The Balangiga bells — referenced by Philippine President Rodrigo Duterte during his second State of the Nation address on Monday — have long been at the center of a tug-of-war between the U.S. and the Philippines.

The chapel, built in 1941 and dedicated in 1958 to all the soldiers who trained at Fort Jackson for World War II, is slated for demolition in October.

When a stranger using a foreign language began trying to contact Libby Todd and her family last month, her father’s stint overseas in World War II didn’t come to mind.

Dirk deBroekert has had a varied medical career: U.S. Navy medical corps, family practice physician, Civil War doctor. And today, deBroekert is a World War II Army surgeon. He is part of the 113th Cavalry Living History Group encampment, which, in turn, is part of a busy day of historical programming at Fort Vancouver National Historic Site.

Someone dropped, chucked or dunked a double-barreled shotgun in the Blackfoot River long ago. By faint but telltale stamps, authorities have dated it back to the mid-19th century, years before there was a Montana.

A historian is going to court this month in an attempt to force Australian authorities to release secret letters that would reveal what Queen Elizabeth II knew of her representative's shocking scheme to dismiss Australia's government more than 40 years ago.

Paula Taylor wanted to bring the history of F.E. Warren Air Force Base alive when she founded Fort D.A. Russell Days 24 years ago.

For about 4,000 miles, cycling from Los Angeles to New York, two students are hoping to bring awareness to women and girls who were forced into prostitution by the Japanese army during World War II.

The heat index reached triple digits on Thursday afternoon, but that didn’t stop nearly 70 Marines and civilians with the Marine and Family Programs Division in Quantico from enjoying the rich military history offered by the Fredericksburg area.

As 33,000 troops take part in Talisman Saber war games near Rockhampton along the central Queensland coast, a small chapel overlooking a pasture serves as a reminder of when about 70,000 U.S. soldiers called the city home.

National Park Service rangers found unexploded World War II-era ordnance Tuesday at the southern end of Hatteras Island, the second piece like it found in a week.

The Massachusetts community where 20 people suspected of witchcraft were put to death in 1692 unveiled a memorial to 19 of those victims on Wednesday, promising never to forget the tragedy.

The American Rosie the Riveter Association is trying to locate women who worked on the home front during World War II.

Two centuries after the bloodiest battle of the American Revolution, archaeologists are digging up a concrete lot in Brooklyn, N.Y., to settle a mystery over the mass grave of famed Maryland soldiers.

Built in 1691 by the French and later occupied by the British, Fort St. Joseph would be a post for four different countries throughout its history. The fort would operate as a military garrison and trading post.

The Navy yard commandant's house at Sackets Harbor Battlefield site will be host to an interactive history program.

Jon Jennings is about to become best friends with a thick manual that explains how the World War II vehicle in his farm shed is put together.

The exhibit at the Dale-Engle-Walker House includes news clips from the era, period artifacts, military uniforms and equipment donated by area collectors.

World War II veteran Charles J. Palmeri visited Dachau when the war in Europe ended in May 1945.

Bob Fritzler, a Vietnam veteran, is working to restore a U.S. Marine Corps Sikorsky H-34 helicopter.

Fans of novelist David Abrams may be surprised with his latest work, “Brave Deeds,” a serious rendering of one of our more recent forays into military action.

Gen. Douglas MacArthur once said "Old soldiers never die, they just fade away." That's just what a 104-year-old military surplus store in downtown Waterloo is doing.

Around 100 artifacts have been discovered at an archaeological site near the first U.S. Army post in the Northwest.

Two decommissioned Navy ships, towed by tugboats, arrived at a desolate stretch of downtown Buffalo's waterfront 40 years ago this summer.

The New York Street bridge in downtown Aurora was a "big concrete wonder" when it was dedicated in 1931, according to the Aurora Historical Society.

Moon dust that Neil Armstrong collected during the first lunar landing is one of 180 lots linked to space travel that Sotheby's is auctioning off July 20 to mark the 48th anniversary of the pioneer lunar landing on that date in 1969.

When Josephine Britt was a young woman living in the Philippines, she and her family risked their lives to help American prisoners of war held captive in her hometown.

A collection of amputation tools used in the Revolutionary War has fetched more than $100,000 at auction.

