehner was also a member of the Plover VFW, American Legion Post 6, Tin Can Sailors and the "First Shot Naval Vets" club.

Others also may have known him through his dedication to the Izaak Walton League as its president, director and chief cook of more than 50 years. He served as a cook aboard the Ward during WWII.

Adamski said his flair for cooking was something her husband, brother, and son learned from Lehner. Lehner passed on his special seasoning recipe to the family, which often appeared at Izaak Walton League events and other community gatherings. Adamski said they'll miss his kitchen critiques.

"Even well after moving into assisted living, he was always helping us out making gravy at Thanksgiving. He always had some suggestions," Adamski said.

Lehner exhibited a thoughtfulness and desire to seek connections with anybody he spoke with, asking about other people's lives first and being a person who would listen to others, Dreier said.

"He always tried to build a bridge," Dreier said. "He reminds us all to live life on purpose like he did. It’s richer that way. It’s richer for yourself and it’s richer for your community and your country, in his case."

AMERICA REMEMBERS -- It is with great sadness, we learn the news that World War II veteran Pfc. Pasqual Reyes who helped liberate Italy and France from the Nazis with his 142nd Infantry, 36th Division has died. He was 96.

It was a cold, rainy September day when Pfc. Pasqual Reyes was taken captive in 1944.

Pfc. Reyes had fought his way through Belgium and into western Germany when new danger arose. His worn and wounded company kept pushing forward as the enemy advanced until a German officer in a tank told Reyes and two others to surrender or be fired upon and killed.

They were taken captive and loaded onto freight trains, shoulder-to-shoulder, unable to sit down or move for three days,” Reyes said.

“During that time, soldiers were wounded, some had died. There was no food or water for three days. They had even been hit by fighter pilots, not knowing it was a prisoner-of-war train.”

Reyes was taken to the Stalag 7A POW camp near Moosburg, where he stayed for nine months until the camp’s liberation. He remembered seeing U.S. Gen. George S. Patton with an ivory-handled pistol on his hip ramming the gates of the camp.

Until that day in 1945, his grandson said, “He just mentally kept positive and sharp, and gained the trust of the guards.”

After the camp’s liberation, some of Reyes’ colleagues were so malnourished their bodies couldn’t handle more food and other liquids. "After they got out, they introduced them to half a cup of eggnog,” Goodman said, “and it shocked them and they died."

LIFE AFTER THE WAR
Reyes’ daughter, Yvonne Reyes, remembers her father being unwilling to wait for a table at crowded restaurants growing up.

“How come we have to leave?” Yvonne recalled asking, “and my mom would say, ‘Because your dad was a prisoner of war, and they would make him stand in line for his food.’ … He did suffer quite a bit from being a prisoner of war, the PTSD.”

Reyes shared some of his experiences with fellow veterans at the VFW. “He told a couple of stories, and anytime he talked about it he broke down,” Goodman said. One of those stories: Shooting at machine gunners, then finding the enemy soldiers he had killed were very young – 13, 14 and 15 years old.

“It just tore him apart every time he saw it,” Goodman said.

He also endured the pain of losing a son to war: Ron Reyes’ father, Ronald, who was killed in Vietnam.

“He loved nothing more than the American flag flying high and proud above his house on his street in Madera,” his grandson said.

Despite the horrors Reyes lived through, his family and friends fondly remember him as a happy, positive man.

Reyes married Ramona in 1948. The couple had four children. He also had two sons from prior marriages. He lived in Hacienda Heights after the war and worked for a metal fabricator. After he retired from that work, he moved to Madera to be closer to his wife’s family and started his own trucking company. Reyes enjoyed camping trips and hosting family gatherings.

AMERICA REMEMBERS - It’s with a heavy heart, we share the news that PEARL HARBOR SUPERSTAR Mr. Delton E. “Wally” Walling has died. He was 98.

With the passing of each year, the number of servicemen and women who survived are shrinking as the greatest generation grows older.

Delton E. Walling was just 19 at the time. He was a communications officer in the Navy.

“I joined because I could see a war coming,” he said.

But when Walling tried to join up at 18 in Michigan, he almost wasn’t allowed in.

“They come over and grab that finger of mine. ‘Oh, you’re 4-F. Go home,’” Walling said.

Walling had broken his right middle finger while boxing.

“And I said, ‘Wait a minute. I can lick the whole bunch of you with one arm behind my back. What do I have to do to get in this great Navy?’” he said. “And they said, ‘Cut it off.’”

So he cut it off and he never looked back.

The morning of the attack, Walling said he started the day running 20 miles around Pearl Harbor. As a long-time boxer, he liked to stay in shape.

Along the way, he took a break at his station, stopping to climb the water tower on Ford Island where his shift was supposed to start hours later.

“I was up there because a man owed me some money,” he said. ”He was being transferred the next day. I knew I would never see him again.”

He collected his debt but soon he noticed a strange sound in the sky.

“The sky is full of planes, a roar of planes,” Walling recalls.

Walling, and most everyone else, figured it was American planes doing drills.

“And then the first bombs went off on the ramp at Ford Island. Now we know we’re in the attack,” he said.

Walling stayed in the Navy for the rest of the war, serving under every admiral at one point or another who was in the Pacific Ocean theater.

He now lives outside of Lockeford. For years, he attended and organized memorial services at Pearl Harbor in Hawaii up until this year.

“See, I’ve got cancer of the bone,” Walling said. “And I am on my way out.”

Walling has had cancer for 14 years but doctors told him three weeks ago that it’s spreading.

“So this is why I wanted to tell all this story right now because it’ll never be told again,” said Wally.

Wally’s family said he still pays for the flowers and wreaths to be changed at all the different memorials and cemeteries around Oahu. He says Dec. 7 is an important day to observe.

Last month, Wally said, “When I am gone, I only hope that Americans today will know what his generation sacrificed for future freedoms. After all, that’s what he’s been doing ever since Dec. 7, 1941.

RIP Wally. You will be missed but never forgotten.

AMERICA REMEMBERS – It is with great sadness, we learn the passing of World War II veteran Mr. George Thurman Perrine, of the Second Armored Division. He was age 95.

Born on Feb. 23, 1924, near Rowlesburg, W.Va., the oldest of eight children of the late George Thurman and Reda Florence (Long) Perrine.

George grew up in West Virginia, Kentucky and North Carolina. He was in the CCC, being in camps near Frederick and in Washington, D.C., prior to enlisting in the Army.

George was a World War II veteran, having served in a scout platoon of the Army's Second Armored Division (Hell on Wheels). He saw action in North Africa, Sicily, France, Belgium and Germany with Company. B 82nd Recon. Bn. 2nd Armored Division.

George was wounded three times, for which he received three Purple Hearts. After being discharged, he got married to the beautiful Mildred Florence Killius on Nov. 30, 1945. The couple had five children.

He worked for the United States Postal Service, most of the years serving as postmaster in the Mountain Lake Park office.

For the 70th anniversary of Normandy, George made the journey back to Europe to honor into those who made the ultimate sacrifice with The Greatest Generations Foundation. He made a deep impact on all he touched.

AMERICA REMEMBERS — One of the last Coast Guard veterans who survived Pearl Harbor has died. Bruce Atwater was 98.

After Bruce Atwater, a fresh-faced 20-year-old Coast Guardsman from Minnesota, survived one of the most devastating attacks on U.S. soil in 1941, he spent the remainder of his years rehashing memories of Pearl Harbor and his country’s unending perseverance and valor in a time of global turmoil.

Bruce Atwater was assigned to sweep out an officer’s recreation hall at the U.S. Navy base, Pearl Harbor, Hawaii. On the morning of December 07, 1941.

Although the Bemidji man had no idea at the time, what happened during that simple work detail would change his life. Atwater was sweeping up when he heard the roar of airplane engines overhead. As he ran outside the rec hall to investigate, Japanese warplanes on their way to Battleship Row flew directly overhead.

From a half mile away, he watched as those planes obliterated ship after ship. He saw the battleship Oklahoma overturn, and the U.S.S. Arizona explode when a bomb hit its ammunition stores. Although thousands of men were dying before his eyes, Atwater initially could do nothing to help them, as he was ordered to stay back.

“The loudspeaker system that connected the buildings told everybody to stay where you were, don’t try to go down in the harbor and help because you’ll only make matters worse,” Atwater, 92, recalled Friday at a local event to honor him at Affinity Plus Federal Credit Union.

Originally from Williams, Minn., Atwater was living in Canada when war broke out in Europe in 1939. To avoid the possibility of the 18-year-old Atwater being drafted into the Canadian armed forces, he came back to Minnesota. He worked as a lumberjack before restlessness set in and he joined the U.S. Coast Guard anyway in 1941.

He had been in the Coast Guard for six weeks and in Hawaii for three days when the Japanese attacked Pearl Harbor.

Tense hours

Ordered to stay back after the initial attack, Atwater spent several hours in the sick bay, helping tend to the hundreds of wounded men. He’s done his best to suppress the memory of those hours, he said.

“I have chosen to forget about most of that,” he said.

That morning’s attack was just the beginning of Pearl Harbor’s ordeal. Everyone expected the Japanese to follow the air attack with a ground invasion of Hawaii.

As night fell, Atwater and his fellow Coast Guardsmen were handed rifles and ammunition to aid in fending off the troops that never came. A flight of four American planes was mistaken for another wave of Japanese bombers, and Atwater watched the sky light up as they came under a hail of anti-aircraft fire. Two of the planes were shot down.

“I’ve never seen a fireworks display to equal it,” he said.

The next day’s dawn revealed Atwater and his compatriots probably would have done more damage to themselves than the enemy had the Japanese actually landed: the guns they had been given were still covered in cosmoline gel from storage.

“If you’d have fired them, you’d have blown your head off,” he said.

The soldiers and sailors at Pearl were still nervous days after the attack, Atwater remembered. None of the buildings had air conditioning, and you could go on the roof to stay cool - if you were willing to risk being shot at by trigger-happy guards.

Atwater often began his harrowing tale of Dec. 7, 1941 with a preface: Barely out of boot camp and assigned to sweep an officer’s recreation hall, he had been stationed in Hawaii for only three days when the warning from loudspeakers and the roar of warplanes signaled something was wrong on that quiet Sunday morning.

From a half mile away, Atwater watched as Japan attacked the U.S. Navy Base’s harbor. Initially ordered to stay back after the first attack, he spent several hours in the sick bay later that day, helping tend to hundreds of wounded men.

In 1946, after five years of service on both land and sea, Atwater was discharged and returned to Minnesota, where he enrolled at Bemidji State Teachers College and earned a Bachelor of Science, a Bachelor of Arts and a Master of Science.

For 30 years, Atwater taught English, speech and journalism at high schools in International Falls, Williams, Esko and Warroad. After retiring from teaching in 1980, Atwater and his wife, Ellen, returned to Bemidji.

AMERICA REMEMBERS — A distinguished RAF pilot Squadron Leader Bernard 'Max' Meyer who flew with Bomber Command during World War II has died at the age of 102.

Max is remembered as a war hero, who was awarded the Distinguished Flying Cross when he was just 21 years old, as a gentleman and a true friend.

Born on August 17, 1917, in Elm Grove, Worthing, where his grandmother, Minerva Henderson, ran a laundry. It was here that West Worthing Evangelical Church was founded in 1900 and Minerva then gave the funding for a purpose-built chapel in Rugby Road, which opened in 1912.

Max went to Steyne School and talked of enjoying rollerskating at The Kursaal and fishing off Worthing Pier as a boy. He then won a scholarship to Woodbridge School in Suffolk.

He had talked of joining the Rhodesia Police and also thought he might become a surgeon, as he was good with his hands, but he joined the RAF in 1937, having seen a recruitment poster in London.

He learned to fly Tiger Moths in Scotland and was with No. 144 Squadron at RAF Hemswell in Lincolnshire when war broke out.

Max was one of the first to fly the Handley Page Hampden bombers and due to the design of the plane, had to learn just by watching, before taking it up himself.

Jocelyn-Anne said: “There was room for only one person, so he was up there on his own. He said once, he was flying for nine hours solid and he was so stiff, they had to lift him out of the plane when he got back.”

His Canadian navigator, Pilot Officer William Tudhope, developed an ingenious way to heat up the cold meat pies they were regularly issued, by tying a them in a bag to the hot-air pipe used for heating the cabin.

In 1940, Max was recommended for the Distinguished Flying Cross by Air Vice Marshal Richard Harrison for his great courage and devotion to duty. He was later also awarded the DFC bar.

Jocelyn-Anne said: “When you think of the responsibility he had, and he was only 21. He had a natural aptitude for it and tenacity.”

By the time Max left the RAF in 1946, he had flown 62 missions and reached the rank of Wing Commander.

Max’s wife Merva, who he married in 1951, was in the Women’s Auxiliary Air Force and they met at an RAF party. They had four children, Michael, Penelope, Tina and Rachel.

Max worked with his cousin for six years before going back into the RAF in an administrative role, at a lower rank. He remained in the forces until he retired as Squadron Leader, working in the careers information service, in 1972.

Max then went to work at Bishop Luffa School in Chichester, were he was bursar until he retired in the early 1980s.

In retirement, he was involved with the Aircrew Association and was president of the West Sussex branch from 2002 onwards.

Jocelyn-Anne said: “The RAF was still a huge connection for him but it was difficult to get him to talk about it.”

She treasures the times she visited him in his shed, where he was often busy working on his Triumph Dolomite or growing tomatoes.

Max and Merva were regulars at the Royal Air Forces Association Club, in Ashacre Lane, Worthing, and had many friends. The couple were very close and were married for more than 65 years but, sadly, she died a week before his 100th birthday in 2017.

Max was looked after at Care for Veterans in the last three weeks of his life.

Jocelyn-Anne said: “He was really glad that they took him. He felt he would fit in there and he enjoyed his time there.”

AMERICA REMEMBERS – It is with a heavy heart we learn the passing of Mr. Robert Giguere, a veteran of D-Day (Normandy), Phillipanes, and Okinawa. He was 93.

In the twilight of his life, Robert Giguere, a Navy veteran who survived Omaha Beach on D-Day and later served in the Pacific Theater of World War II, prepared his own funeral arrangements -- including penning his own obituary.

He enlisted at the age of 17, with his mother's permission. One year later, on his 18th birthday, he awoke in an Army hospital in England covered in shrapnel with a bullet wound throbbing in his shoulder.

Four days earlier, Giguere rode across the choppy English Channel toward the Normandy coast with the Sixth Naval Beach Battalion. When his carrier grounded on the beach, a Teller mine detonated from beneath and tore through the ship's hull, killing several soldiers below deck.

Upon landing, his group but continued further inland where he eventually joined 16th Regimental Combat Team, 1st Infantry Division, who were moving in toward a ravine where the Germans were positioned.

After crawling under barbed wire through two ditches and a minefield, Giguere came upon a German pillbox. He tossed in five grenades and then a sixth, a smoke grenade, which provided a target for the massive weapons on the Allies' destroyers in the channel.

Giguere followed the Army soldiers deeper inland, to Coleville, where they came upon an old church. Giguere said a German sniper was set up in the steeple. The men fought their way into the lower level of the church, where they found a French family being held. Giguere spoke enough French to tell the family to get out before the church was knocked down.

Giguere returned to the beach to find the unit he had started the day with. He was speaking with Amin Isbir, an officer who had taken cover near a truck, when a German shell exploded near them, killing Isbir and knocking Giguere unconscious.

After a few weeks of recovering in the hospital, Giguere was sent home for a 30-day leave in Laconia. He then shipped west to California and on to Asia by way of Pearl Harbor.

Giguere participated in the invasion of the Philippines, and for two weeks, he was behind enemy lines to deliver supplies to Navajo code talkers in the mountains. Giguere then fought at Okinawa in April of 1945, where he was eventually shot in the foot. His service at Okinawa earned him a third Purple Heart, though it didn't come until many years later. More than three decades passed before the bullet was finally removed from his foot. Giguere kept the round in a jewelry box in his home.

Giguere was set to participate in the invasion of Japan, but the war ended before the attack. Two atomic bombs were dropped on the island, and the Japanese surrendered.

"The atomic bomb saved my life," he said.

He returned to Laconia in 1946 and took a job as a machinist at Scott & Williams. He raised a family with five children and was a 35-year volunteer with the Laconia Fire Department. He was an avid hunter and fisher and also enjoyed playing golf.

He never told his children much about his time in the war, but he revealed more and more as the years went on. Dennis joined his father on a trip to France for the 45th anniversary of D-Day in 1989. They went to Omaha Beach, and Giguere showed his son the pillbox he attacked with grenades.

During the visit, Giguere's stayed at a bed and breakfast where a group of Belgian men was also staying. They were dressed in U.S. Army uniforms, circa 1944, as a way to honor the veterans who were visiting. Dennis says that when these men learned a living veteran of D-Day was staying in the same place, "they treated him like a king."

As Giguere grew older, he began to make those arrangements so his family would know what to do when he passed. He told them he wanted to go to the Veterans Home in Tilton, what he called "The Soldiers Home," if he ever needed that level of nursing care.

Family surrounded Giguere in the days leading up to his death. He passed away early Monday morning. Dennis, who lives in Bow, received a call about 4 a.m. from his sister, who was staying overnight at the Veterans Home. He drove up and was there in time to see his father wheeled out of the home on a gurney with a U.S. flag draped over his body.

The 2nd, 6th, and 7th Naval Beach Battalions, attached to the U.S. Army Engineer Special Brigades, had the shared mission of signaling landing craft ashore and getting casualties off the beach. By the end of June 1944, 452,460 troops, 70,910 vehicles, and 289,827 tons of supplies were in northern France. As a result of expert Army and Navy aid on the beachhead and medical care during the Channel crossing, a majority of the 41,035 wounded Americans reaching England were in excellent condition. The mortality rate was 3/10 of 1%.

Giguere and the SIXTH Naval Beach Battalion was awarded the Bronze Service Arrowhead, the Croix de Guerre with Palm by the Provisional Government of France and the Presidential Unit Citation 22 August 2000 by the U.S. Army.

AMERICA REMEMBERS — The beautiful Anne Robson believed to be the oldest surviving female World War Two veteran in the United Kingdom has died at the age of 108.

Anne Robson, from Duns in the Scottish Borders, joined the Auxiliary Territorial Service in 1942.

The Women's Royal Army Corps Association (WRACA) described her as a "true pioneer" who was "fiercely independent".

It confirmed that Ms Robson - who was living in a care home in Edinburgh - died on Monday evening.

It is hoped a memorial service will be held in her honour towards the end of February.

Born Gladys Anne Logan MacWatt on 14 September 1911, Ms Robson trained as a physiotherapist before becoming a teacher.

She joined the ATS in 1942 and rose to the rank of senior commander (major) as an assistant inspector of physical training.

"I didn't join up right at the beginning of the war - I think it was a couple of years," she recalled in an interview in December 2018.

"They were starting a physical training wing for women.

"I went in as a private - I thought it was better if I was going to be an officer to know what went on underground."

However, she said she quickly became an officer.

"My first posting was London district - the bombing was still going on and I saw the first 'doodlebug' fall," she said.

"I didn't know what it was but I was looking out of the window and this thing came buzzing along and I had to suddenly dive down."

Ms Robson remained in service for two years after the war ended before working at the Avery Hill College of Education in London.

She got married in 1953 and moved to Newcastle where she took up the post of deputy head at the Longbenton Secondary Modern School.

'Very inspiring'

When her husband Jack died in 1972 she moved to St Andrews before moving into residential care in Edinburgh.

Ms Robson's niece - Katharine Trotter - said her aunt was always happy to talk about her wartime experience but "never bragged" about it.

"She was a very inspiring relative, " she said.

"Over the years she had her hardships but never once did I hear her complain.

"She retained her sense of humour - and I think that is one of the reasons she had so many visitors."

The WRACA added that it was "extremely proud" of the charity's association with Ms Robson.

AMERICA REMEMBERS — Sophie Yazzie, a WWII veteran and member of the Navajo Nation, dies at 105.

Yazzie, a member of the Navajo Nation, was born in 1914 in Canyon de Chelly, Arizona, and joined the US Army Air Corps when she was 28, Navajo Nation President Jonathan Nez and Vice President Myron Lizer said in a news release.

"On behalf of the Navajo people, we offer our thoughts and prayers for the family of the late Sophie Yazzie, a matriarch for her family and a warrior for our Navajo people who served our country with great honor and dignity.”

AMERICA REMEMBERS - It is with a heavy heart, we learn the news that World War II veteran Mr. Gurdon F. Bores has died. He was 95.

Born Jan. 17, 1925, in the little country home south of Norwalk on the corner of the west side of Ohio 61 and the south side of Settlement Road near St. Alphonsus Church.

Bores joined the U.S. Navy during World War II, serving from 1943 beyond June of 1946. He was trained to serve aboard a new amphibious landing assault ship (LSM) built in Houston. It was used for island hopping the Asiatic Pacific Islands. Gurdon served on this ship for over two years.

After 54 years, he was awarded a combat action ribbon, other ribbons, six battle stars and five medals from the U.S. Navy for his service as MOMM 2nd Class Navy Petty Officer.

Following discharge of the Navy, Gurdon returned to his old job at J.A. Dombart Machine Shop working for Mr. Dombart until he sold the Machine Shop and Force Factory in 1948 to Brooker Brothers of Cleveland. He then worked as a machinist for over seven years in Bellevue, Ohio, for the former, National Farm Machinery, Cock-Shutt Farm Machinery of Canada, and The Ohio Cultivator. He worked for over 28 years for the former G.M. New Departure-Hyatt in Sandusky. Gurdon retired after 46 years as a machinist.

Gurdon was a paid life member of the Knights of Columbus 1117, Third Degree, American Legion Post 547, VFW Post 2743, Moose Lodge of Norwalk 1248, USS LSM Association, United States Navy Memorial and UAW 913.

WORLD REMEMBERS — Last Battle of Britain 'ace' pilot Paul Farnes dies, leaving only two alive from 'The Few' who defended Britain against the Nazis' air attack in 1940.

Mr Farnes, a Hurricane pilot, was one of 3,000 Allied airmen who fought in the Battle of Britain and was the last surviving ace - a pilot who brought down five or more enemy aircraft.

His death means there are now only two surviving members of 'The Few', who repelled Hitler's Luftwaffe during the 1940 battle in the skies over southern England.

Mr Farnes was the only member of the group who was fit enough to attend the annual Memorial Day in July last year, just a week before his 101st birthday.

He was exceptionally proud to have been awarded the Distinguished Flying Medal, the highest honour for non-officers.

Mr Farnes joined the RAF volunteer reserve in 1938, and in July 1939 took the opportunity to spend six months with the regular RAF.

He then converted to Hurricanes and joined No 501 Sqaudron, based in Gloucestershire, on September 14.

He moved to Bétheniville in France with the squadron on May 10, 1940, and during the Battle of France he destroyed one aircraft, possibly destroyed a second and shared two more.

But that was simply a curtain raiser to his impressive tally that followed in the Battle of Britain.

His tally of six destroyed, one probably destroyed and six damaged during the battle led him to be awarded the Distinguished Flying Medal on October 22, 1940.

After being commissioned as an officer, he served as an instructor and fought in Malta with No 229 Squadron as well as serving in North Africa and Iraq.

As the war ended, he was in command of two squadrons in the UK. Remaining in the RAF until 1958, he retired as a squadron leader, retaining the rank of wing commander.

Mr Farnes later ran a hotel in Worthing, West Sussex. He leaves a daughter, Linda, and son, Jonathan. Another son, Nicholas, died in 1954.

Flight Lieutenant William Clark, 100, and Flying Officer John Hemingway, 100, are now the only surviving members of The Few.

AMERICA REMEMBERS – It is with great sadness; we announce the passing of World War II veteran Mr. Denman E. Wolfe who participated in Normandy DDAY invasion. He was 98.

As a 23-year-old private, Mr. Wolfe was one of thousands of American soldiers, and one of the elite Rangers, who waded ashore on D-Day to help secure Omaha Beach at Normandy.

Mr. Wolfe was assigned to the 5th Ranger Battalion, Company D and fought in four major battles of World War II including: Normandy, Battle for Brest, Battle of the Bulge and the Battle of Huertgen Forest where Mr. Wolfe was shot in the face.

In all, Wolfe spent 3 years, 11 months, and 21 days in Europe, fighting the Germans all the way.

He is one of last surviving member of the WWII U.S. Army Rangers to assault the beaches of Normandy in 1944.

One of the few remaining Navajo Code Talkers who used his language to confound the Japanese in World War II has died.

Joe Vandever Sr, was among hundreds of Navajos who served in the U.S. Marine Corps, transmitting messages using a code based on the Navajo language. The code developed by an original group of 29 Navajos was never broken.

Vandever enlisted in the Marines in Santa Fe, New Mexico, in March 1943 and was honorably discharged in January 1946. He worked multiple jobs after the war, including for an oil company and as a mining prospector, and stressed the importance of the Navajo language. He also was a medicine man.

