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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After furious protests, Coussay-les-Bois, in the rolling green farmland of Poitou, has decided it is too early to allow a German man to put up a memorial to his father and 16 other Wehrmacht prisoners who were executed there in September 1944.

The quarrel testifies to lingering bitterness over the Nazi occupation in a part of France that suffered multiple atrocities, and to a reluctance to touch the heroic image of the young insurgents who fought them.

“If they put a plaque there, it will be smashed within a day,” said Jean Herault, who was a 16-year-old fighter in the bloody summer of 1944. Mr Herault, a retired blacksmith, recalled the day in June that year when the Germans took 120 villagers to roadside ditches and prepared to shoot them in reprisal for an attack from the Maquis underground movement.

They were spared after the intervention of a priest, but Mr Herault was forced to watch later that evening as three of his young comrades were executed. One was 17.

They are commemorated at a memorial to the French Forces of the Interior (FFI) but no-one wants to be reminded of the night of September 9 when the German prisoners were machine-gunned against the school wall.

Officially, the massacre never happened. It figures in no histories, only in local memory. It came to light because of the dogged effort by Rudolph Greuel, 67, to find out what happened to his father, a sergeant-major with a Wehrmacht construction battalion. Mr Greuel, a former editor of the Kolnische Rundschau newspaper, unearthed the truth with the help of a German survivor and a French journalist.

Andreas Greuel was an unusually old 47 when he fled the coastal defences at St Malo, riding bicycles and horses ahead of the advancing Allies. A French SAS unit parachuted in from Britain captured his group as it crossed Poitou, still behind German lines.

The Maquis at Coussay put the men to work in the fields for a few days before tying them up and taking them to the village to be shot. Local women persuaded “Lieutenant Pierre”, the maquisard in charge, to spare a few of them. The 17 bodies were dumped in unmarked graves and in 1961 were reburied in a German cemetery at Mont Saint Michel. In 2003 the school wall which bore the impacts from the firing squad was demolished…

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The riddle began 10 years ago, when Ralf Peters stumbled across an old box full of photographs in a cabinet at the Central Institute of Art History in Munich. Peters, an art history Ph.D., had just begun a new job at the institute and was trying to get an idea as to what the archive might contain. Little did he know that the box he found during his first days on the job would preoccupy him and his colleagues for years to come.

Inside the box were 600 undated black-and-white images. They were disorganized and appeared on no inventory lists. “Nobody knew what they were doing inside the cabinet,” Peters recalls. “They weren’t in good condition.”

The images were of burned out residences, destroyed monuments and crumbled palaces, all taken in Italy during World War II. Peters was initially flummoxed as to the photos’ provenance: Who took the pictures? When exactly? And, most importantly, to what end? Peters spent years searching for the answers to these questions, and ultimately they were to provide a unique look at Nazi war propaganda as the Allies inexorably pushed the Germans out of Italy in 1943 and 1944…

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They are being displayed to the public for the first time in Mont Valérien, a 19th century fort outside Paris where the Nazis executed more than 1,000 resistance fighters and hostages during the Second World War – the largest number in one site in France.

The Nazis arrested Resistance members and “hostages” – mainly Communists or Jews arrested in reprisal for the death of German soldiers – and sentenced them to death in military tribunals. The convicted were then driven by military lorries to the isolated fort, west of Paris. They were kept in a chapel, and some of their scrawled final messages on the walls with their name, date of death and “Vive la France” have just been restored…

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The munitions turned up last week at the Western Heritage Museum in Hobbs.

State police technicians were called for an initial evaluation, then officials alerted the Air Force and Army military explosives experts.

Escorted by New Mexico State Police, the joint Air Force-Army team took the ordnance 125 miles to the bombing range near Cannon Air Force Base on Sunday…

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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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Yesterday was June 6th, the 66th anniversary of the successful 1944 Allied invasion of France. Several operations were combined to carry out the largest amphibious invasion in history – over 160,000 troops landed on June 6th, assisted by over 5,000 ships, aerial bombardment, gliders and paratroopers. Thousands of soldiers lost their lives on those beaches on that day – many thousands more would follow as the invasion succeeded and troops began to push German forces eastward, eventually leading to the Allied victory in 1945. Collected here are some photographs of the preparation, execution and immediate aftermath of the 1944 D-Day invasion of Normandy, and a few images from 2010…

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At least 3.5 tons of bones were extracted from the site on the outskirts of the Pacific Ocean port of Vladivostok after it was discovered by workmen building a road, City Hall said in a statement.

Millions of Soviet citizens were executed or died in labor camps during Stalin’s rule from the 1920s until his death in 1953, but discoveries of mass graves became less frequent after a surge in finds that followed the 1991 Soviet collapse.

Experts were checking the hypothesis that the bodies were victims of Stalin’s purges.

“Practically all of the skulls have bullet wounds,” said Yaroslav Livanksy, the head of a group of volunteers who helped to excavate the site.

He said money and clothes from the 1930s had been found at the site. A crushed child’s skull was discovered close to a bead bracelet and a small slipper.

Irina Fliege, a senior researcher with human rights group Memorial, which collects information about Stalin-era killings, said she had no doubt that the victims were shot by Stalinist forces.

She said far more bodies were likely to be found as adjacent sites are studied.

“This happens all over the country, it’s impossible to say how often,” Felige said. “All we can do is put up monuments to remember the dead.”…

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Police said they found swastikas and other graffiti including “SS” and an obscene drawing in pink paint on a dozen graves of British soldiers at the northern cemetery of Loos-en-Gohelle, the site of a major World War I battle.

The Commonwealth War Graves Commission sent a special team to clean the graves.

Sarkozy expressed “indignation and consternation” in a letter to the queen, branding the desecrations “all the more revolting” since they came a week before he visits London for a commemoration of French resistance during World War II.

“I condemn with the greatest firmness this horrible act and ask you to pass on my feelings of sympathy and solidarity, and those of the French people, to the families concerned and to all of the British people,” Sarkozy wrote.

Numerous desecrations of Jewish, Muslim and German graves have been reported in France in recent years.

However officials said the attack on the British graves did not seem to have been politically motivated.

“I think it is a marginal act, a bit of idiocy,” said the mayor of Loos, Jean-Francois Caron. “There are a few inscriptions about all kinds of different things.”…

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Part of Westminister Bridge Road, between Morley Street and Gerridge Street, was closed following the discovery…

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