WW2 - still with us

The Japanese surprise air attack of Dec. 7, 1941, on Hawaii was a staggering military triumph that decimated the Pacific Fleet’s battleships in Pearl Harbor and wiped out most of Oahu’s air defenses.

Three months later, the Japanese Imperial Navy sought to repeat a surprise bombing raid on the island using its newest long-range aircraft, the “flying boat” Kawanishi H8K.…

…The aerial bomb, which the city said the British dropped during World War II, was found last week during construction work… Police said the bomb did not present an immediate danger. …waited until Christmas Day to defuse it because there would be less traffic than usual, and thought many people might be able to stay with their relatives.…

…Soviet Union researchers captured the harrowing footage of the flattened Japanese cities around a month after the US bombings took place.

The black-and-white video, which is around five minutes in length, was presented to Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe in June this year by the chairman of the Russian State Duma, Sergei Naryshkin. …

Lost since the end of World War II in 1945, a tunnel dug by Jewish prisoners at Ponar (today Paneriai), near Vilnius, Lithuania, to escape from the Nazis was discovered recently using state-of-the-art mineral and oil exploration technology for underground predictive scanning.… For three months they clawed out a 35-meter-long burrow, using spoons and their bare hands. On the night of April 15, 1944 – the last night of Passover, 40 prisoners cut their leg shackles with a nail file, and crawled through the escape tunnel. Twenty-five of them were shot by the guards. Fifteen managed to cut the camp’s perimeter fence and escape into the Ponar forest. Eleven joined up with the partisan forces and survived the war.…

How a chicken farmer, a pair of princesses, and 27 imaginary spies helped the Allies win World War II.

It was the toughest mission of D-Day. Allied plans called for 225 Rangers, including Dog Company, to land on a tiny beach, scale the ten-story-high cliffs of Pointe du Hoc, France, under a torrent of enemy fire, and destroy the most dangerous gun battery threatening the American portion of the invasion.

It was a suicide mission.…

… The Battle of Midway is important to memorialize and remember for many reasons. Among these reasons is that it is an inexhaustible source of still-relevant lessons on how to successfully apply intelligence at all levels of war.…

Seventy-one years after meeting for the first time, ninety-four-year-old Sid Shafner and ninety-year-old Marcel Levy were reunited for the first time in over twenty years.…

This is so sublime and funny - especially for those who have lived with Germans for years - I don't even know where to start.…

The animation was created by the Imperial War Museum to mark the re-opening of the American Air Museum. It shows the progress of the Allied strategic bombing campaign against the Germans from 1939 to 1945 …

…The Nazi soldiers made their orders very clear: Jewish American prisoners of war were to be separated from their fellow brothers in arms and sent to an uncertain fate.

But Master Sgt. Roddie Edmonds would have none of that. As the highest-ranking non-commissioned officer held in the German POW camp, he ordered more than 1,000 Americans captives to step forward with him and brazenly pronounced: “We are all Jews here.”

He would not waver, even with a pistol to his head, and his captors eventually backed down.

Seventy years later, the Knoxville, Tennessee, native is being posthumously recognized with Israel’s highest honor for non-Jews who risked their lives to save Jews during World War II. He’s the first American serviceman to earn the honor.…

Pretty amazing footage. Having been to the Brandenburg Gate during the height of the Cold War, it is jarring to see someone driving easily from the British to the Soviet sector (the wall ran right by the Gate, with it just in the Soviet sector).…

Two men in Poland claim they have found a legendary Nazi train that according to local lore was loaded with gold, gems and valuable art and vanished into a system of secret tunnels as the Germans fled advancing Soviet forces at the end of World War II.

Historians say the existence of the train has never been conclusively proven, but authorities are not passing up this chance at possibly recovering treasures that have sparked the imaginations of local people for decades.

"We believe that a train has been found. We are taking this seriously"…

BERLIN — When Margot Bachmann began her search for her mother — from whom she was separated by the Nazi German government in 1944 — the odds looked slim that she would get solid facts, much less a reunion.

Instead, thanks to the help of the International Tracing Service (ITS), the 70-year-old found her mother alive and well, age 91, in Italy.…