Vandever is survived by a sister, several children, and dozens of grandchildren and great grandchildren. He had one great-great grandchild.

Vandever's wife of 73 years, Bessie, died last September.

He will be buried at the Santa Fe National Cemetery. Arrangements are pending.

Vandever's death leaves less than a handful of Navajo Code Talkers still alive.

Please consider supporting the mission of The Greatest GENERATIONS Foundation to help remember those who served.

It is with great sadness; we announce the passing of World War II veteran Mr. John Anderson McGlohon known for photographing Hiroshima atomic bomb strike. He was 96 years old.

John McGlohon, who worked for more than thirty years as a firefighter for Asheboro, North Carolina, was perhaps best known for his work as a photographer for a B-29 crew that had mistakenly flew over Hiroshima on Aug. 6, 1945, hours after the first nuclear bomb released during war time had exploded.
McGlohon, a U.S. Army Air Force sergeant at the time, had joined the Army Air Corp only a few months before Japan attacked Pearl Harbor in 1941, but it was his work and the photos he took toward the end of the war that immortalized his name in the history books.

In recounting the story about taking the photos, McGlohon said after a brilliant flash of light temporarily blinded the pilot and gunners, he turned on the cameras in his compartment located in the aft section of the B-29.
"We realized it was something different than we saw every day," he said.

McGlohon's photos were far different than other photographs that were taken of the historic event. Planes in the area had been instructed to stay at least 50 miles away from the city, however, through a communications mishap, McGlohon's crew did not receive the orders. That meant he and the rest of the crew happened to be closer than anyone else to the nuclear bomb when it was dropped on the city.

The photos he snapped that day are some of the few existing images of the Hiroshima bomb mushroom cloud. Three days after the bomb was dropped on Hiroshima, a second A-bomb was released over Nagasaki, which prompted the Japanese emperor to announce the country's surrender six days later.

After he finished serving his country, McGlohon says he never saw a print of the photos he shot over Hiroshima. He returned to his hometown of Asheboro, North Carolina, eventually volunteering for the Asheboro Fire Department, where he worked, rising up the ranks until he reached the rank of Fire Chief, a position he held for 24 years.

It is with great sadness, we share the news that World War II veteran Superstar Mr. Joe Demler, who was featured in Life magazine as POW, dies at 94.

Joe Demler, whose harrowing World War II experience as a prisoner of war was featured in Life Magazine in 1945, and who went on to a long, rewarding life in Port Washington, died Wednesday night.

Demler was captured in December 1944 by the German army during the Battle of the Bulge. When he was liberated more than four months later, he had lost 90 pounds from his 5-foot-7, 160-pound frame.

A photo of a skeletal Demler appeared in a 1945 Life magazine article after his POW camp was liberated.

Demler recalled in a 2015 Milwaukee Journal Sentinel article how he and other POWs were forced to march many miles during the cold winter of 1944-’45 and repair railroad tracks while being bombed and strafed by Allied planes.

Prisoners had “no control over your destiny to know what’s going to happen to you," Demler said at the time. "You don’t know what to expect. At one time the talk was (Adolf) Hitler was going to kill all of us,” he said.

What helped Demler cope was meeting other prisoners of war captured after him who brought heartening news of Allied troops moving steadily toward Berlin, he said. Demler knew he only had to hold out a little longer.
“You always look forward to living. That’s what kept you alive,” Demler said “You prayed and you thought positively all the time.”

Demler had turned 19 on Dec. 7, 1944, and his unit, K Company, 137th Infantry Regiment, 35th Infantry Division, was sent to fight in the Bulge the day after Christmas. He attended Christmas services outdoors as a chaplain stood on a jeep hood for Mass, Demler's thoughts drifting to his family and friends home in Port Washington celebrating the holiday.

While the Germans proved to be a formidable foe, soldiers also fought brutal cold and heavy snow.

Demler had only his clothing, rifle and ammunition.

"We were moving, but the weather was so bad," he said in 2015. "The snow was up to your hips. It was the coldest winter in Europe. I'm glad I had my overcoat."
Demler used his overcoat as a blanket, sleeping on floors of buildings captured from the Germans.

For Demler, the Battle of the Bulge came to an end on the night of Jan. 4 when a German Panzer IV tank fired a shot through a stone building where he was acting as a lookout on the second floor. The impact launched Demler from the floor into the ceiling. Two companies of American soldiers, more than 300 including Demler, were captured, interrogated and packed into train cars to a prisoner of war camp.

The Germans took Demler's weapon, ammunition and rations. His overcoat, the one thing that had kept him alive during the bitter cold, was burned at his POW camp because of lice.

Each day 10 men shared one pound of cheese and a loaf of German rye bread made mostly of sawdust. Demler rapidly lost weight. As more American POWs arrived, Demler learned the war would likely end soon. On the day he was liberated in April 1945, Demler weighed only 70 pounds.
A Life photographer embedded with liberation troops snapped Demler's photo, published a short time later in the popular magazine. Doctors estimated he would have likely died within three days had the war not ended when it did.

Despite Demler's emaciated condition, he was one of the lucky ones. American casualties during the five-week Battle of the Bulge numbered almost 90,000, including 19,000 killed.

It took Demler months to regain his strength before he returned home to Port Washington, where he worked at the post office for 37 years, rising to assistant postmaster before retiring in 1982. He raised three children with his wife, Therese.
"You can't have a defeated attitude. That's why I'm alive," said Demler, who never returned to Germany. "Every day I think about it. It never goes away."

It is with great sadness, we learn the passing of Mr. Frank Hernandez, member of the U.S. Army during World War II veteran and POW with the 83rd Division has died. He was 94.

A retired cabinetmaker, Frank Hernandez was drafted in December of 1943 into the U.S. Army while living in his native California. He was 18.

"I was a rifleman all the way through," recalls the soldier, who rose to the rank of corporal by war's end.

With the war well under way, the young soldier was initially sent to England, then to Normandy as a member of the 83rd Infantry Division, dubbed the "Thunderbolt Division." He was among the replacements for those lost during the D-Day invasion on June 6, 1944.

His first major battle was "Operation Cobra," which included fighting in the hedgerows of Carentan, France.

"They kept shelling us," he says. "We would go into our foxholes. But a mortar shell landed near me before I could take cover."

Shrapnel sliced into his leg and hip. The concussion temporarily rendered him deaf.

"The medics picked me up with a stretcher and were carrying me away when another shell came down on us," he says. "They just dropped me and took cover.

"I lay there praying," he adds. "I was always praying, you know. I think maybe the prayers kept me alive."

He was picked up again and taken to a field hospital tent, where he underwent surgery. He was then sent back to England, where he spent two months recuperating in a hospital in Bristol.

"I started walking again and one day went over to the servicemen's club," he says. "They had a jukebox playing Glenn Miller swing music. I asked one of the girls if she wanted to jitterbug. We started jitterbugging, and one of my doctors saw me. He said I was going back on duty.

"I guess I was jitterbugging a little too good," adds the veteran, who remains an accomplished ballroom dancer to this day.

He was sent back to the front lines, this time to Germany with the 82nd Airborne Division, where he fought in the Battle of Hurtgen Forest.

From there, he was deployed to Belgium, where he fought in the Battle of the Bulge in December of 1944 and into the following January.

Then it was back to Germany, where his unit took the cities of Duren and Rhineland.

Early in April of that year, he and seven other soldiers were bivouacked in an old house not far from Berlin. While the rest slept in the basement, two soldiers stood guard.

"All of a sudden about 5 o'clock in the morning, I heard some noises outside," he says. "I got up and looked and saw we were surrounded by German soldiers. Our two guards were gone."

Hernandez, who knew a little German, went out to meet the Germans after they demanded the Americans exit the house.

"I went out, and the commander told this young soldier to shoot me," he says. "He took me out to the side of the building. I dropped down on my knees and started praying."

Just then the other Americans came out with their hands up. The German commander then barked an order for all of them to be taken to Stalag 11-A.

"I remember marching through the town and people beating on us," he says. "Our bombers had been bombing them, flattening their buildings. They were getting even."

Upon arriving in the POW camp, the newly minted prisoners were interrogated.

"When they started interrogating me, asking me about my outfit, I told them, 'I no speak English good,' " he recalls with a chuckle. "I told them, 'I am a Mexican. I am from Mexico.' That got me out of the interrogation."

For the next six weeks, he was a POW sitting out the war.

"We didn't have hardly anything to eat," he says. "We were really hungry."

But the war was coming to an end. Americans in trucks soon liberated them as the camp guards fled.

"We were in an airplane to Normandy when we heard over the radio that the war (in Europe) was over," he says of May 8, 1945. "We were very happy to hear that."

Hernandez returned to France on the 50th anniversary of the Battle of Normandy in 1994, where the veteran received the French Gold Medal for his efforts to liberate that country during the war.

It is with great sadness; we learn the news that the beautiful Mr. Gene Higham, World War II veteran Tank Driver in Europe has died. Gene was 96.

Drafted in 1942, at 19 years of age, Mr. Higham traded his position as a coal truck driver in southeastern Ohio for that of a Sherman Tank for the 736th Battalion, 8th Armored Division, U.S. Ninth Army, Europe.

Chosen as a tank driver because he had operated heavy coal moving equipment, Mr. Higham’s life was placed on hold for his country. But Mr. Higham was more than just a driver of a Sherman Tank — he recorded the battalion’s history on a portable typewriter. He was driver and secretary for the battalion commander, Lt. Col. Ritchie.

The 736th trained at Camp Bouse, Arizona — site of the Canal Defense Light — a developmental, top secret weapon that was never deployed. It was designed to illuminate enemy positions with 13 million candle power, nicknamed GIZMO by the troops.

On March 31, 1944, the 736th departed for Europe, crossing the Atlantic in an unescorted troop transport. Mr. Higham refers to this as one of the most harrowing experiences of the war stating that the crossing was “… the scariest thing I experienced … to that point in my life.” Battling constant seasickness, Mr. Higham was on call to be present for all meetings held by senior officers.

On June 6, 1944, D-Day, the battalion was anchored off of Utah Beach, later landing on that fateful day. As Mr. Higham drove the lead tank, the 736th made its way across Northern Europe as the battalion engaged in several major conflicts - including: The Campaign of Northern France; the Ardennes Campaign — better known as the Battle of the Bulge; the Rhineland Campaign; and the Battle of Central Europe.

The battalion would receive 106 Purple Hearts, 90 Bronze Stars, two Oak Leaf Cluster to Bronze Stars, 14 Silver Stars, one Soldier’s Medal, and one Meritorious Unit Plaque. The battalion lost by killed in action, 26 men; slightly wounded in action, 58 men; seriously wounded in action, 17 men; died from wounds, two men.

In early April of 1945, as the tanks rolled into the Munich — a bastion of NAZI support — the Wehrmacht was weakened but also desperate and continued to put forth an intense resistance, deploying hit and run tactics. Mr. Higham refers to the last three days of the war as being very intense, with 72 hours of nonstop combat.

As the driver for the battalion commander, “… I didn’t do any of the shooting. I didn’t want to do the shooting. Think of it … little kids you’d be shooting, women you’d be shooting and this bothered me.” Mr. Higham recalled the “stench of flesh” during this intense combat. He then grew quiet.

In December 1946, he arrived in New York City with two other servicemen. All three men, needing to travel to Ohio, used the little cash they had to entice a cabbie to drink with them. Refusing to drive the men to Ohio — for obvious reasons — the men placed the intoxicated cabbie in the back of his own vehicle and proceeded to drive to Ohio. Waking up in Ohio, the cab driver was not only surprised but would discover he had lost his job upon returning to New York City. Weeks later, the three men would return to New York City, visit the very same cab company, pay the fare and convince the dispatcher to reinstate the cab driver whom they had taken to Ohio.

He left his ordinary life behind — served — then returned home to continue that life. Unlike today’s volunteer army, many servicemen during World War II, once drafted, served for the duration.

Married for 51 years, he and Helen raised three children: Daniel, Ronald and Paulette. As an employee for Macomber Steel from 1947-1972, Mr. Higham worked on the construction of the National Football Hall of Fame in Canton, Ohio. Macomber Steel would relocate Mr. Higham to Fort Myers in 1972, where he worked for its subsidiary, Romac Steel, located on Crystal Avenue. He helped build Lely High School. He loved softball and helped develop the Lee County Parks and Recreation 50-Plus softball league, which was initially played at the Terry Park complex.

The 736th was one of many decorated tank battalions. For several years, many former tankers gathered in Tennessee for a yearly reunion. However, as these numbers have dwindled, the reunions are now thing of the past.

Legendary Soviet World War II Veteran, Mr. Aleksey Botyan who saved Krakow, Poland from Nazi dies days after turning 103.

A Soviet World War II veteran credited with saving the Polish city of Krakow from devastation has died in Moscow. His biography reads like a thriller novel, from battling Nazi invaders in Poland to training elite commandos in the 1980s.

Over his long life, Aleksey Botyan was many things. He was born in 1917, just as the Russian Empire was collapsing and shattering into pieces. His family lived in the territory that became part of Poland in the 1920s.

FIGHTING SINCE DAY ONE
He might have lived as a village schoolteacher – his first choice of career – but in 1939 he was conscripted into the Polish Army just in time to face the Nazi German invasion. As an air defense non-commissioned officer, he spent the first days of World War II shooting at Junker warplanes.

Later, Botyan’s unit fled east and surrendered to the Red Army. The man escaped captivity and returned to his home village. Being a fugitive from the law in Stalin’s Soviet Union ended badly for many, but not for Botyan, who instead was enrolled into state security just a month before the Nazis invaded the USSR in June 1941.

Trained as a saboteur and clandestine operations expert, Botyan cut his teeth in intelligence, raiding German supply lines during the desperate battle for Moscow. After 1943 he was a deep cover agent, coordinating partisan forces in Ukraine, Belarus, Czechoslovakia and Poland.

KRAKOW UNDAMAGED
Poland is where some of Botyan’s most publicized operations took place, like the four-hour raid on the town of Ilza. The operation, by Soviet-friendly Polish resistance forces from the People’s Army, succeeded in freeing many captives and ransacking German stores for crucial supplies. But Botyan’s crowning achievement happened near Krakow in January 1945.

The southern Polish city has the distinction of surviving the German occupation virtually unscathed. Unlike many other places in Poland and elsewhere, it didn’t see intensive street battles. Retreating Nazis didn’t even bother to demolish historic monuments or strategic sites.

The official Soviet explanation for this turn of events was that the Red Army conducted a lightning offensive towards Krakow and didn’t leave the Nazis time to lay waste to the city. The current prevailing Polish point of view is that the Nazis had no intention of damaging Krakow, which its propaganda declared an ancient German city.

FLOODING AVERTED
The retreating Nazis blew up a few bridges across the Dunajec and closed the Roznow Dam. The latter could have been followed with a devastating strike against the city; once enough water had accumulated, the dam would be demolished, causing a massive wave which would tear down Krakow. Botyan and his men are credited with thwarting the man-made disaster.

The partisan network under Botyan’s command learned where explosives required for such a large demolition work were stockpiled and staged a daring attack on the place. It was an old castle in Nowy Sacz, a city southeast of Krakow, which was obliterated just before the advance units of the Red Army reached the area. Botyan was awarded Russia’s highest title – Hero of Russia – for that operation in 2007.

LEGEND AND FICTION
Botyan’s wartime endeavors, after they were declassified in the 1960s, provided inspiration for writer Yulian Semyonov. His book ‘Major Whirlwind’ and its screen adaptation tell the story of a small group of intelligence agents sent behind enemy lines to prevent mass demolitions in Krakow. The titular character is partially based on Botyan, while aspects of the plot were inspired by his actual work.

His subsequent service in Soviet intelligence is far less publicized. Botyan had a long string of clandestine deployments in Czechoslovakia and Western Germany, and he was involved in teaching sabotage techniques to the elite Vympel commando unit. He retired from active service as a colonel in 1983 but kept in touch with the special services as a civilian consultant.

He passed away today, just three days after marking his 103rd birthday.

It is with great sadness, we learn the news that Pearl Harbor survivor Mr. Frank Wasniewski has died. He was 100.

Wasniewski was stationed with the 98th Coast Artillery at Schofield Barracks, some 35 minutes north of Pearl Harbor, but that fateful day he had traveled to the Navy yard to pick up ammunition.

A member of “the greatest generation,” Wasniewski was drafted March 26, 1941 and had planned to serve a year. He was sent near Japan after the attack on Pearl Harbor and served four and a half years.

Wasniewski always considered himself lucky to come home alive. “It was brutal,” he said.

“Frank Wasniewski was a true American hero who stood tall in our country’s darkest hour, and stood by his fellow veterans here at home,” said County Executive Tom DeGise.

“We mourn Frank’s passing with his family, his friends, and his fellow vets, knowing that while our hearts are heavy now, they will be full of pride always that Frank Wasniewski called Hudson County his home.”

After the war, Wasniewski worked as a trailer-truck driver for the United State Postal Service for many years before retiring. He was a member of the Pearl Harbor Survivors Association and a parishioner of St. Joseph R.C. Church.

World War II combat legend Mr. Luke Gasparre dies at age 95.

At the young age of 18, Gasparre trained to become a soldier and was assigned to the 87th Infantry Division that was tasked with breaking through the German lines. He fought in the Battle of the Bulge, which was the highest casualty operation by the end of World War II.

“At one point he was in combat for five straight months,” Astoria civic leader Antonio Meloni said during a ceremony honoring Gasparre in 2014.

Following the war, Gasparre returned to Astoria having earned seven medals including the Bronze Star and Purple Heart. He worked for the postal service for 34 years and to make ends meet he took a job as an usher for the Mets for 55 years, the most ever in the Mets organization.

“Luke held a special place in our Mets family. He served as an usher for parts of six decades and was a decorated World War II veteran who wore his Purple Heart and Bronze Star on his usher’s uniform,” the Mets said in a statement.

“So many of our fans knew him as he always welcomed everyone with open arms and a friendly conversation. He will be missed by many and we send our heartfelt condolences to all his family and friends.”

Gasparre was also a ticket taker and usher at the U.S. Open for more than 40 years. He became the longtime leader of the Tamiment Democratic Club and various other civic groups.

Former City Council Speaker Peter Vallone, Sr., who represented Astoria for more than three decades, put Gasparre on the City Planning Commission “because of his brilliant mind,” and Gasparre was a longtime member of Community Board 1.

He was married to his late wife, Madeline, for 66 years and they had a family of three children, five grandchildren and four great-grandchildren.

It is with great sadness, we share the news that AMERICAN SUPERSTAR Donald Stratton, survivor of Pearl Harbor attack on USS Arizona, dies at 97.

Stratton's family posted on Facebook that he passed away peacefully in his sleep in the company of his wife, Velma, and his son, Randy.

"We are profoundly sad to say that last night, February 15, Donald passed away peacefully in his sleep surrounded by his wife of nearly 70 years, Velma, and his son Randy. One of Donald's final wishes was that people remember Pearl Harbor and the men aboard the USS Arizona. Share their story and never forget those who gave all for our great country." the post read.

Stratton was just 19 years old on Dec. 7, 1941 when the Japanese attacked the U.S. Pacific fleet. The USS Arizona, where Stratton was stationed as a seaman first class, took a direct hit with a bomb detonating in an ammunition storage area directly below Stratton’s battle station. Stratton managed to pull himself through the flames to safety, suffering burns to more than two-thirds of his body.

Among many other accomplishments in his long life, Stratton also became a New York Times bestselling author with his book "All the Gallant Men."

Stratton is survived by his wife, four children, and 13 grandchildren.

It is with great sadness, we share the news that American World War II veteran who piloted one of the search planes that located the Japanese fleet before the Battle of Midway, has died. Mr. Irvin Sullivan was 102.

December 7th, 1941: it was a day Veteran Irvin Sullivan will never forget.

"We heard on the radio live Roosevelt's day of infamy speech. Then I was commissioned in January of '42 as a naval aviator," says Irvin Sullivan.

Sullivan knew this mission would be a high calling on his life.

"The draft board sent me a letter that said greetings: on the 21st of February you will report. So I hurried up and the doctor got me ready and I was sworn into the navy."

He piloted one of the search planes that located the Japanese fleet before the Battle of Midway and led the way for his squadron.

"It was new years eve. At midnight he pulled the bombs and we were the first one to bomb the Japanese in '42."

When the war ended, his life's greatest reward...was back home, waiting for him.

"I came home and married my gal from newton Kansas"

"71 years..never had a cuss word or a shove or a push or anything I can honestly say that. She was perfect."

With deep sadness we learn that, Mr. Arnold Forrester, the last surviving World War II veteran depicted in an iconic photo of the bloody Kokoda Track campaign has died in Australia.

Key points:

• Arnold Forrester was one of six soldiers captured in a photograph by award-winning war cinematographer Damien Parer, on the Kokoda Track in 1942

• He celebrated his 100th birthday in August 2019 and outlived the other men in the photo

• As a younger man he did not discuss the war or participate in Anzac Day, but when the photo resurfaced he felt pride in reliving the legend of the historic campaign.

Short Memoire: Arnold Forrester was in his early 20s when he joined the fabled 39th Infantry Battalion and was one of the last surviving members of the group.

Untrained and under-equipped, Mr Forrester was a company runner during battles against the Japanese on the Kokoda Track in Papua New Guinea in 1942.

More than 600 Australian troops died.

Margi Pavlovic, one of his four children, said she was glad she visited him at his Townsville nursing home on Sunday morning before he suffered a suspected cardiac arrest.

Mr Forrester outlived the other veterans in a photo captured by award-winning war cinematographer Damien Parer.

The group of six are depicted smiling and carrying rifles as they trudge through the muddy track after a battle at Isurava.

It has been printed in history textbooks and displayed at war memorials.

"It's an end of an era. Every year that photo surfaced," Mrs Pavlovic said.

Mrs Pavlovic said the 'lost' photo resurfaced when her husband was looking through Mr Forrester's 'special tins' of war relics.

"We didn't talk about his time in the war or the army at all as children," Mrs Pavlovic said.

"He didn't do Anzac Day … it was just sort of like buried and forgotten.

"That photo has created so much bringing out of history.

"Dad then started to talk about the people in the photo, his mates, and he sort of relived everything once that photo was brought back to life."

Mrs Pavlovic said her father carried the photo with him on Anzac Day marches in recent years.

"He was just very proud of [the photo] — that was mateship," Mrs Pavlovic said.

"Even though it was a terrible battle, that was the biggest thing in his life."

She said her father had faith the younger generations would carry the Kokoda Track legend on.

It is with profound sadness; we share the news that Normandy DDAY veteran Mr. Albert Rose as died. He was 96.

Albert Rose served his country honorably in the U.S. Army during WWII, receiving numerous commendations and medals. He was a member of the First Engineer Special Brigade Amphibious and participated in the invasion of Normandy, landing on Utah Beach on June 6, 1944.

He also was a survivor of the Exercise Tiger tragedy in the English Channel in April 1944.

Albert Rose returned to Normandy for the 49th, 60th, and 65th D-Day Anniversaries. This past June 2019, he returned to Normandy with his son, Patrick, to participate in the 75th Anniversary of D-Day.

After the war, Albert Rose was a machinist by trade, retiring from Precision Custom Components, formerly known as the S. Morgan Smith Company and Allis Chalmers.

Since 1985, Albert Rose has volunteered at the York History Center for the Library/Archives Department. He has spent the last 15 years researching, photographing, and cataloging all of the war memorials in York County.

With a heavy heart, we announce the passing of Pearl Harbor survivor and World War II SUPERSTAR, Mr. Emery J. Arsenault. He was 99.

Born in New Bedford MA in 1921 and was raised in Dennisport, MA. He was the husband of the late Lauretta Doucette Arsenault who passed away in 2002.

Emery leaves three daughters and their husbands Anne Marie and William Mullen, Louise and Donald Best, Laura and Kevin Connolly. He will be missed by his grandchildren Amy Best, Kate King, Philip Best, Lisa Costantiello, Michelle Abbott, Elizabeth Mullen and Marie Bylund. He had nine great grandchildren Matthew, Lilly, Allyssa, Dylan, Gavin, Aaron, Henry, Chloe and Harper. He was predeceased by his sister Alice Sentowski and brothers Hector, Robert, Gerald, and William Arsenault.

Emery joined the US Army at the age of 18 and served in Hawaii. He was one of the few remaining survivors of the attack on Pearl Harbor in 1941. Through the generosity of The Greatest Generation Foundation he was fortunate to be able to return to Honolulu several times to be honored with other veterans on December 7, Pearl Harbor Day. He moved to Lynn, MA after his discharge from the army and it was there he met and married his wife Lauretta. They were parishioners at the former St Jean Baptiste Church in Lynn until its closing. Emery was also a member of the Franco American Amvets Post 161.

