Sometime on Dec. 17, 1944, a plane flown by U.S. Army Air Forces 2nd Lt. Elwood Lawson of Escondido was struck by enemy anti-aircraft fire in the skies over the Italian coastal city of La Spezia and it crashed into the Ligurian Sea.

When it comes to Confederate markers, you’re unlikely to find a place with as many such examples than in Pennsylvania’s Gettysburg National Military Park.

KOREAN WAR AT 70

The Korean War is often called the “Forgotten War” in the U.S. because the stalemated conflict was overshadowed between World War II and Vietnam, but its legacy looms large over the divided peninsula. In a special report, Stars and Stripes marks the 70th anniversary of the conflict, which began on June 25, 1950.

KOREAN WAR AT 70

Hannah Kim has met 1,200 Korean War heroes and visited memorials in all 50 states as well as those in U.S. territories and foreign countries that participated in the conflict.

KOREAN WAR AT 70

More than five million Americans served in the Korean War, which lasted from 1950 to 1953; more than two million of them are still alive. Here are some of their memories.

KOREAN WAR AT 70

The possibility of dying from friendly fire was a worry for Franklin Chang, one of a small group of Chinese American Marines who fought in the Korean War.

The only woman ever to receive the Medal of Honor had it taken away more than a century ago just before she died, then posthumously restored by President Jimmy Carter in 1977. Dr. Mary Walker's story is now on exhibit at a heritage center in Chattanooga, Tenn.

Rudy Maiorana was running down a hillside trying to flee a wave of oncoming Chinese soldiers. Through the confusion, terror, smoke and explosions, he heard a voice cry out: "I need help. I can't see." Every day since that November 1950 attack on the Korean peninsula, Mairorana says he thinks of that American GI who cried out.

Richard Downes was 3 years old when his father, Air Force Lt. Hal Downes, went missing in action in January 1952. "When you just don't know, you grow up with that void that is never filled until you learn what happened," Downes said.

As far as is known, 14 U.S. Army, Air Force and Marine Corps personnel from Walla Walla County died in the Korean War. But as yet there isn't a local memorial for these warriors.

“Today’s cancellation is based on the uncertainty if the state of Ohio will permit a large gathering event due to safety concerns and if military aircraft will be able to participate,” the show said in a release.

Portraits of former House speakers who served in the Confederacy will no longer hang in the Capitol, Speaker Nancy Pelosi announced Thursday.

PT-59, which was the boat then future president John F. Kennedy commanded after PT-109, sank 45 years ago in Manhattan's North Cove, an urban wetland off the Harlem River.

The Robert E. Lee statue that soars over Monument Avenue in Richmond, Va. was designed to seem untouchable. But now that it might come down, the figure has connected with the community below in surprising ways.

Chandra Mundra had planned to spend an entire week in West Point, N.Y., for his son’s graduation from the U.S. Military Academy. Then the coronavirus pandemic swept the nation.

A process to rename 10 Army posts named in honor of Confederate generals from the Civil War would be established by a new bipartisan House bill introduced Thursday, just a day after President Donald Trump said he would not consider the changes.

The 5.7 million Americans who served in the Korean "police action" are mostly in their late 70s and 80s now. And, like their former commander, Douglas MacArthur, memory of America's "Forgotten War" is mostly fading away.

Less than four months after D-Day – the bloody beginning of the Allied invasion of Europe on June 6, 1944 – a baby-faced Ed Sullivan, then only 20 years old, arrived on the shores of Normandy, France, with the U.S. Army's 170th General Hospital.

The American soldier kneels in the grass, bent over the empty white body bag, inscribing the name of the dead GI who will shortly be placed inside. The small moment amid the vast World War II invasion of Nazi-occupied France was captured by an anonymous Navy photographer with Combat Photography Unit 8.

Thursday's demonstrations, which capped a week of protests that first were extremely violent but eventually eased in tensions as the week went on, took on a different flavor in light of proposals from state and Richmond leaders to rid Monument Avenue of all of its Confederate memorials.

