World War 2
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The Four Chaplains, also sometimes referred to as the “Immortal Chaplains” or the “Dorchester Chaplains”, were four United States Army chaplains who gave their lives to save other civilian and military personnel as the troop ship SS Dorchester sank on February 3, 1943, during World War II. They helped other soldiers board lifeboats and gave up…
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When we think of stealth bombers we think of reasonably recent bombers like the F-117-Nighthawk (1981) or B2-Spirit (1989) bombers. But in fact it was the Horten brothers who designed the first stealth fighters/bombers in 1942. The Horten Ho 229 is generally known by a few unique names. The plane was called the H.IX,…
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Ten weeks after the Japanese bombed Pearl Harbor, U.S. President Franklin D. Roosevelt signs Executive Order 9066, authorizing the removal of any or all people from military areas “as deemed necessary or desirable.” The military in turn defined the entire West Coast, home to the majority of Americans of Japanese ancestry or citizenship, as a…
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Although war was raging throughout the world it didn’t stop ordinary people to continue with their lives as “Normal” as possible.Life went on and people had to manage as good as they could. I have heard stories of relatives who lived through the war on how they coped in often very ingenious ways, Having that…
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Rosette “Rose” Wolczak (19 March 1928 – 23 November 1943) was a Jewish child victim of the Holocaust. Born in France in 1928, she came to Geneva, Switzerland, in 1943 as a refugee, and was expelled for what the Swiss authorities ruled to be indecent behavior. She was sent to the Auschwitz concentration camp, where…
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Comfort women were women and girls who were forced into sexual slavery by the Imperial Japanese Army in occupied territories before and during World War II. The name “comfort women” is a translation of the Japanese ianfu a euphemism for “prostitute(s)”,who generally lived under conditions of sexual slavery. Estimates of the number of women involved typically…
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It is not often you come across a feelgood Holocaust story but this is one of them. On 27 September 1942, the Jewish boy Joop Levy went into hiding with his parents. They were taken in by the Ebbers family on their farm in the village of Lintelo in the Achterhoek, a region in the eastern…
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Today marks the 78th anniversary of the Wannsee Conference. On January 20, 1942, 15 high-ranking Nazi Party and German government officials gathered at a villa in the Berlin suburb of Wannsee to discuss and coordinate the implementation of what they called the “Final Solution” of the Jewish Question. The conference was held like…
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The bombing of Sandhurst Road School occurred during an air raid on Wednesday, 20 January 1943 when the school on Minard Road, Catford, south east London was seriously damaged. A German fighter-bomber dropped a single 500 kg (1,100 lb) bomb on the school at 12.30 pm, killing 38 children (32 killed at the school and 6 more…
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I have read a lot about this remarkable man and hero and I was reluctant to write an article about him, because I just didn’t think I would do him justice. However since it is the 72nd anniversary of his disappearance I thought it would be a good opportunity to look at some elements of…
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