The late G. Shigeru Higashioka was part of the 100th Infantry Battalion of the 442nd Regimental Combat Team, a unit made up Nisei soldiers — second-generation Japanese Americans who demanded the opportunity to join the armed forces even after President Franklin Roosevelt ordered Japanese Americans on the West Coast to be incarcerated in camps.

US Army honors Japanese American unit that liberated Tuscany in WWII

After retired Gen. Eric Shinseki presented the younger Higashioka the medal, he received a tour of the museum.

“It was a really cool experience, just learning more about my grandfather’s time in the war, because before this year I really didn’t know much about it at all,” Higashioka said. “So it was really cool to hear from the general and the National Veterans Network, who did a lot of research.”

The unit was first presented the Congressional Gold Medal in 2011.

Higashioka said he looked at a digital soldier registry that included an entry on his family’s behalf for his grandfather detailing what he did during the war. He also saw an exhibit for Nisei soldiers as well as artifacts and medals during his visit.

“I never got a chance to talk to him about any of that stuff,” Higashioka said. “It was cool to hear the stories of all the battles he fought in. It was actually a long time he was fighting because he was fighting in Europe. They were pretty heavily utilized. It’s pretty amazing he even survived.”

The House Armed Services Committee called for the Pentagon to add creatine to MREs in a committee report accompanying the NDAA, sweeping legislation that Congress must pass annually to determine defense spending.

The gains-based recommendation will now await a Senate decision in order to become law.

“A broad body of clinical research has shown that creatine can enhance muscle growth, physical performance, strength training, post-exercise recovery, and injury prevention,” the body-broadening recommendation states.

Kyle Turk, director of government affairs for the Natural Products Association, called the supplement’s potential inclusion in MREs “tremendous for American service members.”

“Creatine is one of the most extensively studied ingredients for safely increasing strength and recovery time,” he told Military Times in an email. Turk consulted with the Armed Services Committee to help craft the language for the provision, he said.

Creatine is a naturally occurring compound that can be found in human muscles, as well as the brain, which the body uses for energy, according to The Mayo Clinic. Recent medical science also suggests the supplement allows at least 227 Instagram users per year to modify their handles to respective iterations of “firstname_fit.”

The Defense Department, meanwhile, has recently introduced other sources of nutrition to yield stronger service members. Performance readiness bars brimming with calcium and vitamin D — good for muscles and bones, OK for taste — are currently distributed throughout select military populations, according to the Defense Logistics Agency.

The Department of Defense Dietary Supplement Resource website outlined the benefits of creatine, saying it could have a “positive effect on strength, power, sprint performance, and muscle mass in athletes who engage in resistance training.”

Despite its swoledier-building properties, it may also cause unwanted weight gain in “those focused on endurance training,” the website noted.

It appears that at least two soldiers may have taken that a step further when they decided to sell 29,000 pounds of spent ammo to a scrapyard near Fort Drum, New York.

That New York scrapyard reached a settlement for unlawfully selling brass casings that the two soldiers and an Army civilian employee improperly sold the company years prior, the Department of Justice recently announced.

The company, Northstar Auto and Salvage LLC, agreed to pay $45,000 to resolve allegations it violated the False Claims Act by receiving the spent ammunition from troops and personnel at the installation who were unauthorized to deliver the casings, the June 14 release said.

“Northstar did not make any effort to verify whether the individuals were authorized to dispose of the brass, beyond accepting their verbal assurances that they were authorized,” the release said.

In this case, the unnamed soldiers and Army civilian could not fool the top brass in their plot to sell the brass to make an extra buck.

Typically, collected cartridges are brought to a centralized processing facility where they’re prepared for sale on the open scrap metal recycling market in order to recoup money for the government. Again, while not glamorous, following a firing qualification or exercise, there can be a sizable amount of expended brass littering a range — doubly so if those on the range decided to conduct a “SPENDEX.” A colloquial term, SPENDEX generally means firing every last round available. The rationale for a SPENDEX can range from not wanting the bean and bullet counters to decide that your unit needs less ammo in the future, to wanting to create such a chorus of sustained fire in the name of training that it would wake the dead. Or, it could just be about avoiding paperwork.

Northstar, however, never had a contract to purchase brass from Fort Drum. Plus, the trio that took approximately 29,000 pounds of casings from the centralized processing facility between 2017 and 2019, and delivered them to the scrapyard in personally-owned pickup trucks, were not authorized to dispose of them. The scrapyard then sold the brass on the open market, making about $24,000 in profit.

The settlement was signed in June, according to a document shared with Military Times by the prosecution, who declined to comment further on the case.

A Fort Drum spokesperson shared that records on the case were not readily accessible and the scrapyard did not return a request for comment by publishing time.

It remains unclear whether any disciplinary steps were taken against the soldiers for their entrepreneurial take on police calling.

Among the hordes moving en masse towards land were the 320th Barrage Balloon Battalion. Of all the units to go ashore that day, the 320th was particularly unique. It was the only unit comprised entirely of African American soldiers.

The men of the 320th were brought ashore during the invasion’s first wave and tasked with providing critical protection to the ships and soldiers below from attacks by enemy aircraft, according to the National Air and Space Museum.

Yet their story, like the contributions of over 8 million personnel of color who fought heroically for the Allied forces during the Second World War, has largely been untold.

National Geographic’s “Erased: WWII’s Heroes of Color,” produced by October Films and Idris Elba’s 22Summers, seeks to change that.

The four-part series “weaves a blend of historical dramatizations with curated archival footage, bridging the past with the present to highlight new perspectives on established histories,” according to the series’ synopsis.

“The series showcases the personal narratives of soldiers through their never-before-aired oral testimonies and journal writings, along with powerful accounts from their descendants — stories passed down the generations.”

Elba, who narrates the series, and director Shianne Brown, spoke to Military Times about the men of the 320th and discussed “the irony that this particular set of stories ... has not been told.”

“Medal of Honor: Flo Groberg” provides a succinct overview of Capt. Florent “Flo” Groberg’s life, from his childhood in France to the heroic act that saved the lives of many and made him a Medal of Honor recipient in 2015. It was written by Chuck Dixon, drawn by Geof Isherwood, and colored by Peter Pantazis, with lettering by Troy Peteri.

Capt. Flo Groberg receives Medal of Honor: 'On his very worst day... he showed guts'

Groberg, who served with the 4th Infantry Brigade Combat Team, 4th Infantry Division, was the first foreign-born recipient of the nation’s highest military award for valor since the Vietnam War.

The Association of the United States Army published the newest edition of their Medal of Honor series, which began in 2018, on May 22. Other issues have covered past Medal of Honor recipients, including Alvin York, Daniel Inouye and Alwyn Cashe, among others.

“The whole idea of the series is to use the graphic novel format as a way to reach out to a new generation and teach them about Army history and Army values,” said Joseph Craig, director of the book program for the Association of the United States Army.

He said they employ seasoned professionals from the comic book world to help bring the stories to life, relying on award citations and government and military documents to paint a cohesive narrative. They also work with professional historians to ensure biographical details are accurate.

On Aug. 8, 2012, Groberg was escorting 28 coalition and Afghan National Army personnel to a security meeting in Afghanistan while serving as a personal security detachment commander, according to the Army.

Halfway to their destination, a suicide bomber approached the group. Groberg rushed the attacker with the help of another soldier, pushing him away from the group as his vest exploded.

The blast caused the suicide vest of a second unseen suicide bomber to detonate prematurely, primarily striking a nearby building.

Groberg’s actions caused the bombs to detonate away from the group, saving countless lives.

Four soldiers died that day, including U.S. Army Command Sgt. Maj. Kevin J. Griffin, U.S. Army Maj. Thomas E. Kennedy, U.S. Air Force Maj. Walter D. Gray and USAID Foreign Service Officer Ragaei Abdelfattah.

16 other soldiers were injured.

As a result of the explosion, Groberg lost nearly half of his left calf muscle, while also suffering nerve damage, a blown eardrum and a traumatic brain injury. He spent nearly three years recovering and medically retired from the Army on July 23, 2015.

Former President Barack Obama bestowed the Medal of Honor on Groberg during a ceremony Nov. 12, 2015.

“On his very worst day, he managed to summon his very best,” Obama said at the White House ceremony.

Groberg, in a 2020 interview with Military Times, described the history of his dedication to the armed forces.

‘I had to go through that dark period’ ― 5 Insights from a Medal of Honor recipient

Growing up, his uncle was killed in 1996 by terrorists in Algeria.

Groberg says his uncle fought for what he believed in and, as a result, was shot, beheaded and dismembered, all during a ceasefire. His remains were sent in a box to Groberg’s grandfather.

Groberg was 12 at the time and says he realized then what it meant to serve a purpose. When 9/11 happened, he said he realized his purpose: to serve a country that had adopted him and given him opportunities.

Only five months after becoming a citizen of the United States of America, Groberg enlisted in the Army.

“The proudest thing I have ever done in my life is to wear this uniform and serve my country,” he said in a statement on the Army’s website.

With that wire, AP war correspondent Edward Kennedy landed the biggest scoop of his career — while simultaneously ruining it.

Only able to dictate about 200 words before the connection was lost, Kennedy’s news about the conclusion of the world’s largest and bloodiest conflict traveled with such speed that inquiries were received in Paris even before he was cut off, according to the New York Times.

As one of 17 war correspondents to witness the official German surrender in Reims, France, in the early hours of May 7, 1945, Kennedy naturally sought to file posthaste.

However, the news remained embargoed, with military handlers insisting that the momentous occasion be kept secret for several hours. As the correspondents returned to their lodgings at Hotel Scribe in Paris that day, the embargo was extended for 24 hours without explanation.

We were “seventeen trained seals,” Kennedy caustically recalled in his memoir, “Ed Kennedy’s War: V-E Day, Censorship, & the Associated Press.”

The embargo was not, Kennedy learned, “for security reasons, which might have been an acceptable rationale, but for political reasons… It turned out that Russia’s leader, Joseph Stalin, wanted to stage a signing ceremony of his own to claim partial credit for the surrender, and U.S. officials were interested in helping him have his moment of glory,” according to an account in the Washington Post.

After hearing that the German high command had broadcasted the surrender from its headquarters in Flensburg, Germany, on May 7, Kennedy bristled.

“For five years you’ve been saying that the only reason for censorship was men’s lives. Now the war is over. I saw the surrender myself. Why can’t the story go?” he reportedly told a clerk at the hotel’s censor’s office.

The censor replied that he did not have the authority to release Kennedy’s story.

“All right then,” Kennedy retorted. “I give you fair warning here and now: I am going to file it.”