A bombardier who became known for his accuracy as he flew 31 raids during World War II is one of three Rhode Island veterans who will receive France's highest distinction, the Legion of Honor.

Virginia Hall, a spy based in Lyon, France, was considered one of the most effective Allied spies leading the French resistance. But she was being stalked by a pursuer of equal repute: Gestapo chief, Nikolaus "Klaus" Barbie, who went by his own moniker, "The Butcher of Lyon."

The museum at Marine Corps Air Station Miramar has a collection of 51 military aircraft – ranging from a World War II vintage F4F Wildcat fighter to Vietnam era A-4 jets to Cobra attack helicopters.

The Ernie Pyle Legacy Foundation is kicking off its campaign for a National Ernie Pyle Day in Albuquerque on Aug. 3, Pyle’s birthday.

Marine Pfc. Ronald Ridgeway, 18, was "killed" outside Khe Sanh in Vietnam on Feb. 25, 1968. On Sept. 10, he was buried in a national cemetery in St. Louis. But as his comrades and family mourned, he sat in harsh North Vietnamese prisons.

For nearly 40 years, Jay Stevens kept his "Spirit of '76" painting in a closet - thinking it was just a copy and unaware it was an original painting possibly worth more than $1 million.

Vietnam War pilot Dayne Smith climbed into a Cobra attack helicopter for the first time in more than 45 years at Dixon's Veterans Memorial Park on Thursday.

From now through the end of the year, the Dowagiac Area History Museum’s newest exhibit, “Battle Tested: Wartime Stories of Cass County,” will tell the stories of Cass County men and women who served their country in the past century.

Sitting in the middle of Portland Harbor, Fort Gorges is completely open to the public. There are few safety rails in the 19th century military installation. It has no front door and the fort is never closed. Visitors, who must come by private boat, are free to roam. Nothing is off limits. It's been this way since the federal government gave it to the city in 1960. But that's changing.

A Fourth of July announcement by U.S. Secretary of the Interior Ryan Zinke at the Antietam National Battlefield in Maryland contained good news for residents working to restore the Battle of Fort Anne site on Battle Hill.

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The U.S. Department of the Interior will provide $7.2 million in matching grants to preserve nearly 1,200 acres of Civil War, Revolutionary War and War of 1812 battlefields, Interior Secretary Ryan Zinke announced Wednesday.

For author Mark Bowden's book, "Hue 1968: A Turning Point of the American War In Vietnam," Bowden interviewed more than 100 men and women from both sides of the fighting.

Soon after Gen. George Washington learned of the signing of the Declaration of Independence in July 1776, he wrote a letter to an old friend. He described how his poorly trained Continental Army was already surrounded by the British. But what happened that day triggered a chain of events that culminated decades later in the creation of a new nation.

A small American flag on display at the Richard M. Nixon Presidential Library & Museum was a patriotic light in the dark days of the Vietnam War.

Most people who come to Rhode Island's State House are there on business. So as they pass through security, they might not notice its treasures, including one of the cannons that sits near the main visitors entrance.

Bits of Civil War history downtown don't normally come to life like they did Sunday during the New Bedford Whaling National Historical Park's Civil War Living History Day.

Next month, if all goes as planned, Little Chief will finally be going home from a cemetery on the grounds of what was the Carlisle Indian Industrial School, now the Army War College, where he lies among nearly 200 native children who died in a misbegotten experiment in forced assimilation.

On Oct. 14, 1926, a distinguished citizen of Poland named Leopold Kotnowski came to the White House with a greeting card for the United States' 150th birthday.

As speaker Tim McCoy noted the unique plight a black soldier faced in a war fought over slavery, members of a Confederate color guard turned their backs on him.

For a couple hundred dollars, you can spend the night in a house that survived the Battle of Gettysburg. The Historic Bushman House was used as a temporary field hospital, serving as a stop for injured soldiers making their way to larger field hospitals, according to a ranger with the Gettysburg National Military Park.

Two of the Confederate Army's best-known leaders have streets named for them in a place not normally associated with the Southern side of the Civil War — New York City. Now some elected officials are trying to undo it.

Analysis

In the United States, “The Great War” led to unprecedented efforts by the federal government to control and restrict “unpatriotic” speech. But the boundary between speech that undermined the government and legitimate criticism was often unclear.