Irene Triplett's father, who'd served as a private in the Confederate Army before defecting to the Union, was on his second marriage when she was born in 1930. He was just a few weeks away from turning 84.

For the Pan Am flight attendants, there were no parades after the war, nor much movement to celebrate their role or their place as accidental pioneers in military history.

Half a century after serving in Vietnam, Bob Shaw — disabled from prostate cancer he says was a side effect of exposure to Agent Orange — volunteers at shelters run by Catholic Community Services in Seattle.

A 30-year Army veteran who was the longest continuously serving Ranger in Vietnam and one of the war’s most decorated enlisted soldiers has died.

Images posted to social media showed graffiti on the memorial's central fountain which read, "Do black vets count?"

Herbert Stempel, the Bronx-born brainiac who became a central figure and whistleblower in the game show rigging scandals of the 1950s, died April 7 at age 93.

For Samuel James Hanna, D-Day was not the first time he had experienced a massive operation to bring soldiers, tanks, equipment and supplies to a beachhead.

During the final days of the war, Aldean Mason's unit entered Buchenwald concentration camp in Germany. There, dhe cared for Holocaust survivors, treating them for typhus and malnutrition, among other illnesses.

A man who died from injuries he suffered in a fire Monday at his family’s rural California home was a World War II and Korean war veteran who learned criminal investigation in the Army and became director of the U.S. Army Crime Laboratories.

Hermann Historica, an auction house in Munich, Germany, expected to take in about $5,000 for the medal, which was awarded to Army Pvt. Thomas Kelly for his actions during the Spanish-American War.

The Congressional Gold Medal was to be awarded collectively to the Chinese veterans — approximately 90% of whom are now deceased — in an April 29 ceremony in the U.S. Capitol before the pandemic caused its postponement.

On Nov. 11, 1899, Maj. John A. Logan Jr. was killed during the Philippine-American War. His father, Maj. Gen. John A. Logan Sr., is credited with starting the tradition that has become Memorial Day.

E. Royce Williams is being called a forgotten hero in a forgotten war — a military pilot whose heroic action was never fully recognized because his mission was filed away as top secret.

National Guard troops based in Western New York and elsewhere around the country rushed to the nation's aid when the Covid-19 pandemic struck – but now the federal government wants to cut short their deployments one day before many of them qualify for valuable federal benefits.

At 22, huddling close to fellow soldiers for warmth saved Bernard Mayrsohn’s life. At 96, keeping away from people is doing the same.

Rep. Debbie Wasserman-Schultz said headstones of German POWs should be removed because their swastika symbols are “a stain on the hallowed ground where so many veterans and their families are laid to rest.”

Abraham "Abie" Jenkins He was the post-military husband of local military legend Mary Owens Jenkins. Family members had believed for decades that the two were buried side-by-side at her grave marker; however, nothing was ever verified regarding Abraham until recently.

With so many staples of daily life out of reach, digital stenographers are reaching into history to put their quarantine time to good use, soothing their psyches in the process.

The people who want to add the names of those killed on the USS Frank E. Evans to the Vietnam Veterans Memorial wall in Washington keep running into a different kind of wall: Congress.

The Honor Flight Network, which sends veterans to tour the war memorials in Washington, D.C., said Thursday that it would cancel trips to the nation’s capital through the end of August.

Several employees of the National WWI Museum and Memorial now spend their days transcribing archival letters and getting to know their writers — the American soldiers who fought in the war. Their roles have been reimagined in an effort to keep museum staff on the payroll.

Fact-checking an old claim that taps was found scribbled on a piece of paper in the pocket of a dead Confederate soldier found on the battlefield by his father, a Union captain.

The Rainbow Beach Victory Garden is the last surviving veteran of Chicago’s contingent in a homefront brigade of World War II.

Galina Brok-Beltsova is the last surviving member of Stalin's three famous all-female air regiments and one of the dwindling cadre of World War II veterans in Russia — and among its wartime allies and foes.