It is with great sadness, we learn the news that Australian World War II veteran Mr. Dick Payten, combat soldier of bloody New Guinea battlefields defending Australia against Japanese invasion.

Born in Dubbo, New South Wales. Dick Payten was sent to the Middle East in 1941 in the in his early 20s, he was sent by the Australian Army to New Guinea. Many of his mates were little more than boys when struck down by enemy fire. Some are buried in a foreign land, near where they fell. He has never forgotten them and their sacrifice, and today, we will never forget the legend Mr. Dick Payten.

You will be remembered and revered always for you were part of something truly wonderful. You stood in the path of one of the greatest forces of evil this world has ever seen and you and your brothers in arms said, "this far, no further". And with God on your side you men stopped the onslaught. This world owes you all a debt of gratitude.

Rosalind P. Walter, the First ‘Rosie the Riveter,’ Dies at 95.

Rosalind Palmer Walter — friends called her Roz, not Rosie — was born on June 24, 1924, in Brooklyn, one of four children of Carleton and Winthrop (Bushnell) Palmer. Her mother was a professor of literature at Long Island University.

Rosalind P. Walter grew up in a wealthy and genteel Long Island home. Yet when the United States entered World War II, she chose to join millions of other women in the home-front crusade to arm the troops with munitions, warships and aircraft.

She worked the night shift driving rivets into the metal bodies of Corsair fighter planes at a plant in Connecticut — a job that had almost always been reserved for men. A newspaper column about her inspired a morale-boosting 1942 song that turned her into the legendary Rosie the Riveter, the archetype of the hard-working women in overalls and bandanna-wrapped hair who kept the military factories humming.

The family settled in Centre Island, a village in the town of Oyster Bay on Long Island’s North Shore. Its 400 or so well-heeled residents have since included the singer Billy Joel, the lyricist Alan Jay Lerner and the media mogul Rupert Murdoch.

Her parents sent Rosalind to the Ethel Walker School in Simsbury, Conn., one of the first college preparatory boarding schools for upper-class women.

By the time she graduated, Europe was at war, and after the attack on Pearl Harbor in 1941 spurred the United States to declare war on Japan, Germany and Italy, she was recruited, at 19, as an assembly line worker at the Vought Aircraft Company in Stratford, Conn.

Her story caught the attention of the syndicated newspaper columnist Igor Cassini, who wrote about her in his “Cholly Knickerbocker” column. And that, in turn, inspired the songwriters.

Ms. Walter was not the only Rosie the Riveter. There were at least four other women who became models for the character as the War Production Board sought to recruit more women for the military factories.

Norman Rockwell drew his version of Rosie for the cover of the May 29, 1943, issue of The Saturday Evening Post — a grimy-faced, muscular woman in denim overalls, work goggles perched on her forehead and a copy of Hitler’s Mein Kampf trampled underfoot. His model was a Vermont woman, Mary Doyle Keefe, who died in 2015.

And J. Howard Miller drew a Rosie poster for Westinghouse war factories. He portrayed her in a red and white polka dot bandanna as she flexed a bicep under the words “We Can Do It!” The image became a feminist symbol starting in the 1980s, reprinted on T-shirts and coffee mugs. The model for that Rosie was most likely Naomi Parker Fraley, a California waitress who died in 2018.

So Rosalind Walter cannot alone claim the crown of being the real Rosie the Riveter. But she was there first.

It is with great sadness, we learn that Mr. John Robert Schaffner, veteran of the 589th Field Artillery Battalion, 106th Division has died. He was 95.

Beloved husband of the late Lillian Schaffner for 71yrs. (nee Schlutz); Devoted father of Robert Schaffner and his Wife Barbara, Jeanne Buchanan and her Husband Richard, Paul Schaffner and his wife Carol; Also survived by 7 Grandchildren and 9 Great-Grandchildren.

The Battle of the Bulge broke the back of the Third Reich during World War II. The bloody battle was fought in the dead of winter. The weather was brutal and so was the fighting. Historians say more than 89,000 American soldiers were killed, wounded, captured or missing. German losses were even higher. A local soldier from Cockeysville had a ringside seat for the battle.

Private First-Class John Schaffner was a scout for the 589th Field Artillery Battalion of the 106th Infantry Division. On the morning of December 16th, 1944 Schaffner was sitting behind a .50 caliber machine gun in a foxhole at the edge of the Ardennes, a heavily forested strip of land along the border between Germany and Belgium.

“Before daylight, about 5:30 a.m. or quarter til six, artillery shells began to fall into our position,” said Schaffner. Being somewhat exposed, Shaffner got down into a little depression where the machine gun was set up, “and more or less crawled into my helmet,” said Schaffner.

A half-hour later, the barrage lifted and Schaffner called the battery commander and tried to get some information about what was going on, but nobody in the rear where the battalion’s 105mm howitzers were dug in knew anything.

“There seemed to be a lot of confusion,” recalled Schaffner as he sat in a rocker in his “war room” at his home in Cockeysville surrounded by memorabilia from World War II.

Outnumbered two to one in men and machines, American units were ordered to fall back in the face of the overwhelming German attack. Schaffner and a buddy were given a bazooka and six rocket rounds and told to cover the battalion’s retreat.

Outnumbered two to one in men and machines, American units were ordered to fall back in the face of the overwhelming German attack. Schaffner and a buddy were given a bazooka and six rocket rounds and told to cover the battalion’s retreat.

“We knew we were in deep doo-doo,” laughed Schaffner and he pointed to a painting of the hair-raising moment that hangs on the wall near his rocking chair. Schaffner picked up his field telephone and whispered to the battery commander, “We have Germans on the road in front of us. What should we do?”

Schaffner and his buddy were told to keep their heads down, because some quad-fifties, four .50 caliber machine guns mounted on lightly armored half-tracks were going to sweep the road with gunfire.

On December 23, Schaffner says German tanks and infantry attacked enforce. They pounded “Parker’s Crossroads,” the key crossroads named for Major Arthur Parker, the battery commander. At that point, Schaffner and 20 t0 30 survivors used a herd of milk cows as cover and escaped the carnage at the crossroads.

Although Schaffner was awarded the Belgian Medal of Honor and written up in twelve books about the Battle of the Bulge, he doesn’t consider himself a hero.

The 95-year-old veteran says he was saved by the Grace of God. At the end of the interview for Veterans Voices, Schaffner showed WDVM his uniform that he keeps in a garment bag in his garage.

“The only things that fit are the socks,” chuckled Schaffner and he struggled to put his uniform jacket on.

It is with great sadness, we learn that Pearl Harbor survivor Arleigh Birk Dies. He was 98.

The sound of a three-volley salute echoed through the streets of Gilbert today to Remember Pearl Harbor survivor Arleigh Birk.

Birk is from Hoyt Lakes and on this day in 1941, served on the USS Honolulu in Pearl Harbor when the Japanese attacked.

He personally saw the bomb that sank the battleship Arizona nearby. 77 years later, the number of Pearl Harbor survivors has dwindled. Birk says so few are left that the survivor association newsletter called the Gram is no longer published.

December 7, 1941 found Birk part of a gun crew on the cruiser Honolulu in Pearl Harbor Hawaii.

“I was going to take pictures and I got halfway down the gangway.”

That’s when Birk noticed the Japanese attack and ran back to his battle station. The Honolulu quickly started returning fire. Birk’s ship was nearly hit by a bomb but reported no casualties when the attack was over.

Birk continued serving in the Navy until American victory in 1945. Today, just two months shy of his 99th birthday, he still lives at home and travels four miles a day to visit his wife Marion at her nursing home.

Arleigh Birk represents the last survivors of those who represent the greatest generation and the sacrifice and efforts those folks put in to ensure our freedom.

The beautiful Mr. James Douglas Jones, reported to be one of the oldest World War II veterans in the United States, has died at age of 106.

Born on Dec. 6, 1913, Mr. Jones was the son of the late James Jones and Rebecca Durham Jones. Known as “Douglas” and “Doug,” he spent many days growing up working on the family farm, and he attended Warren County schools. He also joined Jones Chapel Missionary Baptist Church, where he remained a member for many years.

As a young adult, Mr. Jones moved to Camden, N.J., where he worked with the railroad for many years.

Mr. Jones enlisted into World War II and served with the United States Navy in the Pacific during 1944 and was honorably discharged in 1945.

James Douglas Jones is remembered by family and friends for his service to his country, and the wisdom and example he provided. Mr. Jones married the former Priscilla Henderson, and they had a daughter, Beatrice Jones. Priscilla died shortly after Beatrice was born, leaving Mr. Jones as a single father to raise his daughter.

He went on to work as a maintenance engineer at Mt. Vernon Hospital and to marry the former Bernice Thorpe. The couple had a daughter, Servietta Jones-Hameed. In the 1980s, the Joneses moved to Warrenton for retirement and to enjoy their Golden Years. Bernice preceded her husband in death.

Mr. Jones married the former Sadie Steverson Alston on Nov. 28, 1998. The Joneses often worshipped together, and Douglas sang in the choirs at St. Stephen Missionary Baptist Church. Sadie preceded her husband in death.

The reaper will take the WW II vets and then the Korea vets and then the Vietnam Vets..All we leave behind is our service to our country and a good legacy of service

A dear friend of the Collings Foundation and WWII veteran Frank Tedesco passed away on February 29, 2020 at the age of 99. Born and raised in Weymouth, Frank graduated from Weymouth High School. He went on to further his education, by receiving a Bachelor’s degree from the University of Nebraska.

Frank proudly served his country in the United States Army Air Corps during WW II as a B24 Liberator Pilot. Over the years, he received many awards for his military service, most recently in May of 2019, Frank was awarded a high medal of honor, the Legion D’Honneur for his service alongside France, during WW II. Before retirement, Frank worked for many years as an Aircraft Engineer for General Electric.
He spent countless hours volunteering: building the Spirit of Massachusetts in Boston, restoring a B24J Liberator with the Collings Foundation, in Stow, MA and public speaking educating the public on events of WW II. Frank’s passion for photography was evident by his numerous features in publications. On the weekends, he loved to sing and perform at clubs and piano bars. Frank frequented the Wings of Freedom tour and the Collings Foundation's living history events over many years. He was always the epitome of "The Greatest Generation."

Frank was a kind, selfless, and loving man who cared for his family. He will be deeply missed by all who were blessed to have known him.

World War II Veteran Wilbur Richardson dies at 97

Wilbur Richardson offered up his life for his country 30 times during World War II and spent the rest of it serving the communities in which he lived.

Wilbur Richardson was born in Long Beach on Nov. 17, 1922. Mr. Richardson enlisted in the Army Air Corps and at the age of 21, flew 30 missions in 79 days sitting in a ball turret of a four-engine B17 bomber. Two of those missions were on D-Day. He was a member of the 331st Bomb Squadron, 94th Bomb Group.

Wilbur Richardson was wounded on his 30th mission, over Munich in July 1944, and spent five weeks in the hospital.

The decorated veteran wore his uniform proudly each year to accept a Chino Hills city council proclamation during Mighty Eighth Air Force Week, commemorating Oct. 4 through 14, 1943, when 150 heavy bombers were lost.

The Eighth Air Force was dispatched to England in 1942, the largest military unit in World War II and the largest bomber force in history. Wilbur Richardson was a recipient of the Purple Heart, five Air Medals, the Presidential Citation, the Distinguished Flying Cross, and the Croix de Guerre Avec Palm for dropping supplies for French Resistance fighters. Wilbur Richardson said he was most proud of the Flying Cross medal.

It is with a heavy heart, we learn the news that the beautiful Benjamin Mendoza, World War II, Tech 4 with the 264th Field Artillery Battalion has passed away.

Born in March 1920 in Flagstaff, Arizona, Mr. Mendoza enlisted into the United Army and joined the 264th Field Artillery Battalion saw action in the European Theater in the following battles and campaigns: Northern France, Ardennes (Battle of the Bulge), Rhineland, Central Europe and Battle of Hürtgen Forest.

The 264th supported General Patton’s 3rd Army, General Blaskowitz’s 9th Army and General Bradley’s 1st US. Army.

Here is a transcript of some of his wartime experiences – in his own words:

I sailed across the Atlantic to England aboard “Saturnia” an Italian Luxury Liner which was used for transport of American troop personnel, arriving into Utah Beach during the wintertime. We were on reserve at the Battle of Brest, then traveled across Northern France to the Hürtgen Forest, where we had control at the time.

I was ordered to go on guard at the hotel and take one GI with me. I was so terribly afraid I didn't make any sudden movements. I was constantly checking my watch to see when my guard duty was up, there were Germans all around us. The night was warming up, snow all over, so the snow was melting. When the melting snow would hit the floor, you would imagine that it was German footsteps. My relief came, and I went into a room that was picked by my driver because it had a heater, it was only us two in the hotel when we got there, but by the time I went into the room, it was full of men. I only found a space where my bag was, so I laid down and passed out. The next morning, I got up and had breakfast and went outside, it looked like a tornado had hit. The trees were mowed down, and there were dead German soldiers everywhere.

Three German tanks were up on the hill, and as I went by, there was a group of my men all together looking at all the dead German soldiers. I went past them, and they followed me. I went and removed the snow from the first soldier, but something was off, it was an American uniform. I unbutton the collar and underneath the American uniform was a German uniform. I showed my men and told them that this is what we have to watch out for. Before we knew it, we were in Maastricht and then Aachen Germany.

It was then time for us to take a position before the Rhine River, between Dusseldorf and Cologne. About that time, the Germans broke through on the 1st Army front, and we were ready. My Gosh, it was so incredibly cold. But you know something, being cold, icy and wet most the time and I never got sick. It was so cold that the guns would get stuck. I was trying to get that backpressure out. I didn't have gloves (When I asked the reason why he wasn't issued have gloves, he replied,"

"Oh I was, but the infantrymen in the front needed them more than I did so I gave them to a soldier in the front") and my hands and fingers would get stuck to the Howitzer while I worked on them.

In order to free my fingers, I would have to blow my breath on my fingers to release them.

We crossed the Rhine River at a bridge called Remagan that had been blown out and crossing on a pontoon bridge. Our 8"" Howitzers were heavy for the Pontoon bridge, we struggled with our big tractors. The front end of the tractor with the howitzer was lifted because of the weight, because we were a battalion, we had big, heavy equipment, you know you have to give the engineers credit, what they built stayed until the entire battalion went over the bridge.

Next, the forward observers went, and they found a house and I was invited, they said its going to be night soon, why don't you come with us, you won't be needed. Like a dummy, I went. We went upstairs, and something stirred, and the Germans started to fire. It seemed that they were firing from across the Rhine river. Still, they were firing from some other place, the trajectory was coming in through the window, and I thought what the heck did I get myself into. I realized at that time that I could never be a forward observer, the heck with them. They were crazy.

When I had to sleep in my foxhole in enemy territory, I would get up to work on the guns, and I would use my scabbard sword by waving it in front of me because you couldn't see your hand in front of you. There were shell holes everywhere, you're trying to figure out where to go and wham! You fall into a shell hole, and you are trying to remember which way you fell in, but once you fell in, you had no idea which way to go.

After I was done fixing the guns, I would try to find my way back to my foxhole, I would leave a small piece of the tent out, I would pull it up, take off my rifle, and scabbard and crawl in there soaking wet and shaking. I had half of my foxhole with straw, and soon I would feel the heat and stop shaking and fall asleep. The next day it would be the same thing over and over and over.

Let me tell you about the time I got lost. We moved towards Kassel; the German troops were retreating so fast that we couldn't keep up with them, so we changed directions. I always brought up the rear; when we came to a small valley, I couldn't see the outfit anymore.

There was a fork in the road, so we took a left, which was the wrong way. We drove till the trail got narrow, and we were also running out of gas. Luckily for us, a truck was coming from a post direction. We stopped the truck, and they gave us 10 gallons of gas, which was enough to get us back to the fork on the road. It was already late, and we took turns on guard, surely someone would come after us, but no one came. So early in the morning, we started out. We found out that we were near Frankfort, we ran into an M.P., and we asked if he saw our 8"" Howitzer outfit the night before. He wasn't on duty but directed us to the 3rd Army Headquarters.

After talking to an Officer who was on the phone for over half an hour, he said, soldier, I know where you need to go. He gave me a map marked with red marker for where I needed to go. I told him that we were out of gas. We were able to fill up and get a couple days of rations. We left Frankfort with stomachs full and finally knowing where we were going.

We finally caught up to our outfit and Captain Grant was waiting for us. I saluted, He said; “where the hell have you been?” I said; “we were lost sir,” and he said; “do you know where the hell you are going,” I said; “yes sir,’ I've been to 3rd Army Headquarters, I was told to pull in because everyone was out of gas. From there, we went on to Schwabach, close to Nuremberg, which was the end of our route." ~ Words of Benjamin Mendoza.

Benjamin Mendoza is survived by his wife Elisa and their daughter Elizabeth. Also included are daughters Marina, Monica, Ramona, Jovita, and Guadalupe, his son's Ben Jr. Ricardo and Mario, 23 grandchildren and 24 great-grandchildren as well as numerous nieces, nephews and many other relatives.

It is with great sadness; we learn the news that Bataan Death March survivor, Prisoner of War, Veteran of the Korean War and Vietnam War, Lt. COL Rodolfo V. Paraiso has died. He was 100.

Born in Manila, Philippines in 1919, Rodolfo Paraiso joined the Philippine Army at 20 years of age. Shortly after basic training, Rodolfo Paraiso joined forces with the US. Army in Luzon, Philippines.

After the April 9, 1942 U.S. surrender of the Bataan Peninsula on the main Philippine island of Luzon to the Japanese during World War II (1939-45), the approximately 75,000 Filipino and American troops on Bataan were forced to make an arduous 65-mile march to prison camps. The marchers made the trek in intense heat and were subjected to harsh treatment by Japanese guards. Thousands perished in what became known as the Bataan Death March.

Bataan Death March: Background
The day after Japan bombed the U.S. naval base at Pearl Harbor, on December 7, 1941, the Japanese invasion of the Philippines began. Within a month, the Japanese had captured Manila, the capital of the Philippines, and the American and Filipino defenders of Luzon (the island on which Manila is located) were forced to retreat to the Bataan Peninsula. For the next three months, the combined U.S.-Filipino army held out despite a lack of naval and air support. Finally, on April 9, with his forces crippled by starvation and disease, U.S. General Edward King Jr. (1884-1958), surrendered his approximately 75,000 troops at Bataan.

Bataan Death March: April 1942
The surrendered Filipinos and Americans soon were rounded up by the Japanese and forced to march some 65 miles from Mariveles, on the southern end of the Bataan Peninsula, to San Fernando. The men were divided into groups of approximately 100, and the march typically took each group around five days to complete. The exact figures are unknown, but it is believed that thousands of troops died because of the brutality of their captors, who starved and beat the marchers, and bayoneted those too weak to walk. Survivors were taken by rail from San Fernando to prisoner-of-war camps, where thousands more died from disease, mistreatment and starvation.

Bataan Death March: Aftermath
America avenged its defeat in the Philippines with the invasion of the island of Leyte in October 1944. General Douglas MacArthur (1880-1964), who in 1942 had famously promised to return to the Philippines, made good on his word. In February 1945, U.S.-Filipino forces recaptured the Bataan Peninsula, and Manila was liberated in early March.

After the war, an American military tribunal tried Lieutenant General Homma Masaharu, commander of the Japanese invasion forces in the Philippines. He was held responsible for the death march, a war crime, and was executed by firing squad on April 3, 1946.

Following World War II, Mr. Paraiso joined guerrilla forces to free his homeland of Korea. In Korea, Mr. Paraiso had two combat jumps while serving as forward observer. After Korea, Mr. Paraiso went on to serve in the Vietnam War.

After is military career was over, Mr. Paraiso received the Bronze Star, Purple Heart w/1 Cluster, Commendation with w/1 Cluster, Prisoner of War Medal, Good Conduct (3 awards), American Defense Service Medal, Asiatic-Pacific Campaign w/2 Stars, WWII Victory Medal, Korean Service w/Bronze Arrowhead and 2 Stars, Armed Forces Expeditionary, Occupation (Germany), National Defense Service w/1 Star, Armed Forces Reserve, Philippine Defense w/1 Star, Philippine Liberation, Philippine Independence, UN Service, Presidential Unit Citation w/2 Clusters, Philippine Presidential Unit Citation, Korean Presidential Unit Citation.

It is with great sadness; we learn the news that World War II Veteran and TGGF Ambassador Mr. Joseph H. MACK has died. He was 94.

He’ll never forget the horrors he saw from the moment he stepped onto that sandy beach in a foreign land on the other side of the world.

For 19-year-old Joseph H. Mack, it was a surreal experience -- giant ships filling the port, airplanes flying overhead dropping their loads on the landscape before them, bullets flying by above their heads, the earth shaking beneath their feet and the night filled with the booming explosions of bombs.

“I left a lot of buddies on the field,” Mack remembered. “They were injured, and I wanted to stay with them, but we were told to keep moving. We were the infantry.”

For first time in 70 years, Joseph Mack returned to Normandy with the Greatest GENERATIONS Foundation for the 70th anniversary to the site where he first set foot in Normandy, assigned to U.S. Army King Company, Third Battalion, 112th Infantry Regiment of the 28th Division.

The invasion started on June 6, 1944, but it was more than a month later that Mack landed at Normandy, his grandson Patrick Mack said in the press release, and began fighting in the hedgerows, which were thick growth on embankments that had built up over the centuries as Norman farmers moved rocks and rubbish to the edges of their fields. Battles would be fought from one small field to the next, each a natural fortress, Patrick Mack wrote in a history of his grandfather’s military service.

The one thing Mack surely remembers about his first day in war is that he wasn’t afraid. In training, he had been told that only 10 percent of them would go down in battle. Of course, landing at Normandy soon proved that false. In the first battle, some 50 percent of his division was lost and in two more subsequent battles 75 percent of the division in each fight were lost.

Mack marched through Paris with his division and was wounded in the bloody battles of the Hurtgen forest. A month later, he was right in the middle of the Battle of the Bulge. He led men in combat as an infantry squad leader with the rank of sergeant and also served as a platoon guide, the press release stated. He survived five battles including Omaha Beach (France), Percy (France), Paris (France), Hertgen Forest (Belgium-German Border), and the Battle of the Bulge. It was in the Hertgen Forest battle that he received the wound for which he was awarded the Purple Heart, Patrick Mack stated.

For his service, Mack was awarded the Bronze Star, the Combat Infantry Badge and a Presidential Unit Citation, among other honors. The Bronze Star medal was actually just recently presented to him, 70 years after it was earned. Mack was bestowed the Legion of Honor for participating in the liberation of France during World War II.

Mack said he doesn’t know why he was spared, but he chalks it up to divine intervention. “It’s the only way to describe it,” he said. ” (God) had something planned for me to have survived so many battles. “

After the war, Mack worked at IBM in Binghamton where he lived with his wife, Helen, and raised six children. When he retired, he moved to Charlotte, N.C., and served as a deacon for the Catholic Church for 31 years. He has also been a member of the Knights of the Columbus since 1945.

It is with great sadness; we learn the news that World War II Veteran and TGGF Ambassador Mr. Lou Masciangelo, has died. He was 99.

Mr. Masciangelo served in the Army Air Corp between 1943-1945, 8th Air Force, 339th Bomb Group, 565th Bomb Squad in Norfolk, England.

The 389th Bomb Group, known in more familiar terms as "the Sky Scorpions", flew strategic bombing missions in B-24 Liberators from Hethel, England. They also sent detachments to join bases in North Africa at Benghazi No. 10, Libya, between 3 July 1943 and 25 August 1943 and at Massicault, Tunisia, between 19 September 1943 and 3 October 1943. During this period, the detachment carried out bombing raids over Crete, Sicily, Italy, Austria and Romania. The Group was awarded a Distinguished Unit Citation for the Ploesti oil fields mission on 1 August 1943.

From October 1943, Masciangelo and the 389th supported Allied operations at Salerno and hit targets in Corsica, Italy, and Austria. Resumed operations from England in Oct 1943, and until Apr 1945 concentrated primarily on strategic objectives in France, the Low Countries, and Germany.

Targets included shipbuilding yards at Vegesack, industrial areas of Berlin, oil facilities at Merseburg, factories at Munster, railroad yards at Sangerhausen, and V-weapon sites at Pas de Calais. Participated in the intensive air campaign against the German aircraft industry during Big Week, 20-25 Feb 1944.

Also flew support and interdictory missions on several occasions, bombing gun batteries and airfields in support of the Normandy invasion in Jun 1944, striking enemy positions to aid the breakthrough at St Lo in Jul 1944, hitting storage depots and communications centers during the Battle of the Bulge (Dec 1944-Jan 1945), and dropping food, ammunition, gasoline, and other supplies to troops participating in the airborne assault across the Rhine in Mar 1945. Flew last combat mission late in Apr 1945.

