Posts Tagged ‘WWII’
Easter on Okinawa, 1945
On Easter Sunday, April 1, 1945, Richard (Dick) Whitaker, a Private in the US Marine Corps, landed on Okinawa’s Red Beach-2. For the next 82 days, Whitaker, along with 180,000 American and Allied soldiers, sailors, airmen, and Marines, would fight in a battle so horrific that the world would forever recognize it as the largest…
Read MoreFollow Me! The Life and Legacy of a Medal of Honor Recipient
In one of the most iconic images of the Korean War, a Marine lieutenant climbs out of a landing craft, his right foot on a rocky seawall, his right hand gripping a rifle. Smoke fills the sky. Ladders, with ominous-looking hooks, jut upwards. His body, lunging forward, gives the impression of a man with confidence…
Read MoreShe Eats, Sleeps, and Fights Like the Rest of Us
In a few weeks the 67th publication anniversary of a little-known Korean War book will quietly come and go. The non-fiction work won’t make headlines, and its author won’t be remembered in editorials or magazines. But things were different in 1951. The book, War in Korea, and its author, the award-winning Marguerite Higgins, were hugely…
Read MoreWorld War II and a Grand Matriarch
On December 7, 1941, Pauline Peyton Forney, like all Americans who heard the fateful news of Japan’s attack on Pearl Harbor, knew everything was about to change. The United States was at war, and for her and millions of others, nothing would ever be the same. With over 2,300 American dead, more than a thousand…
Read MoreSmall Town, Big Heroes: South Charleston, West Virginia
I’ve never visited South Charleston, West Virginia, but after spending the past two days reading about the small city, located four miles west of the state capital and on the south bank (hence its name) of the Kanawha River, I feel like I’ve been there. I know it has six elementary schools and a middle and…
Read MoreDuring the Darkest Hours Shine the Brightest Stars
They lived for the moment. They struggled, loved, failed, succeeded, and carried with them the enduring sentiments of optimism and hope, uncertainty and fear. The days, months, and years of their lives passed quickly, and like many of us, they wondered where the time had gone. But despite their “ordinary” lives, they performed extraordinary acts…
Read MoreThe Marine I Never Knew
He’s one of the main reasons I’m in Korea, but he died when I was two, and our family rarely talked about him. He’s always been, in the words of Winston Churchill, “a riddle, wrapped in a mystery, inside an enigma.” After spending over three years researching the man who’s made such an impact on…
Read MoreHonoring Our POW/MIA’s – You Are Not Forgotten
As a school kid in the 1970’s, I remember seeing the six letters “POW” and “MIA” on bumper stickers, billboards, and flags and wondering, “What do they mean?” and “Does it stand for something, or is it just a person or new fad?” I wasn’t sure, and as a know-it-all middle schooler, I wasn’t about to…
Read MoreWe Surround You – Surrender and Survive
In the opening scene of Christopher Dolan’s Dunkirk, Nazi propaganda leaflets, thrown from German planes, reign down on a small group of British soldiers walking through a deserted French street near the beaches of Dunkirk. “We Surround You – Surrender and Survive,” the flyer instructs the soldiers, ominously implying what will happen if they don’t.…
Read MoreShould I Stay or Should I Go?
For Bill Shaw, a 29-year-old husband, father of two, and first-year doctoral student at Harvard, the answer was clear. He told his wife, two young boys, parents, and professors he’d be back soon. His studies could wait, he explained. Three months later, on September 22, 1950, US Navy Lt. William Hamilton Shaw, on patrol with…
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