That month began with a Chinese balloon — the U.S. said it was loaded with spy equipment; Beijing claimed it was just a weather balloon blown off course — drifting across much of the contiguous United States and igniting a furor. That was before it was blowed up real good — the technical terminology — by an F-22 off the coast of South Carolina.

But February’s bizarre occurrences didn’t stop there. U.S. pilots soon shot down three more mystery objects over Alaska, Canada’s Yukon territory and Lake Huron in as many days.

None of those subsequent objects were ever recovered, with the official line indicating they were probably hobbyist or research balloons.

But one grainy image — it’s always a grainy image, isn’t it? — of the object shot down over the Yukon has now emerged, and it’s giving significant “I want to believe” vibes.

An image of the unidentified object shot down over Canada's Yukon territory in Feb. 2023 has been released through a freedom of information request. Thanks to researcher @Steve_uap2020 for sharing this! See "UAP 23" & read my latest @CTVNews 👉https://t.co/lx7G5AYceB #FOIA 🍁❓🔍

— Daniel Otis (@dsotis) September 24, 2024

Canada’s CTV News obtained a report from their nation’s Department of National Defence on the Feb. 11, 2023 Yukon incident, the contents of which include a brigadier general’s description of the unknown object as “cylindrical,” with a metallic top quarter and the rest of it white. It also mentions a package attached to the object by a 20-foot wire.

The report contains an unclassified image of the object, which CTV says “appears to be a photocopy of an email printout.”

Canada’s military originally planned to release the image, but a public affairs official nixed the idea to avoid stirring up more questions. But now that the image has (belatedly) arrived in the public sphere, it’s got aviation — and UFO — enthusiasts chattering.

Due to the poor resolution, it remains difficult to tell exactly what the object is. CTV noted that they’ve requested a higher resolution version. Still, the object’s circular shape, containing a gap on the left side, has sparked speculation.

In the interest of indulging outlandish hypotheses, here are a few of our in-house theories about the true identity of the Yukon object, accompanied by a validity rating system of one spy balloon (least likely) to five spy balloons (most likely).

It’s the droid control ship from ‘Star Wars: The Phantom Menace’

The Yukon object might be too small for this to be the case, but the shape looks identical to something Anakin Skywalker would love to blow up from the inside.

Remember, NORAD: Try spinning, that’s a good trick.

4/5 spy balloons

It’s the Millennium Falcon

OK, this one is a stretch, but we needed to include something from a non-Jar Jar “Star Wars” film.

The image obviously doesn’t have the side-mounted cockpit Han and Chewie used to barnstorm around the galaxy, but one can detect hints of the forward mandibles that gave their YT-1300 light freighter its iconic silhouette. If you squint hard, maybe you can see it?

1/5 spy balloons

It’s a UFO

UFO researcher and government transparency activist John Greenewald, who runs the Black Vault database, noted the similarities between the shape of the Yukon object and the subject of a video purportedly taken in Busan, South Korea, in 2012.

“The object in the [Busan] UFO video has a striking resemblance to the official photo release of the unknown object (”balloon”?) shot down over the Yukon in 2023,” Greenewald tweeted. “Coincidence? Connection? … I’m posting without endorsement, but rather, for discussion.”

3/5 spy balloons

It’s a frakking Cylon Raider!

Just look at that thing. It’s the spitting image of a Cylon Raider fighter — with its swept-forward wings — from the reimagined “Battlestar Galactica.”

We never knew fighting toasters was one of NORAD’s missions, but after seeing how they handled this one, we feel a lot better. So say we all!

5/5 spy balloons

It’s Peloton, the Roman goddess of wealthy stationary cyclists (not really)

Just look at Peloton’s logo and compare it to the unidentified object in the photo.

Is it really out of the realm of possibility that amid the mass hysteria that was 2020′s pandemic-prompted Peloton-palooza that the interconnected exercise network took tangible, sentient form and bicycled its way out of the hearts of millionaire cardio enthusiasts and into the celestial domain?

“Peloton did not wake up to be mediocre,” Peloton reportedly said.

7/5 spy balloons

It’s Pac-Man

If this is the case, with Pac-Man’s insatiable hunger and apparent new flight capabilities, God help us all.

5/5 spy balloons

The Nike Air Power Legacy Series uniform, featuring a red and black color palette, will be worn for the U.S. Air Force Academy’s Oct. 5 game against rival Navy, according to an Aug. 13 release. The game will be played in Falcon Stadium and broadcast on CBS.

The uniform’s red accents invoke the scarlet berets of Special Tactics Combat Controllers. The top of the helmet showcases the AFSOC’s winged dagger insignia, which represents the “swift and silent mobilization of forces,” according to the release.