Preceded in death by his wife of 50 years, Catherine Pomponio, parents Vincent J and Teresa (Piscini), brothers Henry and Vincent, granddaughter Amy.Survived by sons James (Debora) and Stephen, brother Roger, sisters Mae, Theresa Ciccarelli, Ida (Carl), sister-in-law Mary Masciangelo, 3 grandchildren, 3 great children, numerous nieces, nephews and cousins.

Australian World War II legend and Football Star Mr. Jack Jones dies aged 95.

Mr. Jack Jones enlisted in the Second AIF on 15 December 1942 and served with the 24th Infantry Battalion fighting the Japanese in New Guinea and Bougainville until wars end. During active service, Jones lost 85 men killed and 184 wounded from his company.

Upon wars end, members of the battalion received the following decorations: two Distinguished Service Orders, two Members of the Order of the British Empire, eight Military Crosses and one Bar, six Distinguished Conduct Medals, 16 Military Medals, one British Empire Medal, two George Medals, 10 Efficiency Medals, two Efficiency Decorations, and 33 Mentions in dispatches.

On his return from military service, Jones began his career at Essendon in 1946 wearing the number 24 jumper and went on to play 175 games and kick 156 goals. Jones could be dangerous on a half-forward flank as well as taking a fair share of the ruck work. He used his speed to the full by continually breaking into the open. He also thrilled fans with his high-marking and was a good long kick and was considered one of the fastest big men in the game.

Between 1946 and 1952, Jones played in 133 consecutive games, a feat no Essendon player has bettered. He also never played in the Seconds, missing senior games only through injury.

He played during one of the club's golden eras alongside champions like Reynolds, Coleman and Hutchison. He was a reserve in the 1946 premiership team and starred on the half-forward flank in the 1949 premiership team. He was also in that spot in the 1950 premiership win. In all, he played in 18 finals games and seven Grand Finals.

He won Essendon's best utility player award in 1946, 1947, 1949 and 1954 and the best clubman award in 1953.

He maintained a long association with Essendon over the years, conducting tours at Windy Hill and hosting sponsors and guests on match day as well as speaking to players and providing inspiration.

In February 2020 he was diagnosed with cancer and told he had, "maybe three months, maybe six months". He responded by saying “I’m quite ready, 95 is not a bad age to live." Mr. Jones died on March 24 at the age of 95.

It is with great sadness; we learn the news that World War II SUPERSTAR Mr. Paul William Joseph Schumacher has passed from this world. He was 97.

A second-generation German, he was born in rural Indiana on January 30, 1923, and went to fight the Germans twenty years later. He entered France shortly after D-Day, fought through the hedgerows of France to Belgium and Western Germany, and confronted the Germans at the Huertgen Forest, the longest battle of WWII.

Had a German sniper been two inches more accurate, his marriage, his family and his marvelous life would have never been. He crossed the Rhein River, helping to capture the bridge at Remagen before it was destroyed. He remained in Germany as part of the occupation force, and true to his nature, made many friends there, whom he would visit often in the years after the war. He was injured during the war and was hospitalized at the Veterans Hospital at Memphis Tennessee, where he met a nurse, Ada Ellen Huggins, fell in love and married.

He graduated from Indiana Tech University with a degree in engineering, and was employed by the Air Force, assisting with flight test operations, as well as the Mercury and Gemini space programs, after additional training in aeronautical engineering at The Ohio State University. He was employed and stationed at Wright Patterson Air Force Base in Dayton Ohio until he retired, with many profound congratulations.

As a young engineer, he was flying with a test pilot near Dayton when the jet plane malfunctioned and crashed. Once again, he survived, but only with a painful back injury and period of hospitalization. Thank God he survived because organizations such as the Corinth Children’s Theater, the Pleasant Site Volunteer Fire Department, the Ninth Infantry Division Association and many other community programs would have been without his care, skills and donations of time, money and effort.

He loved his wife, his children and his grandchildren, and thanks to his long life, he was able to spend wonderful time with his great granddaughter, who he often drove a thousand miles to see. He always opened his letters to his grandchildren with “Greetings from Tennessee” even though privately, he thought it odd for a Yankee to be buried in the South. He worked in his garden and gave away more than he ate. He loved his Tennessee woods, the creatures there, and he loved his country.

Rest well soldier. Your service to this world is done.

It is with great sadness; we learn the news that World War II Superstar and TGGF Ambassador Mr. Richard "Dick" Manchester has died. Dick was 94.

Dick was born in Baltimore, MD, in 1925, and grew up in western Pennsylvania. In 1943, at the age of 18, he enlisted in the US Army and served as a light infantryman with Co. K 345 Infantry, 87th Division from 1943 to 1945 fighting throughout France, Belgium and Luxembourg during the Battle of the Bulge, through Germany into Czechoslovakia.

By wars end, Manchester and the 87th liberated the Ohrdruf Concentration Camp, a German forced labor and concentration camp located near Ohrdruf, south of Gotha, in Thuringia, Germany. Prisoners not executed by fleeing SS guards were near death from starvation and disease.

After 154 successive days in combat, Manchester and the 87th Division had over battle casualties, with 1,154 killed in action.

After the war, he attended Penn State University on the GI Bill and obtained an engineering degree. He spent his career largely in sales management with both Alcoa and Reynolds Aluminum, and later started his own company in San Francisco as a manufacturer's representative for construction products. Dick was a lover of humanity and his Lord Jesus Christ. His interests included history, literature, art, theater, politics, nature and his fellow man. He valued family, friends, and his faith above all else. Until his last days he stayed engaged in his interests and his pursuit of a better world.

He is survived by his wife Sheila, and children Douglas, Craig, Bruce, Susan and Keith; six grandchildren and great-grandchildren. He was predeceased by his parents Carl and Helen Manchester of Hollidaysburg, PA; his brother Thomas of Dallas, and his son Michael of Mauldin, SC.

Rest in Love Dick. Thank you for your service for our country, and may God bless your family and friends as they live their lives without you.

It is with a heavy heart, we learn that World War II superstar Mr. Edward Bloch, Pearl Harbor survivor who described the bombing, dies at 97.

Edward Bloch was stationed in Hawaii and had just finished KP duty on the morning of Dec. 7, 1941, when he heard the roar of a plane diving over Pearl Harbor. He and his Army buddies ran outside to watch.

They saw a formation of planes dropping bombs. When the bombs hit their targets, “billows of black smoke and flames filled the air,” Mr. Bloch, then 19, wrote in a diary he kept of events before, during, and after the Japanese attack.

“Every one of us thought it was the Navy on maneuvers,” he wrote.

”As soon as they pulled out of their dive, they headed for us at Hickam Field, flying at a daring low altitude, I judge at about 75 feet. And not until then would we see the insignia of the rising sun on the side of their [air]ships.”

As American GIs slept in their barracks, the Japanese bombed a hangar, rows of parked airplanes, and an armament room that “was blown to hell,” Mr. Bloch wrote. The firehouse was hit so hard the men couldn’t sound an alarm. There was no water pressure to fight the fires ignited by the explosions.

After a lull, there was a second air attack. Mr. Bloch dived under a building, as soldiers on either side of him were killed by the blasts.

“I don’t know how I was lucky enough to live through it,” Mr. Bloch wrote.
Mr. Bloch, 97, a Philadelphia native and World War II Army Air Corps veteran who later became a television engineer, died Monday, March 9, of cardiac rest at a hospital in Pembroke Pines, Fla. He had moved 20 years ago to Florida from Lahaska, Bucks County.

Mr. Bloch graduated from Olney High School in 1940. In March 1941, he enlisted in the Army Air Corps at age 18. He wanted to become an airplane mechanic but instead became a high-speed radio operator. He turned 19 just days before Dec. 7.

In his diary, Mr. Bloch told of the carnage he saw that morning. As the men fled the barracks, the Japanese pilots took aim, "strafing everything in sight,” he wrote. He saw six men killed as they tried to repel the invaders with a machine gun.

"Some of the sights I saw made me sick at the stomach,” he wrote. “I couldn’t eat for almost a whole day, although I tried to.”

His most chilling memory was of seeing the enemy in their cockpits. In one case, “he could see the face of the pilot and the guy in the back, the bombardier, they looked at each other and made eye contact,” his stepdaughter, Judy Jawer, said.

After the attack on Pearl Harbor, Mr. Bloch stayed in the South Pacific, serving as a radio operator on B-17 and B-24 bombers. He flew more than 30 missions before being honorably discharged in July 1945 with the rank of technical sergeant.

After the war, Mr. Bloch then studied television for two years at Temple University Technical School and taught there from 1948 to 1958.

From 1948 to 1966, Mr. Bloch also worked at WFIL-TV (ABC affiliate) in Philadelphia as a technician in the master control room, as a cameraman, and performing audio/videotape management and equipment maintenance.

He worked at WCAU-TV (CBS affiliate) in Philadelphia from 1966 to 1986 as a central control supervisor, programming coordinator, and equipment maintenance man.

A music lover, Mr. Bloch enjoyed playing the trumpet and the harmonica. He also enjoyed going to schools to tell of his wartime experiences. In December 2016, he returned to Pearl Harbor for the 75th commemoration of the attack. “It was an amazing experience.”

It is with great sadness; we learn the news that D-Day Superstar Mr. Eric Tandy, veterans of the Parachute Infantry Regiment dies aged 96.

Mr. Eric Tandy, who served with the 7th Battalion The Parachute Regiment, was a 20-year-old paratrooper when he was accidentally dropped behind enemy lines on D-Day and tried to make his way back to his own regiment through a minefield only to be captured by the enemy and held half-starved in a prisoner of war camp before being force marched with fellow POWs to become human shields in Berlin.

He was the sergeant in charge of an aircraft carrying paratroopers from England to France as airborne forces of the British Army took part in the infamous Pegasus Bridge campaign during the early stages of the Normandy Landings.

“I was the first onto the aircraft and, therefore, the last to exit ensuring that all paratroopers had left the aircraft,” he said.

“Unfortunately, midway through the job of deploying the soldiers out of the aircraft, a medic was wounded by anti-aircraft fire.

“He crawled to the exit of the aircraft, resulting in delaying the rest of the “stick” from exiting the aircraft, causing us to overshoot the drop zone by about 10 miles.”

Eric explained that on landing, a gunner corporal and he attempted to make their way back to Pegasus Bridge where the Allies’ mission was to seize the bridge over the Orne River and prevent German armor from crossing over to attack the eastern flank of the landings at Sword Beach.

However, they came across two Commandos trapped in a minefield – one being mortally wounded and the other unhurt.

Eric used his experience of minefields to get them out of the danger zone.

However, later that morning, and after coming under enemy fire, they were taken prisoner after German troops set up camp to cook breakfast and found them hiding in a hedge.
After a couple of days, Eric and his colleagues were taken to Stalag 357 at Fallingbostel where he was a Prisoner of War for approximately eight months.

Eric, whose brother and First World War veteran father also served in the war, was eventually demobilized to the Isle of Wight.

Once he regained his strength, he was deployed with the 4th Parachute Regiment and was posted to Palestine.

Eric, who was schooled in Canada, went on to make his career in the Army after the war.
Marrying June in Coventry in September 1946 and raising a family of two, he re-enlisted with the RASC (Royal Army Service Corps) and from there to the Army Fire Service from where he retired at the age of 62.

He reached the rank of Senior Fire Service Officer (army equivalent rank of Lt Colonel).
Moving to Fife more than a decade ago to be near family, Eric, who has three grand-children and four great grand-children, was widowed in 2015 and, despite his advancing years, he still managed to live largely independently – just a short distance from his daughter Lorraine’s house.

I thought this was interesting.

It is with great sadness, we learn the news that Airborne SUPERSTAR Mr. James “Maggie” Megellas, 3rd Battalion, 504th Parachute Infantry Regiment (PIR), 82nd Airborne Division has died. He was 103.

James “Maggie” Magellas was born and raised in Fond Du Lac, Wisconsin and graduated from Ripon College in 1942, accepting a commission as a Lieutenant, Infantry, United States Army.

Four years later, he was one of the most decorated officers in the 82nd Airborne Division and was discharged from the Army with the rank of Captain. He continued serving as a Citizen- Soldier and retired with the rank of Lt. Col.

His awards include the Distinguished Service Cross, two Silver Stars, two Bronze Stars, two Purple Hearts, Presidential Citation w/cluster, the Belgium Fouragere, 6 Campaign Stars, and Master Parachutist badge.

He was selected by General James Gavin, the commanding general of the 82nd Airborne Division to receive the “Military Order of Willhelm Orange Lanyard” from the Dutch Minister of War in Berlin in 1945, the first American so honored by the Government of Holland.

Magellas fought in the Italian and Western European campaign, first as a Platoon leader, then later as the Company Commander of H Company, 2nd Battalion, 504th Parachute Infantry Regiment (PIR).

His most notable battle experiences include action in the Italian mountains near the Anzio beachhead, his combat jump into Holland as part of Operation Market Garden, crossing of the Waal River under heavy German fire in broad daylight, and the Battle of the Bulge.

He finished World War II in the occupation of Berlin and led his Company, the only Company he served with during the entire war, down 5th Avenue, New York City in the January 1946 Victory Parade.

Magellas served in the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID) for 32 years with work in Yemen, Panama, South Vietnam and Columbia.

During his work with USAID, he served two years in Vietnam, leading 4,000 soldiers and civilians from Vietnam and other nations in civil-military relations. For this work he received the National Chieu Hoi Medal, and the Psychological Warfare Medal from the South Vietnamese government.

It is with great sadness we learn the passing of Normandy DDAY Veteran Mr. Benjamin Klein. He died 33 days before what would have been his 100th birthday after contracting COVID-19.

This American D-Day veteran in Normandy died at the Montefiore St. Luke’s Cornwall Hospital (Newburgh, New York state) in the United States after having tested positive for the COVID-19 virus.

He grew up as a newspaper delivery boy in Woodbridge. He met his wife, Muriel Klein, who vacationed with her aunt in the Catskills from the Bronx.

On June 6, 1944, Benjamin Klein was co-pilot of the HORSA GLIDER NUMBER 21, towed by a Douglas C-47. Onboard, seven Airborne soldiers and two Jeeps of the 101st (US) Airborne Division were to reinforce the American fighters engaged in the early hours of D-Day. His mission was part of Operation Keokuk.

They left the Aldermaston military airfield in England. They flew over the English Channel and Utah Beach, at the right flank of the attack. Once freed from the towline, the glider and its crew had perhaps 90-second descent 1,000 feet to the ground in a field near St. Marie du Mont.

There were tall hedgerows, and they landed in the biggest space they saw. The glider skidded out of control and slammed into a tree, which Mr. Klein said sheared off the right-wing and cut through the aircraft mere inches from his face.

“It was pandemonium, firing in all directions,” he said. The rule of thumb was to run away from the shrill fast fire of the Germans’ machine guns, and toward the more laconic firing of the Army’s machine guns.

After the war, he married is love of his life Muriel Klein. The couple was together for 78 years, married for 73, and they had three children - Tedd Klein, Howard Klein, and Beth Orlan. Muriel Klein died two years ago.

In a 1942 photo of the two, Benjamin Klein wrote to Muriel, “Our eyes do tell, I do love you.” Described by his son and daughter-in-law as a flirt, Benjamin Klein also saved a photo of himself and Muriel in bathing suits on a beach. “What do you think of my girlfriend in a bathing suit?” he signed the letter in 1943.

The family will get together via video chat Friday for a virtual funeral celebrating the life of the patriarch who served his country and his family.

World War II veteran and Prisoner of War (POW) during the capture of Singapore, Dr. William Frankland was one of the top allergists of the 20th century and an indomitable researcher who helped legions of hay fever sneezers by distributing daily pollen counts to the British public, has died in London at 108.

Alfred William Frankland was born in Sussex, England, on March 19, 1912, one of twin boys of Henry and Alice Rose (West) Frankland. His father, a vicar in the Church of England, moved the family to Britain’s Lake District, where the boys grew up surrounded by farms. It was there that William discovered that he suffered from hay fever.

He attended St. Bees School in West Cumberland before studying medicine at Queen’s College, Oxford, and St. Mary’s Hospital Medical School, now part of Imperial College London. After finishing his studies, he enlisted in the Royal Army Medical Corps three days before the outbreak of World War II, anticipating that doctors would be needed. He was later sent to Singapore, where he arrived just days before the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor.

By chance Dr. Frankland was sent to work in Tanglin Military Hospital in Singapore rather than the newly opened Alexandra Military Hospital there — thus eluding almost certain death. The Alexandra hospital was soon overrun by Japanese troops, who massacred the doctors, nurses and patients there. It was one of several times that luck kept him alive.

Dr. Frankland was taken prisoner on Feb. 15, 1942 and spent the remainder of the war in Japanese prison camps, underfed and overworked, treating the other men.
On his return to Britain, he took a post at St. Mary’s, where he worked with Alexander Fleming who won the 1945 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine for the discovery of penicillin.

The mold that had contaminated Dr. Fleming’s Petri dishes decades earlier and led to the development of modern antibiotics had come, in fact, from the allergy department, which was directly below Dr. Fleming’s laboratory. Dr. Frankland correctly predicted that some patients would be allergic to the new wonder drug.

Dr. Frankland had a pollen trap installed on the roof of St. Mary’s and began distributing daily pollen counts to the British news media in the early 1960s. He was one of the first allergists to do so. Pollen counts are now a staple of weather reports around the world.
Dr. Frankland published more than a hundred articles and academic papers on allergies, including four that he wrote after turning 100. Among his many honors, he was named a member of the Order of the British Empire in 2015.

Survivors include his four children and a number of grandchildren and great-grandchildren.

Before entering Charterhouse, Dr. Frankland had lived alone in a Central London apartment that he had shared with his wife, Pauline (Jackson) Frankland, until her death in 2002. He cooked his own meals and, though he used a walking stick, followed a routine of daily exercises into his 100s.

Given his brushes with death, he was frequently asked what the secret of his longevity was. He would reply simply, “Luck.”

It is with great sadness, we learn the news that 101st Airborne SUPERSTAR MR. EDWARD HALLO, Paratrooper of the 501st Parachute Regiment during Operation Market Garden and the Battle of the Bulge has died. He was 99.

Born in 1920 in Toledo, Ohio, his family moved to Detroit in 1925, where he grew up and graduated from Northwestern High school in 1939. HALLO went to work at the Ford Rouge plant, but when the war started, he joined the United States Army and volunteered for the Airborne.

Following training, HALLO was sent over to England to prepare for the invasion of France. Three days before D-Day landings, HALLO and the 501st made their final training jump at night over England. Over 350 men were injured, mostly with broken bones, and were not able to make the jump on D-Day. HALLO broke his leg and was assigned to guarding equipment.

It was there, on the best day of his life, that he met a lovely British lassie named Sylvia. However, God and Country came before love. HALLO than place love on hold and returned to his unit to prepare for the Allied thrust in Northern Europe during Operation Market-Garden.

Operation Market-Garden was an audacious plan concocted by British Field Marshal Montgomery that would be the first major daylight air assault attempted by a military power since Germany's assault on Crete four years earlier, the Allies initial plan for September 17, 1944 was to use the paratroopers and glider men of the 82nd and 101st U.S.

The Airborne objective were to seize roads, bridges and the key communication cities of Eindhoven, Nijmegen and Arnhem, thus cutting Holland in half and clearing a corridor for British armored and motorized columns all the way to the German border.

The 101st mission was to secure the fifteen miles of Hell's Highway stretching from Eindhoven north to Veghel. The 501st was specifically tasked to drop 4 miles south of Veghel and seize railroad and highway bridges over the Aa River and the Willems Canal.

Though Lt Col Kinnard's 1st Battalion landed wide of their mark, they landed all together and were quickly able to seize two railroad bridges to the west of Veghel. Meanwhile, the other two battalions were able to seize intact the road bridges over the Willems Canal and Aa River.

The 501st, along with the rest of the division, moved from initial objective areas to positions on "the island" between the Waal and Rhine Rivers. It became clear that they would not be withdrawn from Holland after a few days, as had been planned because their combat skills were sorely needed by the British. However, the prolonged fighting on "the island" was contrary to airborne tactics and strategy.

After 72 days of combat in the Netherlands the division returned to a new staging area in Mourmelon, France, for what everyone thought would be a long, well-deserved rest. Accordingly, many men were on leave or pass, the Division Commander was in the United States, the Assistant Division Commander was in England (leaving the Artillery Commander, General McAuliffe, in command), and there still were major shortages of equipment and supplies that had not been replaced after the Netherlands.

On 16 December 1944, The Germans had launched a major offensive at dawn on 16 December, west through the Ardennes Forest, in the lightly held sector of our VII Corps. At that time SHAEF'S Reserve consisted of the 101st and 82nd Airborne Divisions. The 101st was ordered to the vitally important town of Bastogne which was the key to the German counteroffensive and had to be held at all cost by the 101st.

The division was jammed into trucks for an overnight rush to Bastogne in Belgium on Dec. 18th. Since the 501st PIR was the first unit to arrive, Col Ewell was ordered to move out on the eastern road, through Longvilly and seize and hold a key road junction beyond Longvilly. The regiment moved out at dawn to meet the approaching German column three miles beyond the town when its first battalion ran into the enemy near Neffe, a few kilometers out of Bastogne. It stopped the enemy cold and held until the rest of the division could arrive. The "Battered Bastards" staved off elements of seven German divisions before Patton broke through the encirclement on December 26th. The 501st paid a dear price of 580 killed, wounded or captured.

On January 20, 1945 the now tattered Airborne division was hurried to Alsace where Hitler's "Operation Nordwind" offensive, under the personal direction of Heinrich Himmler, was threatening a sector of the Seventh Army front. The 501st PIR, now to 60% strength, occupied defensive positions there until returning to France early in March.

As the war in Europe was nearing its end, the 101st division was sent to the Ruhr pocket to help in mop-up operations. The 501st returned to billets in Joigny and Auxerre, France, preparing to jump on POW camps if deemed necessary to rescue American prisoners. On 25 August 1945 the regiment was detached from the 101st and sailed for home to be deactivated at Fort Benning, GA.

The war for HALLO and the 101st was over, and HALLO went to England as part of the Army training to attend school. HALLO married his love SYLVIA. HALLO was sent home in 1946 and discharged. SYLVIA was able to join HALLO in 1947 and, together during their 56 years of marriage, had a family of 8 children, 18 grandchildren and 9 great-grandchildren.

It is was great sadness, World War II veteran Andrew Macleod of Dornoch has died at the age of 98.

A Seaforth Highlander, Mr Macleod fought against Rommel in North Africa and was part of the Allied invasion of Sicily in 1943, going on to fight throughout Italy.

One of his commanding officers was the late Sir Allan Gilmour, father of Lt Col Colin Gilmour of Rosehall.

After the war Mr Macleod worked as a painter and decorator and was also heavily involved in the community, serving as president of Dornoch Highland Games for many years.

A keen golfer, he was still caddying at the age of 90 and was in high demand because of his knowledge of the game.

Latterly Mr Macleod, whose wife Cathie pre-deceased him, was a resident at Oversteps Care Home at Earl’s Cross Road, Dornoch.

He and fellow Dornoch World War II veteran Andrew Mackenzie hit the headlines in 2018 when they received the Légion d’honneur – France’s highest honour.

All British veterans who fought for the liberation of France during WWII are entitled to the honour but rigorous checks are made to ensure they are deserving of it.

Mr Macleod, along with Mr Mackenzie, received his Légion d’honneur through the post as he was unable travel to attend one of the award ceremonies where the honour is presented by the French ambassador.

Oversteps held a party for the two men to celebrate the bestowal of the award.

Mr Macleod is survived by his children Catrina and Gavin, five grandchildren and one great-grandchild.

Family of Normandy World War II Veteran, who lost his arm on D-Day can't give him the funeral he deserves because of coronavirus lockdown.

Rex Blood was hit in the arm as his unit landed in Normandy in June 1944 as the Allies began their efforts to drive back the forces of Nazi Germany. His arm was amputated two weeks later and in the decades that followed Rex also survived cancer.

He was 95 years old, and left behind his wife Ivy, two daughters - Joy and Debra - as well as four grandchildren, six great-grandchildren, and four great-great-grandchildren.

'Of Rex's large family and an even larger network of lives he has touched, only 10 people will be permitted to attend his funeral.

'It's so sad we can't have everyone there.'

Rex and Ivy, who is 95, were both welfare officers for the Blesma, a charity for veterans who have lost limbs, and many friends would have wanted to attend the funeral.

Rex met Ivy in a pub on her 21st birthday and March 29 this year would have been their 73rd wedding anniversary.

Laura said: 'Rex was sent home after his arm was amputated and they found him a bed at a hostel in Leicestershire.

'One night he was at the pub. He raced pigeons and my Grandma's father spotted his pigeon flyer's badge and they got talking.'

Describing her grandfather, Laura said: 'He was wonderful and always really, really family-oriented.

'Whenever anything needed doing he was there and he was the head of the family.

