Obituary

Jim Leavelle, a Pearl Harbor veteran and longtime Dallas lawman who was captured in one of history's most iconic photographs as he escorted President John F. Kennedy's assassin as he was fatally shot, has died. He was 99.

The tags were the only thing Angela had left of her father, Capt. Steven L. Bennett, who was killed in action in Vietnam when Angela was only 2 years old. Her father was an OV-10 pilot and Medal of Honor recipient.

The museum encompasses three different sites with three different historical focuses, expanding beyond its initial concentration on the convergence of soldiers and medical personnel in Frederick after the battles of Antietam, Gettysburg and Monocacy. Changing the logo — or at least the possibility of it — is a new focus as the museum embarks on a rebranding campaign.

The long wait for the USS Arizona Memorial to reopen to walk-on visits is ending soon, with a new anchoring system drilled firmly into the seafloor to keep a formerly wayward floating access dock in place, officials say.

Jan Ruff-O'Herne, who had grown up on her father's colonial sugar plantation in what was then the Dutch East Indies, was one of the few Europeans used by the Japanese as sex slaves during World War II.

The fort is considered to have been an important British military outpost along Wood Creek during the French and Indian War. France blew up Fort Bull and killed or captured nearly 60 soldiers.

At the same time Ruth Reise's husband enlisted in the U.S. Army during World War II, she was also offered a job. Her height – 5 foot – made her the perfect size to climb into plane gas tanks to secure the rivets.

Whether it’s through a glove belonging to Stonewall Jackson, a uniform worn by a Union soldier, a complete Civil War ambulance, or any of the other 24,000 artifacts, dioramas and detailed descriptions in the National Civil War Museum’s collection, visitors learn about the conflict from beginning to end.

Archaeological divers from Rhode Island and Australia are gathering in Newport to positively identify the wreck of Capt. James Cook's Endeavour, the ship that took him around the world and from which he discovered Australia.

What was a grand and enjoyable dinner party honoring returning World War I veteran Col. Charles Weybrecht a century ago turned into a deadly tragedy resulting in the deaths of seven people, including the guest of honor.

The cleansing and naming ritual, presided over by visiting chiefs from Cameroon, kicked off a weekend of events marking the 400th anniversary of the Africans' arrival and the dawn of American slavery.

Liane Russell, a refugee of Nazi Europe who became one of the most distinguished female scientists of her era, building a colony of more than 200,000 laboratory mice that she used to demonstrate the importance of protecting developing embryos from X-rays and other forms of radiation, died July 20 at a hospital in Oak Ridge, Tennessee. She was 95.

A rusty spoon gave high school senior Josh Picoult a portal to World War I and the perilous life of a young soldier. Picoult was among 15 Connecticut students who traveled to France last month to restore trenches that French soldiers dug in 1914 and Connecticut soldiers occupied four years later.

In the photo, a group of straight-faced Japanese prisoners sit, transported by U.S. Army soldiers. At the left, according to Dean Ford, sits Hideki Tojo, Japanese minister of war and later the prime minister during World War II.

Nan Songer, a chemist assistant and naturalist, established a spidery in Yucaipa in 1939 and supplied webs to make crosshairs for equipment such as scopes and sights, including the Norden Bombsight.

In November 1944, Marthe Cohn was recruited by the French Army Intelligence Service to serve as a Nazi spy, a calling that she excelled at, but was not recognized for until decades later. Now, the 99-year-old Holocaust survivor travels around the world with her husband, 93-year-old Major Cohn, sharing her story with anyone who will listen.

As planes from World War II landed, Bob Considine thought of his father, who flew in combat. A P-40 Warhawk, a B-24 bomber and a P-51 Mustang were among the vintage World War II planes that arrived at Hazleton (Pa.) airport as part of the Wings of Freedom tour.

Volunteers continue to clean and polish the USS Arizona Memorial in preparation for the as-yet announced reopening of one of the state’s most visited tourist attractions.

Darr Keirn, Meredith Keirn's brother, had been fighting for years to recover the remains of his brother, and in May 2018, he was told the DNA sample he submitted was an exact match with recently uncovered remains.

Regina Boone's father was only three when his dad, Tsuruju Miyazaki, was taken away. In 2014, before he succumbed to cancer, Raymond Boone asked Regina to sit by him. She took his hand. He then told her: “Find out what happened to my father.”

Raritan Borough is about 4,325 miles away from Italy but a common connection — a World War II hero named John Basilone — now ties the New Jersey town and a small Italian community even closer together.

