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The USS North Carolina battleship, now decommissioned and resting across the Cape Fear River from downtown Wilmington, participated in every major naval offensive in the Pacific during World War II. It carried out nine shore bombardments, sank an enemy troopship, destroyed at least 24 enemy aircraft and assisted in shooting down many more. It then survived the scrap yard to become North Carolina’s official World War II memorial.

But when the Battleship Commission announced in 2001 that much-needed refurbishment to the 73-year-old vessel would require a trip up the East Coast to Norfolk, Va., or down to Charleston, S.C., many prepared to cross their fingers. No one knew if the old war horse could survive one more trip.

Now, it doesn’t have to.

During a press conference on the ship’s fantail Thursday, Capt. Terry Bragg, executive director of the North Carolina Battleship Memorial, announced that he and the Battleship Commission voted May 31 to have the refurbishment done where it sits by using a cofferdam.

A cofferdam is a series of walls made of sheet piling, like that along the Riverwalk in downtown Wilmington. The wall is driven into the riverbed surrounding the ship, enabling water inside this watertight “room” to be pumped out, exposing the ship’s hull.

“Our world is changing here on the battleship,” said Bragg…

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Remember Pearl Harbor — Keep America Alert!

(Now deceased) America’s oldest living Medal of Honor recipient, living his 101st year is former enlisted Chief Petty Officer, Aviation Chief Ordnanceman (ACOM), later wartime commissioned Lieutenant John W. Finn, U. S. Navy (Ret.). He is also the last surviving Medal of Honor, “The Day of Infamy”, Japanese Attack on the Hawaiian Islands, Naval Air Station, Kaneohe Bay, Oahu, Territory of Hawaii, 7 December 1941.

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An Australian trekker said he has discovered the site of a significant World War II battle in the jungles of Papua New Guinea, complete with the remains of Japanese soldiers right where they fell almost 70 years ago.

Former army Capt. Brian Freeman, an expert on the Kokoda Trail – a 60-mile trek through rugged mountainous country and rainforest of the island – said Monday he was led to the Eora Creek battle site where he found the remains of the soldiers.

The site about half a mile from the village of Eora Creek was believed to be the location of the last major battle that was pivotal in Australia’s campaign against the Japanese in Papau New Guinea.

Although the site was known to local villages, jungles reclaimed it after the battle of Eora Creek. Although locals hunted on the plateau surrounding the site, they avoided the 600-square-meter battle ground because of a belief that spirits of the dead were still present in the “lost battlefield.”…

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Navy Lt. John W. Finn, who received the Medal of Honor for mounting a daring counterattack on Japanese airplanes from an improvised machine gun post during the raid on Pearl Harbor, died May 27 at a veterans home in Chula Vista, Calif. No cause of death was reported.

At 100, he was the oldest surviving recipient of the nation’s highest honor for valor and was among the first to receive the award during World War II.

On the morning of Dec. 7, 1941, then-Chief Petty Officer Finn was in charge of aviation ordnance and munitions at the Kaneohe Bay air station 15 miles from Pearl Harbor and Battleship Row.

He was in bed with his wife, Alice, that Sunday when, just before 8 a.m., he heard the rumble of low-flying aircraft and sporadic machine gun fire coming from the hangar a mile away.

Amid the confusion, he threw on a pair of dungarees and his chief hat, and started driving as calmly as possible to the nearby hangar, maintaining the base’s 20-mph speed limit…

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The two submarines were among the most advanced of their time, but neither saw action in WWII. The U.S. captured the subs at war’s end and sank them off Oahu after gleaning their scientific secrets.

U.S. researchers said Thursday that they have located the remains of two high-tech Japanese submarines that were scuttled by the U.S. Navy off Hawaii in 1946 to prevent the technology from falling into the hands of the Soviet Union at the beginning of the Cold War.

