Josef “Sepp” Allerberger, was an Austrian sniper assigned to the II Battalion 144 Regiment of the 3rd Gebirgsjäger Mountain Division under command of General der Gebirgstruppe Julius Ringel  unit operated on the Eastern Front. Allerberger was credited with 257 deaths in his military career. Julius Ringel died 11 February 1967, age 77. Born in the vicinity of… Read more »

Tsutomu Yamaguchi (March 16, 1916 – January 4, 2010) was a survivor of both the Hiroshima and Nagasaki atomic bomb during World War II. Although at least 160 people are known to have been affected by both bombings, he is the only person to have been officially recognized by the government of Japan as surviving both explosions.   A resident of Nagasaki,… Read more »

Herta Bothe was born in Teterow, Mecklenburg-Scwerin on 08-01-1921. In 1938, at age seventeen, Bothe  helped her father in his small Teterow wood shop, then worked temporarily in a factory, then as a hospital nurse. In 1939, Bothe was a member of the Leaque of German Girls . In September 1942, Bothe became the  SS… Read more »

On 20 July 1944, an attempt was made to assassinate Adolf Hitler, Führer of Nazi Germany, perpetrated by Claus Graf Schenk von Stauffenberg   and other conspirators, inside his Wolf’s Lair field headquarters near Rastenburg, East Prussia. The name Operation Valkyrie, originally referring to a component part of the conspirators’ overall plot, has become associated with the event. The apparent purpose of the assassination… Read more »

Operation Market Garden  was set for 17 September 1944, and the 101st , along with the 82nd  Airborne Division, the British 1st Airborne Division  and 52d Lowland Division (Airportable), and the 1st Polish Parachute Brigade  were set to jump. Unlike the Normandy jumps, this operation, by order of Lieutenant General Lewis Brereton  commander of the… Read more »

From the Beginning… Canada entered the 1939-1945 War on 10th September 1939. Within two months the first contingents of Canadian troops arrived in the United Kingdom to supplement the British Expeditionary Forces (BEF). Forestalled by the evacuation of the British Army from Dunkirk and the Channel ports, Canada’s role became one of defence of the… Read more »

Heinrich Hoffmann was born in Fürth, Bavaria, Germany in 1885. His father, who owned a photographic shop in Munich, Bavaria, introduced him to photography. Beginning in 1908, he worked in his father’s shop as a photographer. In 1911, he married Therese “Lelly” Baumann ; they would later have two children, Henriette “Henny”  in 1913 and Heinrich in… Read more »

Ilse Hirsch, born in 1922 in Hamm, was a Nazi resistance fighter who played a key role in the assassination of Franz Oppenhof the mayor of Aachen in the later days of World War Two. Born in 1922, Ilse Hirsch  joined the League of German Girl s  , part of the Hitler Youth movement , when she… Read more »

‘Omaha’ refers to a section of the coast of Normandy, France, facing the English Channel 8 kilometers (5 mi) long, from east of Saint Honorine des Pertes to west of Vierville sur Mer on the right bank of the Douve River, where 101 Airborne Chaplain Father Francis Leon Sampson   dropped in on D-day, estuary and an estimated 150-foot… Read more »

Bedford, Virginia…Like eleven other Virginia communities, Bedford provided a company of soldiers (Company A) to the 29th Infantry Division, nickname “Blue and Gray”  when the National Guard’s 116th Infantry Regiment was activated on 3 February 1941. Some thirty Bedford soldiers were still in that company on D-Day; several more from Bedford were in other D-Day… Read more »