The remains of a New York airman whose trove of 200-plus wartime letters inspired a California museum’s popular World War II exhibit have been identified 75 years after he died in a crash off a Pacific island.
Four graves are known to contain the remains of some of the 136 sailors killed when the Gleaves-class destroyer Turner exploded and sank near the entrance to New York Harbor on Jan. 3, 1944.
There’s now a national veterans cemetery not far from where John Martin grew up along the upper Hudson River, but when it came time to pick a burial place for the soldier 68 years after he was killed in the Korean War, his niece picked the family plot at a nearby cemetery.
Lawrence Reilly Sr. barely survived the 1969 collision that sent half of the USS Frank E. Evans to the bottom of the South China Sea with his namesake son and 73 other shipmates trapped inside. The father spent the last years of his life unsuccessfully trying to convince the Pentagon to add those 74 names to the Vietnam Veterans Memorial.
A group from the U.S. and Japan is trekking to a remote Pacific island jungle to document what is considered one of the most important wreck sites of World War II: where American fighters shot down a Japanese bomber carrying the mastermind of the Pearl Harbor attack.
During World War II, four American service men who graduated from the same upstate New York high school had their photo taken for the yearbook: a Coast Guardsman, a Navy pilot, a sailor and a soldier. The pilot never made it home and is still listed as missing in action.
Before the Army’s 27th Infantry Division was decimated in a bloody World War II battle, Stan Dube sketched portraits of his fellow soldiers. The 17 drawings were forgotten after the war and stashed in an attic for decades before being found a year ago by his son.
Nancy Lewis never knew the uncle everyone called Joey, but the stories her grandmother would tell of the son, Marine Corps Pvt. Joseph Carbone, who didn’t return from World War II made it seem like he was still around. “She made him so real for us,” Lewis said.
A New York military aviation researcher got more than she bargained for on a dream trip to a battle-scarred South Pacific island — the chance to help solve the mystery of an American soldier listed as missing in action from World War II.
The growing national effort to remove monuments or honors to Robert E. Lee and other leading figures of the Confederacy has reached the U.S. Military Academy.