'He often spoke about D-Day and we never tired of hearing his stories about it.'

Its is with great sadness, we learn the news that Okinawa World War II veteran Mr. Len McCutcheon has died at 101 years young.

Len was a special, charismatic man. We met when he was 89. He lived in Lincoln County and more than a handful of WBTV viewers reached out Tuesday afternoon to tell me how much he meant to you. He meant a lot to everyone.

Len and I had the honor of meeting at the most unique and important coffee shop to ever exist: Richard's Coffee Shop in downtown Mooresville.

It’s is a place for veterans and all who support veterans, and Len was what you might call a longtime member. He was there for years every Thursday morning with all his buddies.

This picture is from last August, when Len had just turned 101. It's a quilt given to him by the Mooresville Chapter of Quilts of Valor. It should be on the cover of magazines.

Len had beautiful blue eyes, a fantastic wife Anne, a loving family (many with him today), and a community who valued his service. WWII vets are few and far between. Everyone seems to be more humble than the one before, never wanting to talk about their own past. But with prompting, Len did share.

He and I had became unlikely pen pals after meeting at that coffee shop years ago, and he revealed he had been a Major in the US Army and served in the battle at Okinawa in the Pacific.

Last time I talked with Len, he made me sing Happy Birthday to him over the phone. When you're turning 101, you get to make those types of demands. I'm smiling just thinking of that.

Love to all who knew and loved Len, and his laugh.

'One of the last breed of givers': WWII veteran, beloved Slidell grandma dies of coronavirus

Mary Christopher was a country girl from Talledega, Alabama, when she decided to follow her older sister's example and go to New Orleans to study nursing at the Mather School and then enlist to serve her country during WWII — an adventurous step that her three sons say was completely in keeping with her indomitable spirit.

Christopher, who would have turned 98 in May, died at Slidell Memorial Hospital from coronavirus. Her family was able to have one final conversation with her days before on Zoom, an hour-long chat during which she was awake and was able to hear one of her granddaughters announce her engagement.

Christopher, who lived at Summerfield Senior Living in Slidell, served in the 134th Evacuation Hospital, taking care of soldiers in France, Belgium and Germany. She was promoted to 1st lieutenant and chief nurse in July of 1945.

She didn't talk about her war time experiences until recent years, her sons said, although they recall as children playing with German swords that some of her patients had given her as souvenirs.

Her middle son, Joe Christopher, who also lives in Slidell, said that he last took her to the World War II Museum in New Orleans on D-Day, where she sported a hat that said WWII veteran. "They just treated her so special, like a queen."

Her close-knit family felt the same way about her. "I've never known anyone so dearly and deeply loved," her daughter-in-law, also named Mary Christopher, said. "She was one of the last breed of givers."

Christopher continued to work as a nurse, in private service and at Baptist and Methodist hospitals, until her husband, Joe Frank Christopher, retired in the mid-1970s from his job with the state Department of Agriculture.

She moved to Slidell in the early 1990s, after her husband's death, and worked as a volunteer at North Shore Hospital for years, her sons said. She was also an avid bowler, a sport she continued until last summer, Joe Christopher said. Well into her 90s, she bowled an over 200 game. "She was bragging about that to everybody," he said.

A voracious reader, she had just given her eldest son, Barrett Christopher, a couple of books to read, including one about the American Revolution. "She liked mysteries, but she was an eclectic reader," he said.

A huge Saints fan, she watched the games with Joe every week. "It will break my heart the next time they play," he said.

One thing she taught her sons was to keep moving, Joe Christopher said, and her family believes that's one reason for her longevity. "She was the last one to leave any event, always," her daughter-in-law said. "You never saw her sit down."

She overcame a stroke three years ago, and 10 years ago recovered from a broken hip she suffered while diving for a ball during a ping-pong game with her grandson. "The doctor said that would probably be the end of her," Barrett Christopher said. But she bounced back, and while she was told to use a walker, she carried it in front of her instead.

She was very close to her grandchildren, most of whom called her Gram, until Barrett Christopher's daughter saw a Rambo movie. "Gram is tougher than that guy," she told her father. "I'm going to call her Grambo." The name stuck.

Her son Joe was able to see her twice after she was moved to hospice care, the first time to set up an iPad. She was wearing a bilevel positive airway pressure mask, which made it hard to communicate. But when she saw her son in protective gear, she asked, "Do I have the virus?"

"They hadn't told her. I told her 'yes.' She was well aware of what was going on. It was very poignant," Joe Christopher said.

Born in 1922, Mary Christopher had heard family stories of loved ones lost in the Spanish flu epidemic years earlier, including an uncle who lost his wife and children to the pandemic. "It's kind of ironic, she was born just after that, and lived all these years until now," Frank Christopher said.

"She was strong," Joe Christopher said. "If not for this virus, I think she probably would have made 100 — that was a goal."

On this Good Friday, we learn the news that World War II Airborne Superstar Mr. George Shenkle, a veteran of 508th Parachute Infantry Regiment, 82nd Airborne Division, has died. George Shenkle was 98.

Born in Woodbury, New Jersey, on October 13th, 1921. George traveled throughout his Childhood, attending many different schools and never really having the chance to make great friends at a young age.

Shortly after the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor, George was compelled to join the United States Army when he and a close friend decided to join the Airborne after seeing a promotional video. After extensive training and maneuvers, the 508th embarked on December 19th, 1943, in New York City, New York. It sailed on December 28th, 1943, for Belfast, Northern Ireland, arriving there on January 8th, 1944.

Following five additional months of training in England, George and the 508th parachuted into Normandy around 2:15 a.m. on June 6th, 1944. George served as a radio operator, he said, so he was not actively shooting for most of the time.

For its gallantry and combat action during the first three days of fighting in Normandy, the unit was awarded the Presidential Unit Citation:

The 508th Parachute Infantry is cited for outstanding performance of duty in action against the enemy between 6 and 9 June 1944, during the invasion of France. The Regiment landed by parachute shortly after 0200 hours, June 6th, 1944. Intense antiaircraft and machine-gun fire was directed against the approaching planes and parachutist drops.

Enemy mobile anti airborne landing groups immediately engaged assembled elements of the Regiment and reinforced their opposition with heavily supported reserve units. Elements of the Regiment seized Hill 30, in the wedge between the Merderet and Douve Rivers, and fought vastly superior enemy forces for three days. From this position, they continually threatened German units moving in from the west, as well as the enemy forces opposing the crossing of our troops over the Merderet near La Fiere and Chef-du-Pont. On July 13th, 1944, the Red Devils returned to England after suffering 1,061 casualties out of 2,056 paratroopers, of which 307 were Killed-In-Action (KIA).

After their success in Normandy, the 508th PIR returned to its billet at Wollaton Park and prepared for its part in Operation Market Garden, jumping on September 17th, 1944. The Regiment established and maintained a defensive position over 12,000 yards (11,000 m) in length, with German troops on three sides of their position. They seized a key bridge and prevented its destruction. Other units prevented the demolition of the Waal river Bridge at Nijmegen. The Regiment additionally took, occupied, organized, and defended the Berg en Dal hill mass, terrain which controlled the Groesbeek-Nijmegen area.

They cut Highway K, preventing the movement of enemy reserves, or escape of enemy along this critical international route. After being relieved in the Netherlands, they continued fighting the Germans in the longest-running battle on German soil ever fought by the U.S. Army, then crossing the border into Belgium.

The 508th later played a significant part in the Battle of the Bulge in late December 1944, during which they screened the withdrawal of the 106th Division from St. Vith and defended their positions against the German Panzer divisions. The Regiment held its ground near Chevron when they were ordered to retreat 10 miles. They were under the command of British Gen. Montgomery at that point, and it was a complicated order for General Gavin to give because the 82nd never retreated, George said.

Eleven days into the Battle of the Bulge, George was shot in the shoulder while clearing a house and sent to England to recover. Later he had a nice furlough in Nice, France.

George made his first return to Normandy for the 65th Anniversary, and to the Netherlands with The Greatest Generations Foundation and 20 war veterans for the 70th Anniversary of Operation Market Garden.

It was in the Netherlands, when G George was presented with the Netherlands’ highest military award, the Orange Lanyard of the Military Order of William from the Netherlands government for liberating the Netherlands in World War II in 2014.

For his service to our nation, George was presented with the Bronze Star, Purple Heart, Good Conduct Medal, Occupation Medal, Victory Medal, European Theater Medal, Croix De Guerre France, Orange Lanyard of the Military Order of William, and Presidential Unit Citation.

After the war, George E married his late wife, Dolores, and the couple raised five children. He studied accounting at the University of Pennsylvania and worked at the now-defunct Allenwood Steel.

On behalf of a grateful nation, we salute you George Shenkle for your dedication and service to your country. We will never forget you.

It’s with great sadness, we learn the passing of Emilio “Leo” DiPalma, a World War II veteran who stood guard at Nuremberg Trials dies during COVID-19 outbreak. DiPalma was 94.

Emilio “Leo” DiPalma, a World War II veteran and a guard for some of the most notorious Nazi prisoners during the Nuremberg Trials, died Wednesday along with several other veterans who contracted COVID-19 at the Holyoke Soldiers’ Home in Massachusetts.

Born in Springfield, MA on June 03, 1926, DiPalma was inducted into the Army on September 15, 1944. After 14 weeks of training he was shipped to Europe on the Île de France with 12000 replacements soldiers. Upon arrival into England, they were transferred down to Southampton for relocation to Belgium. By February 03, DiPalma was on the front lines as a replacement soldier with the 79th Division, 314th Infantry Regiment.

During February and March 1945, the division mopped up German resistance, returned to offensive combat, 24 March 1945, crossed the Rhine, drove across the Rhine-Herne Canal, 7 April, secured the north bank of the Ruhr and took part in clearing the Ruhr Pocket until 13 April. The division then went on occupation duty, in the Dortmund, Sudetenland, and Bavarian areas successively, until its return to the United States and inactivation. Total battle casualties: 15,203 with 2,476 killed in action, and 10,971 wounded in action. Over 579 are still listed as missing in action.

He was 19 when the war ended, Staff Sergeant DiPalma did not have enough points to return home, so he was reassigned to the 1st Division (Big Red One) in Nuremberg, assisting for preparations for what would later be known as the “greatest trial in history.”

During the Nuremberg Trials, a series of 13 trials charged high-ranking Nazi party members and military officials with war crimes. Initially, his duties included making copies of German documents and photographs of Nazi war crimes. But you’re more likely to see him in photographs on the Nuremberg Trials, serving as Sergeant of the courtroom guards, standing behind the witness stand as Nazi higher ups were tried.

One of his duties was to run the prison elevator, bringing prisoners into and out of the courtroom each day.

In photographs of the historic event, DiPalma can be seen standing behind the witness box, guarding the likes of Rudolf Hoss, the commandant of the Auschwitz concentration and extermination camp, and Hermann Goering, Adolf Hitler’s designated successor, as a 19-year-old soldier. But for the majority of his life, Aho said, he didn’t talk about it.

He returned from the war, settled in East Longmeadow, Massachusetts, and married his wife, Louise, and had four daughters. He settled into a career as a hoisting engineer, running cranes to build skyscrapers. DiPalma kept busy with the local fire department and thrived on the softball rivalry between the police and fire departments, and loved to hunt and fish, and play golf.

DiPalma made the return to Germany and visited the courtrooms at The Palace of Justice in Nuremberg in 2006. Its was an emotional return DiPalma, he recalled many stories with Hermann Goering, Albert Spears, Alfred Jodl, Julius Streicher, Joachim von Ribbentrop and Rudolf Hoss.

On behalf of TGGF and its members, we salute Emilio DiPalma for his dedication and service to our freedom.

Flight Lieutenant Bob Barckley, Second World War flying ace.



Flight Lieutenant Bob Barckley, who has died aged 99, was shot down over France but managed to evade capture and escape to Spain. On his return he rejoined his squadron and destroyed 12 V-1 flying bombs, making him one of the leading “aces” against the terror weapon.
On the morning of June 2 1943 Barckley and a colleague took off from West Malling in Kent on an intruder mission in their Typhoons of No 3 Squadron, each loaded with two 500lb bombs. Near the French/Belgian border he attacked a stationary train with his cannons, when the locomotive blew up. He then attacked three trucks as he headed towards Dunkirk where he hoped to find a “worthwhile target” for his bombs.
Approaching Bergues, he saw a long goods train and decided to attack. As he started his dive, he encountered intense anti-aircraft fire from a flak wagon on the train. He dropped his bombs, but as he pulled away his aircraft was hit, part of the starboard wing was shot away and the control column ceased to function.
He managed to flatten out as he bounced off some trees, missed some cottages and slammed into the ground at high speed; he was rendered unconscious. After recovering, he cleared the aircraft and escaped as German soldiers appeared.
He walked for 20 miles towards St Omer, and in a nearby village sought help at a church. A doctor attended to his wounds, and he was given food and clothing before being taken to a farm. After proving his identity to the local Resistance chief, he was taken to a “safe house” in Paris. Unknown to him, he was now in the hands of the Belgian-run “Comet” escape line.
After he had spent a few weeks in hiding, a young woman took him by train to a town near Biarritz before he cycled to a remote farmhouse near the Spanish border. He joined a party of other evaders and at nightfall the Basque guide “Florentino” led them across the Pyrenees to San Sebastian in Spain, where he was collected by car and taken to the British Embassy in Madrid.
He was moved to Gibraltar, and on August 16 he was flown to RAF Northolt in a Dakota. After debriefing in London he returned to his squadron and four days later resumed operational flying.
Robert Edward Barckley was born on November 18 1920 in Brentford, Middlesex. In the summer of 1938 he joined a territorial battalion of the Royal Fusiliers and served as a despatch rider with the British Expeditionary Force. He was evacuated from Dunkirk on June 2 1940.
In December of that year he volunteered to transfer to the RAF and train as a pilot. After gaining his “wings” he joined No 3 Squadron operating as both night- and day-fighters with their all-black Hurricane IIs. Their main task was dawn and dusk patrols over the North Sea convoys.
The first time Barckley fired his guns in anger was in August 1942 during Operation Jubilee, the ill-fated combined operation against Dieppe. The squadron’s task was to strafe the German gun positions overlooking the beach.
The following day he attacked German fast patrol boats (E-boats) harassing Allied shipping. Later he again attacked the guns, and his fourth and final sortie was to cover the withdrawal. He would subsequently describe the Dieppe raid as “a shambles”.
After a few weeks flying night intruder missions, the squadron was withdrawn from the front line to re-equip with the Typhoon. On May 18 1943 the squadron lost five pilots, including the CO, during an attack against the Luftwaffe airfield at Poix.
Barckley did not fly on that mission but later he recalled: “The atmosphere was very sombre and contemplative. I had lost my closest friend on the squadron. But I remember also the 50-60 comrades lost before Poix and the two years that followed.” Two weeks later, Barckley was shot down near Dunkirk.
When he returned from Spain he found that his squadron had moved to Manston in Kent. On arrival he telephoned the CO, who refused to believe that it was him making the call. “No,” he responded, “it cannot be Bob Barckley, he was shot down, he is dead.”
Barckley managed to convince him that he was alive and waiting in the officer’s mess. There were celebrations to mark the squadron’s only pilot to be shot down and make it back to England.
Barckley was soon back flying sweeps over France until March 1944, when the squadron became the first to re-equip with the faster Tempest fighter-bomber. On May 8 he was flying an intruder mission over France when he spotted a bright light in the sky. He followed it and shot it down. He wrote in his log book: “chased airborne light from Evreux to Le Havre. Fired three bursts, went down in sea. Jet ship?” He later added: “Rather precognitive of me!”
The squadron moved to Newchurch on Romney Marsh in preparation for D-Day. After flying beachhead patrols, he later wrote: “The landing was an amazing sight – a tremendous armada. The fact I had been with the Resistance made me feel it very deeply.”
Shortly after D-Day the Germans began their V-1 offensive against England. With their powerful Tempests, No 3 Squadron and two others provided the main fighter defence. Over the next three months No 3 shot down 305 of them, the most by any squadron.
Barckley opened his account on June 18, and a day later shot down two more over Kent. By the middle of July he had destroyed nine.
On July 14 he had used up all his ammunition shooting one down when he saw a second. He was able to accelerate and catch the V-1 when he placed his wing tip under the stubby wing of the flying bomb and immediately flipped his control column and banked. The weapon tipped over and crashed into a wood near Sevenoaks.
By the end of August Barckley had destroyed 12 V-Is and shared another. He was twice Mentioned in Despatches, and in November 1944 was awarded the DFC for “his high degree of courage.”
In September he left for Normandy to join No 122 Wing, which moved eastwards as the Allied armies advanced. In January, flying from Volkel in the Netherlands, Barckley was wounded attacking a German airfield and returned to England to recover. When he was fit he was seconded to the Fleet Air Arm for test pilot and fighter instructor duties in Northern Ireland, before being released from the RAF. He was awarded the Territorial Efficiency Medal.
After the war Barckley worked in Northern Ireland and later became managing director of Coca-Cola Bottling. He retired to North Wales, where he enjoyed walking in the hills.
He was a long-standing and devoted member of the Aircrew Association, the RAF Escaping Society and its successor, the Escape Lines Memorial Society. He was a regular at annual conventions and he never forgot his gallant “helpers” of the Comet Line. He attended their reunions in Brussels and in 2014 made his last visit to meet the survivors.
Bob Barckley married Violet Craig in 1944. The marriage was dissolved. His second wife Eva predeceased him. A daughter from his first marriage survives him. A second daughter predeceased him.

Flight Lieutenant Bob Barckley, born November 18 1920, died March 28 2020.

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It’s with great sadness we learn the news that US. Marine and WWII veteran Mr. Denzil Howard who served in the battle of Bougainville and guard for President Roosevelt has died. The World War II veteran was 96.

Denzil "Rusty" Howard was among about 16 million Americans who answered President Franklin D. Roosevelt's call to service after the attack on Pearl Harbor. He enlisted in the Marines and would fight in the Pacific theater, where he watched a fellow Marine die next to him in a foxhole on the island of Bougainville, his own life was spared when a bullet ricocheted off his helmet. After his tour of duty ended, he would serve as part of a special guard detail for FDR.

One of fewer than 390,000 World War II veterans still living, Howard died April 6 at the age of 96 in Middletown, the same place he enlisted.

As was the case with many who fought in the war, Howard talked little about his experiences but opened up later in life. But it was always an emotional journey back in time for Howard and other members of the Greatest Generation.

"Sometimes," Howard told the Journal-News last year as he caught a tear that had rolled down his cheek when he told of the deaths of his fellow Marines, "I get emotional when I talk about it."

The campaign on Bougainville, one of the Solomon Islands east of Papua New Guinea, was ultimately successful, but a difficult memory for Howard.

"Things I saw you can't print, I don't think," he said last year when speaking with a reporter from the Journal-News. "The things they did to our men. I saw a lot of my brothers killed."

After the war ended, Howard helped guard FDR when he stayed at the "Little White House" in Warm Springs, Georgia, remaining part of that duty until the president died on April 12, 1945. President Harry S. Truman preferred to be guarded by Army soldiers, and Howard returned to Middleton and worked for Armco Steel until his retirement in 1986.

Howard reluctantly stepped into the spotlight last year at a ceremony held three days before Veterans Day at Crosspointe Church of Christ in Middleton.

"I'm more of a back person," he told the Journal-News. "I don't like being the front boy."

But the tribute was touching, bringing him to tears.

"It was pretty tough on him," Greg Howard, one of his two sons, told the newspaper.

Howard carried a Bible given to him by his late brother, the Rev. Henry Howard, who had served the Towne Boulevard Church of God. It would keep him safe, his brother said.

"I had some mighty close calls I don't like to talk about," Howard said.

But his country needed him, and Howard was proud to accept the call to duty.

"I'd do it again for my country," he recalls.

He is survived by his wife of 72 years, Dolores; sons Gregory and Geoffrey; two grandsons; and three great grandchildren.

It is with great sadness, we have been informed that WWII veteran Mr. George Murray Seal Jr., a retired lumber purchasing agent, World War II veteran of the 110th Field Artillery has died. He was six weeks shy of 101.

Born in Baltimore and raised on Calvert Street and University Place, he was the son of G. Murray Seal Sr., a Maryland Casualty Co. auditor, and his wife, Edith Bidwell. He attended the Waverly School and was a 1936 McDonogh School graduate. He earned a business economics degree at the Johns Hopkins University.

“Within months of his college graduation, my father faced the certain prospect of military service with the passage of the Selective Service Act in 1940,” said his son, Kenneth Read Seal of Baltimore. “He signed up for one year with the Army C Battery of the 110th Field Artillery, known as the McDonogh Battery, at the Pikesville Armory.”

After Pearl Harbor, he completed Officers Candidate School at the Army War College in Carlisle, Pennsylvania, and was sent to Fort Jackson, South Carolina. He joined a newly formed Medical Assistance Corps and later boarded the Queen Elizabeth, a converted troop carrier, and landed in Ireland.

On July 1, 1944, D-Day +28, Mr. Seal and his unit landed at Omaha Beach. He served in France, Luxembourg and Germany until the German surrender in June 1945. He was awarded two Bronze Stars for logistical support for medical operations.

“He was often defensive in discussing the recognition, being quick to point out that there were no battlefield heroics,” his son said. “But he eventually became comfortable with accepting the honor for playing the logistical role.”

Mr. Seal was stationed at times in Wiltz, Luxembourg, and revisited the town three times after the war.

He left military service as a captain and sailed on the USS Admiral W.E. Eberle. He was on a troop train headed for assignment in Japan when the war ended.

He met his future wife, Nancy Read, at a friend’s party in Baltimore before he was assigned overseas. The two corresponded and married in 1947 at her home.

They moved to the Gaywood residential development on Bellona Avenue and took trips to Sherwood Forest and stayed at the Chalfont Hotel in Atlantic City.

Mr. Seal worked in lumber sales for the Stebbins Anderson Company in Towson and O’Connor Lumber in Essex until 1964.

“He also had an urge to build and sell houses and did build a couple in Dundalk in the late 1950s,” said his son, Kenneth.

In 1965 he joined Triangle Pacific Forest Products and lived in Silver Spring for a time. He retired in 1981.

Mr. Seal was an early Baltimore Colts season-ticket holder.

“Every August he led the family in making a projection of that season’s roster,” his son said.

Mr. Seal, who grew up walking to the old International League Oriole Park on 29th Street, was also a baseball fan.

He was a dedicated Johns Hopkins Blue Jays lacrosse fan, stopping to watch practices on his way home from work. He was a regular in the Homewood Field stands and in later years followed the team on television.

“Up to his death he was placing regular book orders at the Enoch Pratt Roland Park branch,” said his son. “He loved British mysteries on television, including Inspector Morse."

He enjoyed a drink made with Cutty Sark scotch. He also enjoyed rum cake and creamed spinach, and spent years offering visitors blueberry pancakes., his son said.

He was a Lions Club volunteer and raised tomatoes and zucchinis.

“He could quote Tennyson and Kipling. Mostly, he liked to needle people with wordplay,” his son said.

A memorial service will be held at a future date. There will also be a service at Arlington National Cemetery.

World War veteran II, 102, and his wife of 78 years have died just two hours apart on the same day.

David, 102, and Muriel Cohen, 97, from Massachusetts shared a room in their nursing home and the family chose to keep them together even as Muriel tested positive for the fatal virus.

After 78 years of marriage, the couple had never been separated, apart from David's service during World War Two when he helped liberate the Ohrdruf concentration camp in Germany in 1945.

'I said, "My parents cannot be separated, and my dad and mother have to stay together," so that was exactly what we did,' the couple's daughter, Fran Grosnick, told WCVB, adding that both her parents were already very ill.

'They were both very ill with other conditions, and aware only that they were together. This was comforting and they did not suffer,' Grosnick explained of the decision to leave them sharing a room instead of isolating.

David and Muriel, then Muriel Brown, first met in the summer of 1942 when she was in nursing school in Brooklyn.

'Their love story began in the summer of 1942 and continued until last Friday,' Grosnick said.

'She left nursing school to marry him and they were always together, except for when he was in the service.'

David passed away at 6.50pm Friday, aged 102, and Muriel died less than two hours later at 8.30pm.

'My parents are together, and my parents are at peace,' Grosnick said.

'I was very fortunate to have my parents for a very long time. I was fortunate and I was blessed, and I'm going to remember that.'

It is with great sadness that we have learned of the passing of World War II (DDAY) veteran Mr. Ken Smith.

Early this year, the 94-year-old veteran spoke about the conflict and how it affects him today.

Everybody’s D-Day was different. I sailed from Newhaven on a rusty old coastal steamer. Naval vessels were shooting 11-inch guns and there were ships firing rockets. It was like the sound the train makes when you’re standing on the edge of the London underground platform.

As we jumped off into the water, there were bodies strewn up the beach minus one or two limbs. It wasn’t like seeing a person in hospital. They had no chance at all. There were terrible injuries.