Calling up AP’s London office, the next words Kennedy uttered made history — and was on the wire within minutes.

The retribution for Kennedy was swift, however. Stripped of his credentials, the war correspondent was then ordered home by Allied leadership.

According to General Dwight D. Eisenhower, Kennedy’s suspension was “due to self-admitted deliberate violation of SHAEF regulations and breach of confidence.”

To add insult to injury, the following day Kennedy’s fellow correspondents, perhaps as jealous retribution, condemned his actions with a vote of 54-2, for “the most disgraceful, deliberate and unethical double-cross in the history of journalism.”

On May 10, Robert McLean, the president of the AP board, issued a statement saying AP “profoundly” regretted the story and, after placing Kennedy on an “indefinite suspension,” the news agency quietly parted ways with Kennedy several weeks later.

Despite the public rebuke, the reporter remained adamant that his actions were justified.

Upon his arrival in New York on June 4, Kennedy told a group of reporters that he “would do it again. The war over; there was no military security involved, and the people had the right to know.”

The reporter who observed the bloody Spanish Civil War; who covered Eastern Europe and the Balkans; who reported on the war in North Africa; and who joined the Seventh Army’s invasion of southern France in 1944 suddenly found himself without a job.

Kennedy was later hired as a managing editor by the sympathetic owner of the Santa-Barbara News-Press in California, the new position surely a step down for the veteran war correspondent.

In 2012, 67 years after Kennedy broke the news of the century, the AP issued a formal apology for its actions.

It was “a terrible day for the AP. It was handled in the worst possible way,” Curley stated. “Once the war is over, you can’t hold back information like that. The world needed to know.”

The apology was accompanied by a push from journalists to award a posthumous Pulitzer Prize to Kennedy. Although nominated for the prize in 2013, the WWII reporter failed to win the award. However, as USA Today reported, “Pulitzer rules don’t prohibit resubmissions,” and there have been several pushes in recent years for Kennedy’s recognition.

Kennedy, who died in 1963 after being struck by a car, did not live to see his vindication.

A monument to Kennedy now stands in Laguna Grande Park in Seaside, California, with the apt inscription: “He gave the world an extra day of happiness.”

Oscar-winner Kate Winslet is slated to portray Miller in the upcoming “Lee,” with Alexander Skarsgård co-starring as Roland Penrose, an English Surrealist painter, photographer, poet and Lee’s paramour.

The film marks the directorial debut of cinematographer Ellen Kuras (“Eternal Sunshine Of The Spotless Mind”), according to Deadline.

The film itself is not a biopic but focuses on the decade and the war that irrevocably altered the adventurous life of Miller, who was beloved by her peers and GIs alike.

Miller is described in the film’s synopsis as “a middle-aged woman [who] refused to be remembered as a model and male artists’ muse. … She defied the expectations and rules of the time and traveled to Europe to report from the frontline. There, in part as a reaction to her own well-hidden trauma, she used her Rolleiflex camera to give a voice to the voiceless.

“What Lee captured on film in Dachau and throughout Europe was shocking. Her photographs of the war, its victims and its consequences remain among the most historically important [of the conflict]. She changed war photography forever, but Lee paid an enormous personal price for what she witnessed and the stories she fought to tell.”

Vogue reports that the film, out September 27, drew heavily from the biography “The Lives of Lee Miller” by Antony Penrose, Miller’s son with Penrose.

And while Antony himself wrote that Lee was a depressive alcoholic and a terrible mother, her contribution to the war, nevertheless, was profound.

Miller was the first and only wartime photographer to record the first Allied use of napalm at St. Malo, France, and provided witness to the horrors of the Holocaust. Her photographs of the liberation of Dachau were widely spread by the Allies as evidence of Nazi crimes.

One of her photographs at Buchenwald famously captured a liberated 16-year-old Elie Wiesel.

At the time, Miller cabled back to Vogue what she had witnessed. In her report, she simply wrote “Believe it” — which became the subsequent title of her work featured in American Vogue.

“To me, she was a life force to be reckoned with, so much more than an object of attention from famous men with whom she is associated,” Winslet said of her character.

“This photographer, writer, reporter, did everything she did with love, lust, and courage, and is an inspiration of what you can achieve, and what you can bear, if you dare to take life firmly by the hands and live it at full throttle.”

Other cast members include Andy Samberg (“Palm Springs”), who will play the role of Life Magazine photographer David E. Scherman; Marion Cotillard (”Inception”) as Solange d’Ayen, the fashion director of French Vogue and a personal friend of Miller’s; and Josh O’Connor (“The Crown,” “The Durrells”) as Tony, a young journalist.

And while Tolkien later explicitly rejected the idea that his “story was an allegory of any historical event, most of all the recent war against Nazism … for all such protestations, Lewis had clearly been on to something back in 1949,” historian Alan Allport wrote in his 2020 book about the social and military history of the U.K. during World War II, “Britain at Bay.”

Rather than singularly weaving a mythopoeic fantasy world, Allport contended, Tolkien’s future audience “was going to see associations between events in Middle Earth and those in their own world.”

Tolkien, however, was not the first nor the last to draw inspiration from the cataclysmic bloodletting that was the Second World War.

Today, as fans celebrate May the Fourth (be with you), one does not have to stray far to glean that the galaxy of “Star Wars” is rife with WWII-based allegories — and its fanbase might equal, if not surpass, Tolkien’s.

“Star Wars” creator George Lucas famously studied over 25 hours of footage from World War II dogfights and jittery newsreel imagery while researching for the films — even using the footage as placeholders in the film before special effects were added.

“So one second you’re with the Wookiee in the spaceship and the next you’re in ‘The Bridges at Toko-Ri.’ It was like, ‘George, what is going on?’” Willard Huyck, a screenwriter and personal friend of Lucas, stated in a 1997 interview.

Though the b-roll was eventually edited out, the aerial tactics established in World War II remain visible.

One such shot, according to National WWII Museum and Memorial curator Corey Graff, “showed aircraft peeling out of formation and dropping from sight. The clip was used as a model for the memorable shot of Rebel craft diving to attack the Death Star. One at a time, the fictional spaceships elegantly ‘aileron roll’ across the screen, mimicking the movements of the 1940s aircraft almost exactly.”

Entire books have been devoted to such analogies, but we’ve summed up a few of our favorites for some May the Fourth enjoyment.

The Millennium Falcon’s cockpit came from the Boeing B-29 Fortress

After studying hours of WWII footage, Lucas became particularly enamored with the cockpit of B-29s — the famous bomber known for dropping the atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki in 1945.

The result? The cockpit of Han Solo’s beloved Millennium Falcon looks like it was lifted straight out of Boeing’s blueprints, replete with the B-29′s signature greenhouse-style cockpit. And, exactly like on the Superfortress, the Falcon sports defensive gun turrets — which come in handy when battling a Death Star.

The Empire’s similarities to Nazi Germany

From stormtroopers to Imperial officers’ uniforms and even Darth Vader’s helmet, which resembles those worn by the Wehrmacht during WWII, the analogies between Nazi Germany and the Galactic Empire are not exactly subtle.

The gradual rise of Hitler from German chancellor to Nazi dictator is further mirrored in the rise of Darth Sidious, or Sheev Palpatine, from chancellor to world’s most in-need-of-facial-moisturizer emperor.

Depictions of Star Wars spaceships were influenced by WWII fighters

Once again Lucas turned to World War II aviation for inspiration to give his spaceships unique sounds. According to Ian D’Costa for Tacairnet, sounds couldn’t easily be synthesized in the same way studios can create movie sound effects today. To get around that, Lucas sent out sound designer Ben Burtt to Reno Air Races in Nevada, where he was allowed to record the noise of P-51 Mustangs racing overhead.

Burtt later recalled, “I just said, ‘I want to record some planes,’ and they said ‘Yeah? Then go on out there.’ You could never do that nowadays. I was out at the pylons, and planes were passing 15 feet above my head. They were so fast that I could hardly see them go by; they were just a blur, though I could smell the oil and exhaust. ... Almost all of the spaceships came out of those Mojave recordings, including the Falcon.”

The Death Star trench run was inspired by the British Dambuster Raid

Lucas further drew inspiration from the 1955 film “The Dam Busters,” which chronicles the audacious British raid on Germany’s strategic river dams in 1943. The dams were heavily defended by anti-aircraft fire, a recurring theme in “Star Wars.”

“The Death Star attack is all about combat in the face of desperate odds,” Graff wrote in Smithsonian Magazine in 2020. “It’s a clear homage to the epic air battles seen in movies from the 1950s and 1960s.”

The Rebels suffer catastrophic losses, and the Death Star raid, just like in 1943, teeters on the brink of failure, “until a pivotal moment when [the] Millennium Falcon comes diving out of the ‘sun,’ a trick as old as military aviation itself,” Graff concluded.

Born in Pásztó, Hungary, on June 18, 1929, Tibor Rubin was 13 when the Nazis sent him to Mauthausen concentration camp in Austria. He survived 14 months before the U.S. Third Army liberated the camp. His family was less fortunate — his stepmother and sister died in Auschwitz and his father perished in Buchenwald.

In 1948 Rubin emigrated to the United States, working first as a shoemaker and then a butcher in New York City. He also strove to fulfill a promise that “if the Lord helped me go to America, I’d join the Army.”

He failed the language test in 1949 but enlisted after a second try. In July 1950 Private First Class “Ted” Rubin was shipped to Korea as a member of Company I, 8th Regiment, 1st Cavalry Division.

Holocaust survivor, Medal of Honor recipient’s story comes to life in graphic novel

There he discovered the persistence of American anti-Semitism, particularly from his sergeant, Arthur Peyton, who made a policy of “volunteering” him for the most hazardous missions. During one, Rubin defended a hill against waves of attacking North Koreans for 24 hours.

“I didn’t have too much time to get scared,” he explained afterward, “so I went crazy.” For that and other outstanding actions two of Rubin’s commanders recommended him for the Medal of Honor, but both officers were subsequently killed and Peyton “lost” the paperwork.

That October the United Nations forces were advancing into North Korea when the Chinese intervened, reversing fortunes in Korea for the second time since the war began. Manning a lone machine gun, Rubin covered his regiment’s retreat until the ammunition ran out. He was shot in the chest, arm and leg, and was captured.

It wasn’t until April 20, 1953, that Rubin was released in a prisoner of war exchange. Although sick and weak, he claimed that Chinese treatment, harsh though it was, was a cakewalk compared to Mauthausen, from which he’d developed survival techniques that came into play again, such as stealing food and medicine from his captors or using maggots to treat gangrenous wounds, all of which he did for fellow POWs as “mitzvahs” (good deeds).