The front bumper of the helmet references the Special Tactics Combat Control motto, “First there,” while the back of the helmet honors part of the AFSOC motto, “Any place, Any time, Anywhere.”

A sticker on the back of the helmet honors the AFSOC logo with a lightning bolt, green feet, and a dagger.

The left shoulder is adorned with one of three Air Force Special Tactics badges, and a dagger on the left leg of the uniform symbolizes the Special Operations Command.

The players’ names will be emblazoned across the right chest of the uniform, providing an adequate reference point for opponents to put some respect on one’s name.

(The assembly’s jockstrap is not visible in photos, but we assume it is also most definitely rad.)

Special Tactics Officers are tasked with leading special reconnaissance, strike, and recovery missions, according to the Air Force.

Airmen who become combat controllers are highly specialized, FAA-certified air traffic controllers who are trained in scuba, parachuting, and snowmobiling.

The Air Force Special Operations Command is based at Hurlburt Field, Florida.

The first iteration of the Air Power Legacy Series uniforms were unveiled in 2016.

The Air Force opted to use restraint for the Falcons’ announcement, knowing the threads could speak for themselves.

Instead, the press release used straightforward language and subtle images of Air Force players manning gun turrets and posing moodily in the shadows.

Let the games begin.

Inspiring the World War II series was the tumultuous history of the 100th Bombardment Group of the Eighth Air Force. Three years (1942-1945) of daylight bombing runs by the Eighth’s Flying Fortresses over Nazi Germany unleashed 697,000 tons of bombs.

But the effort to pry the claws of the Third Reich from Europe was met with deadly resistance, with casualty totals that, by war’s end, would exceed 115,000 personnel from the U.S. Army Air Force.

Of that total, over 47,000 were from the Eighth.

Despite devastating odds, men from the “Mighty Eighth” again and again climbed into B-17 cockpits and bombardier enclosures and took to the sky. Many of those missions provided inspiration for the series’ most harrowing scenes.

For those who enjoyed the series — and want more of the Flying Fortress — a few classic films (and one recent documentary) can help satisfy any B-17 cravings.

The Memphis Belle: A Story of a Flying Fortress (1944)

Director William Wyler left Hollywood to document the war for the U.S. and received permission to film an account of a B-17 crew on a mission over Germany. He ended up flying five missions with pilot Robert Morgan of the 91st Bombardment Group, two of them in Morgan’s regular plane, Memphis Belle.

Wyler used his footage to create a composite 25th mission for Morgan and the crew of the aircraft. (While not the first bomber to complete 25 missions, Memphis Belle was the first to return to America after having done so and earned much public attention as a result.)

Released on April 15, 1944, the New York Times called the film “a perfect example of what can be properly done by competent film reporters to visualize the war for people back home.” The real Memphis Belle is on display at the National Museum of the U.S. Air Force in Dayton, Ohio.

Cold Blue (2018)

A modern and breathtaking addition to this list — albeit with a historical tie-in — director Erik Nelson’s project “The Cold Blue” resurrected and restored footage from Wyler’s “Memphis Belle,” while adding previously lost footage, new recordings and interviews with veterans who lived through the experience.

“We screened the film to the Eighth Air Force reunion in Dayton [in 2018], and I wanted them to see that their story is still being told, and I want to tell the story in a way that this really would impact young 20-year-olds today,” Nelson told Military Times in 2019.

“These guys were 19, 20, and 21, and they’re flying B-17s on these ridiculously complicated, hazardous missions. The idea that they’d be in these planes for 10 hours, round-trip, in temperatures equaling Mount Everest, with this sort of crude technology to drop bombs, and they’d head back and wake up and do it all over again ... people just can’t imagine now.”

Air Force (1943)

While B-17s are known primarily for their role in the European Theater, they flew in the Pacific as well.

Howard Hawks’ “Air Force” tells the story of one such Flying Fortress known as Mary Ann. After flying into the attack on Pearl Harbor, the aircraft and its crew proceed to Wake Island and then on to the Philippines to take action against the Japanese.

The production used real B-17B, C and D models, supplemented by model work when necessary. The film stars John Ridgely, Gig Young, Arthur Kennedy, Charles Drake, Harry Carey, George Tobias and John Garfield.

Memphis Belle (1990)

The fictionalized film based on Wyler’s picture — and co-produced by his daughter — also tells the story of the titular B-17′s 25th mission. However, it suffers from a willingness to embrace cliché as the crew faces a familiar litany of threats — bandits, flak, cloud cover, engine loss.