The average life of an infantryman was one and a half months. I survived five months before I was wounded on October 20 1944 in Holland.

I was hit by shrapnel. It just tore through the flesh like a knife through butter. The day I found out I was going to survive was one of the happiest of my life: I knew I was going to be flown back.

D-Day was a great thing – we got 156,000 men ashore, but the actual fighting was a lot worse on the second and third day. There’s a lot more to it than D-Day.

Our condolences for his family at this time.

It is with a heavy heart and great sadness that we report the passing of F Company / 2nd Battalion / 506th PIR / 101st Airborne Division "BAND OF BROTHERS" - Mr. BOB NOODY. Bob was a young 95.

Bob Noody joined the Army in February 1943, shortly after his 18th birthday. He volunteered for the paratroopers, not knowing what that was about, except that it meant an additional $50 per month. His arrival at Ft. Benning was an eye-opener, yet he survived the “brutal training.” He joined Fox Company, 506th PIR, 101st Airborne at Aldbourne, England, just in time for the Normandy invasion.

On the evening of June 5, 1944, at Upottery Airfield, Noody was immortalized in a photo taken of him aboard his C-47 immediately before takeoff. The photo was first published on the cover of an Army Air Forces magazine and it took on a life of its own afterward. In the picture Bob remembers he must have weighed at least 250 lbs., encumbered with his M-1 rifle, a bazooka, three rockets, land mines, and other assorted “necessities.”



Fifty feet of rope hung from his chest, which he later used to lower his leg bag to the ground, easing his fall and ensuring he was ready to fight. He landed behind the mayor’s house at Ste. Mere-Eglise. In the ensuing days, Noody utilized his bazooka to destroy a German tank that threatened his unit outside of Carentan. It was his first and last bazooka usage, as he expended the three rockets he carried into battle. A leg wound at Carentan ended his Normandy adventure.

Noody recovered from his wounds in time to make the Market Garden jump. He fought with Fox Company from Eindhoven to the Rhine. While recovering from the exhaustive Holland campaign, Noody and his unit were rushed by truck to stem the German breakthrough at Bastogne. He froze in regular fatigues, holding the line in the Bois Jacques woods next to Easy Company, above the town of Foy. He survived the patrols and constant shelling only to be wounded during a nighttime recon patrol of Foy prior to Easy Company’s assault on the town. Noody was wounded by friendly fire when a comrade dropped a live grenade while they sought refuge in a small house outside of Foy.

Noody recovered from his wounds in time to join his unit at Hagenau. He vividly recalls lying in a graveyard on the German side of the river at night during an attempt to take prisoners. As fighting ensued a friend whispered, “Boy, what a convenient place to die.” He survived the patrol only to discover that the “Grease Gun” he carried was defective. To this day Noody swears, “I hate guns! I don’t like guns of any kind.”

As the war ended, Noody celebrated with his unit in Berchtesgarden. One day, searching a train hidden in a tunnel, he retrieved a hand-crafted ceremonial sword belonging to Herman Goering. With the help of his friends he managed to get his prize home to America, where it now resides in a private museum collection.

Noody completed his wartime duty in Zell Am Zee, Austria, and returned to the US where he received his discharge in November 1945 at Ft. Dix, New Jersey. Over the years, Bob has traveled the world talking about his war experiences. He made a great impact on those he touched. He will be missed by so many.

BEST FRIENDS UNTIL THE END: Rat of Tobruk and Burma railway veteran die within days of each other -- will be remembered ahead of ANZAC Day.

Former Rat of Tobruk Murray Willing and fellow veteran Norvyn "Bluey" Stevens — who fought Japanese and Vichy French forces during World War II — knew a great deal about strength in the face of adversity.

The pair of old soldiers, who both recently died at the age of 100 during the current lead-up to Anzac Day, served in different theatres of war but they each had battle scars.

Mr Willing, who was believed to be the state's last living Rat of Tobruk, survived being shot during later fighting in Papua New Guinea.

During his wartime service, Mr Stevens was taken prisoner by the Japanese and was put to work on the notorious Thai-Burma railway.

"One in three Australians died in those camps, but Bluey and his mates fancied themselves as amateur saboteurs," Mr Denny said.

"When the supports for the railway bridges were being sunk, the POWs backfilled all the holes with leaves rather than dirt in the hope the bridges might eventually collapse."

The men just missed out on one final Anzac Day but Mr Denny said, given the cancellation of so many marches and services to protect veterans from coronavirus, it would have been a very different experience from the one they were used to.

"[Murray] used to love being in the Anzac Day marches, he wouldn't miss them for the world," he said.

"It's so sad to have this thrust upon them in their last years … you never know when an ANZAC Day is going to be your last when you get into your nineties.

"To have it snatched away from you by something like this and then know it's another 12 months before you get another crack — you just wonder how many are going to be around."

Murray Willing lied about his age and enlisted as a 20-year-old at Wallaroo on South Australia's Yorke Peninsula in March 1940.

During the war, he more than lived up to his name, willingly enduring hardship during his service in the Middle East and North Africa.

He survived the Siege of Tobruk and, along with 14,000 other Australians, held off the German forces for more than six months.

After resting in Syria, he was sent to fight the Japanese in Papua New Guinea where, during the Battle of Buna, he was shot in the chest.

"As my captain put his hand up for us to move forward, the sniper got me through my chest and it came out under my arm," he said.

He was strapped to the front of a vehicle for evacuation to a waiting aircraft, before Japanese forces attacked.

Like Mr Willing, Norvyn Stevens enlisted in Adelaide early in the war and served as a dispatch rider.

"They went off to the Middle East and worked in Syria, where they fought against the Vichy French under the command of Arthur Blackburn VC," Mr Denny said.

His battalion was later sent to Java to defend against the Japanese but, after the battalion's machine guns were sent on the wrong boat many soldiers, including Bluey, were captured as prisoners of war.

They were put to work on the notorious Thai-Burma railway.

He started as a "hammer and tap man", but Mr Denny said he soon had other ideas — including sabotage — and he was soon responsible for demolition.

A piece of rock damaged his shin badly in an explosion and the wound became very infected.

Managing to survive, he was then shipped to Japan to work in the coal mines until he was liberated after the end of the war.

Mr Denny said he was actively involved in his battalion's association and in Anzac Day marches.

"He held the unit standard, the first man in the unit, in his chair, in his uniform, with his slouch hat — he was always pushed in his wheelchair by his granddaughter," he said.

His granddaughter Ineke Van Rijswijk said he became her best friend.

"He was an amazing man who, despite the struggles and trauma he suffered in life, continued to see good everywhere, to love life and all people right up to his passing."

Despite a harrowing war experience, he did not share the stories with his family freely.

"His view was that if he burdened us and others with those stories, the sacrifices would've been for nothing," Ms Van Rijswijk said.

"I recall other stories … like him laughing with old friends about sunbaking in prison camps and getting burnt.

"We are heartbroken that given current COVID restrictions we cannot send Pa off the way he deserves."

Its with great sadness, we learn the news that World War II veteran and Superstar Mr. Lester Hudson, dies month short of his 100th birthday.

Lester Hudson was one of the last surviving members of the Chindits unit - a highly trained unit who fought against the Japanese during the Burma Campaign.

The war hero was married with one daughter, three grandchildren and four great grandchildren, was due to celebrate his 100th birthday in October. Speaking two years ago about the war, the military veteran told how he was shot by the Japanese during a fierce battle in the South-East Asian theatre of WWII.

He said: "If the bullet had been a fraction inwards, that would've been it. The bullet went right through me and out the other side."

The Chindits, officially titled the Long Range Penetration Sniper, were a special operations unit of the British and Indian armies that saw action in 1943 and 1944.

Their man focus was raiding operations against the Imperial Japanese Army, especially long-range penetration: attacking Japanese troops, facilities and lines of communication, deep behind Japanese lines.

It is thought Mr. Hudson was one of the unit's last survivors.

Today, we pause to remember the sacrifices and service of those who have gone before us due to Covid-19.

Rest in Peace. Your Nation does not forget your service. Your soul may now rest upon the Altar of Freedom that we all hold dear to us.

AMERICA REMEMBERS -- ZYSMAN, KAHN, 96, served during the war in the United States Air Forces and took part in the Battle of Iwo Jima and bombing raids over Japan, as well as in aerial surveys of Hiroshima and Nagasaki after the dropping of the atom bombs over Japan.

AMERICA REMEMBERS -- MAJOR LEN MCCUTCHEON, 101, served in the United States Army during the battle at Okinawa in the Pacific.

AMERICA REMEMBERS -- WILLIAM MIRANDA, 96, served with the United States Army, First “Big Red One” Division landing on Omaha Beach during DDAY. Bill went on to fight in ferocious battles in Belgium or Holland before being assigned to guard duty in Nuremburg, Germany.

AMERICA REMEMBERS -- FRANK BONOMO, 94, served in the United States Navy in the South and Central Pacific during World War II.

AMERICA REMEMBERS -- JAMES PARAS, 94, at 17 enlisted into the United States Navy and served the Pacific during World War.

AMERICA REMEMBERS -- GEORGE “THE SILVER FOX” CATALDO joined the Navy in 1944 after graduating from New Bedford Vocational High School, serving in the South Pacific until the end of World War II in 1945.

AMERICA REMEMBERS -- WILLIAM H. MIRANDA JR., 96, served with the United States Army, 29th Division during World War II, landing on Omaha Beach on D-Day, was wounded outside Saint Lo, and later awarded two bronze stars for his service.

AMERICA REMEMBERS -- EDWARD TURKEN, 96, joined the U.S. Army Air Corps in December 1942, and became a gunner on a B-24 Liberator.

AMERICA REMEMBERS -- FORREST COMPTON, an Army veteran who earned his greatest fame playing Marine Lt. Col. Edward Gray on "Gomer Pyle: U.S.M.C.," In real life, Compton served with the U.S. Army's 103rd Infantry Division in France during World War II.

AMERICA REMEMBERS -- EMILIO JOSEPH DIPALMA, served in World War II with the United States Army, First “Big Red One” Infantry Division Leo was a WWII Veteran known for his service as a courtroom guard at the 1st Nuremberg Trial.

There aren’t many left that have as much to look back on as Pearl Harbor survivor Mr. Daniel Kramer did.

A survivor of the bombing of Pearl Harbor, Kramer died today at Prairie Hills Assisted Living in Clinton. He was 103.

Kramer had spoken with the Clinton Herald about the events of Dec. 7, 1941 many times. He grew up in Dubuque, attended the University of Iowa, joined the U.S. Navy and lived through one of the most harrowing attacks of World War II. Seven battleships were stationed at Pearl Harbor in early December 1941; the morning of Dec. 7, 1941, Kramer was on duty on the U.S.S California.

According to the Naval History and Heritage Command website, the USS California was hit forward and aft by two Japanese torpedoes in the early minutes of the Pearl Harbor raid. She was later hit by a bomb and near-missed by another, which caused additional flooding. Though her design included very good protection against underwater damage, California’s actual condition was much less satisfactory, with many watertight compartments open and some design details proving unable to resist the effects of torpedo warheads, according to the website.

“California was nearly ready to get underway when a large mass of burning oil, drifting down ‘Battleship Row’, threatened to set the ship on fire. She was ordered abandoned, and, when the crew returned on board sometime later, it was impossible to control her flooding,” the website states. The ship settled to the bottom of Pearl Harbor, coming to rest on Dec. 10, 1941. Nearly 100 of her officers and men were killed in action during the Pearl Harbor attack.

Kramer, 25, at the time, had enlisted one year before the the ships were attacked. He had been married less than six months.

“General quarters were sounded,” Kramer said in an interview with the Herald a few years ago. “That means everyone gets to their battle station. My battle station was on the bridge of the battleship. That is where the ship is steered from. We did not get underway before we were attacked by bombs and torpedoes. The battleship slowly sank in the water where the main deck was under water but the rest of the battleship was not. It was a total surprise.”

In an attack that killed nearly 2,500 people, Kramer survived. He went on to Fort Shafter, not escaping more bomb attacks from Japanese airplanes.

He continued his military service until 1946, when he moved back to Clinton with his wife. There, he started a new career with DuPont.

When 2020 started there were fewer than 500 Pearl Harbor survivors still alive in the United States, putting Kramer in an elite group of military veterans.

It is with great sadness we learn the passing of Pearl Harbor survivor Mr. Thomas Berg, 98, of Port Townsend, Wash. He was aboard the USS Tennessee at the time of the attack.

Berg, born July 19, 1922, was a regular face at the annual Dec. 7 observances at Pearl Harbor, Hawaii. In December he served as grand marshal for the annual parade, which he had ridden in each year since 2011.

During the 2018 commemoration, Berg recounted for Stars and Stripes how he had joined the Navy right out of high school in 1940 and had been assigned below deck in Boiler Room 7 on the USS Tennessee on the morning of the attack. The ship was moored on Battleship Row beside the USS West Virginia.

He was walking the deck for some fresh air before heading to the boiler room for the day’s work, then stopped into his living quarters. Moments later, a clarinet player from the morning-colors band raced in, shouting that the Japanese were bombing.

“Everybody reeled back and thought he’d gone berserk,” Berg said.

Below deck in the boiler room, Berg’s job was to communicate by radio with a sailor on the navigation bridge.

“He was describing what was going on,” Berg said. “He told us when the Oklahoma turned over, when the West Virginia was sinking and listing.”

When the [USS] Arizona’s magazine blew up, the repercussion drove smoke down the Tennessee’s pipes into the boiler room, burning off the eyebrows of some men, Berg said. The Tennessee’s stern was engulfed in flames from the Arizona’s burning fuel oil.

“I was scared stiff,” he said.

Berg went on to submarine duty during World War II and was discharged in 1946, according to his obituary. He earned a degree in mechanical engineering, and in the late 1960s was a test engineer for the Mark 45 torpedo at Naval Torpedo Station-Keyport. He retired in 1977.

He is survived by Lesa Barnes, his wife of 21 years, three children from his first marriage, seven grandchildren and seven great-grandchildren.

D-Day veteran who was one of the first Allied soldiers to enter the Bergen-Belsen concentration camp after its Nazi guards fled dies aged 95.

When he was just 18, John Gardiner, from Sidmouth Devon, fought his way off Sword Beach during the D-Day landings on June 6, 1944.

With his unit, part of the Devonshire Regiment, John battled inland to help his comrades hold Pegasus Bridge, which Allied soldiers had famously captured a few hours earlier.

His unit then made their way across Germany towards the Baltic coast when John and an officer arrived at Bergen-Belsen - making him one of the first Allied soldiers to come across the horrors of the infamous concentration camp.

Approximately 50,000 people, most of them Jewish, died at the concentration camp, including Anne Frank and her mother Edith.

In 2017 he was awarded the Legion d'honneur - France's highest military decoration - for helping to liberate the country from the Nazis.

Now tributes have been paid to John, who died in hospital on May 4 from kidney failure after suffering a fall.

He did not have coronavirus, his family confirmed, though they were unable to say goodbye to him due to visiting restrictions in place due to Covid-19.

His daughter Terina Worrall said: 'Dad will be mainly remembered as a quiet, gentle, kind, generous and helpful gentleman.

'He was always happy to help others and was a very humble person with a quiet humour.

'He enjoyed gardening and had a collection of tortoises in the garden too.'

John served with the 12 Battalion Devonshire Regiment, part of the 6th Airborne Division, and after training his first action was landing on Sword Beach on D-Day.

After fighting in the D-Day landings, John and his unit fought in the Battle of the Bulge in the Ardennes Forest in Belgium to help quell Hitler's last major offensive of the Second World War.

In March 1945 he was flown by glider 50 miles behind the German lines to help secure strategic river bridges as part of Operation Varsity.

During the operation - the largest ever airborne operation - John saw pal Private Jack Bristol fatally shot through the stomach.

John was unable to stop for the 20-year-old fellow Devonian as they were still under intense fire.

The death of his friend continued to haunt John after the war and his family say he would send money to his relatives as a means of support.

Mrs Worrall said: ' He didn't talk about (the war) for ages. He lost his best friend - he was hit and he was ordered to leave him to die as they were under fire.

'He never really got over that. He used to send money to his friends's mum to help her out financially as she was a widow.

'Today I would say his experiences left him with PTSD but like so many of that era they just got on with it.'

Three weeks later after John's unit headed north through Germany he and a senior officer came across a series of huts behind barbed wire fences.

They were urged to approach it by a skeletal figure of a man who opened the gate for them.

Mrs Worrall said: 'At Belsen he found the camp all but empty of people apart from a German/Jewish guy who spoke a little English.

'He showed him around and one can only imagine how traumatic it must have been to find bodies in a pit with lime spread over them.

'Again, I think that contributed to his quiet demeanour.'

John had four children with his first wife Pat.

After they divorced in the early 1970s he met his second wife and now widow Joan who he later married in 2003.

John's funeral is due to take place at Whimple Crematorium on May 19.

It is with great sadness; we learn the passing of Polish WWII fighter pilot. Mr. Jerzy Glowczewski. He was 97.

Jerzy Glowczewski, a Polish-born fighter pilot who flew World War II missions with Britain's Royal Air Force after Nazi Germany invaded his country.

He is believed to have been the last surviving member of a group of Polish exiles who joined the Royal Air Force to fight the Nazis.

Born in Warsaw in November 1922, Jerzy Eligiusz Glowczewski fled Poland with his stepfather at the age of 16 when Nazi Germany invaded in 1939.

Glowczewski was nearly killed in a strafing run by a German plane as he tried to find what remained of the Polish Army. As refugees, Glowczewski and his stepfather lived in Bucharest, Romania, before moving to Tel Aviv, Israel.

He served with the Allied Forces in the Independent Carpathian Rifle Brigade in Egypt and in Libya before he traveled to Britain to become a pilot.

He joined the Polish army in exile in 1941, where he served in the No. 308 'City of Krakow' Polish fighter squad. With this squadron, Glowczewski completed 100 mission and was awarded the Polish Cross of Valor three times for his efforts.

Glowczewski was also instrumental in halting the final major attack on the Western front by the German Luftwaffe.

On New Year's Day in 1945, Glowczewski shot down a Focke-Wulf 190, a German fighter aircraft, over Belgium from his Spitefire fighter plane.

'As I looked over my shoulder, the Focke-Wulf was a crumbling crucifix against the bright, morning sky. Another explosion, it tumbled down,' he wrote in his memoirs.

'It was probably one of the last classic dogfights in which survival depended on the acrobatic skill and lightning reflexes of the pilot.'

After World War II, he returned to a savaged Poland following the German's surrender in May 1945. Glowczewski decided to pursue a career in architecture and attended that Warsaw University of Technology. He graduated in 1952.

His work as an architecture helped rebuild Poland's ruined old town and designed many projects around the country.

He married Irena 'Lenta' Glowczewska and had his daughter, Klara.

Glowczewski career eventually took him to the United States, where in 1961 he visited in 1961 on a Ford Foundation grant.

He taught architecture at North Carolina State University, before spending two years in Egypt directing the redevelopment of the city of Aswan in 1965.

Wartime in Israel led Glowczewski to flee Egypt with his family, including their dachshund named Romulus, two years later.

In later years, Glowczewski taught architecture at the Pratt Institute in New York and wrote memoirs recounting his life experiences.

The Accidental Immigrant' was a single volume memoir released in English in 2007.

Glowczewski is survived by his daughter Klara and two grandchildren.

Sarah Gibson dispatch rider.


https://www.telegraph.co.uk/obituar...h-rider-one-fighting-wellses-lauded-war/

Commander Jim Speed Royal Navy beach commando Sword beach.

https://www.telegraph.co.uk/obituar...commando-cleared-beaches-d-day-obituary/

Mieczyslaw Stachiewicz, Polish Second World War bomber pilot.


https://www.telegraph.co.uk/obituar...cz-polish-second-world-war-bomber-pilot/

Scotland's oldest veteran and World War II hero Jimmy Sinclair dies aged 107

Scotland’s oldest veteran and World War II veteran Jimmy Sinclair has sadly died at the age of 107.

Tributes have poured in for the war hero after he passed away at his home in Kirkcaldy, Fife, on Wednesday, May 27.

Jimmy, who served as a gunner with the elite Chestnut Troop of the 7th Armored Division in North Africa, lived a fascinating life and was the last surviving Desert Rat.

The pensioner, who celebrated his last birthday with a dram and a bowl of porridge, included Prince Charles and wife Camilla as personal friends.

He regularly corresponded with the royal couple as the Duchess of Rothesay’s father was a fellow Desert Rat.

Two armed forces charities have paid tribute to Jimmy, who passed away just weeks after featuring in a special VE day exhibition to mark the 75th anniversary.

In a joint statement, Mark Bibbey, of Poppyscotland, and Dr Claire Armstrong, of Legion Scotland, said: “It is with great sadness that we learned today of the passing of Jimmy Sinclair, who fought against Rommel in the North African desert as a gunner with the elite Chestnut Troop, 1st Regiment Horse Artillery, of the 7th Armored Division.

“We are blessed that so many were able to hear Jimmy’s incredible story over the years and it was no surprise that he received numerous commendations for his Service during the Second World War and, following that, with the Allied Control Commission in Berlin.

“His was one of the most important voices that were heard as the country celebrated VE Day just a few short weeks ago.

“We wish to send our sincere condolences to Jimmy’s family at this time, along with his legion of friends and followers.

“There is no better way to sum up this wonderful man than highlighting that he refused to wear his medals out of solidarity for those he served with that were lost.

“We are sure that many of us across the country and beyond will be raising a glass to this incredible man.”

It is with great sadness; we learn the passing of Pearl Harbor survivor and World War II superstar Mr. Harry Ogg. He was 98.

Harry enlisted in the Navy in June of 1941 and after boot camp, was assigned to the USS Neosho AO 23 which was in the attack on Pearl Harbor on December 7, 1941. After years of service he returned home on August 14, 1945 on his birthday. During his time in the Navy he earned 5 battle stars and he thanks the good lord he survived.

Ogg was a long-time member of Chapter 5 Pearl Harbor Survivors Association and paid for the Pearl Harbor Survivors memorial at Sherrill Park in Corpus Christi, Texas.

It is with great sadness; we learn the passing of World War II SUPERHERO and longtime Fort Berthold doctor Mr. Herbert Wilson. He was 99.

He spent two years in Europe in the 1940s, participating in 31 bombing raids with the 506th Bombardment Squadron, 44th Bombardment Group. He joined the U.S. Army Air Corps as a gunner and bombardier, looking after armament, the bombs and guns, and flying on a B-24 Liberator. A model of that cherished plane still hangs from the ceiling in his office.

It was during the war when he met his helpmate of 70 years, the young Lilian May “Ozzie” Osborne. The two met at an American Red Cross Club party in London, but neither of them danced so they bonded over a book they were both reading, “War and Peace.”

Herbert Wilson, and his wife Lilian, had six children, 14 grandchildren and nine great-grandchildren.

After the war, Wilson, a Bethel, Vt., native, graduated from Harvard and Tufts Medical School on the GI Bill and worked two years for the U.S. Public Health Service. His second year he transferred to the Indian Health Service at Elbowoods, where he spent a year before the rising reservoir of the Garrison Dam flooded the town. He established himself in New Town, where he doctored for 42 years.

It is with great sadness we learn this morning that one of the last survivors who witnessed the Japanese Surrender, 1st Class Machinist Mate, Arthur C, Albert Sr., went home to be with his Lord. He was 93.

Art was born on January 29, 1927, in Syracuse, NY. He served in the United States Navy for 21 years. He enlisted in the U.S. Navy at the age of 17, where he bravely fought and served aboard the USS Missouri during World War II.

He witnessed Japan’s formal instrument of surrender ending World War II on September 2, 1945, in Tokyo Bay, Japan. He was injured during the Battle of Okinawa when a kamikaze struck it, but he never reported the injury.

He later had to have his right kneecap removed, and the bones fused, which caused him to walk with a stiff leg. He then went on to serve during the Korean and Vietnam Wars.

Nearly every year, Art, his wife Sherry, and other family and friends would travel with him to Pearl Harbor in Hawaii to celebrate the signing of the peace treaty, and in fact, he had plans to attend the 75th anniversary in just a few short months.

Art was the life of the party when he would be on board the ship with crowds, cameras, and microphones following him around as he regaled his days aboard the “Mighty Mo.” He also loved to speak at schools to share with students the events of his time in the service.

He is the kindest and loving person you could ever meet.

Arthur C, Albert Sr was one of the few left who could wear World War II, Korea, and Vietnam hat. RIP Arthur C, Albert Sr.

Vera Lynn dies.

RIP the forces sweetheart.

https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-53091856

Wow, 103!! RIP

I admit, other than the context and time period of a short obscure song, I had no idea who she was...

"Does anybody here remember Vera Lynn?
Remember how she said that
We would meet again
Some sunny day?
Vera, Vera
What has become of you
Does anybody else in here
Feel the way I do?"