The 1944 Dodge WC-57 Command Car 4x4 military vehicle, which is said to have been specifically modified for Gen. George S. Patton, will be sold with no reserve. However. vehicle lacks specific documentation confirming its authenticity.

Seventy-five years ago, throngs filled the streets of Paris, London, Moscow and New York to celebrate Victory in Europe Day, but on Friday as the world marks the anniversary of Nazi Germany’s defeat the ceremonial pomp will be muted.

On Friday, the world marks the anniversary of Nazi Germany’s defeat in World War II. We've rounded up some related images.

Veterans who were active military in posts around the world 50 years ago recall that when they heard about the Kent State shootings there was, among those in their unit, confusion and disbelief that American soldiers had fired upon citizens.

The 13-second burst of gunfire on May 4, 1970 – the culmination of four days of riots and tension between the Guard and protestors – changed Kent State, the anti-Vietnam War movement and the already deep generational divide in the United States.

The Allentown, Pa. school board tabled naming a new elementary school for Brig. Gen. Anna Mae Hays, the first female general in the Army, after community members expressed concern that the suggestion does not reflect the district’s diverse student body.

While the experience we’re living through now feels unprecedented, Crawford Scott’s letters to his then-girlfriend (and eventual wife) Minerva shine a light on the similarities people dealt with in the last major global pandemic.

COLUMN

With their first-ever draft pick in 1936, the Pittsburgh Steelers chose a bona fide celebrity, a dazzling Notre Dame man who’d thrown the winning pass in the greatest college game ever played. He never played a down in the NFL, but he did fight in the Battle of the Bulge.

Analysis

The New Deal's legacy still provides support today. Unemployment insurance. Retirement and disability income. Transparency in the stock markets. Infrastructure that ensures a steady flow of electricity and supply of water. Yet the coronavirus outbreak has also revealed how ill-equipped the government was to address the rapidly escalating fallout of 26 million job losses

It’s not every day you see a World Warr II-era ship lifted into the air and placed into a storage lot, but it was the position of this particular “Higgins Boat" on its way to being restored to its former glory.

No signs of the vessel that Jaclyn Urmey studied had been recorded since the 1980s, when the area was surveyed for highway and bridge projects for Interstate 295, and she was determined to find out if there was anything left.

Gilbert de la O fought in and survived one of the bloodiest and little-known early battles of the war -- Operation Abilene.

Video

Fifty years after Apollo 13 blasted into space, carrying Fred Haise Jr., Commander James Lovell Jr. and John Swigert Jr. to the moon, the "unlucky 13" seems to be at work again. The new coronavirus pandemic ended the Apollo 13 commemoration before it began.

Attorney Stephen Jones was contacted two weeks after the 1995 Oklahoma City bombing and asked to represent one of the most infamous defendants in American history. He said he'd never been in a case that put his family or business associates in possible danger, so he asked for 24 hours to consult with them before deciding.

Seventy-five years ago today, famed war correspondent Ernie Pyle was felled by a Japanese machine gun on Ie Shima off Okinawa in the waning days of World War II.

The Army abandoned the 33-acre site in Woolwich Township and hundreds of others like it around the country in 1974. Now the New Jersey community hopes a commercial developer will buy it.

A tall, athletic and shy man who rarely speaks with the news media, Bill McVeigh said he thinks every day about the families in Oklahoma City who were devastated by his son’s act of hatred. He wishes he could change what happened, but knows it is impossible.

Author Matthew Rozell was planning to travel to Germany to celebrate the 75th anniversary of the train liberation near Magdeburg. “I’m supposed to be there right now,” said Rozell, who, due to the coronavirus pandemic, couldn’t travel to the small German town where Americans liberated a train of Jews 75 years ago on April 13, 1945.

Some 78 years after the Bataan Death March and Pvt. Hulon Lee Raper’s death in a POW camp, a genealogist working on behalf of the Army has reached out to Raper’s family members asking for DNA to verify that the remains the government has found are his.

All a reader had to do to understand how much World War II cost the United States — in lives and materials — was read a War Bonds advertisement published in the newspaper.