Learning that he was not yet an American citizen, the Chinese repeatedly offered to repatriate him to Hungary if he wished. Given the oppressive Communist regime there, Rubin declined.

After his honorable discharge with two Purple Hearts, Rubin attained citizenship and settled in Long Beach, California, mainly working at a liquor store with his brother Emery. After meeting him at later reunions, however, veterans of I Company and men who knew him in captivity began a campaign to get Rubin the recognition they thought he’d long deserved.

Finally, in 2005, President George W. Bush presented him with the Medal of Honor, with a citation that described all he’d been witnessed to have done:

“Corporal Tibor Rubin distinguished himself by extraordinary heroism during the period from July 23, 1950, to April 20, 1953, while serving as a rifleman with I Company, 8th Cavalry Regiment, 1st Cavalry Division in the Republic of Korea. While his unit was retreating to the Pusan Perimeter, Corporal Rubin was assigned to stay behind to keep open the Taegu-Pusan Road link used by his withdrawing unit.

During the ensuing battle, overwhelming numbers of North Korean troops assaulted a hill defended solely by Corporal Rubin. He inflicted a staggering number of casualties on the attacking force during this 24-hour personal battle, single-handedly slowing the enemy advance and allowing the 8th Cavalry Regiment to complete its withdrawal successfully.

Following the breakout from the Pusan Perimeter, the 8th Cavalry Regiment proceeded northward and advanced into North Korea. During the advance he helped capture several hundred North Korean soldiers. On October 30, 1950, Chinese forces attacked his unit at Unsan, North Korea, during a massive nighttime assault. That night and throughout the next day, he manned a .30 caliber machine gun at the south end of the unit’s line after three gunners became casualties. He continued to man his machine gun until his ammunition was exhausted. His determined stand slowed the pace of the enemy advance in his sector, permitting the remnants of his unit to retreat southward.

As the battle raged, Corporal Rubin was severely wounded and captured by the Chinese. Choosing to remain in the prison camp despite offers from the Chinese to return him to his native Hungary, Corporal Rubin disregarded his own personal safety and immediately began sneaking out of the camp at night in search of food for his comrades. Breaking into enemy storehouses and gardens, he risked certain torture or death if caught. Corporal Rubin provided not only food to the starving soldiers, but also desperately needed medical care and moral support for the sick and wounded of the POW camp. His brave, selfless efforts were directly attributed to saving the lives of as many as forty of his fellow prisoners.”

Rubin’s nephew, Robert Huntly, who was inspired by him to join the Army, described him as having a Hungarian accent and a Jackie Mason sense of humor.

Tibor “Ted” Rubin, the only survivor of the Nazi genocide to earn the Medal of Honor, died in Garden Grove, California, on December 5, 2015.

Traversing five miles across treacherous mountainous terrain, Marines battled against blizzard conditions that cut visibility to almost zero. Temperatures oftentimes plummeted to 30 below.

Despite bullet wounds and a broken arm suffered during a previous engagement, Lee, along with his unit, went on to relentlessly engage the enemy while under intense fire. By the end, their exploits would help preserve a crucial evacuation route for American troops fighting as United Nations forces. Approximately 8,000 men were saved from certain death or imprisonment at the hands of the Chinese.

Born on January 21, 1926, in San Francisco, the slight-of-build Lee — all of 5-feet-6 inches tall and roughly 130 pounds — is believed to be the first Asian-American officer in Marine Corps history. Still, Lee “brought outsized determination to the battlefield,” according to an account in the New York Times.

Lee, who enlisted in the Marines at the end of World War II, told the Los Angeles Times in 2010 that he identified most with the Corps due to its reputation of being first into battle.

“I wanted to dispel the notion about the Chinese being meek, bland and obsequious,” he said.

Lee was assigned during WWII as a Japanese language instructor in San Diego. Swallowing his disappointment at not being sent to the Pacific, he chose to remain in the Marine Corps after the war and commissioned as an officer in 1946.

As the U.S. entered into the Korean War in June 1950, Lee was placed in charge of a machine gun platoon that was tasked with advancing deep into North Korean territory.

Before the fighting began, many of Lee’s fellow Marines questioned whether he was capable of killing Chinese soldiers. Behind his back some even used racial epithets, calling him a “Chinese laundry man.”

For Lee, the questioning of his devotion to his nation was ludicrous.

“I would have … done whatever was necessary,” he told the Los Angeles Times. “To me, it didn’t matter whether those were Chinese, Korean, Mongolian, whatever — they were the enemy.”

Lee’s Chinese ancestry, however, came as a boon on the night of November 2, 1950. Conducting a solo reconnaissance mission amid heavy snowfall, he began to lob grenades and fire rounds at the enemy with the intent of exposing the location of Chinese soldiers who were firing upon his men.

Undetected, Lee crept up on the enemy outpost and utilized his working knowledge of Mandarin to confuse the enemy combatants, who hesitated briefly as Lee called out in their native tongue, “Don’t shoot, I’m Chinese.”

That pause allowed just enough time for Lee’s unit to reposition and drive back the Chinese. For this, Lee was awarded the Navy Cross, the second-highest honor a Marine can receive.

“Despite serious wounds sustained as he pushed forward, First Lieutenant Lee charged directly into the face of the enemy fire and, by his dauntless fighting spirit and resourcefulness, served to inspire other members of his platoon to heroic efforts in pressing a determined counterattack and driving the hostile forces from the sector,” his citation reads.

Less than a month later, while Lee was still recovering in a field hospital from a gunshot wound to the arm he sustained during the early November fighting, the Chinese launched its Second Phase Offensive — aimed at driving the United Nations out of North Korea. Tens of thousands of Chinese forces converged on the mountainous region near the Chosin Reservoir, overrunning the nearly 8,000 American troops stationed there.

Undeterred by his wounds, Lee “and a sergeant left the hospital against orders, commandeered an Army jeep and returned to the front” to link up with the 1st Marine Battalion, according to the New York Times. Lee’s arm was still in a sling.

Using only a compass to traverse the snowy mountain terrain, Lee and his 500 Marines managed to find and reinforce the surrounded Americans, repeatedly driving back Chinese soldiers, according to the Times, and ensuring “the vastly outnumbered Americans were able to retreat to the sea.”

The fighting was so fierce that roughly 90 percent of Lee’s rifle company was killed or wounded, but thanks to Lee’s indefatigable efforts, the evacuation route remained open.

“Certainly, I was never afraid,” Lee told the Washington Post in 2010. “Perhaps the Chinese are all fatalists. I never expected to survive the war. So I was adamant that my death be honorable, be spectacular.”

Lee survived the war, retiring from the Marines in 1968 after serving in Vietnam as an intelligence officer. In addition to the Navy Cross, Lee was awarded a Silver Star and two Purple Hearts.

The men he commanded never forgot their officer.

“I didn’t care what color he was,” Ronald Burbridge, a rifleman in his unit in Korea, said in an interview for a 2010 Smithsonian documentary.

“I have told him many times, thank God that we had him.”

That region of the island was used as a staging area for Japanese forces to regroup and launch further attacks, particularly against the tenuously held Allied airfield dubbed Henderson Field.

Through miscommunication and miscues, that reconnaissance mission quickly turned deadly.

“On September 27, a message from the group was either misinterpreted or ambiguous, leading division headquarters to believe they had crossed the river and were fighting there,” according to the National WWII Museum. “This resulted in the order for three companies of 1st Battalion, 7th Marines [to go ashore] via landing craft on a beach west of Point Cruz to enter the attack from the rear.”

On that date, Petty Officer in Charge Douglas Munro led the group of 24 Higgins boats and deposited nearly 500 Marines on the beachhead with the mission to wipe out the Japanese staging area.

Within an hour of landing, however, the Marines were in danger of being pushed back into the sea amid crushing Japanese bombing raids and gunfire.

The Higgins crews were still refueling when they received the message that the Marines needed to withdraw immediately. When asked by his commanding officer if the Coast Guardsman was able to go back and extract the overwhelmed Marines, the 22-year-old Munro reportedly gave a confident, “Hell, yeah!”

Born to an American father and British mother in October 1919, the then-19-year-old Munro enlisted with the U.S. Coast Guard in August 1939 as war loomed and the likelihood of an impending draft all but certain.

But his journey from enlistment to combat in the Pacific was not linear.

“Coast Guard training in the latter part of 1939 was virtually nonexistent,” according to the museum. Sworn in on September 18, Munro and 18 other recruits “were sent to Air Station Port Angeles, where the staff there were clueless as to what was to be done with them. For three days they peeled potatoes, mowed grass, and helped with boat maintenance.”

After three days of menial labor, Munro was selected to be a crewman aboard the Coast Guard cutter USCGC Spencer, and the following year transferred to the transport ship USS Hunter Liggett to train as a coxswain for landing craft.

With the U.S. entry into the war, Munro was headed for the Pacific — and Guadalcanal.

After participating in several landings during the Guadalcanal campaign, on September 27 Munro did not hesitate.

“The Marines were being driven back to the beach and many did not have radios to request assistance,” according to the USO. “A single ‘HELP’ spelled out in T-shirts on the ridge near the beach sent a loud and clear signal to those looking on.”

“Under constant strafing by enemy machine guns on the island, and at great risk of his life, Munro daringly led five of his small craft toward the shore,” according to his Medal of Honor citation. “As he closed in on the beach, he signaled the others to land, and then in order to draw the enemy’s fire and protect the heavily loaded boats, he valiantly placed his craft with its two small guns as a shield between the beachhead and the Japanese.”

As he used his landing craft to shield the beleaguered Marines from withering enemy fire, an enemy bullet struck the base of Munro’s skull. His best friend and fellow crewman Raymond J. Evans grabbed the wheel and continued Munro’s mission until the Marines were safely back at the Allied-held location of Lunga Point.

It was there that Munro briefly regained consciousness and asked his final question: “Did they get off?”

Evans replied that they had, with Munro reportedly dying with a smile on his lips.

Munro was posthumously awarded the nation’s highest military honor in May 1943, with President Franklin D. Roosevelt presenting the Medal of Honor to Munro’s parents, James and Edith.

And with that final dispatch, war correspondent Floyd Gibbons — armed with nothing but his pen and paper — strolled into a melee of artillery and machine gun fire.

This dispatch would later help to shape the ethos of the United States Marine Corps and more than a century on, define the public’s view of the “Devil Dogs.”

A seasoned reporter for the Chicago Tribune, the charismatic Gibbons had reported on the Pancho Villa expedition in 1916 and the sinking of the RMS Laconia in 1917 before accepting his latest assignment as one of only 36 American reporters officially accredited in World War I.