One of the craft was the largest non-nuclear sub ever built and had the ability to circle the globe 1 1/2 times without refueling. Called the I-14, the behemoth was 400 feet long and 40 feet high and carried a crew of 144. It was designed to launch two folding-wing bombers on kamikaze missions against U.S. cities such as New York and Washington, D.C., although changes in tactics, and the end of the war, prevented such attacks.

The second, which also never entered the war, was an attack submarine called the I-201 whose design foreshadowed the sleek submarines of today. It was thought to be more than twice as fast as any U.S. subs used in the war.

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Robert Stanley White hasn’t erased the horrific memories of April Fools Day 1945. The 84-year-old Navy picket veteran calls it the First Day of the Kamikazes.

That day, the U.S. began fighting for pivotal Okinawa, near the Japanese mainland. That day, the first of 5,000 suicide pilots reserved to fend off the mainland invasion began their strikes. Historically, the last day of the kamikazes should be 19 weeks later on Victory in Japan Day, or VJ Day. Depending on which side of the International Date Line you stood, VJ Day was 64 years ago on Aug. 14 or Aug. 15.

But for the U.S. radar picket destroyers, the suicide planes didn’t necessarily end with Emperor Hirohito’s famous radio surrender. Bob White knows that firsthand because his picket shot down two kamikazes on Aug. 14, an hour after the Japanese peace plane flew over on its way to the Philippines to sign a cease fire with U.S. Gen. Douglas MacArthur.

White has an overload of World War II anecdotes of suicide misses and “kamikaze kills” by his beloved pickets. All those who were aboard these Navy destroyers have fascinating stories, and that’s what White wants Americans to remember on this VJ Day anniversary.

“This is not my story but a story about thousands on the pickets who have received little credit for their role in ending the war,” said White, who married Biloxian Irma Lund and is now retired on the Coast.

“In Okinawa, 80 percent of the pickets were damaged or sunk, and 5,000 sailors dead and another 4,000 injured.

“There were 4 1/2 months of solid terror every day, 24 hours a day, seven days a week, no matter if we were at sea or in harbor. We were in constant attack mode. We never slept. We were afraid suiciders would get us.” He also recalls the wartime camaraderie and wants to swap stories. But White has found no local veterans of Okinawa pickets, the “3/8-inch steel tin cans” vital to the last pitched battle of the war.

White is a plank owner of one of those pickets, the USS Brown DD-546. That title means he served on the Brown from its commissioning in July 1943 to war’s end, by which time the Brown had received 13 battle stars. The small destroyer claimed 27 kamikaze kills, a Japanese cruiser and two destroyers and her crew received Navy and presidential unit citations…

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The devastating explosion on August 6 1945, which claimed 140,000 lives and flattened the Japanese city, marked a turning point in the Second World War and the dawn of the nuclear age.

Named ‘Little Boy’, the 8,900lb bomb dropped by U.S. B-29 bomber the Enola Gay vaporised buildings as temperatures reached 6000C (10,832F) for one tenth of a second. Now a roof tile from the Sairenji Temple, which was handed to a British tourist by the chief priest, is to go under the hammer along with other macabre items next month in Lincolnshire.

Other lots include a signed picture of a crippled man with an injured back caused by the huge explosion and a signed parchment from Sairenji Temple’s Rev. S. T. Katsaki.

The lot also features a tourist map and eight postcards showing the devastated city and the Japanese surrender on the USS Missouri in Tokyo bay in September 1945. Retired communications officer John Sydney Watts, 81, picked up the items seven years after the blast while visiting Hiroshima in 1952…

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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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Test pile drivings will begin later this month at the USS Arizona Memorial Visitor Center site at Pearl Harbor as work begins on a $58 million program to rebuild the tourist destination’s facilities.

Watts Constructors LLC was awarded a $32.6 million contract in September as part of the first phase, which includes a new 17,750-square-foot visitor center. Healy Tibbitts Builders Inc. has been hired as the project’s pile-driving subcontractor. The existing visitor center will remain open during construction.