Gallery

The Pacific Aviation Museum brochure suggests a tour of this expansive throng of aircraft will take an hour, maybe 90 minutes. That’s a highly optimistic — unless, of course, you fly through it.

The famed Sea Witch is on track to make its planned move to its new pier in the Fore River Shipyard in the next several weeks, according to Quincy businessman Jay Cashman, who owns both the old and the new pier.

During World War II, Vazken Harry Alemian served in the Navy, working at factories in the South Pacific to make oxygen used by pilots during the war.

On July 12, 1917, the Germans dispensed mustard gas for the first time on Belgian battlefields during WWI. The gas was not used in WWII, but Allied armies, gearing for its possible use or other chemical warfare, conducted mustard gas experiments on their own soldiers during that war.

The nephew of Andrew Piter Jr., who was killed fifteen days before the end of WWII, is seeking information about the woman his late uncle fell in love with during the war.

This July, the National Museum of the Great Lakes will host a temporary exhibit about the life of Colonel Schoonmaker, who is the namesake of the massive lake freighter that sits on the Maumee River, the Col. James M. Schoonmaker.

An organization that was the predecessor to the CIA and special operations forces celebrated its 75th anniversary with an event in Virginia Saturday evening.

Their families didn't know they were in Laos, and didn't know that they'd started working for the CIA in addition to their jobs with the U.S. Forest Service.

Ken Underwood has an incredible story to tell. It's an unbelievable tale of service, love, devotion and determination, so full of impossible twists that Hollywood producers would reject it as too far-fetched, nigh onto impossible.

This year's show was dedicated to golf legend Arnold Palmer, who died in September. “This is something that he always enjoyed,” said Westmoreland County Airport Authority Executive Director Gabe Monzo. “Airshows would get him all fired up."

The Vatican remains intensely interested in the Kansas priest’s story of heroism and faith during the Korean War, said Father John Hotze, who has researched Kapaun’s story for the Wichita Diocese of the Catholic church.

Gallery

The first 100 years of Naval Station Norfolk have witnessed name changes, reorganizations and technological advancements in aviation and sea power. Social forces in the larger community also transformed the military and the faces of sailors and airmen here. As the naval station has grown, at times painfully, so has the community.

As Okinawans marked the 72nd anniversary of the end of the Battle of Okinawa, a war artifact belonging to a Japanese soldier killed in the bloody conflict was returned to his family after more than seven decades.

Capt. Andrew Maples Jr., a Tuskegee airman who perished while leading a group of fighter aircraft on a bomber escort mission to Hungary, will be remembered at noon as dignitaries dedicate a state historical marker.

The State Foundation on Culture and the Arts will appoint an artist to design and build a World War II Filipino Veterans Monument under a bill signed into law by Gov. David Ige on Monday.

It’s unclear who first received the military medal engraved with John Brandley's name, but when a stranger turned it over to VFW members several months ago, JoAnn Piazzola made it her mission to return the medal to the family.

92-year-old Arline Watts still takes great pride in her work tending the wounded of World War II as a cadet nurse at the Army's Crile General Hospital.

A 19-year-old who died in the Korean War and an 18-year-old who perished on the USS Oklahoma on Dec. 7, 1941, are among five identifications announced Friday by the Defense POW/MIA Accounting Agency for return to family.

It was 1945. The United States had spent over three years in combat, with soldiers fighting and dying in Europe and the Pacific and civilians on the home front manufacturing munitions and military hardware, including nearly 13,000 Boeing B-17 bomber planes. One of them, the “Sentimental Journey,” a B-17G Flying Fortress, was built, taking its maiden flight on July 28.

Obituary

An Army Air Forces veteran, whose secret missions aided the resistance in Nazi-occupied Europe during World War II, died Tuesday of cardiac arrest at Bryn Mawr Hospital.

Larry Seaboyer would be the first to say the century-old officers' quarters house at Fort Revere is in bad shape. When the property's new curator moved into the state-owned house a couple of weeks ago, he and his son had to remove a raccoon family from the attic.

The Trail of Tears has footsteps across several Arkansas counties, and one group wants to ensure those steps are not forgotten.

