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A nurse who was photographed being kissed in Times Square in New York to celebrate the end of the second world war in 1945 has died, aged 91.

The iconic VJ Day picture of Edith Shain by Alfred Eisenstaedt was published in Life magazine.

The identity of the nurse in the photograph was not known until the late 1970s when Shain wrote to Eisenstaedt to say that she was the woman in the picture. It was taken on 14 August 1945 when she had been working at Doctor’s Hospital in New York.

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April 15, 2010 – Liberty Belle, a restored World War II B-17 bomber, is making a visit to Seattle and The Museum of Flight. The Flying Fortress will arrive Monday, April 19 at 10 a.m. and be on view at the Museum ramp from April 19 – April 26.

On April 24 – 25 aircraft rides will be available hourly from 10 a.m. to 4 p.m., followed by ground tours of the plane from 4:30 – 6 p.m. Flight experiences last about 45 minutes, with 30 minutes in the air. Ground tours of the plane are from 4:30 – 6 p.m. The aircraft is owned and operated by the Liberty Foundation.

There were over 12,000 B-17s produced between 1935 and 1945, with almost 5,000 lost in combat. The Liberty Foundation’s B-17 Liberty Belle is one of only 14 B-17s that still fly today.
The aircraft was built toward the end of the war and was not flown in combat. It is painted in the colors and nose art of the original Liberty Belle B-17 that flew missions with the 390th bomb group of the U.S. 8th Air Force. The non-profit Museum of Flight is one of the largest independent air and space museums in the world. The Museum’s collection includes more than 150 historically significant air- and spacecraft, as well as the William E. Boeing Red Barn the original manufacturing facility of the Boeing Co.

The J. Elroy McCaw Personal Courage Wing displays 28 World War I and World War II aircraft from the United States and other countries including Germany, Russia, and Japan. Over 30 aircraft representing the first century of aviation are displayed in the all-glass T.A. Wilson Great Gallery. The evolution of space flight and a look into the future are presented in the exhibit, Space: Exploring the New Frontier.

The Airpark includes outdoor displays including the first jet Air Force One, a supersonic Concorde airliner and the prototype Boeing 747 jumbo jet. Interactive displays in The Flight Zone provide educational and entertaining activities for young children. The Museum’s aeronautical library and archival holdings are the largest on the West Coast…

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Scouting founder Lord Robert Baden-Powell was invited to meet Adolf Hitler after friendly talks with the Hitler Youth about forming closer ties, secret British files released Monday showed.

Britain’s Baden-Powell, who started the Scouts in 1907, held talks with German ambassador Joachim von Ribbentrop and Hitler Youth chief of staff Hartmann Lauterbacher on November 19, 1937.

Lauterbacher, then 28, was in Britain to foster closer relations with the Boy Scout movement and Ribbentrop invited Baden-Powell to tea with the Hitler Youth leader, newly declassified MI5 Security Service files revealed.

A letter from Baden-Powell to Ribbentrop the day after the meeting showed how he felt about the talks…

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Miep Gies, who ensured the diary of Anne Frank did not fall into the hands of Nazis after the teen’s arrest, has died. She was 100.

Gies was among a team of Dutch citizens who hid the Frank family of four and four others in a secret annex in Amsterdam, Netherlands, during World War II, according to her official Web site, which announced her death Monday. She worked as a secretary for Anne Frank’s father, Otto, in the front side of the same Prinsengracht building.

The family stayed in the secret room from July 1942 until August 4, 1944, when they were arrested by Gestapo and Dutch police after being betrayed by an informant. Two of Gies’ team were arrested that day, but she and her friend, Bep Voskuijl, were left behind — and found 14-year-old Anne’s papers.

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As the world remembers the 70th anniversary of the outbreak of World War II, three former child evacuees relive their experiences of strange lands and even stranger times.

Imagine being six years old and it is a normal day at school – until, that is, you are put on a train with your classmates and teachers, destination unknown. When you arrive in this place you never knew existed, you are handed over to strangers. You have no idea when you will see your family again.

It sounds unbelievable but during World War II, some 3.5 million people, mostly children, were evacuated from towns and cities to areas deemed safe from bombs by the authorities.

When war broke out on 1 September 1939, 1.5m children, mothers, pensioners and hospital patients were relocated in just four days. It was known as Operation Pied Piper, the biggest mass movement of people in Britain’s history.

About 750,000 of those were unaccompanied children, and the same happened to 600,000 a year later.

Jim Wright and his elder brother Jack were taken from Upton Park in east London to Llanhilleth in the Welsh valleys in the summer of 1940.

Sixty children and a few teachers got off at the mining village and the seven-year-old Jim, who thought he was on a school trip, can remember seeing a “big green thing” ahead of him…

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An Australian researcher is enlisting the public’s help to identify photos of Kiwi airmen at work and play during World War II, that were retrieved from a military rubbish tip.