Phase 2, which will begin in early 2010, includes demolition of the existing visitor center and construction of new exhibit pavilions. Naval Facilities Engineering Command Hawaii is administering the construction. The estimated completion date for this project is September 2010, with a formal opening planned for Dec. 7, 2010.

The new complex will house state-of-the-art exhibits and accommodate 1.5 million people, 362 days a year. It will include a ticket office, concession, administrative and support areas, exhibit space, theaters and restrooms, plus site improvements such as crosswalks and walkways, security walls, fencing, landscaping and vehicle and bus parking…

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A 93-year-old Japanese man has become the first person certified as a survivor of both U.S. atomic bombings at the end of World War II, officials said Tuesday.

Tsutomu Yamaguchi had already been a certified “hibakusha,” or radiation survivor, of the Aug. 9, 1945, atomic bombing in Nagasaki, but has now been confirmed as surviving the attack on Hiroshima three days earlier as well, city officials said.

Yamaguchi was in Hiroshima on a business trip on Aug. 6, 1945, when a U.S. B-29 dropped an atomic bomb on the city. He suffered serious burns to his upper body and spent the night in the city. He then returned to his hometown of Nagasaki just in time for the second attack, city officials said.

“As far as we know, he is the first one to be officially recognized as a survivor of atomic bombings in both Hiroshima and Nagasaki,” Nagasaki city official Toshiro Miyamoto said. “It’s such an unfortunate case, but it is possible that there are more people like him.”

Certification qualifies survivors for government compensation — including monthly allowances, free medical checkups and funeral costs — but Yamaguchi’s compensation will not increase, Miyamoto said.

Japan is the only country to have suffered atomic bomb attacks. About 140,000 people were killed in Hiroshima and 70,000 in Nagasaki…

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Over the nearly six decades since the atomic bombing of Hiroshima, a substantial majority of Americans has continued to defend the action. The heated controversies surrounding the opening in 1995 and 2003 of bomb-related exhibits at the National Air and Space Museum of the U.S. government’s Smithsonian Institution help to clarify the bases for this stubborn defense. During the Smithsonian disputes, peace groups and historians provided a spirited and informed critique of the necessity for the Hiroshima bombing and highlighting its human costs. Nevertheless, more hawkish forces, appealing to narrow definitions of patriotism, easily won the battle for public opinion.

In the early 1990s, with the approach of the fiftieth anniversary of the Hiroshima bombing, the curators at the Smithsonian, a complex of eighteen museums in and around the nation’s capital, proposed to display the fuselage of the Enola Gay, the giant B-29 bomber that had dropped the atomic bomb on Hiroshima. The plane was the projected centerpiece for an exhibit that would inspire public reflection on the development and use of nuclear weapons, as well as on the dawn and denouement of the nuclear era. A preliminary script, drawn up by the curators, was approved by an advisory panel of prominent historians.
But when the museum submitted the script to interested citizens’ groups, controversy erupted. The American Legion, the Retired Officers Association, and other veterans’ organizations lashed out at an exhibit displaying pictures of dead Japanese civilians and raising questions about the postwar arms race rather than celebrating the quintessential American triumph. In the words of General Paul Tibbets, who piloted the Enola Gay, the planned exhibit was “a damn big insult.” He and other veterans demanded that the bomber be displayed “proudly and patriotically” (Hogan 1996, 205; Tibbets website). They were joined by the Air Force Association–a military lobbying group focusing on the glories of American air power–in denouncing the planned exhibit as “anti-American” (Engelhardt and Linenthal 1996, 2)…

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Iwabuchi Nobuteru has visited New Guinea more than 200 times over the past 40 years — not to relax on a tropical beach but to look for human remains.

The divided East Indies island — the west half Irian, Indonesia, and the east half Papua New Guinea — saw heavy fighting between Japanese and Allied forces during World War II. Thousands of soldiers died there, and Iwabuchi’s father, Keiji, was one of them.His father was drafted in 1943 and sent to the northern coast of the island in September 1944. During an air raid later that year, he died at age 34. The government later sent his family just a small, empty wooden box.