The film is directed by Michael Caton-Jones and stars Matthew Modine, Eric Stoltz, Tate Donovan, D.B. Sweeney, Billy Zane, Sean Astin, Harry Connick Jr., John Lithgow and David Strathairn.

Command Decision (1948)

Where “Masters of the Air” focuses on what B-17 crews endured during the war, “Command Decision” looks at the commanders who sent them on missions in what Brig. Gen. “Casey” Dennis — played by Clark Gable, who actually flew some missions over Europe — calls “the weirdest kind of war on earth.”

“In a few hours from now they’ll be fighting on oxygen five miles above Germany,” he says, watching B-17s and their crews head out on a mission. “Tonight some of them will be dancing at the Savoy. Some of them will still be in Germany.”

The film can’t escape its roots as a Broadway play (adapted from a novel) and remains mostly set-bound. A scene i Dennis has to talk down a B-17 bombardier flying for his wounded pilot suffers from some obvious model work that stands out in comparison to the actual combat footage used elsewhere.

Twelve O’Clock High (1949)

Directed by Henry King and starring Gregory Peck, Hugh Marlowe, Gary Merrill and Dean Jagger, “Twelve O’Clock High” covers some of the same ground as Command Decision — but does it much better.

The focal point is General Frank Savage (Peck), who takes command of the snakebitten 918th Bombardment Group after its previous commander got too close to his men and efficiency suffered. Savage plans to whip the unit into shape, even if it means attracting the crews’ ire. The 918th does improve, but the stresses of command eventually take their toll on Savage.

B-17 fans will especially enjoy a legendary stunt sequence when stunt pilot Paul Mantz performs a belly landing in a real Fortress. The film later inspired a television series.

The War Lover (1962)

Directed by Philip Leacock and starring Steve McQueen, Robert Wagner and Shirley Ann Field, this adaptation of John Hersey’s novel tells the story of a pilot (McQueen) and co-pilot (Wagner) of a Flying Fortress — and the woman (Field) occupying the thoughts of one of them.

The pilot, “Buzz” Rickson, is the title character, a man who treads the “fine line between the hero and the psychopath,” in the words of the squadron doctor. Filmed using three actual B-17s, the film boasts a strong performance by McQueen but is weakened by the romance in which Field’s character is used to deliver the movie’s themes.

“You are on the side of life,” she tells Wagner’s character, subsequently explaining to Buzz, “You can’t make love. … You can only make hate.”

Target for Today (1944)

Also of interest, this wartime documentary provides a detailed nuts-and-bolts look at what it took to plan and fly B-17 missions over Europe.

Cast with real military personnel and filmed largely on location, it offers viewers some key background for the events of “Masters of the Air.”

The House Armed Services Committee called for the Pentagon to add creatine to MREs in a committee report accompanying the NDAA, sweeping legislation that Congress must pass annually to determine defense spending.

The gains-based recommendation will now await a Senate decision in order to become law.

“A broad body of clinical research has shown that creatine can enhance muscle growth, physical performance, strength training, post-exercise recovery, and injury prevention,” the body-broadening recommendation states.

Kyle Turk, director of government affairs for the Natural Products Association, called the supplement’s potential inclusion in MREs “tremendous for American service members.”

“Creatine is one of the most extensively studied ingredients for safely increasing strength and recovery time,” he told Military Times in an email. Turk consulted with the Armed Services Committee to help craft the language for the provision, he said.

Creatine is a naturally occurring compound that can be found in human muscles, as well as the brain, which the body uses for energy, according to The Mayo Clinic. Recent medical science also suggests the supplement allows at least 227 Instagram users per year to modify their handles to respective iterations of “firstname_fit.”

The Defense Department, meanwhile, has recently introduced other sources of nutrition to yield stronger service members. Performance readiness bars brimming with calcium and vitamin D — good for muscles and bones, OK for taste — are currently distributed throughout select military populations, according to the Defense Logistics Agency.

The Department of Defense Dietary Supplement Resource website outlined the benefits of creatine, saying it could have a “positive effect on strength, power, sprint performance, and muscle mass in athletes who engage in resistance training.”

Despite its swoledier-building properties, it may also cause unwanted weight gain in “those focused on endurance training,” the website noted.

That’s the pullup-related hot take from this journalist, who struggles to bang out even half a handful of the things on his designated pull day at the gym.

Not so for Vice Adm. Doug Perry, the head of U.S. 2nd Fleet.

A Navy diver by trade, Perry, 57 (!), demonstrated his pullup prowess during the Navy’s Fleet Week in New York City in late May.

Look at this flag go.

