December 1944, Adolf Hitler attempted to split the Allied armies in northwest Europe by means of a surprise blitzkrieg thrust through the Ardennes to Antwerp. Caught off-guard, American units fought desperate battles to stem the German advance at St.-Vith, Elsenborn Ridge, Houffalize and Bastogne. As the Germans, under command of SS Standartenführer Peiper, Joachim “Jochen”… Read more »
Corporal Edgar Harrell was a Marine, a 20-year-old kid, who finished his watch on the USS Indianapolis at midnight July 29, 1945. It was unbearably hot, stifling down below where his berth was, so he got permission to make a pallet on deck, right under the barrels of the No. 1 forward turret. Harrell had… Read more »
Maria Mandl was born 10-01-1912 in Münzkirchen, Upper Austria, then part of Austria-Hungary, the daughter of a shoemaker. After the Anschluss by Nazi Germany, Mandl moved to Munich, and on 15 October 1938 joined the camp staff as an Aufseherin at Lichtenburg, an early Nazi concentration camp in the Province of Saxony where she worked with fifty other SS women. On 15 May 1939,… Read more »
Eindhoven, my birthtown in 1946, a city in the south of the Netherlands, originally at the confluence of the Dommel and Gender streams, where I played in my younger years. By 1920, the population was 47,946; by 1925 it was 63,870 and in 1935 that had ballooned to 103,030. The direct involvement of the Netherlands in World War II… Read more »
Louis Zamperini was born in January 1917, in Olean, New York. Raised in California, Zamperini joined the track team in high school. Excelling at long-distance events, Zamperini competed in the 1936 Berlin Olympics and was set to compete again in the 1940 games in Tokyo, which were canceled when World War II broke out. A… Read more »