As a noncombatant, Gibbons ignored the request that he stay back and joined a Marine attack on June 6, 1918, through the waist-high wheat toward the woods some several hundred yards away.

By early June “more than 2,000 German soldiers with at least 30 machine guns had ensconced themselves in Belleau Wood, and another 100 Germans with at least six machine guns held Bouresches,” recalled historian David John Ulbrich. All awaited the Marines.

As the Marines advanced, the enemy fire “was more than flesh and blood could stand,” Col. Albertus W. Catlin wrote in his memoir “With the Help of God and a Few Marines.” Catlin was awarded the Medal of Honor in 1914 for action in Vera Cruz and led the Sixth Regiment at Belleau Wood.

With no defense Gibbons was eventually cut down — bullets striking his left arm, left shoulder blade and left eye.

Made to lie in the field for three hours until the safety of darkness, Gibbons wondered if he was dead. With his left hand and arm numb and his left eyeball split in half and lying on his cheek, Gibbons used his right hand to pinch himself for reassurance. He was indeed still alive.

The news censor, however, incorrectly believing Gibbons to be dead, “concluded that it would be a crime to cut the last dispatch of Gibbons’s life, so he decided to let it go through as written,” according to an account in the Washington Post.

When he sent his final dispatch, Gibbons had expected the word “Marines” to be omitted. Up until that point no correspondent was permitted to name which troops were on which fronts due to wartime censorship.

“Because the censor let Gibbons’s dispatch go through, all correspondents were given the same privilege,” the Post continued.

For three days, reports of Marines in action at Belleau Wood went uncensored, and the American public, hungry for news of the war, were regaled with stories of the Devil Dogs as they fought in close-quarters combat with fixed bayonets, and, “worst of all,” historian George B. Clark noted, “machine guns at point-blank range.”

“For all intents and purposes, the old warriors of the U.S. Marine Corps were virtually wiped out,” Clark wrote. The Marines suffered 4,000 casualties and 1,000 killed — a 55 percent attrition rate — losing more men in this single campaign than in all its previous existence.

The dispatch from Gibbons, who would live another 21 years after the engagement, gave full credit to the 9,500-strong 4th Marine Brigade, altogether ignoring the U.S. Army’s 2nd Division of the American Expeditionary Forces who fought alongside the Marines. Even before the conclusion of the battle on June 26th, thanks to Gibbons getting past the censor, the legend of the Marines at Belleau Wood emerged.

Remembered for their gritty, victorious stand some 105 years ago, Belleau Wood stands immortal in Marine Corps lore.

“The Germans were good,” Clark wrote. “The Marines were better.”

Few questions in military history are more loaded.

“It’s no secret that MacArthur was and is a polarizing figure,” Barbara Noe Kennedy wrote in World War II magazine. “A brilliant tactician, revered for helping to win World War II and overseeing the successful Allied occupation of postwar Japan, but also a man who could be vain, arrogant, suspicious and insubordinate.”

To be sure, multitudes of American service members fondly remember the Army general for his variation on the “island hopping” strategy along the northern coast of New Guinea, which brought about great advances with relatively light casualties. Or for his later landing at Inchon in 1950, which did much to turn the tide of the Korean War.

Many others, however, remember how seriously MacArthur, who claimed to understand the mind of his enemies, underestimated his opponents in the Philippines in December 1941, the North Koreans in June 1950 and the Chinese in November 1950. Those miscalculations loom large, especially to those soldiers and Marines who suffered the consequences.

So what was he? A mastermind? A megalomaniac? One of the greatest — if not the greatest — general in American military history? A genius, albeit a flawed one?

A nation hungry for heroes embraced MacArthur as “Destiny’s Child,” the “Lion of Luzon,” the “Hero of the Pacific,” according to military historian Richard B. Frank.

“In 1945, a pollster asked Americans to name the greatest American general of the war. MacArthur won hands down, with 43 percent,” Frank wrote in a 2018 History Net article. “Only 31 percent chose Ike. George S. Patton Jr. came in a distant third at 17 percent.”

A different perspective on MacArthur’s genius allegedly came from one of his opponents, as described in Kunlun, the magazine of the Chinese People’s Liberation Army. After occupying Seoul on Jan. 7, 1951, General Peng Dehuai halted to plan the next “phase” of his offensive.

Soon afterward the Soviet ambassador to North Korea arrived and announced that he had just learned that “the Americans are prepared to completely withdraw following our retaking of Seoul,” that United Nations forces were “now faced with an overall situation of total collapse,” and added that he could not understand why the Chinese had suddenly stopped their pursuit when “the Korean War can be over in one go at it.”

Peng replied that after three consecutive offensives, his troops needed to rest and regroup at a time when his ability to resupply them had been hobbled by U.N. air attacks. Furthermore, he added, “the enemy could use the narrow, long terrain and his sea and air superiority to land in our rear at any time and that is extremely dangerous.”

“What’s more,” he concluded, “the enemy is absolutely not going to make any overall withdrawal. This is a fake impression that is to lure us southward. I, Peng Dehuai, am not MacArthur. I will not be taken in by this!”

One other man who was not overawed by the head of the Far East Command was, of course, President Harry S. Truman, who relieved him of command of U.S. forces in Korea.

The events leading to that extraordinary decision are presented in great deal in a 2008 book by Korean War veteran Stanley Weintraub, “MacArthur’s War: Korea and the Undoing of an American Hero.”

In essence, the growing disagreement between MacArthur and his commander in chief came to a head in March 1951 when House Minority Leader Joe Martin, R-Mass., sent MacArthur a copy of his speech advocating for an invasion of the Chinese mainland by Chiang Kaishek’s forces from Taiwan, in concert with a U.N. offensive in Korea.

MacArthur, who in 1950 had declared his willingness to use “our virtual monopoly of the atom bomb” against the Chinese if need be, wrote to Martin of his wholehearted agreement: “As you point out we must win. There is no substitute for victory.”

When Martin released the letter to the press, it made MacArthur’s endorsement of his plan public — and in public conflict with Truman’s strategy of limiting the war to stopping the Communist advances in Korea without escalating it into a global conflict.

Fellow generals, such as George C. Marshall, knew that MacArthur had committed an act of insubordination. So, for that matter, did MacArthur, who on April 9 remarked to Maj. Gen. Edward M. Almond, “I have become politically involved and may be relieved by the president.”

Indeed, on April 11, 1951, President Truman announced on the radio that “General of the Army Douglas MacArthur is unable to give his wholehearted support to the policies of the United States Government and the United Nations on matters pertaining to his official duties.” Truman added that he was replacing MacArthur with Lt. Gen. Matthew B. Ridgway.

In standing up for his constitutional authority as commander in chief, Truman knew he had committed political suicide. His successor, Dwight D. Eisenhower — who had served for six years on MacArthur’s staff — proved to be no more impressed with MacArthur than Truman had been.

“I wouldn’t trade one Marshall for fifty MacArthurs,” Eisenhower said, adding, “My God! That would be a lousy deal. What would I do with fifty MacArthurs?”

Far from fading away, however, MacArthur continues to endure as a larger-than-life figure, revered by some, derided by others — most recently, in James Ellman’s 2023 book, “MacArthur Reconsidered,” which reassess the commander in a more negative light.

And so the debate will continue, quite possibly with a little more restirring of the pot. One certainty is that any attempt to balance his accomplishments against his failures, concluding with the image of a “flawed genius,” is likely to be the minority viewpoint.

Editor’s note: This story has been corrected to reflect House Minority Leader Joe Martin’s state representation as Massachusetts.

Serving in the U.S. Army Air Force during the Second World War, Finnegan was a passenger of an A-20 Havoc, when, for “unknown reasons, this plane was forced to ditch in the ocean off the north coast of New Guinea,” according to an account published by the Defense POW/MIA Accounting agency. “Both engines failed at low altitude, and the aircraft’s nose hit the water hard.”

“And my uncle, they called him — Ambrose, they called him Bosie… and he became an Army Air Corps, before the Air Force came along, he flew those single engine planes as reconnaissance over war zones,” Biden said during remarks at the United Steelworkers Headquarters in Pittsburgh.

“And he got shot down in New Guinea, and they never found the body because there used to be a lot of cannibals — for real — in that part of the New Guinea.”

Biden’s claim contradicts the DPAA report, which notes that “Three men failed to emerge from the sinking wreck and were lost in the crash. One crew member survived and was rescued by a passing barge.”

The president’s comments on cannibalism, meanwhile, are not far off. In 1992, nearly half a century after World War II, Japanese historian Toshiyuki Tanaka revealed that he had uncovered more than 100 cases of cannibalism committed by Japanese troops in Papua New Guinea.

“These documents clearly show that this cannibalism was done by a whole group of Japanese soldiers, and in some cases they were not even starving,” Tanaka said.

A translated Imperial Army order from Nov. 18, 1944, described cannibalism as the “worst human crime” and blamed increases in murders and the possession of human flesh by soldiers on a “lack of thoroughness in moral training,” according to the Associated Press.

“In all cases, the condition of the remains were such that there can be no doubt that the bodies had been dismembered and portions of flesh cooked,” one Australian lieutenant recalled after finding the dismembered remains of several comrades.

The military was ultimately unable to recover the remains of the president’s uncle, whose life and service are memorialized on the Walls of the Missing at the Manila American Cemetery in the Philippines.

“President Biden is proud of his uncle’s service in uniform, who lost his life when the military aircraft he was on crashed in the Pacific after taking off near New Guinea,” White House deputy press secretary Andrew Bates told CNN.

“The president highlighted his uncle’s story as he made the case for honoring our ‘sacred commitment … to equip those we send to war and take care of them and their families when they come home,’ and as he reiterated that the last thing American veterans are is ‘suckers’ or ‘losers.’”

Soldiers with the 1st Brigade, 506th Infantry Regiment, 101st Airborne Division received a batch of XM7 rifles and XM250 automatic rifles and their XM157 fire controls in late March.

The XM7 is the Army’s replacement for the M4 while the XM250 will replace the M249 Squad Automatic Weapon. Both new weapons are chambered in 6.8mm, a larger and more powerful round than the legacy 5.56mm round used in the M4 and M249.

The soldiers conducted classroom training last week and began firing the weapons in demonstrations on Monday, Col. Trevor Voelkel, 1st Brigade commander, told Army Times in a phone interview.

Voelkel said he was impressed with the demonstration that showed the 6.8mm round piercing concrete blocks to strike paper targets on steel backdrops behind the barriers.

101st Airborne first Army unit to field Next Generation Squad Weapons

“Seeing the effects on the targets we had makes up for any concerns I had initially about the increased weight,” the colonel said.