View this post on Instagram

A post shared by Commander, U.S. 2nd Fleet (@us2ndfleet)

That’s 19 pullups by our count, in his summer whites no less, and we’re more than willing to forgive Perry’s semi-struggles on the last few. Calorie-loving civilians like yours truly couldn’t bang out half of those.

For the “0...0...0″ Marines out there, Perry does appear to do a handful before he begins to lock his elbows out.

And sure enough, some pointed this out in the comments.

This three-star feat happened as Perry visited sailors and Marines in Times Square during Fleet Week on May 24, after he stopped by the Warrior Challenge area set up by fellow Navy divers and explosive ordnance disposal technicians.

“When they learned I was a Navy diver, the team in Times Square challenged me to see how many pullups I could do,” Perry said in a statement. “So I jumped up and gave them my best, as I’m committed to giving my best every day to our sailors.”

Perry added that staying in top shape is part of leadership.

“I start every day early with a workout,” he said. “Rain or shine, snow or heat, I hit the pavement past our fleet in Norfolk (Virginia) on the naval station for three to five miles, get in an early bike ride, or lift and stretch at the gym on base.”

He also shouted out the Navy divers and EOD techs, who do bonkers jobs.

“These tough professionals must perform physically demanding duties in a wide range of locations and climates...from the decks of an aircraft carrier to the depths of the oceans,” Perry said.

Will Perry hit the pullup bar again at next year’s Fleet Week? Only time will tell.

And to the fellow Navy leaders out there, from the lead petty officers to the admirals: Send us social media posts of your physical training stud-ness in action. If we get enough responses, we’ll assemble them for a follow-up article.

Email your best to geoffz@militarytimes.com.

Among the hordes moving en masse towards land were the 320th Barrage Balloon Battalion. Of all the units to go ashore that day, the 320th was particularly unique. It was the only unit comprised entirely of African American soldiers.

The men of the 320th were brought ashore during the invasion’s first wave and tasked with providing critical protection to the ships and soldiers below from attacks by enemy aircraft, according to the National Air and Space Museum.

Yet their story, like the contributions of over 8 million personnel of color who fought heroically for the Allied forces during the Second World War, has largely been untold.

National Geographic’s “Erased: WWII’s Heroes of Color,” produced by October Films and Idris Elba’s 22Summers, seeks to change that.

The four-part series “weaves a blend of historical dramatizations with curated archival footage, bridging the past with the present to highlight new perspectives on established histories,” according to the series’ synopsis.

“The series showcases the personal narratives of soldiers through their never-before-aired oral testimonies and journal writings, along with powerful accounts from their descendants — stories passed down the generations.”

Elba, who narrates the series, and director Shianne Brown, spoke to Military Times about the men of the 320th and discussed “the irony that this particular set of stories ... has not been told.”

The grain silos CFT Manbij called home were bustling with people preparing for the day’s mission on a chilly, overcast Wednesday morning on January 16. It was winter in Syria, so everything seemed muddy and damp, devoid of sunshine. Shannon wore her black North Face hiking pants, a down jacket, and a scarf around her neck to block the brisk wind that day — but which could easily be repurposed into a hijab if the situation required it. Most weren’t wearing plate carriers as they were reasonably comfortable in this location, but still packed them in the vehicles — just in case. Shannon didn’t carry a rifle, instead opting for a Glock pistol tucked into her waistband. Scotty carried an H&K 416.

CFT Manbij departed from the silos at approximately 11 a.m. local time. There were two American vehicles in the convoy: Shannon and Jon in the lead vehicle while Clarke drove the other with Scotty and Chief Farmer. Jasmine, two more American Green Berets, and sixteen SDF soldiers following in gun trucks rounded out the rest of the manifest.

Their convoy tried parking at the school as planned, but the situation on the ground dictated a move to their alternate location, outside the Palace of Princes restaurant. After parking their vehicles to deliberately make it difficult for anyone to walk up unnoticed and slip an IED under their trucks, Clarke moved to the restaurant’s top floor and established overwatch for most of the market.

On the sidewalk below, Shannon and Scotty synced watches and reaffirmed the exact time everyone was required to be back.

“All right, Jon, we’ll be back no later than 1100 Zulu. You know what to do if we’re not back by then,” Shannon said, confirming an abbreviated five-point contingency plan commonly used throughout the military.

“Roger, we know the plan. Good luck, guys,” Jon replied.

Clarke watched as the routine patrol departed, with Shannon and Scotty breaking off to move toward their destination. He didn’t know exactly where they were going or who they were meeting, but such was life on a Shannon Kent mission.