Thanks to the persistence of two nieces born after his death, U.S. Navy pilot John Dean Armstrong will be buried with full military honors in his hometown of Hutchinson, Kansas, on Saturday.

Uniforms, helmets, and combat gear from the wars in Vietnam, Iraq and Afghanistan will join hundreds of military artifacts in "Echoes from the Battlefield," a new exhibit at Haverhill's Buttonwoods Museum.

When Roy Shenkel rides aloft in a restored Boeing B-17 airplane Saturday, it will be far less dramatic than his last trip inside one of those bombers.

A hundred years ago in a blinding fog, a U.S. Coast Guard ship was sailing off the coast of Southern California when it smashed into a passenger steamship. The USCGC McCulloch sank within 35 minutes and lingered on the ocean floor undisturbed by people for a century.

The Superfortress will forever be remembered as the aircraft that ushered in the Atomic Age, dropping A-bombs on the Japanese cities of Hiroshima and Nagasaki to end World War II.

ANALYSIS

At the time, the speech was hardly seen as the beginning of any end. To the contrary, what is today often referred to as perhaps Ronald Reagan's most powerful one-liner was almost completely ignored.

The recently-discovered ashes of Elizabeth Crump Enders, a Red Cross volunteer during World War I, will be buried next to her husband Gordon Enders, a veteran of three American wars, on June 30.

Fifty years ago today, two years after he graduated from West High School, Joe Carpenter and his U.S. Navy shipmates were attacked by an unlikely enemy.

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Nearly 17 years after experts began working to unravel why the Confederate sub went down off the Charleston coast, questions linger about why it sank and precisely how the eight-man crew perished.

Before 2nd Lieutenant Carl Alexander, a Mainer, took his last breath in 1944 in France, he told medics to turn their attention to someone they could save and gave his men their orders. This month, it will be up to high school junior Madison Taylor to tell his story.

Starting around May 2, 1944, codewords for specific parts of the "D-Day" operation began popping up as answers in the Daily Telegraph's crosswords. The strange coincidence led British intelligence to eventually question the puzzles' creator.

That Andrew Jackson Higgins was able to accomplish what he did — provide U.S. forces with the means to swiftly attack beaches, including on D-Day — despite his personal shortcomings is a testament, historians say, to his relentless talent and creativity as an entrepreneur.

On June 7, 1967, a young American reporter looking for adventure witnessed the aftermath of a battle that would change the course of history for Israel and the Jewish people.

The report — 14 paragraphs long — suggested a secret U.S. intelligence coup, and became one of the biggest and potentially damaging news leaks of World War II.

Opinion

Jared Kushner is not the first member of a presidential family to try to open a back channel with the Kremlin. John F. Kennedy's brother Robert met secretly with a Soviet intelligence agent named Georgi Bolshakov many times during the Kennedy administration. Their dealings illustrate the shortcomings and dangers of informal high-level diplomacy - but also the potential for breakthrough in a crisis.

Army Pfc. Walter Piper died on June 18, 1951, of wounds received during the Battle of Hoengsong about four months earlier, according to Korean War Project Remembrance. His remains were not recovered until 1990 and not identified until April. On June 17, he will be buried with full military honors at the Gloucester County Veterans Memorial Cemetery in Williamstown, N.J.

Ask around Fort Detrick and you’ll probably learn more about Operation Whitecoat — an Army program that exposed human participants to infectious pathogens. But outside the base, the experiments are virtually unheard of, according to a documentary filmmaker.

Across the sea, the children's mother pines for her son and two daughters. But she knows they are safer in America than they would be in England. Where, night after night, the full fury of the Nazi war machine rains metal and flame and death on everyone below. Including children.

Even as he was warned about the British threat, Thomas Jefferson puttered about Monticello, not wanting to leave. He remembered how his family had lost precious items when his childhood home burned down decades earlier. He gathered crucial documents for his saddlebag.

ANALYSIS

A century ago, not long after the United States entered World War I, the Salvation Army deployed hundreds of volunteers to France to soothe and bolster American troops. The boys were homesick. They were hungry. They wanted a slice of apple pie. But that, of course, was impossible.

After Japan bombed Pearl Harbor and America plunged into World War II, Technical High School in St. Cloud, Minn., became a "great camp of the Unarmed Forces of the United States" where students learned skills to work in defense factories and collected scrap metal for the war effort.