Unloaded, the XM7 weighs 8.4 pounds, which is 3 pounds heavier than the M4. The XM250 weighs roughly 13 pounds unloaded, which is 2.7 pounds lighter than the M249.

The 6.8mm round has a lethal range of at least 600m, twice that of 5.56mm rounds, Army officials said.

Staff Sgt. Garrett Steele, a weapons squad leader, and Sgt. Marcus Colston, bravo team leader, told Army Times that before they fired the weapon they were worried that the new round would add recoil, which might make it hard to get back on target.

“The recoil, honestly, was very negligible even with the larger round,” Colston said. “The weight of the weapon was pretty negligible.”

Steele agreed and said the XM7 was very accurate, both with iron sights and the new fire control. The weapons team leader said the group of soldiers with 1st Brigade that he trained with were able to zero their weapons and get tight groupings after shooting 10 rounds or fewer.

“There wasn’t anybody who had any issues getting groupings or zeroing quickly,” Steele said.

The XM157 has a host of features not available in the standard rifle optics such as the Close Combat Optic and Advanced Combat Optical Gunsight that have been used by soldiers for years.

The new fire control has a built-in infrared aiming laser, bullet drop compensator and ballistics calculator that can receive data for any weapons system in the Army’s inventory and add new data for future weapons.

The fire control will adjust the aiming point for the shooter based on distance and the ballistics of the round. It allows shooters to use eight times magnification to zoom in on a target, compared to the four times magnification on current standard optics.

Both sergeants said the optic was easy and quick to use. And the features were all applicable.

“There’s no fluff on the optic,” Colston said. “Everything that we can do with that, in my experience, the things we do as infantrymen, every single one of those features is going to be useful at a certain time.”

Voelkel echoed his soldiers’ comments on the fire control, comparing it to the current optics.

“It’s kind of like going from my Nokia flip phone to an iPhone,” he said.

The rangefinder and IR laser will allow soldiers to mark target reference points and laser targets for call for fire in the field with no additional equipment, the colonel said.

“I think that’s going to open up a whole new world of capabilities,” Voelkel said.

The brigade will receive 1,500 XM7s and 200 XM150s, all with their own optics, according to Program Executive Office-Soldier. The brigade is expected to be fully fielded with the new weapons by September.

The brigade is scheduled for their pre-deployment Joint Readiness Training Center rotation in March 2025, Voelkel said. The unit has a large-scale field training exercise scheduled for this fall with the entire 101st Airborne Division.

Those events will help the unit see the performance of a brigade fully equipped with the new small arms and optics in both live fires and simulated, force-on-force training, the colonel said.

During force-on-force exercises, soldiers armed with the weapons will have greater ranges and the ability to penetrate barriers when in a close fight. The laser shooting systems used for force-on-force can be adjusted to accommodate the 6.8mm ballistics so commanders can get a sample of its performance.

“It’s going to allow us to engage the enemy earlier than we would have,” Garrett said. “If we see an enemy far out, we can get better eyes on with the optic.”

In 2017, the 101st Airborne Division was also the first unit to field the replacement for the legacy M9 handgun with the Modular Handgun System, which includes the M17 and M18 handguns.

Following that fielding with the next generation weapons gives the division a chance to give the Army feedback on a weapon that many soldiers may carry for decades to come.

“I think there’s a lot of pride and a feeling of weighty responsibility,” Voelkel said.

The $4.7 billion rifle and automatic rifle weapons contract with firearms manufacturer Sig Sauer and the $2.7 billion contract with Sheltered Wings, a subsidiary of Vortex Optics, for the XM157, are the most significant changes to Army individual weapons since the M16 was fielded in the 1960s.

The XM7 is a piston-driven, modular, select-fire, magazine-fed, suppressed rifle.

The XM250 is a belt-fed, air-cooled, lightweight, gas-operated, select-fire, suppressed light machine gun that fires from the open-bolt position.

The Army plans to field the new weapons to close combat forces such as infantry, special operations, scouts, combat engineers, forward observers and combat medics by fiscal year 2033.

The legacy M4 and M249 will see continued use for decades to come for the rest of the Army.

Correction: This article has been updated to remove an inaccurate reference to a 7.62mm comparison with 6.8mm.

Ulm — meager, fairly accurate.

Heilbronn — meager, fairly accurate.

Furth — meager to moderate, inaccurate.

Sindelfingen — moderate to intense, accurate.

And so on through another eighteen cities and towns with reported flak varying from light to heavy, meager to moderate to intense, inaccurate to accurate.

The reported intensity and accuracy of flak varied from man to man in the same crew. There were no standards. How do you measure flak? In some ways the reports may have been a psychological portrait — whoa that was close. When one shell burst right under his plane, a navigator reported, “I thought someone hit me with a baseball bat. The concussion was so terrific.” And a waist gunner, riding through another attack, said, “At 40 degrees below zero, you can sweat.”

Flak hit the big bombers in a rain of steel pellets. It sounded like hail on a tin roof, like BBs rolling around, said the airmen. It could tear into the bomber’s aluminum skin with a “shriek” or a “hissing.” It could splatter the head of your pilot or miss by an inch. Loose, hot steel rattling around, as if your anxieties had taken shape. It was lethal with a randomness that was cruel. They could smell the flak through their oxygen masks.

The German anti-aircraft gunners filled the sky with explosions and steel. Nearly a million men and women were committed to the guns. In the last years of the war, the 88mm guns were grouped in Grossbatterien of twelve, sixteen, eighteen, or twenty-four — a huge shotgun firing thousands of rounds — tons of explosives a minute — four or five miles high. Major targets were surrounded by two hundred guns; oil refineries by 450 guns, and so many guns guarded the factories in the Ruhr Valley that it was known as Flak Alley. The guns had an effect; the Air Force found that flak reduced bombing accuracy by 10 to 20 percent. The big guns rattled the fliers; they were missing their targets.

Each exploding shell launched about 1,500 metal fragments. Some would pass right through the plane, or explode inside, and some shells brought a rain of fire. If they were close enough to see the red center of the dark cloud, they expected to be hit. This could be what hell looks like, thought George McGovern, a B-24 pilot who flew thirty-five missions and was awarded the Distinguished Flying Cross. “Hell can’t be any worse than that.” An unnamed crewman, in another battle, was more direct when he said over the plane’s intercom, “Mary, Mother of God, get me out of this.”

The bombers sometimes returned with hundreds of holes, with engines out or on fire, with ruptured fuel lines and cut rudder cables, with men wounded, maimed, and bleeding to death. On “good missions” with “meager flak” and few of the Luftwaffe’s fighters attacking, bombers and fighters could still be lost or “missing in action.” Seven bombers and four fighters on one mission, nine bombers and three fighters on another “good mission,” as many as ninety-three men “missing.” Telegrams sent to Ada, Oklahoma; Palo Alto, California; Grand Rapids, Michigan; Hillsboro, Texas: “We regret to inform you . . .”

The flak-filled skies followed the bomber crews back to England. When the airmen were flak happy (shaken up), they were sent to flak homes or flak farms on flak leave for a week’s “R & R” (rest and relaxation). At briefings they studied the Flak Zone over a target, looking at the Flak Maps. They carried the word into battle flying B-17s named: Flack Alley, Flack Alley II, Flak Alley Lil’ (2 of those), Flak Alley Lil’ II, Flack Buster, Flak Dancer (2), Flak Dodger (4), Flak Eater, Flak Evader, Flak Fed Gal, Flak Flirter, Flak Fobic, Flak Hack (2), Flak Happy (8), Flak Happy II, Flak Happy Pappy, Flak Heaven, Flak Hopper (2), Flak House (2), Flak Magic, Flak Magnet (2), Flak Magnet II, Flak No. 2, Flak Off Limits, Flak Palace, Flak Plow, Flak Queen, Flak Rabbit, Flak Rat, Flak Rat II, Flack Sack, Flak Sak, Flack Shack (2), Flak Shack (3), Flak Shy, Flak Shy Lady, Flak Suit, Flak-Wolf, Flakstop, Mac’s Flak Shak, Miss Flak, Old Flak Magnet, Ole Flak Sack, Ole Scatter Flak, and so on.

They parodied their fears by singing tunes like As Flak Goes By:

You must remember this

The flak can’t always miss

Somebody’s gotta’ die.

And they carried their fears into their sleep. They had “flak dreams,” said Bud Hutton and Andy Rooney in a wartime book. “You doze off in your sack and pretty soon the F-Ws begin to bore in at you, cannon flashing, and the flak begins to come up in close black puffs; or maybe you find yourself endlessly falling through space, tearing at a parachute which never opens.”

The stories of flak are a literature of near misses, of geometry, chance, and luck. It was a universe in which an inch or two separated life and death or injury.

The Eighth Air Force fed quotes to the press from the pilots and crews of the bombers. The quotes usually said: flak was everywhere, but it missed us. Flak was so thick you could walk on it; the sky was black with flak; we were shot up, but we made it back. Flak grazed my face, my leg, sliced my sleeve and glove to ribbons, but I’m OK. It ripped off my oxygen mask, just missing my Adam’s apple. I can’t figure out how it missed me. It tore a hole in the map I was reading but didn’t touch me.

Kurt Wolf was a tail gunner on a B-17. He was part of the 452nd Bomb Group based just seven miles from the 453rd at Old Buckenham. Wool socks saved his life. He had gotten a pair sent from home. Wool socks were scarce. He was sitting at his gun in the small glass canopy on the tail of the plane when he felt that his right sock had fallen. It had “crawled down in my boot,” he said. At 35 below zero, this could be serious. “I leaned down to pull that sock back up and just as I leaned down . . . a piece of shrapnel took out both those windows where my head was. So that pair of socks saved my life.” That’s how he told the story when he was 87 years old.

The flak stories are like that tale of a fallen sock. The flak was heavy, was accurate, was moderate, light, inaccurate, was everywhere. There was no empty air. The sky was a maze of thick flak smoke. But I’m alive — that was the unstated refrain. And unspoken — for now.

Chance, fate, luck, and near misses live in the vets’ stories — the pilot assigned to the squadron’s “coffin corner” of the formation whose position is switched at the last moment and is saved, the shards of flak twisting through the airplane cockpit missing by an inch or less, the navigator pulled from the English Channel by an RAF rescue launch seconds before he drowned.

Minutes. Inches. Banal changes that meant life or death. Back in the peacetime world — working nine-to-five, taking children to get shoes — how could the veterans explain that they were only in this life by a few inches? It was as though they’d realized, years before the physicists’ theories, that many universes exist side by side — the world with them and the world without them. They saw it and they had no words for it.