Clarke had been to the restaurant on two previous occasions and was comfortable conducting his own low-level source operation by talking to a few visitors in the restaurant. Shannon might be doing the big stuff, but Clarke wanted to pitch in by establishing rapport with locals while maintaining visibility from the second floor. He struck up a conversation with the restaurant owner and got his business card, tucking it away for future use. You never know who you might need, and having friends in the area is better than enemies.

Pulling security during the daytime in a bustling city market is nerve-racking. They were surrounded by two- and three-story buildings all with their own windows and doors that could open at any time. You never know what’s truly going on or who might be watching you from afar. Clarke felt uncomfortable but couldn’t put his finger on what it was. There were more Arabs in this Kurdish-owned store, but that wasn’t necessarily indicative of anything since many properties in Bandar were like that. Clarke was receiving a lot of looks, though. More than usual. Am I being discreet enough? he wondered.

Then he noticed something outside the window. Four or five guys were literally staring him down, not talking. They didn’t seem very friendly, but they weren’t doing anything that could be considered hostile either.

Little did he know, ISIS had started planning an assassination in December 2018. They wanted to use a suicide bomber to hit the American soldiers in Manbij who had been causing so many problems, so they imported operatives from Aleppo who linked up with local contacts in Manbij that were already patrolling the city, looking for a chance to attack. They finally saw an opportunity on the sixteenth of January.

Clarke moved back down to the street so that one of the Green Berets could go inside and use the bathroom. As the Green Beret came back out to relieve Clarke, they saw Shannon and Scotty on their way back to the restaurant along with the rest of the element that had been out on a foot patrol.

They regrouped out front as the vehicles were prepared for movement. Clarke was standing next to his truck, ready to go, talking to one of the Green Berets and an SDF soldier.

At 12:38 local time, just as the team was about to get back in their trucks and drive back to the grain silos, a man approached their position from south of the market. He walked right past Clarke toward the restaurant entrance, where the rest of the group stood. Without warning, he detonated a hidden suicide vest within feet of Shannon, Scotty, and the rest of their group.

ISIS later claimed responsibility.

Clarke felt an incredible force push him back, like a 200-mile-per-hour gust of hot wind hit him. A person, three feet to his front, fell straight back like a stiff plank — his face was immediately devoid of life. The explosion threw Clarke back anywhere from four to twelve feet — he can’t quite remember but knows it was a significant distance. His pants were torn up; his face and hand were covered in second- and third-degree burns. He survived, but his injuries would eventually require multiple surgeries.

The ODA’s junior weapons sergeant and junior engineer sergeant were positioned farther away and were among the few Americans outside the immediate vicinity of the blast. A driver in another vehicle was also protected from the explosion. Everyone else was exposed, standing in the open and very close to where the bomb detonated. Paper flew everywhere. Hot ash covered everything. There was mass confusion in the street. There was blood.

Clarke started scrambling to check bodies in an attempt to identify his teammates, but the first few people he found were Syrian. No one was responsive. For a moment, he couldn’t find any other Americans still alive. Finally, he found a body with the black Patagonia jacket Chief Farmer always wore. But the nature of his wounds made further identification impossible at the scene.

Okay, there could be a follow-on attack, Clarke realized, trying to process what was happening right in front of him. He moved inside a store next to the restaurant because the restaurant itself was completely blown out. The shopkeeper asked him if he was okay and offered him water, but Clarke’s mind was still racing. He told the shopkeeper to look for Daesh and to let him know if anything happened in the next thirty seconds.

Thirty seconds transpired without incident, so he went back outside. Of course, the threat of a follow-on attack wasn’t completely gone, but he could be more confident after taking a tactical pause to let the situation develop, ensuring he didn’t miss anything by rushing through a chaotic scene.

One of the Green Berets was already taking accountability of the survivors and the dead. He was surprised Clarke was alive. They set up a casualty collection point and started working on reestablishing communications.

That’s when something amazing started happening. It seemed like everyone in Manbij rushed toward them, trying to find a way to help. The people of Manbij knew who these Americans were. They were the people who sent their girls back to school, who made the streets safer for their children to play in, the ones who cared enough to shoot when it was time to shoot and hug when it was time to hug. They were the protectors.

And now, the locals wanted to return the favor in their time of need.

The initial rush of people worried Clarke, though. The situation was still chaotic, and losing control seemed like a worst-case scenario. He kept his cool, despite clearly being in shock. He watched as the locals started picking up bodies while pointing out the Americans among them. Unfortunately, the other Americans died in a manner that made identification challenging. Chief Farmer was the only one they could identify with any degree of certainty. How can you know you haven’t left anyone behind if you don’t know who still needs to be accounted for?

One of the Syrians ran up to Clarke.

“There’s a woman underneath this car,” he said.