Almost 50 years after U.S. Army Cpl. Robert William Cupp was killed by a booby trap in South Vietnam, his mother, 97-year-old Emogene Cupp, paid tribute to him Monday at the Vietnam Veterans Memorial.

They gathered Monday morning at the World War II Memorial to remember the fallen on Memorial Day, but those who survived that conflict can feel that responsibility every day.

As an aerial gunner, Robert La Rosa waged war from the heavens by firing down a hailstorm of bullets from gunships so ferocious they were named after dragons.

Edward J. Haslinger found work at Liberty Wire Works at Elmwood and Kenmore avenues in Buffalo, thanks to his Uncle Martin who worked at the plant back in the early 1940s.

As a young man, John Ellerton worked at a bank performing clerical duties, but he felt he could do better for himself and marched off to a state employment office.

The past 69 years have not dimmed Warren Musch’s memory of his experiences on the volcanic island of Iwo Jima, the scene of some of the fiercest and bloodiest fighting of World War II. For Musch, then a 23-year-old Marine second lieutenant from rural Virginia, Iwo Jima was where he got his first and only taste of combat.

By late April of 1945, Allied forces were closing in on Adolf Hitler's Germany. The front page headlines in that day's Owensboro Inquirer spoke of the U.S. Third Army being just 79 miles from Hitler's mountain retreat and Berlin cut off from reinforcements by Russian troops.

Frank Rueda is the real deal. He's 78 years old, a bona fide war hero and a proud man reticent to talk about the past. Until you get him started.

Sixteen-year-old Raymond Lujan Vasquez, along with more than 75,000 starving, sick and dehydrated prisoners of war, started out on the 65-mile trek to a prison camp in Tarlac Province, Philippines, that would come to be known as the Bataan Death March.

Thirty years in the Navy left Worth Hinnant with a plethora of memories — some good and some bad — but all of them made him the man he is today.

When Harry R. Wisniewski received a draft notice, he showed it to his boss at Metal Alloys Specialties in Black Rock and was told he could receive a one-year deferment.

For 95-year-old Gilbert Fann, the rush of being shot at is not just something indescribable; it is something he still misses decades after leaving war behind him.

Joseph M. Falzone’s love of music introduced him to the military while still in high school. “I had joined the band at Seneca Vocational but was very poor and needed a trumpet. I was told if I joined the Army National Guard, they would give me a trumpet for playing in the Guard’s band at the Masten Armory. That way, I would have a trumpet for the school band,” Falzone explains.

Vestal “Pappy” Yeats negotiated the Great Depression, then ricocheted off military illogic in World War II, and later retired after teaching at Texas Tech.

In some military families, each generation corresponds to services in a war: Grandpa in World War II, Dad in Vietnam, and a son or daughter in Iraq. It’s less common, however, to have two generations actively serving during the same war.

It was around 4 a.m. on May 1, 1945, on board the USS Terror when crew member Fred Bartlett got relieved of duty and was ready to get some sleep. He said he heard a boom that he later learned was a Japanese kamikaze attack and was told get to his battle station.

Before shipping off to Europe to fight the Germans in World War II, Sebastian “Yono” Bordonaro and fellow combat engineers practiced building bridges across the Colorado River to test the strength of the structures.

The Hite brothers were soldiers when the nation needed them most. Robert, who was a co-pilot for one of Gen. Jimmy Doolittle’s B-25 bombers that avenged Pearl Harbor, is six years older than Kenneth, a pilot who served in World War II, Korea and Vietnam. They grew up at Earth in a farm family of five.

Stillman Harding shouldn't have been at the 464th Bombardment Group's reunion this month. Then again, he shouldn't have been anywhere but 6 feet under for the past seven decades.

In observance of National POW/MIA Recognition Day, which is observed the third Friday of September, Georgia Southwestern State University (GSW) held the 8th Annual POW Convocation program in Jackson Hall Wednesday. The convocation’s featured speaker was Bill Norwood. Held as a POW between 1951-53, Norwood founded the Korean War Ex-POW Association in 1976.

The so-called forgotten war in Korea — which ended 60 years ago — remains fresh in the minds of Ronald Evans Sr., Stanley Levin, Clarence Davis, and others who survived the ordeal.