RIP, and to all referenced on this thread.

Same here Mark. I didn't know who she was until I was in my 30's and indeed when I first listened to "The Wall" when I was in high school I had no clue who Roger Waters was singing about.

It is with great sadness; we learn the passing of SUPERSTAR Warren Jorgenson, a Marine veteran of World War II, POW who survived Corregidor and 'hell ship' voyage, He was 99.

Not many Marines survived more hell than Warren Jorgenson.

The veteran from Bennington witnessed the attack on Manila at the outset of World War II. He was wounded just before the fall of Corregidor, endured a "hell ship" journey to Japan, and three years as a POW.

“Jorg,” as friends called him, lost a high school sweetheart who married another man, thinking Jorg had died in the war. He married three times before they finally reconnected.

“He was such a sweet man,” said Jan Thompson, president of American Defenders of Bataan and Corregidor Memorial Society, who had known him for many years.

She said there are only about 60 known veterans still living who survived the Japanese POW camps.

In 2014, Thompson selected Jorgenson along with several other World War II POWs to travel to Japan on a tour of goodwill and reconciliation. The former POWs, in their 90s, appeared on television, gave talks, and met with senior diplomats from both the U.S. and Japan.

Though Jorgenson endured harsh treatment at the hands of the Japanese, he told The World-Herald at the time that he made an early decision not to be bitter about it.

“I decided life’s too short,” he said. “I’m not going to be angry.”

Jorgenson was born in 1921, in Bertram, Iowa, a whistlestop town near Cedar Rapids. His father was a railroad foreman, and his childhood revolved around trains.

He graduated from high school in 1938, got a job in a factory, and planned on marrying his high school sweetheart, Ruth Harrison. He lost the job the following year, and joined the Marines after seeing an ad in the paper about the adventure of serving in Asia.

“When I broke the news to her, she was distraught,” Jorgenson said in 2014. “We were two church kids, straight-arrow. We tentatively figured we’d marry when I got back.”

After boot camp, Jorgenson was sent to Shanghai, China — at the time described as the “Paris of the East.”

In late November 1941, Jorgenson and the Shanghai Marine garrison was evacuated to the Philippines as the Japanese menaced the city. On the morning of Dec. 8 — Dec. 7 in the United States, across the International Date Line — he crowed to his gunnery sergeant that his Marine Corps tour was half over.

“Ten minutes later, someone came up and said ­‘Oahu’s been bombed!’” Jorgenson recalled, referring to the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor, Hawaii.

That day he saw Japanese aircraft fly overhead to bomb Manila. By the end of December, his unit, the 4th Marine Regiment, was sent to guard the island fortress at Corregidor, in Manila Bay.

During the four-month siege that followed, Jorgenson grew to hate the whine of the air-raid siren.

“I was in terror,” he said. “But you finally adjust, because you’re not dead yet.”

He was shot in the side the day before the garrison fell. The bullet missed his heart because it was deflected by his gas-mask canister.

Jorgenson was sent to Fortress Corregidor’s massive underground hospital. He was lying on a blood-soaked cot when the loudspeaker announced the garrison was being surrendered.

“They said the Japanese will be entering the tunnel in a few minutes,” Jorgenson said.

He said the Japanese didn’t disturb operations in the hospital and left the wounded to heal.

While he was recovering, Jorgenson missed a critical roll call. As a result, his family in Iowa received a message that he was missing and presumed dead.

He spent two years in the Philippines, doing manual labor. He felt his treatment was harsh but not brutal.

“I’d gotten hit a few times, but that was just part of the territory,” he said. “You feel like you want to get up and clobber them — but you don’t.”

Jorgenson was shipped with 1,035 POWs to Japan in August 1944 on one of the notorious hell ships, the Noto Maru. They were crammed into a hot cargo hold with no room to sit. They were given only a little rice and water each day. An open vat in the middle of the room was a communal toilet.

“There were no fights. Just a lot of congestion and smells,” Jorgenson said.

Once in Japan, he was among about 900 POWs sent to the Hanawa prison camp in the mountains of northern Japan to work as slave laborers in the Mitsubishi copper mines. Twenty-seven of them died.

Jorgenson was one of only two of the POWs still living in 2015, when Mitsubishi officials delivered a formal apology to the POWs in Los Angeles.

Characteristically, Jorgenson tended years later to recall moments when his captors showed their humanity. In a 2014 interview, he remembered talking in English with a Mitsubishi engineer who had studied at Columbia University in New York. And the memory of a Japanese officer who was a Christian and gave each prisoner at Corregidor a pack of cigarettes moved him to tears. The officer told them he hoped they got home safely at the end of the war.

“There were times when you saw the brighter side of things,” Jorgenson said.

The Hanawa prisoners heard rumors of the atomic bombs that destroyed Hiroshima and Nagasaki in August 1945. Within weeks they were rescued by American troops. He lost 70 pounds while in captivity.

After traveling by ship to the West Coast, Jorgenson called his parents, who were stunned to hear from him. He asked about Ruth.

“My mom said, ‘Sonny boy, just cool it. She’s married,’” he said. Ruth had moved to California with her new husband.

Jorgenson was crushed, but he moved on. He married Louise Messick, and used his GI Bill to go to Drake University and earn a degree in radio broadcasting. He worked for decades in the music industry.

The couple had three sons and divorced in 1959. Jorgenson remarried and settled in Omaha. His second wife, Betty, died in 1981.

Fourteen years later, Ruth — who was widowed and living in Pebble Beach, California — learned Warren was still alive. She wrote him a letter. They rekindled their youthful romance and spent 18 years together, until she died in 2013 after a fall in their California home.

“It was really a honeymoon,” Jorgenson said.

He moved back to Nebraska, near two of his children, to live in a retirement home in Bennington.

Jorgenson had long participated in American Defenders of Bataan and Corregidor events, which Thompson said were therapeutic for the veterans (including her own father) who survived the often brutal imprisonment by the Japanese military. Few received any kind of treatment for their trauma.

For many, she said, the bitterness they felt dissipated after goodwill trips like the one Jorgenson joined in 2014.

"Since we started sending them back, it's been a night-and-day difference," Thompson said. "That's the power of these trips."

Jorgenson published a pair of books through a Christian bookseller after turning 90. The first was a politically charged indictment of modern parenting called “Daisies & Dandelions.” The second, “The Expendable Garrison,” was a memoir of his Iowa childhood and his military service, including his POW experience.

In 2017, the then-commander of his wartime unit, Col. Kevin Norton, visited Bennington to film an interview with Jorgenson about his Marine Corps experience.

It is with great sadness, we learn the passing of World War II SUPERSTAR Mr. Marvin Strombo. He was 96.

Marvin Strombo, a United States Marine who as a young man on war-torn islands of the Pacific saw humanity at its worst and journeyed to Japan at age 93 to display it at its best, died Tuesday night.

Strombo grew up in Dixon and lived his last six decades in Missoula, in the log home where he drew his final breath.

"What a good man he was, or is," Sandra Williamson said Tuesday in her father's final hours. "He lived a long, full life and taught a lot of lessons along the way. We're so grateful we had him."

Strombo was in good health earlier this month, when a book about his swashbuckling Scout-Sniper platoon in the 6th Marine Regiment during World War II was published. He was one of author Joseph Tachovsky's primary sources as the ranks of the 35 Marines who survived the Battle of Saipan dwindled.

Just one remains: Roscoe Mullins in West Virginia.

"It's funny. Marvin and Roscoe were best buddies from boot camp through Tarawa, Saipan, Tinian and then they acted as a police force in Japan after the war. They were the last two," said Tachovsky, who began researching "40 Thieves On Saipan" after his father's death in 2011.

Frank Tachovsky was the highly respected commander of the "40 Thieves" who were, as the book jacket cover states, "trained in a ruthless array of hand-to-hand killing techniques" to "wreak havoc in and around, but mostly behind, enemy lines."

Those lines moved steadily and bloodily north along the 12-mile long island after U.S. Marines stormed the southern beaches of Saipan on June 15, 1944. Victory was declared on July 9.

"Daddy loved the book," Williamson said. "He thought it was wonderful that the stories of all those men were going to be told. That mattered a lot to him."

Like many war survivors, Strombo kept his memories to himself. Tachovsky was able to comb some out in frequent visits to Missoula from his own home in Wisconsin. Strombo shared stories of his days on Saipan freely with the Missoulian for a Veterans Day profile in 2016. One of them turned into what his daughter called a "life-changing" experience.

Rex and Keiko Ziak of the Obon Society of Oregon tracked down the family of a Japanese officer who died on Saipan and whose "Good Luck Flag" Strombo claimed as a souvenir. In company with the Ziaks, Williamson, Williamson's sister Brenda Strombo of Portland, Oregon, daughter Emily Williamson and Tachovsky, Marvin traveled to a remote village in Japan in August 2017 to return the flag.

In a moving ceremony, he presented it to three siblings of Sadao Yasue, whose body Strombo came upon among more than 100 fresh corpses on the outskirts of Garapan, the island's capital. In his book, co-written by longtime friend Cynthia Kraack of Minneapolis, Tachovsky described Strombo's encounter outside Garapan. It occurred on June 25, 1944, or 76 years ago Thursday.

Strombo broke off from the six-man group when he saw among the bodies what appeared to be a small World War I cannon. As he approached it, it vanished in the shimmer of the tropical heat.

"In its place lay a dead Japanese captain, as peaceful as if he were sleeping," Tachovsky wrote.

Strombo gazed at the placid face.

"No visible wounds, very little blood, Strombo guessed that he had been killed by a mortar strike," Tachovsky reported. "Rummaging through the warrior's pack, he found many family photos: mother, father and their children in a mountainous village strikingly similar to his home in Montana. He's no different from me, Strombo thought.

"Standing up to leave, he noticed the captain's Good Luck Flag peeking out of his uniform."

Strombo first decided against taking the flag, knowing it to be sacred to the Japanese, Tachovsky said. But he changed his mind.

"If I don't take it, somebody else will," Strombo said, and tucked the flag into his dungarees. "I promise I'll give it back to your family someday."

When he did 73 years later, he became the first U.S. veteran to return a Good Luck Flag in person to Japan, at least through the Obon Society.

"I can almost smell my brother's skin from the flag, so we know that you have kept it well for so long," 89-year-old Tatsuya Yasue said during the hour-long ceremony that the Ziaks arranged to have live-streamed.

The act was typical of her father, Sandra Williams said Tuesday.

"To be able to go back there and do something that brought the family peace meant something to him," she said. "It’s hard when you're in the fog of war, just trying to survive. To be able to go over there and bring comfort instead of bullets, to him that was almost life-changing."

Strombo was one of four brothers who fought in and survived World War II. Oliver Strombo, two years Marvin's elder, was with the Second Marines in the same Pacific battles. Marvin reupped after the war and served in the Korean conflict as well.

He had nightmares, mostly of waking up in the throes of a Japanese banzai. But he handled what has since been labeled Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder, or PTSD, better than many. He was discharged in 1951. Starting in 1959 his only marriage produced the four children who were with him on his deathbed Tuesday night. They are, in order of age, Noemi Bassler of Florence, Brenda Strombo, Sandra Williamson and Tim Strombo of Redondo Beach, Calif.

"When Marvin's wife left him shortly after their fourth child was born, he found that being the single parent of four was the best medicine in the world to help him ease his demons," Tachovsky wrote in "40 Thieves."

"He just put all of his focus on raising us and making sure that we felt loved and safe and had a roof over our heads," Williamson said this week. "We were to him what he was to us, just that saving grace."

Tachovsky was at his home in Sturgeon Bay, Wisconsin, late at night nine days ago when he received an urgent email from Brenda Strombo asking him to call her. The news was bad: Marvin, who had been so fit and alert for his age, had taken a dramatic downturn. Hospice was called in.

Tachovsky put everything else aside and jumped in his car the next morning, a Wednesday. After the familiar 1,500-mile drive, he pulled up to the Strombo house Thursday night.

"It's Marvin," he said simply. "All these old guys have become like second and third fathers to me. I went to Japan with him, and I wanted to see him one last time."

Work beckoned Tachovsky home on Monday, and Strombo drifted into unconsciousness that evening. He passed away shortly after 10:30 p.m. Tuesday.

"Marvin kind of rallied when I was leaving," Tachovsky said. "The last cognizant thing I heard him say, he just looked me and said, 'Joe, Semper Fi.'"

The Marine Corps motto that means "always faithful" is also the final line in Tachovsky's book.

In his final hours Tuesday, Strombo was surrounded by his children, grandchildren and great-grandchildren.

It is with great sadness; we learn the news that World War II (D-DAY) and Korean War Veteran, Mr. Harvey (Bill) Morrison of Hillman Mich has passed away. He was 95.

Bill was 19 when in the early hours of June 6, 1944, jumped on Normandy with the 82nd Airborne. His unit they were responsible for capturing various targets west of the allied amphibious invasion zone, such as the town of Sainte-Mère-Eglise or the La Fière bridge.

After Normandy, he jumped into Holland during Operation Market Garden, the Ardennes before crossing the Rhine and passed the Siegfried Line into Germany on April 30, 1945.

On 2 May 1945, the 82nd Airborne Division discovered and released the survivors of the concentration camp in Woebbelin. On the same day General Gavin accepted the surrender of nearly 150,000 soldiers of the 21st German Army.

After returning to the United States in March 1946. He brought his fearlessness and strong work ethic back home to Detroit alone with his Purple Heart in hand.

However, shortly before the war in Korea, the country called Bill to reenter the service then was reactivated in 1950 to train new soldiers at Ft Custer in Battle Creek, Michigan. After the Korean War, he returned home to operate his grocery store in Hillman.

In all those years, he taught thousands about work ethic and being an adult and seen many of those youngsters go into the military. He was a mentor, father figure, and friend, but he was ready to be with his wife again.

It is with great sadness; we learn the passing of World War II, Korean, and Vietnam war SUPERSTAR Mr. Merlyn Hoppel. He was 97.

Merlyn Hoppel was born in Minersville, Pa. February 1923 and moved to Philadelphia at a young age. In January 1943, Mr. Hoppel enlisted into the U.S Army, and in December of 1944, he went to Camp Hood, Texas, to attend Tank Destroyer school. After completion of his training, he was shipped out to the far east from October 1944 until January 1946.

During World War II, he was part of the early landings in the Philippines, where he took part in the Liberation of the Philippines and then was involved in the battle of Japan. He received the Liberation of Philippines medal, Army of Occupation Medal (Japan), and Asiatic Pacific Campaign Medal, and Good Conduct Medal.

After returning from World War II, he left the Army for a short period, and before the Korean war, he reenlisted into the Army. In 1953 he was deployed to Korea to take part in the Korean War until 1954. Once Mr. Hoppel returned from Korea, he served two tours in Germany.

In September of 1967 until November of 1968 and then again in November of 1969 until November of 1970, he was shipped out to Vietnam.

Mr. Hoppel reached the rank of Sergeant First Class before his retirement in 1973. During his time in the service, he served in Iran as part of a training unit that trained the Iranian military in helicopter repair.

For his service in the military, SFC Hoppel received the Bronze star with one Oak Leaf cluster, Vietnam Service Medal, Vietnam Campaign Medal, National Defense Medal with one Oak Leaf cluster, Aircraft Crewman Badge, Air medal, Iranian Crewmember Wings, Army Commendation Medal and seven Good Conduct awards.

After he retired from the Army, he worked for Bell helicopter, where he returned to Iran and worked for two years. Mr. Hoppel was on the last flight out of Iran before the hostages being taken at the United States Embassy.

It is with great sadness; we learn the passing of WWII Army veteran Jesse Whitley, a member of the “Black Devils.” He was 99.

After World War II, decorated Army veteran Jesse Whitley returned home and became a soldier for the Lord, serving as a Baptist pastor and preacher for more than 45 years.

“Sgt.” Whitley, who celebrated his 99th birthday Dec. 14, received renewed recognition on Veterans Day, Nov. 11, with Green Beret status for his service in a special forces unit nicknamed “the Devil’s Brigade.”

It came as a surprise to Whitley, who faced combat action with the First Special Service Force against the Japanese in Alaska’s Aleutian Islands and against the Germans in Italy.

Whitley joined the U.S. Army on April 25, 1939, at age 19 in Texarkana, Ark., where he grew up, trained in Helena, Montana. He was honorably discharged on Oct. 31, 1945.

FBC Pearland member John Triplett spearheaded the effort to obtain Green Beret status for Whitley, who served in the First Special Service Force (FSSF), forerunner of the current U.S. Army Special Forces, whose elite troops wear the iconic Green Beret.

The FSSF garnered WWII fame for a 99-day period in 1943 when it operated behind enemy lines primarily at night, inspiring a 1966 book and a 1968 film based on the book, both titled “The Devil’s Brigade.”

On behalf of TGGF and its members, we salute Jesse Whitley for his dedication and service to our freedom.

"Mr. Hoppel was on the last flight out of Iran before the hostages being taken at the United States Embassy."


A lucky man. RIP

World War II U.S. Marine veteran Bayne Stevens joined his fallen comrades on Saturday, dying at the age of 98 in Carson City.

Stevens served with the 4th Marine Division and fought in three of the bloodiest battles of World War II in late 1944 and 1945 — Saipan, Tinian and Iwo Jima, according to his family.

Late last month, his granddaughter issued a plea for help after Stevens was transferred from where he was living to a Gardnerville rehabilitation center.

He was preceded in death by his wife, Frances Nell Stevens, 95, in 2018. The couple met in Los Angeles during the early portion of the war after Stevens had joined the Marines. They were married in December 1945 in Michigan.

After the war, Stevens attended Michigan State where he obtained his teaching degree. The couple lived in the San Fernando Valley in California until they moved to Gardnerville in the late 1980s.

He is survived by his son Bruce Stevens, daughter Lisa Cribbs and four grandchildren.

Services are pending the end of the coronavirus outbreak.

May they all R.I.P.

Selfless and brave heroes, each and everyone of them.

Many of them joined up after Pearl Harbor without being asked.

They didn't question how high when they were told to jump. They just do it.

There are also stories of many young men who when they were told they were 4-F, committed suicide because they couldn't bear to live with the shame that every one of their age in their small town/city/community were going on to serve and fight and they were the only ones staying behind.

It is with great sadness; we learn the news that World War II SUPERSTAR Mr. George Ford has died. He was 102.

He joined the Army Air Force on July 23, 1943. After several training stints around the United States, he eventually found himself stationed in Europe, working as a radio radar technician in a B-17 Bomber. Ford was part of 25 bombing missions over Germany during the war.

In 1945, Ford participated in humanitarian food drops over the Netherlands. At the time, the western portion of the region was still under German control and some 3 million Dutch were at risk of starvation.

Ford flew on four food drop runs. In 1985, he was invited by Holland to attend a 40th anniversary celebration for the humanitarian missions. The country awarded Ford with the Medal of Liberation.

Ford was awarded a Medal of Honor from France and Air Medals and Major Battle Stars from the United States.
Ford’s wife, Lorraine, died more than 20 years ago, and since his spouse’s death up until the time he died Ford lived alone in the same east-central Ogden home he built mostly by himself in the early 1950s.

The Standard-Examiner profiled Ford last year, shortly after his 102nd birthday. He told the paper then he attributed his longevity and durability to his active lifestyle. He exercised daily, regularly drove and did all of his own yard work. There may have been some genetics at play as well — Ford’s dad was 92 when he died, and he had a brother that lived to be 98.

“He was out working in his yard right up until he died,” said Ford’s longtime friend, Gordon Williams. “He really was quite a fellow.”

In a social media tribute, Ford’s son, Greg Ford, said his father was the “best dad a son could have ever had” and highlighted the man’s work ethic and charity.

“He was still driving and coming out to help me until a couple of days before he got sick,” Greg Ford said. “Helping others was always his greatest legacy.”

It is with great sadness; we learn the passing of Australian World War II veteran, proud member of the famous “RATS OF TOBRUK” Mr. Gordon Wallace. He was 98.

In 2012, Gordon Wallace - a Rat of Tobruk made the journey back to North Africa to attend official commemorations marking the 70th anniversary of the North Africa campaign and the Battle of El Alamein alongside 21 World War II veterans.

Serving with the 2/15th Infantry Battalion, Australian 9th Division in North Africa, the Battle of El Alamein was a decisive battle of WWII with the Allies forcing the Germans to retreat down the Mediterranean coast and ultimately abandon their campaign in North Africa.

On the night of 23 October 1942, the Allies launched a major offensive at El Alamein that would lead to 12 days of brutal fighting. The Australians of the 9th Division were tasked with holding the northern flank against the German assault while the British forces breached the enemy line on the southern flank.

The RAAF provided air support, the Navy patrolled in nearby waters and nurses helped evacuate the wounded to nearby casualty clearing stations. Together, their efforts forced the Germans to retreat along the Mediterranean coast and abandon North Africa in May 1943.

After North Africa, Gordon went on to serve in New Guinea, which he described as "a little easier" because at least there was cover - places to hide - unlike the almost treeless deserts of North Africa.'

'After the War ended, Gordon continued to write poems detailing his experiences on the battlefields of North Africa and New Guinea. His poetry gives us a first-hand account of what it was like to live through some of the major battles of the war.

This is Gordon's poem, Jungle Patrol:
"When you're out in the Jungle, it's a much different affair.
There are no static lines - you could be anywhere.
When you're out as a forward scout you feel like live bait – to draw the tiger out you know there lies in wait."

Perhaps Gordon's poetry was his way of coping with the tragedy and battlefield trauma of the scenes he witnessed, the mates he lost and the enduring psychological pain of war.'

It is with great sadness; we learn the passing of World War II veteran Mr. William Varosso, a decorated war veteran and Police Officer. He was 94.

Mr. Varroso joined the United States Navy when he was 18 serving aboard the USS Underhill during World War II.

He was involved in escorting convoys between Bizerte, Tunisia and Oran, Algeria. After her first convoy in Bizerte, Underhill was ordered out into the Mediterranean Sea where she steamed all night at flank speed, fully illuminated in waters known to be populated with U-boats and overflown by German aircraft. The invasion of southern France was launched a few days later; it is likely Underhill's cruise was a diversion or a probe. When returning to Bizerte, she struck a ship sunken in the channel and badly damaged her port propeller and shaft, which was repaired in Oran.

In January 1945, Underhill was assigned to the Seventh Fleet in the Philippine Islands, departing New London on 8 February 1945, rendezvousing with HMS Patroller to escort the British escort carrier to the Panama Canal Zone. Underhill then steamed via the Panama Canal, the Galapagos Islands, and Bora Bora to the Admiralty Islands and arrived at Seeadler Harbor on 15 March 1945.

On July 24, 1945, Varroso was aboard a destroyer, the USS Underhill, which was leading a convoy of tank landing ships.

Two "suicide submarines," typically operated by one Japanese sailor armed with 3,000 pounds of explosives, rammed the Underhill, splitting the ship and causing it to sink in the Pacific Ocean. Out of the 236 sailors aboard the Underhill, 122 survived, including Varroso.

"We as a Police Department, will send off Officer Bill with the respect he earned due to his lifetime of service to his country, the Town of Braintree, and his countless hours of volunteer work," police said in a statement.

Our most heartfelt condolences go out to Officer William Varosso's children, grandchildren and the Varroso Family.

It is with great sadness; we learn the passing of World War II veteran B-25 pilot and veteran Howard Dungan. He was just three weeks shy of his 100th birthday.

Born on a Nebraskan farm in 1920, Howard grew up in an age before electricity was available in rural areas, with only kerosene lamps to light his family’s home at night, a physical pump for water and an outdoor lavatory.

“He would ride a horse back and forth to school,” Michelle reminisced. “It was still the Great Depression, so when he was finished with school, he’d head into work at a local bowling alley. In his town, setting pins.”

Howard’s childhood years mirrored that of many younger Americans during the Great Depression in that after completing high school, he sought work anywhere he could, traveling the country picking apples, processing poultry, and learning a bit about banking before moving to San Diego in 1939.

It wouldn’t be until one fateful morning in December of 1941 while driving back from Tijuana with his future wife, Anita, that Howard would feel truly called to serve his country — a call he continued to answer his entire life.

That morning, as Howard pulled up to the U.S. – Mexican border, the agent looked at him and asked, “haven’t you heard? The Japanese attacked Pearl Harbor.”

Dungan would go on to join the Army Air Corps as an officer and B-25 pilot, eventually landing a duty station in Hawaii, flying missions over the Philippines, Japan and China. By the war’s end, he had achieved the rank of First Lieutenant.

His high school sweetheart, Anita, whom he married in 1943 prior to his deployment, would go on to serve as a Rosie the Riveter, filing and welding B-20’s for Ryan Air in San Diego while Howard was away at war.

When Howard returned from the war, he used his GI Bill, completing his college degree and teaching at Roseville Junior High for 36 years, impacting the lives of students spanning all of San Diego County.