That’s my vehicle. It must be either Ghadir or Shannon, Clarke thought.

He looked closer. It was Shannon.

Clarke kept moving, now focused on trying to find Ghadir. “Have you seen Ghadir?” Clarke asked the other Green Beret.

He still hadn’t received confirmation she was dead and hoped she’d found a way to survive the blast.

“She’s gone, man.”

Clarke cursed the gods. How could they just leave like this?

“They’re dead,” the Green Beret repeated. He could see Clarke was having trouble coming to terms with the reality of what just happened.

But it was starting to sink in. Clarke grew angry. Trauma manifests itself in many ways, and Clarke went through it all. These were people he — and everyone — thought were untouchable.

The gravity of the situation was settling on the survivors, but there was still work to do. They popped a red smoke grenade, and a helicopter started circling above moments later. It had only been a few minutes since the terrorist detonated his suicide vest. Although that felt like a lifetime on the ground, Clarke was impressed with the response time of the helicopter, considering America’s light footprint in Syria at the time.

He could see the door gunner from the ground, which was mildly reassuring. They couldn’t talk to the helicopter crew, though. They were still in the casualty collection point trying to find a frequency on their radios that would work. They couldn’t hear anyone; the blast had throttled their system so hard that they lost comms. Clarke did his best with no “Echos” — shorthand for Special Forces communications sergeant — to work their magic.

Finally, he broke through and established radio contact. The pilots relayed instructions on what they needed to do next. The longer they stayed in the same place, the more they risked enemy fighters showing up to make the situation worse than it already was.

Clarke and one of the Green Berets who spoke Arabic started talking to a few nearby locals, asking for directions to the hospital. Then an emergency vehicle appeared out of nowhere, and Clarke recognized it as one that would be going to al-Firat Hospital, the same one Shannon had visited before. Shannon and the others, both dead and alive, were loaded in the emergency vehicle before it sped off. Jon, who was gravely injured and in need of immediate medical care, was among the people who made it on for the ride to the hospital.

Senior Chief Petty Officer Shannon Kent — a loving wife, daughter, sister, friend, and mother of two — was killed in action alongside Special Forces Chief Warrant Officer 2 Jonathan R. Farmer, loving husband and father of four; former Navy SEAL Scott A. Wirtz; and Ghadir Taher, an American working as a civilian interpreter. Eleven Syrian nationals also died in the attack, with another eighteen wounded.

At this point, it had been at least thirty minutes since the explosion. There was no way to lock down the area or secure it — especially considering the limited resources they had at their disposal. Knowing that the gravely injured and dead were en route to the hospital, they decided to move there on foot since help was unlikely to arrive in a busy marketplace. The hospital wasn’t too far away if driving, but walking there after surviving a bomb detonation was significantly more difficult.

They gathered all the sensitive equipment and weapons left from the dead and wounded and even found Scotty’s H&K 416 and plate carrier. It was a lot of equipment for Clarke and the two remaining Green Berets to carry on a long movement, but they were alive and determined to make it to the hospital.

They walked maybe a hundred feet from the blast site before the shrapnel started bothering Clarke. His ankle wasn’t holding up well either. He was exhausted, and the adrenaline was starting to wear off. Then, seemingly out of nowhere, people started yelling and running away from them. They saw what was causing the commotion: SDF soldiers rolled up in the local police bureau’s BearCat tactical vehicle, along with two American special operations soldiers in the back. It was a saving grace. He and the two other surviving Americans jumped in the back and headed straight for the soccer field.

Excerpted from SEND ME: The True Story of a Mother at War by Marty Skovlund Jr. & Joe Kent, published by William Morrow. Copyright © 2024 by Joe Kent and Marty Skovlund Jr. Reprinted courtesy of HarperCollins Publishers.

With that wire, AP war correspondent Edward Kennedy landed the biggest scoop of his career — while simultaneously ruining it.

Only able to dictate about 200 words before the connection was lost, Kennedy’s news about the conclusion of the world’s largest and bloodiest conflict traveled with such speed that inquiries were received in Paris even before he was cut off, according to the New York Times.

As one of 17 war correspondents to witness the official German surrender in Reims, France, in the early hours of May 7, 1945, Kennedy naturally sought to file posthaste.

However, the news remained embargoed, with military handlers insisting that the momentous occasion be kept secret for several hours. As the correspondents returned to their lodgings at Hotel Scribe in Paris that day, the embargo was extended for 24 hours without explanation.

We were “seventeen trained seals,” Kennedy caustically recalled in his memoir, “Ed Kennedy’s War: V-E Day, Censorship, & the Associated Press.”