As his young bride followed him from base to base, Malcolm Johnston, a technical sergeant, became the radio operator and gunner as part of a nine-man crew flying in a B-17 bomber.

1943: It was a big year for Malcolm Johnston. In just 12 months, he married his childhood sweetheart, Carolyn, became a United States citizen, and joined the United States Air Force.

It has been said that a war never truly ends until the last participant is gone. For Jack Bertram, who served as a bomber pilot during World War II, his war had seemed far in the past for many years. But in recent times, his memories of it have come more to the forefront.

Few would characterize the LST class of amphibious warships as beautiful. But when Suzanne Figuiere saw a flotilla of the gawky, snub-nosed craft moored at the old port of her native Marseille, France, in September 1944, its ungraceful lines were not foremost on her mind.

The last Illinois survivor of a mostly forgotten World War II prisoner-of-war saga lives in a white farmhouse 7 miles north of town. Retired from grain farming since 1988, Alva Moss, 89, walks a narrow road, mows his lawn and plays tennis for exercise. And, he waits for recognition.

New London - Retired Seaman Sherwood Anderson, who received the Coast Guard's Gold Lifesaving Medal in 1957, is thinking about donating a file of documents related to his lifesaving effort to the planned National Coast Guard museum.

In the 1940s, Oklahoman Ed Livermore spent years training on the latest military artillery as World War II ground on, but he never saw battle. Victory over Japan Day saved him from combat, he says.

At 16, Larry L. Penrod went to war for a buddy caught smoking in the boys room at Tonawanda High School. “A teacher came in and started giving my friend a hard time for smoking. I said to the teacher, ‘I was smoking, too,’ and that put the attention on me. The teacher started pushing me. I started pushing back. I pulled his tie off, and they suspended me,” Penrod says.

Though his own memory is beginning to fade, he wants others to remember him as an American patriot and a good son. Just one day after his 85th birthday, Firmo Santiago sat down at the Fort Smith home he shares with his son and niece’s family to share his recollections of his Army service.

Cyndy Witman pulled a yellowing newspaper clipping from a manila envelope and looked at the young woman in the accompanying photograph. "That's me," she said, pointing to the photograph. "I was the first woman to join the Pennsylvania National Guard unit in Reading."

Paul Albert's journal from 1944 is filled with terse entries that sound like nightmares, but these were his daily routine, reminding all who read them of the horrors of war.

Long before Charles J. Zappo toiled as a medic on World War II’s battlefields and assisted in liberating a concentration camp, he knew what hard work was and how war could exact a devastating price.

J.D. Payne remembers that he was one of the few boys raised in Matador who didn’t work as a cowboy during the Great Depression of the 1930s.

One of the things Bobby Burkhalter Sr. remembers most about his service during the Korean War was the brutally cold weather and how it might have helped hasten the end of the fighting.

Three years, seven months and seven days at war. For one of Jacksonville “Hard Core Warriors” his years at war in the Pacific during World War II still weigh on his heart and his mind.

Ernie Baumgardner went through seven invasions during World War II, getting a front-row seat to each one aboard a Higgins boat, one of the ubiquitous landing craft that ferried men, vehicles and supplies from ship to shore.

It was a time to reminisce a century of living. Invariably, Hartle’s memories float back to World War II when he risked his life time and time again as a salvage diver with the U.S. Navy.

When asked why he wanted to serve so badly, Chuck Cromwell's answer was simple. “It was war,” Cromwell said. “It was 1942.”

Sixty years ago, when the armistice between South Korea and North Korea stopped the fighting and troops withdrew to designated areas to create a demilitarized zone, Art Hock was one of those men moving back.

At the age of 19, recent Myerstown High School graduate Richard Hardy thought he was going to be a printer. But the year was 1941, and Uncle Sam had other plans for the young man.

“They don’t call it a war, they call it a conflict,” Bill Hutchens says with a chuckle. “We always said, ‘If it’s a conflict and not a war, why don’t they just send some policemen over here to fight the conflict and let us go home?’”

Of the 177 bombers that launched that day, 54 planes did not return. Out of the 1,726 men aboard the bombers, 532 did not return, with more than 100 of those taken as prisoners of war.