The absence of signage made finding it a challenge. It was a steamy-hot summer day on Okinawa. Leaving the comfortable air conditioning of the taxi, my sunglasses immediately fogged up. As a native of the American South, I am used…
The concentration camps were not just barbaric, they also served a political function. They made death anonymous. They removed any meaning from death as they made the extinction of life, in such a mechanized fashion, a statement about its worthlessness….
Saturday night and Mr Chow is hopping. It’s a fashionable, delicious Chinese bistro and as I waited for my guests, Magic Johnson walked in and upstairs to a private dining room. My guests came. Three astonishingly healthy-looking men from Holland,…
The Battle of Midway began 77 years ago, today. This anniversary (if that, indeed, is the right word) will be noted but not so lavishly as the one in two days time, in remembrance of D-Day. These were both great…
1. God bless for all time the fliers and support crews of the Royal Air Force in the Battle of Britain. 2. Let us be on our knees to the freedom fighters of Poland, Jewish and Catholic, who fought with…
Later this month will mark the 75th anniversary of the biggest air battle — actually week of air battles — of World War II. Operation Argument, informally known to the flyers who had to execute it and the journalists who wrote about it as Big Week, is not as well-known as other turning point engagements in the war. But it should be.
It’s appropriate that I started writing this on Thanksgiving morning. We all have every reason to be thankful for the courageous Americans who stood up and did their duty during WWII, including the flyers military historian Bruce Gamble brings us in the very readable Kangaroo Squadron.
World War II is probably the biggest and most horrific event in the history of the world. It led to probably more than 65 million deaths, untold suffering on the part of millions more across the globe, and changed the direction of history for the remainder of a very bloody century. It’s only sometimes called “the good war” because it had more moral clarity than most. No mistake, it was awful.
The week of May 8 to 15 closed a chapter in my life whose first pages were written in France before I made my 1947 debut, in New York City. My father’s first cousin, William Friedman, authored those pages by…