The airmen would be woken up at 3:00 a.m. for breakfast — fresh eggs on mission mornings, “combat eggs,” instead of powdered “square eggs.” Some men didn’t eat a thing, and others ate like it was their last meal. “You could hear a pin drop,” a crewman remembered. “You had a 50 percent chance of returning. You don’t want to think about it, but it’s there.”

My father recalled one morning like this. “They woke us at 3:30 in the morning and told us to get on down to the mess hall. A Maximum Effort has been called. That means any airplane that could fly was going to be in the air. So we all got on our bicycles and went over to the mess hall and got on line. And when I got to my turn to tell the cook what I wanted, he said to me, ‘How do you want your eggs? Scrambled or over easy or what?’ The guy behind me says, ‘I think we’re getting killed today because they never ask us how we want our eggs.’ I thought that was funny, at the time anyway.

“On our way over to the mess hall we saw Royal Air Force bombers returning from missions. They returned and flew over our base. The Royal Air Force bombed the enemy at night. We bombed them during the day. How effective this all was has been written about by many people and nobody really knows. I just know it killed a lot of people.”

The pilot and copilot started the four engines about twenty-five minutes before they took off, running through the checklist. This was a “two-man job,” said B-24 pilot Lieutenant Colonel William E. Carigan Jr. “Both pilots are busy with both hands; the copilot with all the mechanical things — sequences of fuel boosters, primers, energizing and meshing starters; the pilot with mixtures and throttles, which require some touch.” After that, the B-24 required “considerable muscle,” said Carigan. It called for “more muscle to fly than does any other airplane.” It was “sternly unforgiving and demanding.”

As they taxied, the bomb bay doors were open to vent fumes. The lead squadron went first. The control tower fired a flare and the big bombers — thirty-five tons at their maximum “war emergency” weight — began moving down the runway toward take-off speed — 160 mph — just seconds apart, closer than at any airport today. “What sounded like a charging bull was actually more akin to a duck beginning to waddle. It was agonizingly slow,” said pilot Eino Alve. “So, you hunched and rocked back and forth in your seat, in a futile attempt to nudge the plane forward faster. Standing behind you and to your right, the engineer watched the engines’ health on the instruments. The co-pilot watched the airspeed indicator, calling out its advancing numbers: 70, 80, 90 . . . and then you were committed. Even if you lost an engine, you’d have no choice but to try to take off.”

“The doors to the bomb bays close behind you, and you know that you are a prisoner of this ship,” said a reluctant reporter for Yank, the Army’s weekly magazine. “That imprisonment can be broken only by three factors, and they are in order: Disaster by explosion and parachuting to another prison, death, or a safe return.”

This was the life my father lived as a teenager — up at 3:30 a.m., breakfast by 4:00, a briefing at the plane to get the target for the day, long hours in flight, the Luftwaffe sometimes attacking, flying through flak over the target, watching the bombs drop, flying home through more flak and possible fighter attacks, landing to be met by the Red Cross girls with sandwiches, doughnuts, and coffee, and then a shot of whiskey at the “interrogation,” the debriefing. And up again to do it the next day.

Excerpted from “I Will Tell No War Stories” by Howard Mansfield. Copyright © 2024 by Howard Mansfield. Excerpted with permission by Lyons Press.

His father, Pincus Mansfield, had served with the 453rd Bombardment Group of the Eighth Air Force, but, like many veterans, Pincus had never spoken to his sons about his time serving in the flak-filled skies of occupied Europe.

It wasn’t until 65 years on, as Howard and his brother began clearing out their father’s home, did they happen upon a treasure trove of histories past.

“Cleaning up one day, in a small drawer with his cufflinks and tie clips, I found some small, unlined, pocket-sized notebook pages, folded over and tossed aside, sitting as they had for almost sixty-five years,” Mansfield writes in his prologue to “I Will Tell No War Stories.”

“It was an account of each bomber mission he had flown as he had recorded it when he was nineteen and twenty years old. I had no idea such a record even existed.”

Mansfield seamlessly weaves the tracing of his own father’s story with the broader implications of history and memory.

Combat, as Mansfield’s research reveals, and as his father intimately knew, is an “experience so overwhelming that words diminish it, as if trying to draw a frame around the infinite.”

That didn’t stop Mansfield from trying, as he “began to undo the forgetting as best [he] could.” His latest, “I Will Tell No War Stories” is a testament to that.

Can you discuss discovering your father’s war ‘twice’?

The first time I was in Wales — they have these great long-distance paths over there, all throughout the countryside. I was on one that runs along the Irish Sea and one night, I’m in this pub — because that’s where you’re going to be in this little village — and I get talking to this guy. I told him my father flew during the war so he said to me, “You’ve got to come upstairs to our meeting and see this film.” He introduces me as this honored guest because my father flew in the Eighth Air Force during the war.

They showed me this film — “Target for Tonight” — that has stayed with me to this day. It was like no war movie I’d ever seen. It was small. It was quiet. There were no special effects. It was only 45 minutes. But you came away with a real understanding of World War II from the British perspective. But what really came across to me was how unrelenting the industrial bombing was. You got up in the morning and if the weather was good, you’d go out. So at that point, I thought, oh my gosh, I bet my dad lived a life much like that of the film.

The second time just happened a few years ago. My dad never talked about the war just like most of the veterans. There were a couple of hints around the house, an old uniform in the basement, that sort of thing. But during the last year of his life we were cleaning up his home to move him to a veteran’s nursing home, and there was this little diary that he had kept during his bombing missions. They were not supposed to do this of course, it was strictly verboten for airmen to keep diaries at all, but a lot of them did.

I was just astounded to see it folded over and left. It had been sitting like that for 65 years.

From that I was able to start putting together the story of how he had served, where he was, and what he had gone through. He received two Purple Hearts, something that he had never mentioned.

What was your research process like — especially with your father’s records destroyed in the 1973 fire?

At first I was like, “Oh, I’ll request his military records.” But yes, I learned that after the 1973 St. Louis fire they lost maybe 85 percent of the U.S. Army Air Forces’ records from World War I through the early ‘60s. It’s just a phenomenal loss. So I had to put it together from other sources.

So a couple of key things: One, is I remembered the name of his pilot. I found his son who had the same name. I wrote him a letter, an old-fashioned letter, which he answered and called me back. Miraculously he had his father’s pilot logbook, so I had the missions my father flew and I knew when he had been hit because I had his Purple Heart papers, which I also found in his house.

He was in the 453 BG [bombardment group] and a couple of histories have been written on that, which I was able to use. From the Air Force Historical Research Agency I got miles and miles of microfilm. Once I decoded that sort of military way of categorizing things, I was able to see all the planning for the missions.

It was primarily the miles and miles and microfiche that gave me a feeling for what it was like — it gave me a real feeling for all the losses of the airplanes. In the book there is a place where I list all the planes and how they were lost. I think it’s just chilling.

As you combed through your own father’s history, ‘undoing the forgetting,’ so to speak, how did your relationship with, or understanding, of him evolve?

By the time I was doing this he had died, but what I came to understand is why he didn’t want to talk about it.

I think there are two things, which was the cause for a lot of his generation. One, is remorse. Remorse about killing.

My father had been dead a year or two and my brother had the last few things in a storage locker. We were going through it and opened up this box that contained these two cassettes. I don’t remember him recording on microfiche and he must’ve just thrown them in a drawer or something. But in it, he talks about, oh my gosh, it was such an incredible thing. He’s home and my brother is 3, 4 years old. They’re watching TV and it’s a dark documentary kind of thing. They’re dropping bombs on cities and my father, who is watching says, “Oh my God.” That always bothered him.

And primarily, Ernie Pyle wrote this so well, and I’ll paraphrase but, “We did this so you don’t have to think about it. Go live in peace. Just go.”

Military history is not always strategy or battle tactics, but the humanity (or lack thereof). Their silence gave us peace. How do you reconcile that as both a son of this generation, but also as a historian?

Well, as a historian, I wish that people would have told us more. And particularly, actually, particularly now, because there’s two things about what happened in World War II that I think people should never lose track of. One was how vast the destruction was in Europe. And the other thing is that this can’t happen again. Just can’t.

I do wish he had told us more at a certain age you know. All the guys on the block where I grew up had been in the Marines, the Navy, the Army. None of them talked about it. Who knows what they had seen or what they had done.

Your words ‘The commemorations and retellings of World War II became part of our forgetting’ bring to mind Milan Kundera’s ‘The Book of Laughter and Forgetting.’ How has the collective memory of World War II diminished or obscured realities?

That’s an immense question. I’d say the films we grew up watching, most of them couldn’t be as fierce as what happened. Every now and then that happens — the recent film “Dunkirk,” the first 20 minutes of “Saving Private Ryan” — but most films have been watered down.

It also becomes kind of this thing that always happens in history where you go from the end, and read back in the beginning, “Oh, of course, we were gonna win.” Which wasn’t the case at all. A lot of things could have broken different ways, so I think it’s very hard to connect with.

I flew in a restored B-17 recently and I got a feel for how incredibly small inside it was. How loud it was to fly in that bomber, but even that was so cleaned up and sanitized. There was no blood. Vomit. Fear. Everything was wonderful. And that’s not the way it was.

You’re up at 20-25,000 feet in the air and then wait, you’re open to the weather? The plane isn’t pressurized?

It was all just physically exhausting. There’s long hours when nothing happens, and then those moments with just everything happens and you can be killed. It’s a very strange mix of tedium and possible death.

You vowed to never write about World War II again after finishing ‘Dwelling in Possibility.’ Do you feel the same sentiment now after?

Yes, I’m tired of having things destroyed. Writing about it was really a very upsetting exercise. You really have to open yourself up to that kind of destruction and suffering and try to portray it honestly.

I’m sure the mental toll of sifting through archives revolving around constant death and destruction, but even then, that in itself gets sanitized.

Yeah, exactly. You mentioned rivet counters — and yes, you gotta have those guys that check things, but sometimes they just get too locked in, lost in the hardware of the whole thing. You miss the point that these were boys flying the hardware.

You have to keep your eye on what was going on.

On May 4, 1982, a month after forces from Argentina invaded the British overseas dominion of the Falkland Islands and two days after a British task force traversed nearly 8,000 miles to join the fight, an Argentine Exocet missile slammed into the destroyer as it patrolled off Port Stanley in the South Atlantic.

According to the warship’s board of inquiry report released in 2012, “the missile’s impact left a 15 feet by 4 feet hole in the ship’s side and caused widespread minor shock damage.” Fire spread almost immediately throughout the lower decks of the ship.