The collection of more than 100 photographs are of the Royal New Zealand Air Force No 6 Flying Boat Squadron in the Solomon Islands. In one photograph, more than 200 men line the wing of one of the giant Catalina flying boats that were affectionately known as “Dumbos”.

The photos were rescued from the rubbish by Flight Lieutenant Alastair “Scotty” Scott, his daughter Jenny said. “They were all lying out on a rubbish tip. Rather than leave them, he scavenged them.” Ms Scott, now an archivist in Adelaide, has put them on photo-sharing website Flickr. “Do they sit at the bottom of my cupboard doing nothing or do I get them out there?” Ms Scott said.

“The men in these photos are largely unidentified but there must be many hundreds of their children and grandchildren in New Zealand who would like a wartime photo of their father or grandfather.”

Among the pictures is a little-known shot of a young Sir Edmund Hillary, who was then a navigator, helping to launch a small boat named the “Jolly Roger”. “They were trying to keep themselves occupied,” Ms Scott said.

Michael Davies served as a flight engineer with RNZAF 6 Squadron the “flying boat” squadron and was one of the hundreds of men who posed on the wings of the Catalina. The photo now hangs above his bed in his Taradale home. His experience in the Solomon Islands led to a lifelong love of “Dumbos”. He is one of the owners of the only Catalina in New Zealand.

In the third of a series of articles marking the outbreak of World War II 70 years ago, the BBC Russian Service’s Andrei Ostalski analyses media coverage of the events that led to conflict.

On 21 August 1939 the Soviet government newspaper Izvestiya published a short article entitled On Soviet-German Relations in its middle pages, between pieces on the development of Soviet agriculture and the legal system.

Just a few lines in length, it was to have the effect of an exploding bomb on a global scale.

“Following completion of the Soviet-German trade and credit agreement, there has arisen the question of improving political links between Germany and the USSR,” said the article.

“The exchange of opinion on this subject that has taken place, has established the desire on both sides to reduce the tensions affecting political links, in order to remove the threat of war and to sign a non-aggression treaty. “In connection with this, German Foreign Minister von Ribbentrop will arrive in Moscow within the next few days to take part in the corresponding talks.”

Curious content

The style of the piece was strange: the throwing together of a myriad of issues into a few sentences; the repetition of such words as “relations”, “political” and “tension”. There were also grammatical errors in the Russian text, showing the article had been written in great haste – probably dictated by someone whom no one dared correct.

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A 1938 Mercedes Benz hidden in a basement under a rose garden during and after World War II will be the star attraction at the Orrin B. Hayes Fun Concours event Saturday.

The restored, one-of-a-kind 540K Sport Tourer is owned by Bill and Barbara Parfet, of Kalamazoo, and displayed at the Gilmore Car Museum in Hickory Corners. It is valued at $3.5 million.

The car will be loaned to the Hayes car dealership for the event, which will feature members of the Western Michigan Section of the Mercedes Benz Club of America displaying their vehicles, made from the 1950s through 1970s. The event also will include the new, highly publicized 2010 E Class Mercedes Benz models.

The Parfets’ 1938 Mercedes Benz has a unique history, said Jay Follis, marketing director for the Gilmore Car Museum.

Only two of its kind were built, and only one survives, Follis said. It was purchased new by a Dresden, Germany, man who built a secret area in his walkout basement and hid the car there during World War II, when he feared the Russians would seize the car.

“He rigged up his basement to fit the car and then bricked it up so that anyone going into the basement couldn’t see it” Follis said. “Then he planted a rose garden over the top to hide it.”

When the Berlin Wall came down in the early 1990s, the man brought the car out and sold it. It was restored by a Canadian company and purchased by the Parfets, who since 2005 have displayed it at the Gilmore Car Museum…

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War of the poison dart

How Britain planned to rain death on the Nazis with sewing machine needles

The concept sounds almost medieval in its crude simplicity.

A war strategy to shower enemy troops with tens of thousands of poisoned darts made from sewing machine needles that could bring death in minutes.

Incredibly, it was a plan considered by Britain at the height of the Second World War.

Details, revealed today in secret documents released by the National Archives, outline the gruesome physical effects of such an attack on Nazi troops.

The papers also show how the Government tried to rope the Singer Sewing Machine Company into supplying the needles.

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Executive produced by Steven Spielberg and from the creators of “Band of Brothers”, The Pacific is a a 10-part HBO mini-series which tells the intertwined stories of three Marines, Robert Leckie (played by James Badge Dale), Eugene Sledge (Joe Mazzello) and John Basilone (Jon Seda), during America’s battle with the Japanese in the Pacific during World War II. You might remember that we posted a promo trailer for the series back in March.

