After a torpedo hit the USAT Dorchester on Jan. 23, 1943, and it became clear that the ship was sinking, the chaplains tried to calm the men and organize an orderly evacuation. As life jackets were passed out, the supply ran out. The chaplains removed their own life jackets and gave them to others.

In 1951, Walter B. Dixon's family received the news that the 22-year-old had been killed in action in Korea. President Harry Truman sent a letter of condolence, and his wife eventually remarried. But there was just one catch: Dixon wasn't actually dead, he was a prisoner of war.

Pfc. Edward A. Nalazek had been buried in a trench with other Marines on Betio Island, where he fell. But the cemetery’s location was lost to history, and in 1949 the family was told that Nalazek’s remains could not be recovered. That changed last year.

The 1971 Sylmar earthquake killed 58 people. Forty-nine of them died at the Sylmar VA. Witnesses later told members of the House Committee on Veterans Affairs that two hospital buildings collapsed "in a cloud of dust" while the ground was still shaking.

U.S. Navy Fireman First Class Rex E. Wise is expected to be buried near his home in April, nearly right decades after he died in the Japanese attack on his ship, the USS Oklahoma, at Pearl Harbor.

The opening exhibit of Chattanooga's Charles H. Coolidge National Medal of Honor Heritage Center will feature a large collection of medals and the stories of their recipients, according to organizers of the museum's launch, which is set for Feb. 22.

A traveling exhibit at the Riley County Historical Museum is helping shed light on the role and lives of African American soldiers at Fort Riley in the late 1800s to early 1900s.

Obituary

Retired Gen. Erneido Oliva, who was second in command during the Bay of Pigs invasion to overthrow Fidel Castro and fought alongside fellow brigade members, died Thursday in Maryland. Oliva passed away following an illness. He was 87.

The collection contains several, gawk-worthy stops – rare items from England, the U.S. National Archives, Library of Congress and art commissioned by MacArthur “genius” grant-winner Titus Kaphar.

When relatives learned that the remains of Korean War veteran Army Cpl. Arthur Contreras Ramirez were found, a roller coaster of emotions broke loose.

The exhibit, titled, "So Ready for Laughter: The Legacy of Bob Hope," was created in 2018 and displayed at the National World War II Museum in New Orleans. Columbus is the start of a planned six-city tour.

Engines roared as the B-17 Flying Fortress steadily lifted off the runway. When he got the go-ahead, 94-year-old veteran Alfred Colbath walked through the narrow walkway in the bomb bay to get to the cockpit. Colbath then crawled into the nose for an unrivaled view of Lake County.

The Philippine Navy retired BRP Rizal, which began life in 1944 and was commissioned as the USS Murrelet.

Hundreds of photos of the notorious Sobibor death camp and other key sites in the Nazi extermination machine were stashed for decades in albums belonging to the camp's deputy commandant and in the attic and cupboards of the family home.

At age 23 in the spring of 1945, Guy Prestia was in the Army and fighting his way across southern Germany when his unit walked into hell on earth — the Nazi death camp at Dachau.

The real Battle of Rio San Gabriel, a pivotal battle for control of California in the two-year U.S.-Mexican War, ended on Jan. 8, 1847, with an American victory.

Sometime in the mid-1980s, someone made their way into the Biblioteca Nazionale Marciana in Venice, Italy, and walked out with a 500-year old Latin copy of the first letter Christopher Columbus wrote to Ferdinand, King of Spain, describing the wonders he beheld in the Americas. This week, U.S. officials announced that the letter, which bears an estimated market value of $1.3 million, had been recovered.

Analysis

Turkey is in the ascendancy and Libya a divided, war-ravaged shell. Yet ties are being rekindled, inflaming a region that's still nursing the wound from the defining events of almost a half century ago.

For many years, visitors to the Smithsonian's Air and Space Museum in Washington, D.C. were able to view the front section of one of the U.S. military's most durable combat aircraft, the Martin B-26B-25-MA Marauder "Flak-Bait." Now the entire plane is being restored and readied for display.

Stepping inside the B-17 Flying Fortress, many would think they are being transported back in time as airmen who battled in the skies. The Liberty Foundation's nationwide "Salute to Veterans Tour" will give civilians that chance.