“My boots were actually melting because the superstructure was getting that hot,” John Miller, a Royal Navy weapons engineer, recalled in an interview with the York Press. “We couldn’t put the fire out. All we could do was close the steel bulkheads down and contain it.”

Of the 300 sailors that manned the 4,100-tonne destroyer, 20 were killed and 26 wounded.

“After some 4 hours firefighting the situation was deteriorating,” the report continued. “Internally the ship was burning fiercely. ... Sheffield’s fighting capability was totally and probably irremediably destroyed.”

It was then, while watching their ship burn, that Sub-Lieutenant Clive Carrington-Wood struck up a tune, bringing the sardonic British sense of humor into full display as he and his fellow sailors sang “Always Look on the Bright Side of Life” — a classic from Monty Python’s “Life of Brian.”

The attack was a blow to British military prestige, especially so after the report found the anti-air warfare officer negligent due to his “lengthy absence” from the ops room, which “meant an important air-defense facility was not manned,” according to a report by The Guardian. Twelve minutes after the impact, the officer was still not convinced that the ship had even been struck, the report added.

But ever the masters of spin — Dunkirk, anyone? — the news of Carrington-Wood’s cheekiness reached the British press and injected some pride back into the British spirit in the aftermath of the attack.

Three weeks later, as the HMS Coventry sank after coming under waves of attacks from Argentine Douglas A-4 Skyhawks, the survivors took a leaf out of Carrington-Wood’s book and hummed, sang and whistled the track as they sat precariously perched in life rafts.

A little more than a month later, British forces prevailed to force Argentina’s surrender, giving new meaning to the notion that “when you’re chewing on life’s gristle, don’t grumble, give a whistle, and this’ll help things turn out for the best.”

In 1986, members of a U.S. Navy helicopter crew stationed aboard the USS America sought to bring a moment of levity to the conclusion of their six-month deployment to the Mediterranean.

With the aircraft carrier John F. Kennedy poised to relieve the Kitty Hawk-class super carrier, aircrewman Brian Christoff and his fellow aviators hatched a plan.

“I was an Aircrewman/SAR Swimmer with HS-11 helo squadron,” Christoff wrote in a since-deleted Facebook post. “The fighter jet jocks got with us and came up with this slant, on an age-old tradition, of releasing a greased pig onto the deck of the relieving ship. Three pigs painted with red, white and blue food coloring and lathered in grease. The Kennedy never [saw] it coming!”

From sling bullets bearing tongue-in-cheek inscriptions of DEXAI (“Catch!” in Greek), to modern day Porta-John art drawn by an ever-imaginative lance corporal, military humor has spanned millennia. The “pig prank” was no exception.

In the video, three pigs can be seen being released from the helo onto the flight deck of the Kennedy, as bewildered sailors below eventually chase after the freed baconated trio.

With the helicopter departing after dropping its “artiodactyl payload,” the Kennedy can be heard radioing, “Appreciate it. We can return the favor when we see you next.”

It is unclear if the favor was ever returned.

*No animals were harmed in the making of this film.

But can any of the other branches promise to make you a king? Considering a series of unusual events in the 1920s, the Marine Corps might be able to.

In a stranger than fiction, yet true turn of events, one stocky, blonde haired, blue-eyed Marine from a small coal mining town in Pennsylvania went from a simple gunnery sergeant to the king of the island of La Gonave, Haiti.

Sgt. Faustin Wirkus’ ascent from a poor “breaker boy” — separating coal from slate — to king, is the stuff of Marine Corps legend.

“I had to go to work in the collieries,” Wirkus later wrote. “There was no escaping the sequence of that rule … but there was a different idea in my mind. … In the little time I had been in school, it had become foggily known to me that somewhere out beyond the dust, the rattling collieries, and the grimy shacks of Dupont [Pennsylvania], was a world full of thrill and the glory of being alive.”

For Wirkus, the path to that thrill and glory lay in becoming a U.S. Marine. By age 18 the teen ran away from home to become one of “The Few.”

In 1915 he was among the first outfits of “Leathernecks” sent to Haiti to restore order, according to his New York Times obituary. It was during his first tour that Wirkus fell in love with the island, returning for duty on and off for several years before, in 1920, he established a fortuitous friendship while serving at the tiny outpost of Anse à Gallet.

That day, according to a 1931 Time article, Wirkus witnessed a tax collector arrest a Haitian woman for “voodoo offenses.” The woman, the magazine wrote, claimed that she was Queen Ti Memenne of La Gonave. Although initially transferred to Port-au-Prince to stand trial, the queen was eventually freed due to Wirkus’ pleas for leniency.

Five years later, the Haitian-obsessed Wirkus once again applied for duty on the island. His superiors, according to the Marine, “thought of La Gonave as the butt-end of the world,” yet granted his request. Made resident commander of La Gonave, Wirkus returned to the island in April 1925.

“During his tenure, he saved the Haitian government thousands of dollars by exposing graft in tax collection and ensured the island farmers were given fair tax assessments. He also oversaw the construction of the first airfield and directed the first census,” according to Marine Corps records.

Wirkus’ practical reforms quickly endeared him to the 12,000 inhabitants of La Gonave, but that endearment would go one step further.

According to local superstition, “a previous ruler of the island had borne that name [King Faustin I] and, according to legend had vanished in 1848 with the promise that his descendant of the same name would return to take his throne,” according to a New York Times report.

By candlelight on the evening of July 18, 1926, Queen Ti Memenne crowned the gunnery sergeant Faustin II, the “White King of La Gonave.” Carried from the houmfort, or voodoo temple, a blood sacrifice was made via a rooster — The New York Times story claimed it was a goat — as the crowd shouted “The King! Long live King Faustin!” to the more than slightly confused Marine.

“They made me a sort of king in a ceremony I thought was just a celebration of some kind,” the flabbergasted Marine recalled. “I learned later they thought I was the reincarnation of a former king of the island who had taken the name of Faustin I when he came into power. The coincidence was just good luck for me.”

Wirkus reigned for an incredible three years while still serving in the Marines. He was eventually recalled to Port-au-Prince after Haitian officials expressed “jealousy” over Wirkus’ successes.

By 1931, King Faustin II was no more, with Wirkus leaving the service and returning stateside. In 1939, he reenlisted with the Marines, serving first as a recruiter in New York before being transferred to the Navy Pre-Flight School in North Carolina.

The Marine and one-time king died in October 1945, leaving behind a wife and a young son — also named Faustin.

The film follows a family through their daily routine. There’s a birthday celebration; the family dog that wants to follow its owners from room to room; a daughter who has sleepwalking issues.

Except these aren’t normal times, and this isn’t a normal family.

The characters in question are Rudolph Höss, the Nazi commandant of the Auschwitz death camp, his wife Hedwig, and their five small children. The family lives an upper-middle-class suburban life, with one small hitch: they share a wall with Auschwitz.

From its opening in 1940 to the camp’s liberation in 1945, over 1.1 million men, women and children were systematically murdered at Auschwitz. More than 11 million were killed in the Holocaust — six million of whom were Jews.

Yet Glazer’s camera never focuses on mass murder. Instead, the viewer is left with only a handful of impressionistic shots — flowers being grown with the ashes of human remains or a shot of water running red as Hoss’ boot heels are cleaned after a day’s “work.”

Viewers never go inside the gates of Auschwitz, but they hear its horrors. The constant ambient soundscape suggests the untold terrors within. Distant gunshots, the hum of machinery, dogs snarling, train whistles and the shrieks of parents separated from children. One never truly sees the Holocaust unfold, which makes Glazer’s portrayal of it all the more of a gut punch.

“Since Rudolph is not affected in his everyday life by what he does or sees within the concentration camp, Glazer would like us to imagine living in the same way as Rudolph,” writer and filmmaker Enid Tihanyi Zentelis wrote for Talkhouse. “Because the Holocaust has been so fully written about and analyzed by historians, it makes for an ideal study of humankind’s ongoing capacity for violence, depravity and staggering lack of empathy, no matter what country or time period we consider.”

Called “a study in extreme cognitive dissonance” by the Guardian, “Zone of Interest” does feature one strand of hope in the form of a young girl.

Shot on a thermal imaging camera, the film pivots from its hauntingly ordinariness to nighttime scenes that follow a young woman moving “almost ghostlike by the camera,” according to the Guardian. “[She] clandestinely moves through a construction site beneath a railway that runs into the camp. She places apples in the earth for the starving prisoners on work duty to find the following day.”

This particular scene is a result of Glazer meeting a 90-year-old Polish resistance fighter by happenstance. The woman, called Alexandria, was just 12 when she began defying the Nazis and hiding apples and other food for the prisoners of Auschwitz.

While speaking to Alexandria, the woman revealed that she had discovered a small sheet of music while laying out food, which turned out to have been composed by an Auschwitz prisoner, composer Joseph Wulf, who survived the war.

“She lived in the house we shot in,” Glazer told the Guardian. “It was her bike we used, and the dress the actor wears was her dress. Sadly, she died a few weeks after we spoke.”

Her defiance, however, became a ray of sunlight for Glazer amid the darkest subject matter.

“That small act of resistance, the simple, almost holy act of leaving food, is crucial because it is the one point of light,” he recounts for the Guardian. “I really thought I couldn’t make the film at that point. I kept ringing my producer, Jim, and saying: ‘I’m getting out. I can’t do this. It’s just too dark.’ It felt impossible to just show the utter darkness, so I was looking for the light somewhere and I found it in her. She is the force for good.”

The seemingly phantom American “Ghost Army” was one of many problems plaguing the Wehrmacht in the summer of 1944. The Germans were not, as they believed, fighting a numerically superior American force, but battling artists, engineers and inflatables.

“The top-secret unit waged war using inflatable tanks and weapons, fake radio traffic, sound effects, even phony generals — all to fool the enemy into thinking that the army was bigger, better-armed, or in a different place than it was,” according to James M. Linn IV, curator at The National WWII Museum.

Now, after nearly a decade of research and grass-roots lobbying on their behalf, the masterful performers of the Ghost Army are slated to receive the Congressional Gold Medal.

Activated on Jan. 20, 1944, the unit known as the U.S. 23rd Headquarters Special Troops was the first mobile, multimedia tactical deception outfit in U.S. Army history. Comprising 82 officers and 1,023 men under the command of Army Col. Harry L. Reeder, this unique, top-secret detachment was capable of simulating two entire divisions — approximately 30,000 men — while being armed with nothing heavier than .50 caliber machine guns, according to The National WWII Museum.

First deployed two weeks after D-Day, the 23rd conducted 22 deception operations over a nine-month period. As the months wore on, the Ghost Army’s tactics became more sophisticated — with a flair of dramatics.