The embargo was not, Kennedy learned, “for security reasons, which might have been an acceptable rationale, but for political reasons… It turned out that Russia’s leader, Joseph Stalin, wanted to stage a signing ceremony of his own to claim partial credit for the surrender, and U.S. officials were interested in helping him have his moment of glory,” according to an account in the Washington Post.

After hearing that the German high command had broadcasted the surrender from its headquarters in Flensburg, Germany, on May 7, Kennedy bristled.

“For five years you’ve been saying that the only reason for censorship was men’s lives. Now the war is over. I saw the surrender myself. Why can’t the story go?” he reportedly told a clerk at the hotel’s censor’s office.

The censor replied that he did not have the authority to release Kennedy’s story.

“All right then,” Kennedy retorted. “I give you fair warning here and now: I am going to file it.”

Calling up AP’s London office, the next words Kennedy uttered made history — and was on the wire within minutes.

The retribution for Kennedy was swift, however. Stripped of his credentials, the war correspondent was then ordered home by Allied leadership.

According to General Dwight D. Eisenhower, Kennedy’s suspension was “due to self-admitted deliberate violation of SHAEF regulations and breach of confidence.”

To add insult to injury, the following day Kennedy’s fellow correspondents, perhaps as jealous retribution, condemned his actions with a vote of 54-2, for “the most disgraceful, deliberate and unethical double-cross in the history of journalism.”

On May 10, Robert McLean, the president of the AP board, issued a statement saying AP “profoundly” regretted the story and, after placing Kennedy on an “indefinite suspension,” the news agency quietly parted ways with Kennedy several weeks later.

Despite the public rebuke, the reporter remained adamant that his actions were justified.

Upon his arrival in New York on June 4, Kennedy told a group of reporters that he “would do it again. The war over; there was no military security involved, and the people had the right to know.”

The reporter who observed the bloody Spanish Civil War; who covered Eastern Europe and the Balkans; who reported on the war in North Africa; and who joined the Seventh Army’s invasion of southern France in 1944 suddenly found himself without a job.

Kennedy was later hired as a managing editor by the sympathetic owner of the Santa-Barbara News-Press in California, the new position surely a step down for the veteran war correspondent.

In 2012, 67 years after Kennedy broke the news of the century, the AP issued a formal apology for its actions.

It was “a terrible day for the AP. It was handled in the worst possible way,” Curley stated. “Once the war is over, you can’t hold back information like that. The world needed to know.”

The apology was accompanied by a push from journalists to award a posthumous Pulitzer Prize to Kennedy. Although nominated for the prize in 2013, the WWII reporter failed to win the award. However, as USA Today reported, “Pulitzer rules don’t prohibit resubmissions,” and there have been several pushes in recent years for Kennedy’s recognition.

Kennedy, who died in 1963 after being struck by a car, did not live to see his vindication.

A monument to Kennedy now stands in Laguna Grande Park in Seaside, California, with the apt inscription: “He gave the world an extra day of happiness.”

Oscar-winner Kate Winslet is slated to portray Miller in the upcoming “Lee,” with Alexander Skarsgård co-starring as Roland Penrose, an English Surrealist painter, photographer, poet and Lee’s paramour.

The film marks the directorial debut of cinematographer Ellen Kuras (“Eternal Sunshine Of The Spotless Mind”), according to Deadline.

The film itself is not a biopic but focuses on the decade and the war that irrevocably altered the adventurous life of Miller, who was beloved by her peers and GIs alike.

Miller is described in the film’s synopsis as “a middle-aged woman [who] refused to be remembered as a model and male artists’ muse. … She defied the expectations and rules of the time and traveled to Europe to report from the frontline. There, in part as a reaction to her own well-hidden trauma, she used her Rolleiflex camera to give a voice to the voiceless.

“What Lee captured on film in Dachau and throughout Europe was shocking. Her photographs of the war, its victims and its consequences remain among the most historically important [of the conflict]. She changed war photography forever, but Lee paid an enormous personal price for what she witnessed and the stories she fought to tell.”

Vogue reports that the film, out September 27, drew heavily from the biography “The Lives of Lee Miller” by Antony Penrose, Miller’s son with Penrose.

And while Antony himself wrote that Lee was a depressive alcoholic and a terrible mother, her contribution to the war, nevertheless, was profound.

Miller was the first and only wartime photographer to record the first Allied use of napalm at St. Malo, France, and provided witness to the horrors of the Holocaust. Her photographs of the liberation of Dachau were widely spread by the Allies as evidence of Nazi crimes.

One of her photographs at Buchenwald famously captured a liberated 16-year-old Elie Wiesel.