Operation Dragoon was planned to happen simultaneously with the Normandy invasion, but a shortage of resources — mainly ships — led to the operation being launched Aug. 15, 1944.

VIETNAM AT 50

Vietnam had been Lyndon Johnson’s war, and it destroyed his presidency. Richard Nixon entered the White House on Jan. 20, 1969, anxious to avoid Johnson’s fate.

The valley bottom is dried terraces, each terrace three of four feet higher or lower than the one next to it. Around each of these tiny fields are thick hedgerows. And in the middle of the hedgerows are ditches and bunkers — ditches and bunkers that you just know Charlie is in.

VIETNAM AT 50

Fifty years after leading a company of soldiers up Hamburger Hill, Gerald “Bob” Harkins sees the assault against burrowed-in North Vietnamese army forces no differently than he did then.

VIETNAM AT 50

On Aug. 18, 1969, former soldier Jimi Hendrix, resplendent in bright red headband, white fringed shirt and bell-bottom blue jeans, unfurled what has been called the cultural moment of the 1960s when he played an incendiary instrumental version of “The Star-Spangled Banner” for remnants of the crowd at the Woodstock Music & Art Fair in Bethel, N.Y.

VIETNAM AT 50

For Cohasset, Mass., 1969 held the worst eight months of the Vietnam War, when 5 of the town’s soldiers were killed in action, including three from the Cohasset High School Class of 1966.

A thief brazenly stole World War II medals and other memorabilia from a floating ship museum, including ripping some items off a uniform on display.

Battling through the dense Burmese jungle during World War II, members of the all-volunteer Army special operations unit known as Merrill’s Marauders engaged the enemy Japanese behind their lines — dealing blows to the Imperial Army and suffering high casualties in the process.

The Collings Foundation's Wings of Freedom Tour, in its 30th year, includes five rare bomber and fighter aircraft, including the B-17 Flying Fortress and the P-51 Mustang.

Organized by the Military Vehicle Preservation Association, the procession is planned as a 36-day, 3,200-mile trek that will retrace as closely as possible the cross-country route a 1919 convoy followed to road-test Army vehicles of that time.

In a forest near the German village of Speyerdorf, about 20 miles southwest of Ludwigshafen and about 350 miles east of Bassingbourn, a research team is carefully sweeping an area with metal detectors and sifting dirt through screens where some 75 years ago Strictly GI crashed.

But for more than a decade at the height of the Cold War, the Twin Cities were protected by a quartet of nuclear missile installations ringing the metro area.

About three years ago the Naval History and Heritage Command asked institute volunteers to conduct a search for lost aircraft in the bay near Patuxent River Naval Air Station. The Navy had begun a systematic search for such planes. One of them was Lt. j.g. David L. Mandt's Bearcat. It disappeared in 1945.

Five vintage World War II aircraft will fly into the MAPS (Military Aviation Preservation Society) Air Museum on Aug. 9 and will be available for tours through Aug. 11.

Seaman 1st Class James Cunningham was among the sailors killed aboard the patrol boat USS Eagle off the coast of Maine on April 23, 1945, when an explosion ripped its hull in half. On Saturday, the Navy awarded the Purple Heart medal to Cunningham’s 85-year-old sister.

More than 100 veterans gathered at the National Museum of American History on Friday to see the unveiling of a 48-star flag that flew on Landing Craft Control 60 during the 1944 D-Day assault on Utah Beach in Normandy.

U.S. Army Cpl. Charles Stanley Lawler’s burial will close an excruciating chapter for his family. His mother always held out hope that he had been captured and not killed or missing.

Around the clock for weeks after the battle of Gettysberg, medical personnel cared for the wounded, performing amputations, dealing with infections and, in many cases, providing comfort for the dying in their final minutes.

By the time Apollo 11 blasted off, many astronauts had come to develop an appreciation for lunar geology — and the new light it would shed on our own planet.

Fifty years ago Thursday, a car driven by U.S. Sen. Edward Kennedy plunged off the Dike Bridge on Chappaquiddick, killing Mary Jo Kopechne, 28, a former aide and campaign worker for his late brother Robert F. Kennedy, and derailing his aspirations to follow another brother, John F. Kennedy, to the White House.

During one of the last and bloodiest battles of World War II, the Battle of Okinawa, Anthony “Tony” Procassini was pinned down with fellow soldiers, praying the Japanese shelling would miss. It did, but not by much.

