Valor
Valor Friday
Picture this. It’s 6 June, 1944. You’re a young lieutenant in the US Army’s 506th Parachute Infantry Regiment of the 101st Airborne Division (the same regiment as the famous Band of Brothers). After being scattered all over the Normandy countryside, you and your men have regrouped and are pushing the war on the Germans at […]
Sergeant Major Canley, MoH recipient, dies aged 84
After battling cancer for 10 years, retired US Marine Corps Sergeant Major John Canley has passed away. Canley received the Medal of Honor in 2018, fifty years after his heroics in 1968 Vietnam, for which he originally received the Navy Cross. Last year, the Navy named a new Expeditionary Sea Base (ESB) ship after him. […]
Valor Friday
Continuing my series of those who’ve served in more than one Army, I have an American today. Joseph Beyrle was the third of seven kids born to German immigrant parents in 1923 Michigan. He enlisted into the US Army in June 1942 and volunteered for the nascent paratroopers. He turned down a baseball scholarship to […]
Valor Friday
I have something of a bit of a series I’ll be starting here, men who fought in more than one army. I’ve already talked about two, the legendary “Soldier of Three Armies” Larry Thorne (Finnish Army, German Wehrmacht, and American Army) and Richard Stern (Imperial German and American Army). Fighting for multiple countries was actually, […]
Valor Friday
On 9 April 1940, the Nazi German Wehrmacht launched an invasion of Norway. This was just a few months after the Invasion of Poland which set the world to war, just days before the Battle of France that would see that country fall to German control, which itself was followed by Operation Barbarossa (the Invasion […]
Valor Friday
As I research my subjects, I find some amazing stories. What drives me to tell these stories is to remember these men and women. By remembering who they were, what they did, and why they did it, I hope that I’m honoring their memory. On very rare occasions, I come across an article that’s written […]
80 years ago today
Boomer reminds us that it was 80 years ago today that then-Lieutenant Colonel Jimmy Doolittle led 80 men in 16 B-25 Mitchell medium bombers off the deck of USS Hornet. It was, from the outset, to be essentially a suicide mission. After bombing Tokyo, there were no plans to be recovered by American forces. At […]
Valor Friday
Of the hundreds of American prisoners of war (POW) during the Vietnam War, many remained in the service post-war. Unique among conflicts with American involvement, the vast majority of POWs were aircrew, and most of those were officers. Among the well known names of Vietnam POWs are Senator John McCain III (who retired as a […]
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