Cape Cod Airfield manager Chris Siderwicz estimated the damage to the two airplanes to be between $10,000 and $15,000. The parts to fix the planes are difficult to come by, he said.

The story of Camp Crane is a story worth revisiting, not only as evidence that isolation and distancing work to thwart the spread of infection, but as a reminder that the coronavirus pandemic, too, shall pass.

More than three years before the Oklahoma City bombing, Timothy J. McVeigh sent up a red flag, a warning to all the world that he was considering an act of violence against the United States government.

On Monday, it will have been 75 years since George Mills’ liberation. Retired Army Lt. Col Michael Snyder, senior Army instructor of Decatur High JROTC, said even after three-quarters of a century, Mills’ experience remains worthy of reflection.

Japanese “hell ships” like the Oryoku Maru lived up to their name: Historians say they were crammed with hundreds or thousands of POWs — usually in dark, unventilated holds below deck. Most were denied medical care or fresh water.

Dan Sisson has spent more than three decades planning and building a replica of Monticello, Thomas Jefferson's iconic home, in an isolated timberland in eastern Washington state.

John R. Weiler and other artillerymen didn’t get the glory of some other World War II veterans. But the shells his unit fired from as far as 10 miles away softened up the enemy and allowed those who were at the front to do their jobs.

During a walk through Spring Hill Cemetery last summer, Duncan Auter spotted a name that sounded familiar. Duncan, 12, had heard stories from Larry Weatherford, president of two historical groups, about Pvt. George McKibben, a Civil War veteran.

PHOTO GALLERY

On National Vietnam Veterans Day 2020, a collection of Stars and Stripes photos of veterans visiting the Vietnam Wall in Washington in recent years.

“Iwo Jima is a testament to what America was willing to endure to defend freedom and our way of life,” said Marine Corps History Division director Edward Nevgloski.

How did a trunk that once belonged to a decorated Montford Point Marine from New Jersey who fought at Iwo Jima end up in Connecticut? The mystery has the family of Gilmon D. Brooks scratching their heads.

Six 32-foot tall bronze giants adjacent to Arlington National Cemetery in Arlington, Va., have helped ensure Americans never forget World War II Battle of Iwo Jima.

Although the coronavirus crisis has forced the postponement of Medal of Honor Day activities in the Washington, D.C., area to a later date, the Congressional Medal of Honor Society has announced the recipients of its annual Citizen Honors Awards.

After nearly 70 years listed as missing in action, Korean War veteran Army Cpl. Arthur Contreras Ramirez’s remains were laid to rest before family, friends and veterans on Thursday.

In the midst of the Revolutionary War, Mary Hays jumped on her cannon to continue her husband's job during the Battle of Monmouth. And Hays is celebrated each year in what is known as Molly Pitcher Day, said Lt. Col. Wayne Fogel, commander of 2nd Battalion, 319th Airborne Field Artillery Regiment.

Doctors had little defense against this mysterious disease. Its very name could ignite panic throughout the populace. Fears of the disease's spread could bring community affairs to a standstill. Sound familiar? The Savannah epidemic of 1876 "was the worst of its kind in coastal Georgia history," according to one historian.

The Museum of the Bible admitted Friday that 16 fragments displayed as pieces of the Dead Sea Scrolls, the oldest known surviving copies of the original Hebrew Bible, were fakes. The fragments have been on exhibit at the Washington, D.C. museum since its opening in 2017.

The highly anticipated march was expected to draw more than 10,000 participants this year but was canceled after New Mexico's governor declared a public health emergency over the arrival of the COVID-19 virus on Wednesday.

In 2020, as sports officials here and elsewhere struggle to deal with the worldwide coronavirus outbreak, the influenza epidemic of a century ago might offer some clues. During that fall and winter, the flu killed an estimated 50 million worldwide, 675,000 in the United States.

The Navy’s investigation into the 1963 sinking of the USS Thresher resulted in a 1,700-page report; only 19 pages have been publicly released. Capt. Jim Bryant, a submarine skipper retired in Point Loma, wants the public to see the other 1,681 pages.