It is with great sadness; we learn the passing of World War II veteran and Superstar Mr. Ernie Micka. He was 102.

Micka, a man who saw America for all of its successes and downfalls, was born as World War I was coming to an end. When it was time to sign up for the second war, Micka knew he wanted to fight for the country.

As a member of the 9th Infantry Division of the US Army, Micka found himself on the front lines. He spent five years at war, surviving bomb attempts and serving in North Africa and France, before later moving to Louisville in 1962 for a job with GE Appliances.

He had a thing for big band music, meeting his wife, Dorothy, at a dance. When he came to visit the WHAS11 newsroom in 2019, he was surprised with the Ladies of Liberty singing.

We last saw Micka in the spring, the beginning of the virus shutdowns, to celebrate 102 years with a drive-thru birthday.

"It was wonderful," Micka said. "I have neighbors, friends, and the community and the fire engines police cars going around here. I just don't deserve it, truly. I don't know why they do that, but I appreciate it and I think it was wonderful."

Another member of the greatest generation now gone, showing how to live a life the right way.

It is with great sadness; we learn the news that Col. Steve dePyssler, veteran of four wars has died. He was 101.

Steve dePyssler is believed to be the only known American to serve in four wars which were World War II, the Korean War, the French-IndoChina War and the Vietnam War.

After his retirement, dePyssler worked in the Retirees Office at Louisiana’s Barksdale Air Force Base for 40 years and was the office’s director for more than 30 of those years. Saying his goal was to help at least one person each day, dePyssler helped veterans get their VA benefits, as well as assisting widows of veterans.

As another momentous milestone is checked off for dePyssler, the lives he’s touched and people he’s helped will continue his legacy for centuries to come.

Tributes have been paid to the beautiful Joyce Dowding, a veteran of World War II who served in Normandy. She was 97.

Joyce was conscripted in 1940, aged 18, into the Navy, Army, and Air Force Institute (NAAFI), which catered for service members in combat zones in the 1939-1945 war and was serving in Ypres, Belgium when the war ended.

Born and raised in Redcar, a former cook for the armed forces has told of her experiences in a secret army camp on D-Day - and being one of the first women to go into Normandy shortly after the invasion on June 06.

She began as a kitchen assistant, but by 1944, after attending a catering course just behind York Minster, she was appointed a head cook. And when a notice was issued, asking for volunteers for specialized work in the buildup to D-Day, she put her name forward.

She recalled: “I was told all would be explained at interview. All went well, but the destination of where I was going was kept from me. I was given a train ticket and found ten more girls, going to the same destination. We were taken in a lorry into this dense forest.”

Despite being aware, there was a particular operation, Miss Dowding and her ten workmates had no idea that the soldiers in the camp would be taking part in one of the most significant military invasions in world history.

After the successful landing on June 6, 1944, another appeal went out, signed by Eisenhower, asking for volunteers to help the Liberation Army, and Joyce again answered the call.

A few months later, she found herself the only Northern Command member of the NAAFI aboard a hospital ship bound for Normandy, France.

He unit landed at Arromanches, in the Gold Beach sector, used in the invasion in Normandy, and the young woman had to climb down a rope ladder onto a landing craft and then onto the prefabricated ‘Mulberry’ human-made harbor before being taken to the devastated city of Caen.

She was billeted into a cinema and, one day, not used to cooking with oil, set the kitchen range on fire, it was a mess. she recalls.

It was during the Battle of Normandy, Joyce, who remembers bumping into close family friend Terry Collins in Caen, who later went on to become the Mayor of Redcar.

After Normandy, she went on to Ypres and was stationed there through to VE Day. She then served in Germany after the war for the next five years.

“I often reflect on my memorials, and I can still recall those boys who came through our camp that day and never came home,” she said. “I can never forget them. They were my heroes, every one of them.”

Today, we learn the news that Normandy, DDAY veteran Mr. Peter Barlow, railway manager who saw some of the fiercest fighting of World War II with the Northumberland Fusiliers, has died. He was 94.

At just 18, Peter landed on the beaches in Normandy and experienced some of the fiercest fightings of World War II, from Gold Beach in Normandy, through the battle for Eindhoven, to a shoot-out with the SS and German marines in Hamburg.

A corporal in the Northumberland Fusiliers, Barlow lost 40 percent of his company was dead or wounded, and he saw his best friend's head blown off, but he liberated one of Hitler's bow ties. He continued to visit France throughout his life, and the last time went to Normandy was for the 75th anniversary of D-Day.

Peter was born in Swindon but spent most of his life in Reading, where he played Badminton for the county and spent a lot of his time training young adults to play.

Immediately after the war, he worked on the railways in Swindon, eventually becoming a railway manager. Years later, he was offered early retirement, so he had 36 years of doing his own thing.

He loved to travel and teach and became heavily involved in sports. He was also a Reading FC season ticket holder and enjoyed supporting the team. He loved to play golf also, playing for Sand Martins in Wokingham. He would be very well-known amongst the sporting community in Reading. He played Badminton for Berkshire before teaching others and becoming umpire after he retired."

Its with great sadness; we learn the news that Normandy DDAY veteran and superstar, Private First Class Russell Pickett has died. He was 94.

Know as the last survivor of Company A of the 116th Infantry Regiment, 29th Division, which led the charge 75 years ago on to Omaha beach, a chaotic bloodbath which became known as the “suicide wave”and was made infamous by the Hollywood film Saving Private Ryan.

Pickett’s highly-trained company suffered a 96% casualty rate during the first hour on Omaha, the fiercest and costliest strip of beach landed during Operation Overlord, the world’s largest amphibious operation which would eventually pave a bloody way to the liberation of Europe.

The US air force’s bombing campaign had, unknown to the supreme allied commander General Dwight Eisenhower, failed to knock out the German defences ahead of the landing. This left the 29th division to emerge from the sea into untrammelled machine gun and artillery fire which turned the sand red and the sea into a gruesome soup of body parts.

Two thirds of Private first class Pickett’s company were to die within a week of the landing on 6 June 1944.

Pickett was Company A’s flamethrower, a job he had been transferred to after witnessing a comrade being blown in half by TNT during his training in the demolition unit. “I wanted out of that. ‘You can be the flamethrower then,’ they said.”

His job at 6.30am on 6 June 1944 was to land on the beach, crawl through a gap made by the wire-cutters and run across the 300 metres of fine sand to knock out a German pillbox containing machine gunners.

His boat was in the lead in the assault on the beach.

But as Pickett’s landing craft came up to shore at the right time and in the right place, it hit something, possibly a mine or an artillery shell. “It just knocked me coo-coo,” said Pickett. The young soldier awoke sometime later in shallow water unable to move.

“About 12 to 15 feet to my right up in front there was a dead man and I couldn’t see his face and I don’t know who it was. And I couldn’t pull myself over there to see because my elbows were just digging into the sand.”

“I saw a lot – too much,” Pickett said. “A lieutenant on another boat, a big lieutenant, he had been a football player, we thought the world of him, Lt Fergusson. Well, I saw him running down the beach screaming and hollering: ‘I can’t see, I can’t see.’ His whole forehead was down over his face. You couldn’t see his face. He didn’t run far when another guy hollered at him to stop, and told him to turn directly to the left, off the beach. He did, he ran a few yards, and he was shot down.”

Pickett let the tide take him away from the beach where a landing craft was able to pick him up to be returned to England. “I kept on feeling my back for blood but there was nothing. Perhaps I was so terrified that my back and legs seized.

“By the time I got back to England I could hop around. They offered for me to go to hospital but they were saying how much they needed us back there. Another guy and I went back. Limping really. I was back with the company in six days.”

Pickett joined a unit seeking to liberate Saint-Lô. He was hit by grenade shrapnel in his left arm and sent back to England for 21 days – before rejoining the front again during the battle for the French port of Brest, where he was in a foxhole when an enemy shell collapsed a wall on top of him and left him on the edge of the death.

Pickett said he had been tormented over being unable to clear out the German machine gunners’ post on D-day. “I get gripey with myself on that. I go over it a lot in my mind. How many could have been saved? But then did I want to be the person to use the flamethrower? There were five men in there.”

Pickett’s nights and days have ever since been tortured by visions of what he saw. “But if it came to it – and I was involved – I would do it again,” he said. “I thought my country was worth it then and I still do.”

It is with great sadness; we learn the news that World War II bomber pilot Roman Tritz, the last known survivor of a U.S. government program to lobotomize mentally ill combat veterans have died. He was 97.

At 21, Lt. Roman Tritz flew 34 bombing missions over Germany and occupied countries. The Army Air Force had Roman piloting a B-17 bomber, which he did under intense odds and relentless enemy fire.

When Roman talks about the war he uses one word to describe his experience: “Terrified.”

Tom Tritz, a nephew of Roman's, is also a veteran and a voracious reader of military history. He lives in Kirkland, Wash., but has made it a point numerous times to see his uncle in La Crosse.

“He’s intelligent, capable and competent,” Tom said.

In a rough draft of a Tritz family reunion newsletter, he wrote: “To categorize these missions as dangerous would be an understatement since the life expectancy of a bomber crew was 13 missions or, eight to 10 weeks give or take.”

In March 1945, the military sent a news release to the Portage Daily Register-Democrat, about a near-death experience of the local pilot.

Roman’s B-17 Bomber “Puddin’s Pride” was caught in the slipstream created by the churning propellers of the other planes over Hamburg, Germany. The plane dropped 2,000 feet before he could regain control.

Although Roman said he doesn’t regret joining the military, he recognizes that what he witnessed made a permanent impression.

“It was hell for everybody: on land or in the air, trenches in the wintertime,” he said.

What Roman did like about the military was the ritual and expectations, he said. His life has been about routines.

“It’s no wonder the horror of what Roman went through, it would’ve gotten to anybody. Each generation seemed to have their own word for it, but it was battle fatigue, those guys go through hell,” Dorothea said.

In late 1945, Roman was discharged from the military with a clean bill of health, and he returned to the family farm. He would often lie down for long periods of time.

“After he came home from the service he would get rambunctious, might get angry at people. I don’t remember him being like that at all before he went to the service,” Regina said.

Hutterli, also a World War II veteran, said what combat soldiers experienced could color their world long after it ceased.

One thing he will never forget happened on July 1, 1953, when he was physically held down, strong-armed into getting a lobotomy at the Veterans Administration Hospital in Tomah. The brain surgery scraped and cut away connections to and from the prefrontal cortex, a region linked to personality expression, decision making and moderating social behavior. The lobotomy was thought to calm the voices he was hearing since coming back from the war.

Roman was one of about 2,000 World War II veterans who underwent a lobotomy at a VA hospital, according to agency documents dusted off by the Wall Street Journal.

It is with great sadness; we learn the news that World War II superstar, Mr. Fiske Hanley II, POW, American Hero, dies at 100, leaving a legacy.

Early in the afternoon on Sunday, August 9 came the saddening news of the passing of one of our nation's heroes and a dear friend, Fiske Hanley II.

Born in Brownwood, Texas, and raised in Fort Worth, young Fiske Hanley spent his days dreaming of flying airplanes. Therefore, following graduation from Paschal High School in 1938, he went on to earn a bachelor's degree in Texas Tech's new aeronautical engineering in 1943.

A year earlier, he had received word he had been selected to serve in the Air Force, although he was given an allowance to graduate first. So, following graduation in 1943, Fiske left for basic training in Boca Raton. There he would become commissioned a second lieutenant and assigned as a B-29 flight engineer with the 504th Bombardment Group (HV).

Soon he was involved in bombing missions over Japan. Unfortunately, the seventh mission resulted in his plane being shot down. Sadly, he did not parachute to safety. Instead, he landed on Japanese soil, being captured by the Japanese Kempeitai. Yet, he has not held prisoner as just a POW. He was considered a particular prisoner of war because he was a flight engineer of the B-29 super fortress. Sixty-four men from his mission joined him in the POW camp. In all, 2000 prisoners were held there.

For six grueling months, Fiske suffered at the hands of the Kempeitai. He endured severe starvation seeing as how individual prisoners received fewer rations than pows. In addition to torture, he received no clothing, no personal hygiene products, and no medical care. Many times, Fiske wondered why he was chosen to survive while so many perished. He continued to survive 14 different situations, which should have killed him.

"Once even speaking with a preacher at a church he had spoken at. That preacher told him, 'because God wanted you to tell what happened and that is what you are doing, Mr. Hanley,'" said Mark Donahew, President of Roll Call in Fort Worth, where Fiske was a member. Of the 2000 prisoners with him, only 60 survived to walk out the day they were liberated on August 29, 1945.

After returning home, Fiske would become employed for General Dynamics as an engineer. He would remain with the company until his retirement 44 years later. He experienced Post Traumatic Stress Disorder in the form of nightmares that haunted him in the middle of the night. Fiske would resort to putting those terrors in his mind onto paper as a means of dealing. The resulting product would be his first book, "Accused American War Criminal."

It is with a heavy heart; we learn that World War II “SUPERSTAR” Mr. Jay D. Trimmer, passed away peacefully at home surrounded by his family. He was 97.

Mr. Trimmer was born in Decatur on May 27, 1923, to James and Frances (Taylor) Trimmer. After graduating from Decatur High School, he was drafted into the US Army in 1943 at the age of 19. He was captured in Italy and was a prisoner of war for eight months in Germany. He served with the 88th Infantry Division known as the Blue Devils.

When Mr. Trimmer returned home, he weighed 70 pounds. For his services in World War II, he received a Bronze Star and Purple Heart and numerous other awards.

Mr. Trimmer graduated from Millikin University in Decatur. He married the beautiful Eva Look on July 2, 1946. They celebrated 65 years of marriage. Mr. Trimmer worked as an administrator for the State of Illinois Vocational Rehabilitation, retiring in 1989.

Mr. Trimmer enjoyed golfing, bowling, going to the casino, and playing poker. He also loved spending time with his grandchildren. He was a member of the Peru Lions Club, a lifetime member of the La Salle VFW, Illinois POW Association, and The Greatest Generations Foundation.

In 2018, Mr. Trimmer made his return to France with The Greatest Generations Foundation to mark the 100th Anniversary of the First World War, as guest of the President of the United States.

On behalf of The Greatest Generations Foundation and its members, we salute Mr. Trimmer for his devotion and service to our freedom. RIP, Mate.

It is with a heavy heart; we learn World War II “SUPERSTAR” Dr. George Mogill, M.D. from the Army's 8th Field Hospital. He was 103

Born in 1917, Mogill survived two pandemics and practiced more than 70 years until retiring in 2010 at age 92. For decades, he regularly hosted gatherings at his Bloomfield Hills home with family, friends, former patients and WSU medical students and doctors.

"George Mogill was a wonderful role model to students and colleagues alike," said Jack Sobel, M.D., dean emeritus of Wayne State medical school, in an email. "He exemplified selflessness and dedication to his patients. He loved to teach and was loved by many. He will be sorely missed."

Mogill received his bachelor's degree in biological sciences from WSU in 1937. He graduated from the WSU medical school in 1942, completed a one-year surgery internship and then joined the United States Army Medical Corps in 1943.

Four days after D-Day, Mogill landed in Normandy and cared for patients in the Army's 8th Field Hospital in France and Germany.

Mogill was last interviewed by Crain's in 2018, when he received a Health Care Hero lifetime achievement recognition.

"I fought to get into the Army. I was a Jewish-American. I had no choice but to go to prove myself a good American," said Mogill as he sat in his kitchen telling stories to Crain's.
"I became a doctor to take care of people," he said.

"When I opened my practice to Blacks, I got a phone call one day from someone who said, 'If you treat (Blacks), you won't have a practice. I said, 'Well, I won't have a practice.'"

From 1977 to 1094, Mogill was chief of the department of family practice at Harper-Grace Hospital and later at Sinai-Grace Hospital. He was a lifetime member and former board member of the Wayne State University School of Medicine Alumni Association.

In 2016, he received a special Lifetime Achievement Citation for his meritorious loyalty and commitment to the School of Medicine, the field of medicine, and teaching and mentoring medical students and residents.

Since 2000, the George Mogill, M.D., Endowed Award for Family Medicine is presented annually during "Match Day" in March to a graduating senior who specializes in family medicine. It was established by a former patient of Mogill.

Mogill and his wife, Irma, who passed away in 2012, have eight grandchildren from their two daughters and son — Jain Lauter, Elizabeth Silver and David Mogill. One grandson, Jonathan Lauter, is a pediatrician who graduated from WSU medical school in 2008.

Tributes as World War II Desert Rat and “SUPERSTAR” Mr. Les Cherrington dies aged 101.

World War II Desert Rat, Mr. Les Cherrington, from Shifnal in Shropshire, was the only survivor from his tank when it was engaged by German forces in Tunisia during the Battle of the Mareth Line.

In a tribute, the Royal Air Force Cosford, where he later began his 40-year career as a military policeman, said it would "always be thankful" for his service.

Mr Cherrington's tank suffered a direct hit by an 88mm enemy gun, which pierced the tank and exploded.

After regaining consciousness to find the tank engulfed in flames and his left arm almost completely severed by shrapnel, Mr Cherrington dragged himself through the open turret, slid down the front of the tank on his belly and was hit in the back by machine gunfire. He crawled into a slit trench where he lay until the next morning when he was found by an Australian soldier.

After spending weeks in hospital, Mr Cherrington returned to the UK in August 1943 and underwent a number of skin graft operations. Unable to continue in service, he later became a Ministry of Defense policeman.

Mr Cherrington told the BBC in 2017, aged 99, about how thinking about his "very good pals" who were killed in the war made him emotional.

A statement from RAF Cosford said: "We will always be thankful that we had Les and his generation looking after us during World War II."

Mr Cherrington had also volunteered at the RAF Museum, Cosford and was president and long-serving member of Shifnal Male Voice Choir.

It is with great sadness; we learn the news that World War II “Superstar” and survivor of Pearl Harbor, Mr. Floyd Welch, has died. He was 99.

Welch, who was born in February 1921 in Burlington, Conn., was serving aboard the USS Maryland on Dec. 7, 1941, when the U.S. fleet at Pearl Harbor came under attack by Japan.

Welch has said he was coming out of the shower on that Sunday morning when he heard the first alarm and later the loud explosions of bombs and torpedoes. When he came on deck, he saw the raging fire and the overturned USS Oklahoma next to the Maryland.

He helped pull survivors from the Oklahoma out of the water. He and others then climbed onto the Oklahoma, where they heard tapping coming from inside the ship.

"By using blueprints of the Oklahoma, so as not to burn into a fuel void, we began the long and extremely difficult process of cutting holes through the bottom steel plates of the Oklahoma," he wrote in a remembrance of the battle.

"When we could see the planes coming, we would try to find cover. We would cut near where we heard the trapped crewmen tapping. In all, I believe 33 men from the Oklahoma were rescued through these holes."

The attack killed more than 2,400 people, including 17 from Connecticut, according to the Pearl Harbor Memorial.
Floyd served on the Maryland for the entire war, earning numerous honors, including American Defense Medal, the WWII Victory Medal, the American Campaign Medal, the Asiatic Pacific Campaign Medal with three stars, the Good Conduct Medal and the United States Navy Constitution Medal.

"His was just a remarkable story of bravery, discipline and dedication," said U.S. Sen. Richard Blumenthal. "He lived the word 'hero' in his actions, not just words and gave it real meaning. He was a hero, not just in his dedication and bravery, but also in the result of his actions, which was to save lives."

After leaving the Navy in January 1946, Welch worked as an alarm installer, a farmer and a milkman, before opening a construction company, Welch & Son, which built road infrastructures, foundations, and drainage systems throughout the Northeast.

Welch, who served for a time as an officer in the Pearl Harbor Survivors Association, was a guest of honor in 2016 at the 75th Pearl Harbor Survivors Memorial Ceremony in Hawaii.

He is survived by his wife, Marjorie, six children, 13 grandchildren and 10 great grandchildren.

It is with great sadness; we learn the news that World War II “Superstar,” Mr. Lester Bernard Cook, one of the last Darby's Rangers has died. He was 97.

Mr. Lester Bernard Cook was known to be one of the last veterans of the original 1st Battalion US Rangers, which was formed at Carrickfergus in 1942.

Born in Des Moines, Iowa, on September 25, 1922, he enlisted in the Iowa National Guard while still in high school.

His unit, the 168th Infantry Regt. 34th Division "The Red Bulls", was activated on February 10, 1941.

The US Rangers Museum in Carrickfergus was established in 1994 following a visit by a number of veterans - original "Darby's Rangers" who donated their photographs, uniforms, medals and much more.

"We are honored to be the birthplace of the US Rangers and we are as committed to telling their stories and keeping their memory alive just as much today as we were then. We thank you for your service."

Stationed in Northern Ireland following the United States' entry into World War II in December 1941, Mr Cook came to Sunnylands Camp to try out for a new, elite special operations force being raised as the spearhead of all Allied offences against the enemy in the war in Europe.

He was one of up to 2,000 men who were put through a vigorous selection process - only 500 made the cut. The new unit was officially activated on June 19, 1942.

During an interview Mr Cook said: "I had no idea what I was getting into when I saw a notice on the bulletin board about the Rangers. I was stationed in Belfast, Ireland, with the 168th Infantry."

He went on to serve the full tour with Darby's Rangers.
The original 1st Ranger Battalion comprised six-line companies. Eventually these would come to number 2,000 men. The Rangers were instrumental in the Allied assaults on North Africa, Sicily and Italy.

Some 198 Rangers were brought home in May 1944, most of these were from the original Darby's Rangers. This elite commando-style force remains the only US military unit to be formed on foreign soil.

During the invasion of Anzio, though wounded and in the hospital, Les went AWOL to join the fight with the 4th Ranger Battalion as they attempted to breakout the 1st and 3rd Ranger Battalions (who were encircled by two German Divisions).

Ranger Cook earned the Silver Star Medal for actions during the battle for Venefro, Italy on 10 November 1943 reads in part, "... during a German counterattack, Sergeant Cook and six American soldiers became cutoff from the main body.

Moving forward to an adjacent knoll, Sergeant Cook and two other men and four artillery observers encountered a group of eight German soldiers. While his companions withdrew, Sergeant Cook calmly opened fire, killing all eight. Sergeant Cook then reorganized the small group of men, led them back to the hill, and directed them in fighting to hold the position."

Mr Cook's military career spanned three wars and 26 years. He earned two Silver Stars, Purple Hearts and Presidential Unit Citations among many other accolades. This summer Mr Cook was inducted into The Ranger Hall of Fame at Fort Benning, Georgia.

His loss is felt by the wider WWII Rangers community of veterans and descendants, where he was an active member of their Facebook page on which he participated up until a few months ago.

Recently the US Senate unanimously passed the United States Army Rangers Veterans of WWII Congressional Gold Medal Act. Pending approval by the House of Representatives, it is hoped a medal presentation will take place next year to honor and give recognition to the WWII Rangers.

It is with great sadness; we learn the passing of World War II veterans and “SUPERHERO” Mr. George Smilanich. He was 98.

Smilanich was the youngest of seven children born to Serbian immigrants Yelena and Mane Smilanich on June 21, 1922, just outside of Buhl. His father worked underground at the Wanless Mine.

After helping Buhl win the Minnesota boys state basketball tournament in 1941 and 1942 as a starting guard, he was drafted. He spent three years as a tank driver in the 2nd Armored Division.

He served in North Africa and Sicily before landing in Normandy three days after D-Day. His unit fought in Northern France and the Battle of the Bulge.

Smilanich survived having three of the tanks he drove destroyed by enemy fire. He earned a Bronze Star for heroism for pulling his wounded commander from their burning tank. He later was awarded the Purple Heart for injuries he suffered in the Battle of the Bulge.

Mr. Smilanich was awarded the following: Bronze Star Medal, Purple Heart, European-African-Middle Eastern Campaign Medal with six bronze battle stars, World War II Victory Medal, and Belgian Fourragere. He was honorably discharged on November 17, 1945.

In 2014, Smilanich opened up about his service after he was contacted by Jack Slattery of the 2nd Armored Division Association. Slattery asked Smilanich if he wanted to serve as a consultant to a Hollywood-produced movie titled “Fury.” The movie, directed by David Ayer, starred Brad Pitt.

“Jack knew my dad,” Susan Smilanich said. “My dad told him he didn’t want to do it. He said, ‘Who the hell is Brad Pitt?’ My dad’s whole life had been sports. He had no interest in movies. We told him to consider it because it would be a once-in-a-lifetime thing.”

Smilanich relented and spent three days in Hollywood telling the movie’s producers about his experiences. He and his wife, Mary, and daughter attended the movie’s premiere in Washington, D.C.

“The movie is fiction. It’s David Ayer’s story,” said Susan Smilanich. “But it aligned with the stories that my father shared with them, down to small details.”

After his discharge in 1945, Smilanich enrolled at St. Cloud State Teachers College. He played basketball and was on the track team while earning his degree.