After resting at the bottom of the ocean for more than a century, the rust-covered device that relayed messages from the sinking RMS Titanic could be recovered.

On a recent Saturday, a 500-pound statue of Gen. Dwight Eisenhower was lowered into place before a scene from D-Day carved in limestone. The memorial is scheduled to be dedicated on May 8, the 75th anniversary of the end of World War II in Europe.

Located down a winding wooded path in Sandwich, Mass., a lonely gravesite sits within a fenced-in area covered in American flags. Inside, a penny sits atop the moss-covered stone that marks the grave of Joseph Wilson.

Little did anyone know, but the Purple Heart medal of Pvt. Richard Earl Gregor had not reached the end of its journey last year when it was presented to the Marion County Historical Museum in Fairmont, W. Va.

An auction in New Jersey recently featured a table said to have been used for the planning of the Normandy invasion. But at the Eisenhower Presidential Museum, there is a table passed down through Dwight D. Eisenhower himself which was used for confidential delegations before D-Day.

An overlooked Civil War veteran needed to be recognized, so a mission was launched to honor Abraham "Abie" Jenkins, who entered the war in 1861.

Four hundred men were housed at Fort Gaines at its peak and those men would need facilities in quiet times and during attacks. After all, fighting for one’s life does not preclude nature’s call.

A ceremony at the National World War II Memorial Thursday morning marked the 75th anniversary of the start of the Battle of Luzon, an invasion whose goal was to free the Philippines' largest island from Japanese control.

Analysis

The vice president's story about his advice on a pivotal moment in Obama's presidency keeps evolving.

Retired Gen. Dennis Reimer, former chief of staff of the United States Army, capped off a career of more than six decades on Dec. 31, 2019, with his retirement from Army Emergency Relief.

The National Museum of Civil War Medicine, a quirky and fascinating repository of battlefield medical artifacts including skull saws and rusty scalpels, is amputating the Confederate flag from its logo. And naturally, the Internet has opinions.

"Vergangenheitsbewältigung" is the term German government officials use to describe German diplomat Ruprecht Polenz's mission. It means "to overcome the past." At issue is what happened between 1904 and 1908, when German colonial troops killed an estimated 80,000 people in southwest Africa, in what is now Namibia.

Ulysses S. Grant has been reconsidered by historians in recent years, rising 11 spots — to No. 22 — in the C-SPAN historians poll between 2000 and 2017. Major, sympathetic biographies of Grant have been published by H.W. Brands, Ron Chernow and Ronald C. White since 2012.

The nonprofit Naval Air Museum Barbers Point, which maintains that it is being wrongfully evicted by state airport officials over a convoluted contract history, has filed a lawsuit claiming it has an “implied agreement” with the state to occupy certain space at what is now known as Kalaeloa Airport.

Jim Kelly spent almost three years as an aircraft mechanic at Marana airfield in Arizona before he found out who he was really working for: The CIA.

Pfc. Roger W. Taylor left his family's farm 75 years ago for deployment to Europe during World War II, and never came home. But the dog tags he wore during his 22 months of Army service finally finished their journey back to his home town.

Analysis

It was a bad year to be any kind of socialist in Europe. The decline has been long and agonizing for a once-dominant force, but in 2019 falling popularity reached new depths and raised questions over whether reinvention can lead to a revival.

On Dec. 21, 1944, Robert Potach celebrated his 21st birthday in a foxhole outside the Belgian town of Bastogne. It was several days after the beginning of the Battle of the Bulge. Potach celebrated his 96th birthday last week.

It was just after 8 a.m. on Christmas morning, 1944, outside the village of Echternach, Luxembourg, when a bullet from a Nazi machine gun found its way into Lt. James P. Teehan’s helmet.

The news broke most places on Christmas Day 1944, crammed onto front pages amid the blaring war headlines: Glenn Miller was missing.

We dipped into our archives for some of our memorable holiday photos through the years.

Seventy-five years ago this week, the biggest and most deadly single battle of World War II for American soldiers climaxed during what became known as the Battle of the Bulge.

Important matters of international security aren’t usually what sitting presidents discuss with 8-year-old girls. But on a fall day in 1961, John Kennedy felt compelled to do just that after receiving a letter written in pencil.