“The spirit of my father has not been consoled yet,” said Iwabuchi, 65, who founded the nonprofit organization Pacific War History Museum in Ohshu, Iwate Prefecture, in 1993. It displays war-related items and documents, studies war sites on the island and lobbies the government to collect the remains of the war dead.

The war ended 61 years ago, and Iwabuchi is not the only one seeking the return of relatives’ remains. It is estimated that 1.16 million Japanese soldiers and civilians — about 48 percent of the 2.4 million war dead overseas — remain where they fell, including in the Philippines, New Guinea and Siberia…

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Later this month, New Boston resident Tommie Foster and sisters Linda and Sherry will journey thousands of miles to visit an island that appears to be from another planet.

But it won’t be the scenery that attracts them.

Instead, the black sand-covered volcanic island is something Foster and her sisters have a 64-year connection to, thanks to their dad and about 70,000 other Marines who struggled against interlocking enemy machine gun fire to secure the rocky, hilly, barren island known as Iwo Jima during World War II…

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After first lifting a curse and using sonar to sweep for explosive booby traps, villagers from East Nusa Tenggara Province have started excavating a cave they believe contains Japanese treasure buried during World War II.

Rambu Kristina, from Mbataka Ridu village in East Sumba district, was the first person to report that Japanese forces stationed on Sumba Island during the occupation may have buried treasure before their departure.

With the Japanese invading army’s defeat imminent, she said, based on testimony from her late father, soldiers ordered 50 locals to bury gold and personal belongings in a cave near the village.

Her father, Umbu Nai Kadumbu, had been among them, Rambu told the state-run news agency Antara.

To keep the secret safe, the soldiers then proceeded to massacre all the villagers except for two people, including Umbu, who had promised that he would not reveal the location, she said.

As a further means of safeguarding the treasure, the Japanese troops planted booby traps and cursed the cave, she said.

Rambu, as quoted by Antara, said that her father summoned the strength to violate the curse in 1982 when he took some of the gold, but it was a fatal mistake.

Umbu quickly fell ill and died — though not before passing on his secret to Rambu, she said.

In spite of the curse, she divulged her secret when she met the former district head of East Sumba, Lukas Kaborang.

Lukas supported her efforts to locate the treasure, pledging to supply police from the local bomb squad unit to sweep for booby traps…

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When Howard Whittaker stepped onto a beach of volcanic ash on the Japanese island of Iwo Jima during World War II, the first thing he saw was a dead U.S. Marine.

It was 1945 amidst bloody fighting in the Battle of Iwo Jima.

“There were bodies scattered all over — not just hit with bullets, but blown to pieces,” said Whittaker, a Marine during the war. “It was hell on earth was what it was.”

But Whittaker not only witnessed the brutality of the war but also one of its most historic moments — the raising of an American flag atop Mount Suribachi, which at 556 feet is the highest point on Iwo Jima.

Today marks the 64th anniversary of that famous flag raising, and there were actually two that day.

The first, a smaller flag, was raised at the summit by mid morning after fierce fighting by the Marines.

Deemed too small to be seen at a distance, however, it was replaced by a second, larger flag raised soon thereafter. It was this second flag raising — by five Marines and one Navy Corpsman — that was immortalized in a Pulitzer Prize-winning photograph by Associated Press photographer Joe Rosenthal.

Approximately one-third of all Marines killed in action during World War II were killed on Iwo Jima, a volcanic island about 650 miles south of Tokyo. More than 100,000 Americans fought there, and 6,821 died as a result — 5,931 of them Marines. More than 19,000 Marines and soldiers were wounded.

The flags were raised after the Marines captured Mount Suribachi on Feb. 23, 1945. It would take another month of battle for them to secure the island from the Japanese.

Whittaker, 84, who recently moved from Windsor Locks to Farmington, was an engineer in the 4th Pioneer Battalion of the 4th Marine Division during World War II. He enlisted out of Hartford in 1942 — just a day after turning 18…

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