Produced on a reported budget of more $200 million (some have reported $250 million), and shot on location in Australia, the series follows (from an early press release) “The extraordinary experiences of these men and their fellow Marines take them from the first clash with the Japanese in the haunted jungles of Guadalcanal, through the impenetrable rain forests of Cape Gloucester, across the blasted coral strongholds of Peleliu, up the black sand terraces of Iwo Jima, through the killing fields of Okinawa, to the triumphant, yet uneasy, return home after V-J Day.”…

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Beth Guyver never knew her father. For most of her life, the London resident believed he was a British pilot, killed during World War II. She thought he had died just before her birth in 1945.

The truth came out at a family Christmas dinner in 1990. Her mother looked across the table at one of Guyver’s sons, then 18, and made a startling observation: He looked just like an American GI she had known in 1944 . . . just like Guyver’s father.

The revelation changed Guyver’s life.

For nearly two decades since then, she has been searching for her father, David Greene, a Pennsylvania man who was stationed at an Army Air Corps base in Chelveston, Northamptonshire, in the fall of 1944.

She has spent thousands of British pounds, filled up nine two-drawer filing cabinets with correspondence, and traveled to the United States, even knocking on doors in Philadelphia as she tried to find him…

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When Stanislaw “Stanley” Pasternak got a phone call from the American Red Cross telling him they had located his mother’s family, missing in the Ukraine since the end of World War II, he thought it was a scam.

But Pasternak took the woman’s name, hung up, and called information to get the Red Cross’ telephone number in New Jersey and then called her back.

After confirming that the call legitimate, Pasternak said, his thoughts turned to his mother, Eugenia Kawczak, now 86, who had lived the last 64 years believing her brothers and sisters, separated by the Nazis, had all died during the war.

“Everyone has been so excited about this thing,” said Pasternak, who lives in Wolfeboro.

His mother, who lives in Salem, N.J., is scheduled to fly today with her stepdaughter Nadija to Germany and then to the Ukraine to meet her long-lost siblings…

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On the Fourth of July weekend of 1957, Darrell Robertson was on a train from Fort Lewis, Wash., to southern Nevada. He was one of hundreds of young men with orders in hand to take part in a training exercise that they were told was crucial to the fight against communism.

The native of Lamar was headed deep into the burnt landscape of the Mojave Desert, to a place called Camp Desert Rock. There, between 1945 and 1958, the U.S. military conducted 106 atmospheric nuclear tests.

At the time, Robertson said, military brass believed a nuclear confrontation with the Soviets was likely. They were intent on developing a group of troops hardened by repeated exposure to radiation. They thought exposure to radiation was like sunning on the beach: First you burn, then you tan.

“Today, you think, ‘How would you ever harden troops to that?’ ” Robertson said in an interview this week at the Tribune. “It’s not something that you can become accustomed to or environmentally be exposed to and continue to go on. That’s just not a fact. But see, they didn’t know that then.”

On one of his first days in the tent city, Robertson was roused at 4 a.m. — the time of least wind and highest humidity in the desert — and driven to a lookout spot known as Newsman’s Knob to observe his first-ever “shot.”

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Danger lurks for dogs in the most unexpected places. According to an Internet article published by the German public broadcasting system WDR, a dog dug up a live American hand grenade from World War II Sunday, June 7, 2009. The pup was taking a walk with its owner, a 40-year-old woman, in the German town of Erkrath, 5 miles east of Düsseldorf, sniffing and playing at a riverbank. He proudly presented a found treasure to his mom, letting go of it when asked.

The owner, recognizing her dog’s trove as a rusty grenade, called the police and waited until the police arrived. A bomb disposal unit, assisting at the scene, evaluated the grenade as still in working condition and very dangerous.

Explosive devices from World War II are still buried all over Germany, and at times, their removal or detonation process even requires evacuation of the surrounding areas. Usually, people discover the grenades and bombs by chance. A dog appropriating a live hand grenade he found while exploring his neighborhood shows the vulnerability of pets and their need for careful supervision….

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The Tokyo High Court on Thursday dismissed a suit filed by victims from China’s Hainan Province seeking damages and apologies from the Japanese government for forcing them to be “comfort women” for the Japanese army during World War II.

Presiding Judge Watanabe Hitoshi gave the ruling that the individual Chinese has no right to demand compensation from Japan as the right was abandoned under the 1972 Japan-China Joint Communique, in which Beijing “renounced its war reparation from Japan.” The court, however, recognized that the plaintiffs were abducted, confined and raped by Japanese soldiers and have been suffering from post-traumatic stress disorder due to the Japanese soldiers’ brutal behaviors.

Indignant about the adjudication, the plaintiffs pledged to appeal to the Japanese Supreme Court and vowed to contend for their rightful demand till the last breath.

The plaintiffs filed the suit with the Tokyo District Court in July 2001, demanding that the Japanese government apologize for its wartime atrocities, rehabilitate their reputation and give 23 million yen (235,000 U.S. dollars) each in compensation. The court turned down their suit on August 30, 2006…

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