As a combat veteran and a retired, award-winning TV news and sports camera operator, George Larsen told good stories. An old one recounted how he first thought it was an earthquake that rattled him awake in Hawaii on the morning of Dec. 7, 1941.

Thousands of years ago, long before modern industry began to heat the planet, rising seas threatened a community on the coast of Israel. The villagers needed to defend their home, so they built a wall. It failed. People abandoned the village. The Mediterranean sea swept inland and drowned the buildings.

Visitors to Home of the Brave Hawaii can hop aboard a 1945 Ford Jeep featured in the 2001 movie “Pearl Harbor,” grab a vintage bottle of Coca-Cola and flip through a scrapbook of the USS Saratoga featuring personal letters from a World War II sailor.

For years, not even her family knew the pivotal role Mitsuye Endo played in the only successful Supreme Court challenge to the internment of Japanese Americans during World War II.

The only World War II veteran who ended up participating in Monday's Battle of the Bulge 75th Anniversary commemoration, 95-year-old George Arnstein, took a taxi to the National World War II Memorial, then braved the rain and cold wind.

Roger Taylor died on Jan. 6, 1945, while attacking high ground east of Lutrebois in Belgium as a member of the 134th Infantry Regiment.

Defense Secretary Mark Esper and European leaders gathered Monday at the Luxembourg American Cemetery to honor those killed in the Battle of the Bulge, and to thank veterans on hand to mark the 75th anniversary of the pivotal battle.

American and Belgian flags flew side-by-side Saturday in commemoration of U.S. soldiers who fought 75 years ago in the six-week Battle of the Bulge, a victory that thwarted the last major German offensive on the Western Front during World War II.

PHOTO GALLERY

Wreaths Across America came to the U.S. Naval Academy cemetery a day early on Friday, as volunteers placed more than 2.500 wreaths at the final resting places of sailors and Marines of all ranks.

Minority World War I veterans whose actions during the war were overlooked because of their race or religion could have their service records reviewed to determine whether some of them deserve the Medal of Honor.

A newly-opened exhibit at the Smithsonian's National Museum of African American History and Culture chronicles the black experience before, during and after World War I, and tells how the war opened a new front in the struggle for equality that echoes to today.

Pushing through dense foliage toward the site of the bygone ambush, Michael McDonald-Low felt like he was floating through time.

Sgt. Marshall Edgerton died Dec. 11, 2003 while doing a force protection shift on Combat Outpost Champion Main in Ar Ramadi, Iraqi. Edgerton had volunteered to escort an incoming vehicle so that his fellow soldier could finish his meal.

When the Battle of the Bulge ended after 40 days of frozen, frenzied fighting, one of the largest and longest American battles in Europe had impacted both the future of that continent, and the lives of thousands of soldiers, including many Northeast Ohioans.

Y.C. Jao was a Chinese correspondent working in April 1949 when Mao Zedong's Red Army stormed into Nanjing, defeating the Nationalist forces of leader Chiang Kai-shek. The new authorities ordered his execution in April 1951.

Kevin Riley, the current editor of The Atlanta Journal-Constitution, is disputing the film's depiction of the newspaper's reporting and decision-making processes, especially the portrayal of reporter Kathy Scruggs, who the movie implies traded sex with an FBI agent for a tip on the story.

Pfc. Paul W. Shrewsbury of the United States Army, 1st Cavalry Division, died March 11, 1969. The Army sent his mother’s last letter to him back.

Wilfred K. Hussey Jr., the football-playing son of a University of Hawaii football-playing father, volunteered for the Army in July 1949 a month after graduating from Hilo High School.

In unusually candid interviews, officials who served under Presidents George W. Bush and Barack Obama said both leaders failed in their most important task as commanders in chief — to devise a clear strategy with concise, attainable objectives.

In a trove of confidential government interviews obtained by The Washington Post, U.S., NATO and Afghan officials described their efforts to create an Afghan proxy force as a long-running calamity.

The scale of the corruption was the unintended result of swamping the war zone with far more aid and defense contracts than impoverished Afghanistan could absorb. There was so much excess, financed by American taxpayers, that opportunities for bribery and fraud became almost limitless, according to the interviews.

Of all the failures in Afghanistan, the war on drugs has been perhaps the most feckless, according to a cache of confidential government interviews and other documents obtained by The Washington Post.