"Doc," one of the only two World War II Boeing B-29 Superfortress bombers still flying, was built in 1944 as one of 1,644 B-29 bombers manufactured in Boeing’s Wichita, Kan., plant and delivered to the U.S. Army Air Corps in March 1945 — too near the end of World War II to see combat.

Stephen Reagan isn't from Muskogee, but he wants Ernest Edwin Evans to be more than a distant memory to the people here.

Searching for his roots about 10 years ago, Pat Montoya, a retired U.S. Postal Service postmaster, discovered some fascinating details about his great-grandfather, Juan Domingo Montoya.

Gary George found the original videotapes capturing the Apollo 11 lunar landing at a government surplus auction while working at the NASA Johnson Space Center in 1973, according to Sotheby's. He paid $217.77 for the 1,150 reels of magnetic tape, which include Neil Armstrong's declaration, "That's one small step for a man, one giant leap for mankind."

The three men who took the journey to the moon became the faces of the achievement. But it was the men and women who worked in factories and offices across the nation over the better part of a decade that took the moon landing from presidential challenge to tangible reality.

Remembering Ross Perot

A few weeks after Orson Swindle returned home from Hanoi after spending more than six years in North Vietnamese prisoner of war camps, he picked up his phone and heard Ross Perot's high-pitched twang. Perot was calling to invite Swindle and fellow former POWs of Son Tay POW Camp to San Francisco.

Veterans' Stories

Brig. Gen. Dennis Sullivan flew three CIA reconnaissance missions as a pilot of the A-12 OXCART in 1967 over North Vietnam and earned the CIA's Intelligence Star of Valor Award in 1968, one of the rarest valor awards awarded by the U.S. government. He was inducted into the Wisconsin Aviation Hall of Fame in 2011.

The Environmental Protection Agency on Thursday honored the former Myrtle Beach Air Force Base as a shining example of how formerly federal land can be repurposed.

The amendment inserted into the National Defense Authorization Act calls on the Secretary of the U.S. Navy to publicly exonerate the "Port Chicago 50" – the group of African-American sailors who refused to go back to the Concord Naval Weapons Station to load and unload dangerous munitions without proper safety training.

GALLERY / VIDEO

103 veterans from the Chicago area came to Washington, D.C. Wednesday as part of Honor Flight Chicago, a non-profit that brings vets on a whirlwind one-day trip to the nation’s capital to visit the memorials that commemorate the wars they served in.

The Army and Navy are now the only branches of the military with any assets named after symbols of the Confederacy, according to a September 2017 Congressional Research Service report.

Some local funeral directors estimate that there are “hundreds” of veterans whose ashes are being stored – either in funeral homes or on the shelves of family members’ homes – until the new burial ground opens.

Rep. Matt Gaetz is working to get an honorary posthumous promotion for Lt. Col. Dick Cole, one of the 80 Army Air Force aviators who participated in daring bombing raid on Japan in the early months of World War II.

Veterans' Stories

Marine Corps Base Camp Pendleton has played a major role in military history over the past 77 years, and John Farritor is one of the rare men who has seen that history unfold from the start.

A 363-foot projection of a rocket will be flashed on one side of the Washington Monument next week to commemorate the 50th anniversary of the Apollo moon landing.

We are joined this week by former British colonel Tim Collins, who delivered one of the most famous speeches of the Iraq War. Collins — now involved with private military and security contracting firm New Century — shares his perspective on the operations gaps filled by contracting and how it’s shaping the modern battlefield.

A long line of nearly 100 vehicles stretched out along the White House Ellipse on the morning of July 7, 1919, replete with heavy troop carriers, light trucks, sidecar motorcycles, reconnaissance cars, field kitchens, blacksmith shops and one Renault light tank.

It's taken years for Judge George Greer to tell his story on his decision to remove Terri Schiavo's feeding tube. He recently wrote the first chapter in "Tough Cases," a book that features the reflections of judges who don't often get to speak openly about their decisions.

Tens of thousands of Uighurs live in Turkey, cut off from friends and family back home in China's Xinjiang region. Analysts say the Urumqi riots set in motion the harsh security measures now in place across Xinjiang, where about 1 million Uighurs, Kazakhs and other Muslims are estimated to be held in internment camps.

It has been 28 years since tanks last rolled through the streets of Washington, leaving heavy tread marks in the asphalt along the way. On Tuesday night, they came back.

Nearly 100 adults and kids of all ages gathered around the west runway of the airport in Eugene, Ore., on Saturday morning to watch a historic Consolidated PBY-5A Catalina fly in and end its long trip from where it was found in a Paris museum.