“There is too much MILITARY and not enough SHOWMANSHIP,” Lt. Fred Fox wrote in a memo to the unit’s leaders. “We must remember that we are playing to a very critical and attentive radio, ground and aerial audience. They must all be convinced.”

The mission, then, was never to fight Nazis, but to hoodwink them. Operating that close to the front, however, meant inherent danger.

The unit’s baptism by fire came near the city of Brest, France, on Aug. 23-25, 1944. The battle “marked the first time the 23rd Headquarters Special Troops used visual, radio and sonic deception all together,” according to The Ghost Army Legacy Project.

Their mission in Brest was to exaggerate the size of American forces attacking the city. Outnumbered and outgunned, the 23rd blasted sounds of marching troops and inflated over 200 plastic tanks and trucks to shore up the unit’s size.

“I guess we were successful because the Germans fired upon us,” 100-year-old Ghost Army veteran Bernie Bluestein, who specialized in fake signs and vehicle stencils, told The Washington Post. “We convinced them that we were the real thing.”

The deception proved so authentic that the German general, Hermann-Bernhard Ramcke, surrendered.

The Ghost Army’s final act came on March 18, 1945, when the 1,100-man unit deceived Nazi intelligence about the site and timing of the U.S. Ninth Army’s Rhine River crossing.

Under the cover of darkness, the phantom forces “blared sounds of rumbling vehicles, hammering and even soldiers swearing,” according to the Washington Post. “They radioed false orders to simulate movement to the front and posed as loose-lipped colonels and generals while planting disinformation for German spies to overhear in local bars and cafes.”

The Ghost Army’s contribution to Operation Plunder helped to overcome the final natural obstacle barring the U.S. Army’s way into Germany from the West.

Credited with saving between 15,000 and 30,000 American lives during the final year and a half of World War II, the actions of the secret unit were kept classified until 1996 — in case similar deceit was needed during the Cold War. Their contributions to the war effort only recently began receiving national attention.

“Some of these guys went to their graves without telling anybody in their families what this unit was involved in,” Beyer said.

That vault of secrecy, of course, will be pried open on March 21, when Congress presents the Congressional Gold Medal to the Ghost Army in a ceremony at the U.S. Capitol. Of the unit’s seven known surviving members, Bluestein, Seymour Nussenbaum and John Christman plan to attend.

“I’m certainly happy that it’s happening and they’re giving us a little recognition,” Bluestein told The Post. “But I’m very disappointed that it couldn’t have been a lot earlier when many of these soldiers were still living so they could have accepted and had some recognition the same as I am.”

For viewers looking to learn more about the larger-than-life troops depicted on the show, a companion documentary titled “The Bloody Hundredth” is just the ticket.

Directed by Mark Herzog and Laurent Bouzereau, the 62-minute film features interviews with living B-17 bomber pilots who flew some of the war’s most dangerous missions. And while many of the conflict’s air crew members have since passed away, Herzog was able to source previously recorded footage that fit seamlessly within the story.

“We found interviews that were conducted in the ‘80s, the ‘90s, and the 2000s, and then we augmented that with interviewing veterans who were still with us, including John “Lucky” Luckadoo and Bob Wolff, who are both 102,” Herzog told Military Times. “Being able to tell the story to the audience and have them get just a little bit extra beyond what the series can deliver is great.”

One of the biggest challenges, Herzog added, was sifting through the archival combat footage to condense it into something palatable. The flight scenes, he noted, aren’t quite the same as what viewers will see in the television show.

“While our battle sequences in the sky will never be as visceral as what the series portrays, I really love the flight sequences in the series,” he said. “Ours were actual footage filmed on handhelds, so it’s a little hard to see sometimes.”

The documentary is narrated by Hanks, whose steady voice lends authority to the subject matter. It is one of several companion documentaries Herzog has done to supplement other programming. He also produced a documentary for the HBO series “Band of Brothers” and “John Adams.”

“A good story is a good story, no matter when that story happened,” he said. ”A good story can always teach us and enlighten us to what’s going on.”

“The Bloody Hundredth” is available on Apple TV+.

In 1944, the line between “Monty Python” and reality blurred when Helen Duncan, a Scottish medium who earned her living conducting séances, was imprisoned and tried under the Witchcraft Act of 1735.

Duncan began her career in the mid-1920s, summoning spirits in dimly lit rooms across Britain — preying on desperate families of the recently deceased. Spiritualism, she found, thrived on disaster and desperation, and as the Second World War raged on, Duncan’s business was booming.

Despite having her fair share of believers and naysayers throughout her decades-long career, it was one particular incident in November 1941 that attracted the attention of the British War Office.

While performing a séance in her hometown of Portsmouth, Duncan went “beyond her usual vagaries” — assuming the persona of a spirit and orally producing ectoplasm, which was really a swallowed mixture of cheesecloth, paper, egg white and toilet paper — and claimed to have summoned the spirit of a sailor who’d allegedly gone down with the battleship HMS Barham, according to one History Hit report.

The Portsmouth-based battleship was sunk on Nov. 25, 1941 after being struck by three German torpedoes while patrolling between Crete and Cyrenaica. Fifty-five officers and 806 men were killed.

The rub? The sinking of the HMS Barham was kept in strict confidence, with only the relatives of the casualties learning of the ship’s fate. In fact, it was not until Jan. 27, 1942, that the public would learn of the its sinking.

In his book “Loose Cannons,” Historian Graeme Donald wrote that Duncan discovered that loose lips did indeed sink ships, or at the very least, her career.

“The loss of HMS Barham, torpedoed off the coast of Egypt on 25 November 1941, was indeed kept quiet for a while, but letters of condolence were sent out to families of the 861 dead, asking them to keep the secret until the official announcement,” Donald wrote. “So, allowing for perhaps 10 people in each family, there were about 9,000 people who knew of the sinking; if each of them told only one other person, there were 20,000 people in the country aware of the sinking, and so on. ... Duncan simply picked up the gossip and decided to turn it into profit.”

In subsequent years, the leak was found to have originated from Sir Michael Postan of the Ministry of Economic Warfare, after a secretary of the First Sea Lord, Sir Dudley Pound, discussed the loss of the Barham with the professor. Neither were arrested.

The revelation of a state secret caught the attention of MI5 and was seen, at best, to damage the morale of British civilians. At worst, she was believed to pose a security risk.

Still, Duncan continued to peddle her con unmolested for nearly three more years until her arrest in January 1944, when two lieutenants became so disgusted with her fraudulent ruse that they reported her. Five days later, she was arrested by undercover police mid-performance.

Duncan initially faced fairly minor charges relating to fortune-telling, astrology and spiritualism under the section 4 of the Vagrancy Act of 1824, according to History Hit, but it was her 1941 performance that came back to — rather literally — haunt her.

Duncan was subsequently brought to trial at the Old Bailey in London and became the last person to be prosecuted under the Witchcraft Act of 1735 — which deemed “magic, witchcraft and fortune-telling …[as] fraudulent, and the practitioners marked as con artists and vagrants.” The act itself had not been used for more than a century.

“It has been alleged that the real reason for the raid was due to the official paranoia surrounding the forthcoming D-Day Normandy landings and the fear that she may reveal the date, location and other details,” according to Historic UK.

After a weeklong spectacle of a trial, Duncan was sentenced to nine months in London’s Holloway Prison.

The verdict itself was contentious, with Prime Minister Winston Churchill even inquiring in a memo to his Home Secretary, Herbert Morrison, as to “why the Witchcraft Act, 1735, was used in a modern Court of Justice. What was the cost of this trial to the State, observing that witnesses were brought from Portsmouth and maintained here in this crowded London, for a fortnight, and the Recorder kept busy with all this obsolete tomfoolery, to the detriment of necessary work in the Courts?”

“The person tried and convicted,” Churchill continued, “was a stout and ailing Scotswoman called Helen Duncan, whom few people loved and many exploited. She was not a witch in any popular sense of the word; she did not fly, wear a pointed hat or have congress with the devil, and neither she nor her followers imagined that she did.”

After serving her time, Duncan was released and returned to her spiritualist ways — despite her promise to cease such activities. She died at the age of 59 in 1956, five years after the Witchcraft Act was repealed.

No word as to whether she weighed the same as a duck, however.

The installation, which moved in February to officially shut down DFAC service on weekends due to lack of use, opted to use newly established kiosks to serve as the sole dining option on Saturdays and Sundays.

Kiosk options, which some soldiers likened to gas station food, include microwaveable meals, cut fruit, and pre-made salads and sandwiches. Each week, the installation puts in an order for the food, which is sourced from the local commissary and delivered on Friday.

Leaders from the installation “acknowledge there was a food shortage at the kiosks over the weekend, and sincerely apologize to the soldiers who were impacted,” Lt. Col. Joey Payton, 4th Infantry Division and Fort Carson spokesperson, told Army Times in a statement.

Payton added that the decision to close DFACs on the weekend was the result of staff rarely serving more than 200 meals over that span, while still being required to work full time.

Despite the kiosks now being the sole option for meal card holders on weekends — aside from on-post fast food options — base officials were still surprised by how many soldiers required the food service.

“We were caught off guard with the amount of soldiers that are choosing to use the kiosk,” Payton said.

An unnamed source told the r/Army Reddit, however, that those numbers may have been incorrectly based on a period when a large segment of the division was deployed.

“Since the first week of kiosk operations, we have seen an increase in kiosk usage each weekend and ultimately served approximately 1,850 meals this past weekend,” Payton said.

As a result, kiosks were extremely understocked this weekend.

Photos submitted to r/Army and several Fort Carson Instagram pages show refrigerator shelves that were reportedly emptied on Friday afternoon within 30 minutes to an hour of being stocked. Other images feature leftover items such as Yoplait yogurt, Slim Jims, string cheese or soft drinks, but no meals.

The r/Army moderator, an Army veteran who goes by the moniker Kinmuan, noted that this is not just a food problem but a morale issue.

“If your DFAC utilization is ‘low’, and soldiers are present on base, your DFAC is bad,” he told Army Times. “They should be working to improve the DFAC. Instead, they took a substandard DFAC that’s underperforming and got rid of it.”

He added that the kiosks present other problems because the barracks don’t always offer an environment for cooking or sitting for a meal. And limiting opportunities for soldiers who use meal cards defeats their purpose.

For now, Fort Carson intends to continue improving the kiosk process — rather than pursue a return to any weekend DFAC schedule — by adding more deliveries throughout the weekend if stock is low.

As for those who paid out of pocket over the weekend, Payton noted there is an indemnity process.

“We strongly encourage soldiers who were impacted to submit a missed meal voucher with their units so that they may be reimbursed,” he said.