A confidential trove of government documents obtained by The Washington Post reveals that senior U.S. officials failed to tell the truth about the war in Afghanistan throughout the 18-year campaign, making rosy pronouncements they knew to be false and hiding unmistakable evidence the war had become unwinnable.

For a generation of Chicagoans, their opinion of what happened in 1969 when Chicago police raided the West Side apartment of Black Panther Party members depended greatly on what neighborhood they called home.

Analysis

Perhaps no other country has poured as many resources into studying Germany's unification as South Korea. Its bureaucrats, academics and politicians have parsed the German example from every possible angle.

Then-Brig. Gen. Dwight D. Eisenhower awoke to an urgent call from military higher-ups informing him of the news from Pearl Harbor. Four hectic, harried days after that, Eisenhower received another call - this one demanding he "hop a plane" and travel to Washington to develop the U.S. response to Japanese aggression.

When does a one and five zeros cause an audience to erupt in cheers and applause? When there's a dollar sign attached.

Saturday, Bob Henry will visit Beaver Cemetery. He'll pause at the grave of a man he never met, but one to whom he owes plenty. He comes to honor and remember the sacrifice of 2nd Lt. Louis Gustav Moslener Jr., Beaver County's first casualty Dec. 7, 1941, in a surprise attack by Japanese forces on Pearl Harbor.

On the windswept plains of eastern Colorado, dust storms rattled the barracks of the Granada War Relocation Center. It was 1944, and Esther Takei didn't understand why she had to be languishing there, alienated by the only country she knew.

On Nov. 29, 1924, the nation's first aircraft carrier, the Langley, arrived at San Diego to join the Pacific Battle Fleet. The ship was originally built to carry coal for the World War I fighting fleets but had been converted into an experimental aircraft carrier.

The Cold War fallout bunker built by the U.S. Navy in 1961 for President John F. Kennedy today remains closed to the public. The Peanut Island shelter and nearby historical Coast Guard station and house, which were closed to public tours in October 2017, are showing the signs of abandonment.

Could new evidence solve once and for all the mystery of Jimmy Hoffa's disappearance? A leading Hoffa expert, author Dan Moldea, says yes. Moldea said a former NJ landfill may hold the grave of the former Teamsters boss.

It was probably a sapling when George Washington returned to Mount Vernon in 1783, triumphant after his victory in the Revolutionary War. On Nov. 4, the night caretakers at Mt. Vernon heard it fall, the tree was about 115 feet tall, 12 feet around, and roughly 230 years old.

The National Medal of Honor Monument Act tasks the National Medal of Honor Museum Foundation with the creation of a monument in Washington to honor the more than 3,500 recipients of the nation’s highest award for military service.

James Wormley Jones, who had served as a captain in the Great War abroad and as a police officer in the District of Columbia became the FBI’s first documented black special agent.

Lt. Kayla Barron never imagined she might one day become an astronaut, let alone be one of the first people to visit Mars, until she served on a submarine.

The Connecticut Wartime Service Medal was established in 2005 by the state's General Assembly to honor veterans who served for at least 90 days on active duty in a time of war and were honorably discharged.

Obituary

Holocaust survivor Branko Lustig's film career took him to movie sets across Europe and to Hollywood, where in 1994 he shared the Academy Award for best picture as a producer of "Schindler's List." Lustig died Nov. 14 in Croatia. He was 87.

Seventy-six years after he was killed in action on a little-known island in the Pacific during World War II, the remains of U.S. Marine Pfc. Joseph Robert Livermore arrived in Bakersfield by motorcade Thursday as hundreds of residents lined the streets and gathered on freeway bridges to welcome him home.

Bass, a Belgian Malinois, served more than six years in Marine Corps special operations in Iraq, Afghanistan and Somalia. During his time in Iraq, Bass conducted more than 350 explosive detections with his handler, Staff Sgt. Alex Schnell. On Thursday, Bass was awarded the Medal of Bravery.

In four videos, entertainer Ann-Margret talks with Stars and Stripes' Ken-Yon Hardy about the time she spent entertaining the troops in Vietnam and elsewhere, a record of service that earned her the USO's first Bob Hope Legacy Award.