Airman 2nd Class Verne Budahn died when a C-124 Globemaster II went down in bad weather on Nov. 22, 1952.

A Navy reservist and military historian was among the few dozen people in a lakeside lodge at Richmond’s Camp Takodah, N.H. They'd gathered to remember 12 individuals who had attended Camp Takodah as boys and died in World War II as young men.

Dan Simmons' book “With His Hand” details Medal of Honor recipient John C. “Red” Morgan’s experiences during World War II, some of which were fictionalized and included in a novel and a subsequent movie called “12 O’Clock High”.

At some point over the past 76 years, the charm of the structure got lost in rotting wood and a pervasive musty stench. It's plagued with mold, water damage, buckling floorboards and peeling paint. It's boarded shut, and used only by termites, rodents and the occasional homeless person who slips into the crawlspace below the building.

A bill introduced Tuesday would rescind 20 Medals of Honor awarded to soldiers who received them for actions during the Wounded Knee Massacre in 1890, when hundreds of Native Americans were killed by U.S. cavalry soldiers.

The State Archives of North Carolina has honored Guy Cox by digitizing more than 400 photographs the lensman took from 1943-45.

On this warm, humid day, with dolphins in the water, divers dug through mud and oyster shells on the bottom of York River, searching for remnants of the battle that ensured American independence.

While recuperating from back surgery, Beth Rieman had time to think about family, ask questions about her grandmother's Uncle Jim, and eventually uncover an amazing find about the decorated veteran of two world wars.

Robert Friend, a decorated fighter pilot who flew 142 combat missions with the fabled Tuskegee Airmen during World War II, then became an expert on missile systems and directed the classified Air Force investigation into UFOs, died June 21 at age 99.

The third week in June, 1994 began as any other at Fairchild Air Force Base. It was warm and sunny, with the base preparing for an open house the following Sunday. It ended with the base hospital closed, walls scarred from bullets and floors stained with blood. The burnt wreckage of the base’s last B-52 was scattered near the runway.

Nearly eight years ago, a stealth American surveillance drone with a 66-foot wingspan went down over Iran. The United States insisted the RQ-170 Sentinel, which had taken off for a CIA mission from a base in Afghanistan, experienced a malfunction; Iran said they neutralized it in a cyberattack.

Over a century ago, employees of Westinghouse companies contributed to the most ambitious, high-tech projects of their day. On a Library of Congress website, their labor - and innovations that changed the way Americans worked and traveled - comes to flickering life.

When Soviet troops invaded the Kurile islands in 1945 after Japan announced its surrender in World War II, all of the 17,000 Japanese residents either fled or were forcibly evicted.

The bloody three-month siege of Kohima took place in the Himalayan foothills of Nagaland, in northeast India. Though the allied victory against the Japanese was a major turning point on par with the Battle of Stalingrad, we won't see world leaders travel to Kohima for its remembrance.

For decades, William “Hoover” Jones’s family wondered what happened to him. He left North Carolina as an 18-year-old boy from a small town in Nash County, off to Korea to fight as an infantryman in the U.S. Army. He has been missing-in-action since 1950. On Thursday, he came home.

For Navy veterans Maghan and Jamie Alberts, the GI Bill not only let them pursue a higher education after returning home from the service in 1997, it also gave them the opportunity to start a new life together.

He fought with distinction, historians say, in two of this country’s formative wars, but James Robinson, who was born into slavery in Maryland in the mid-18th century, was denied his liberty for most of his life and never got the military honors he’d earned. That is to change this weekend.

A new National Park Service grant will help preserve a part of the Spotsylvania Court House Battlefield that’s been called one of America’s most historic roads.

A glass of whisky in his hand, Norman Mailer cursed the roaring crowd in Greenwich Village and told them to shut up when they interrupted his speech, a rollicking cascade of F-bombs and insults from start to finish. "You're nothing but a bunch of spoiled pigs!" Mailer shouted on that May night in 1969.

Jeremy Lin has joined Wataru "Wat" Misaka in the history books. In 1947, Misaka was the first person of color to play professional basketball in what would become the NBA. With the Raptors' Game 6 win Thursday, Lin has become the first Asian American to win an NBA championship.

Video

Derek Cincotta was in the open hatch of a World War II warplane, fighting the wind and looking down at a quilted French countryside thousands of feet below. The man running the drop yelled "Go!" and the immediate rush, as Cincotta leapt from the plane and focused on his body positioning, resolved into calm once he pulled his parachute.