At the time, Miller cabled back to Vogue what she had witnessed. In her report, she simply wrote “Believe it” — which became the subsequent title of her work featured in American Vogue.

“To me, she was a life force to be reckoned with, so much more than an object of attention from famous men with whom she is associated,” Winslet said of her character.

“This photographer, writer, reporter, did everything she did with love, lust, and courage, and is an inspiration of what you can achieve, and what you can bear, if you dare to take life firmly by the hands and live it at full throttle.”

Other cast members include Andy Samberg (“Palm Springs”), who will play the role of Life Magazine photographer David E. Scherman; Marion Cotillard (”Inception”) as Solange d’Ayen, the fashion director of French Vogue and a personal friend of Miller’s; and Josh O’Connor (“The Crown,” “The Durrells”) as Tony, a young journalist.

And while Tolkien later explicitly rejected the idea that his “story was an allegory of any historical event, most of all the recent war against Nazism … for all such protestations, Lewis had clearly been on to something back in 1949,” historian Alan Allport wrote in his 2020 book about the social and military history of the U.K. during World War II, “Britain at Bay.”

Rather than singularly weaving a mythopoeic fantasy world, Allport contended, Tolkien’s future audience “was going to see associations between events in Middle Earth and those in their own world.”

Tolkien, however, was not the first nor the last to draw inspiration from the cataclysmic bloodletting that was the Second World War.

Today, as fans celebrate May the Fourth (be with you), one does not have to stray far to glean that the galaxy of “Star Wars” is rife with WWII-based allegories — and its fanbase might equal, if not surpass, Tolkien’s.

“Star Wars” creator George Lucas famously studied over 25 hours of footage from World War II dogfights and jittery newsreel imagery while researching for the films — even using the footage as placeholders in the film before special effects were added.

“So one second you’re with the Wookiee in the spaceship and the next you’re in ‘The Bridges at Toko-Ri.’ It was like, ‘George, what is going on?’” Willard Huyck, a screenwriter and personal friend of Lucas, stated in a 1997 interview.

Though the b-roll was eventually edited out, the aerial tactics established in World War II remain visible.

One such shot, according to National WWII Museum and Memorial curator Corey Graff, “showed aircraft peeling out of formation and dropping from sight. The clip was used as a model for the memorable shot of Rebel craft diving to attack the Death Star. One at a time, the fictional spaceships elegantly ‘aileron roll’ across the screen, mimicking the movements of the 1940s aircraft almost exactly.”

Entire books have been devoted to such analogies, but we’ve summed up a few of our favorites for some May the Fourth enjoyment.

The Millennium Falcon’s cockpit came from the Boeing B-29 Fortress

After studying hours of WWII footage, Lucas became particularly enamored with the cockpit of B-29s — the famous bomber known for dropping the atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki in 1945.

The result? The cockpit of Han Solo’s beloved Millennium Falcon looks like it was lifted straight out of Boeing’s blueprints, replete with the B-29′s signature greenhouse-style cockpit. And, exactly like on the Superfortress, the Falcon sports defensive gun turrets — which come in handy when battling a Death Star.

The Empire’s similarities to Nazi Germany

From stormtroopers to Imperial officers’ uniforms and even Darth Vader’s helmet, which resembles those worn by the Wehrmacht during WWII, the analogies between Nazi Germany and the Galactic Empire are not exactly subtle.

The gradual rise of Hitler from German chancellor to Nazi dictator is further mirrored in the rise of Darth Sidious, or Sheev Palpatine, from chancellor to world’s most in-need-of-facial-moisturizer emperor.

Depictions of Star Wars spaceships were influenced by WWII fighters

Once again Lucas turned to World War II aviation for inspiration to give his spaceships unique sounds. According to Ian D’Costa for Tacairnet, sounds couldn’t easily be synthesized in the same way studios can create movie sound effects today. To get around that, Lucas sent out sound designer Ben Burtt to Reno Air Races in Nevada, where he was allowed to record the noise of P-51 Mustangs racing overhead.

Burtt later recalled, “I just said, ‘I want to record some planes,’ and they said ‘Yeah? Then go on out there.’ You could never do that nowadays. I was out at the pylons, and planes were passing 15 feet above my head. They were so fast that I could hardly see them go by; they were just a blur, though I could smell the oil and exhaust. ... Almost all of the spaceships came out of those Mojave recordings, including the Falcon.”

The Death Star trench run was inspired by the British Dambuster Raid

Lucas further drew inspiration from the 1955 film “The Dam Busters,” which chronicles the audacious British raid on Germany’s strategic river dams in 1943. The dams were heavily defended by anti-aircraft fire, a recurring theme in “Star Wars.”

“The Death Star attack is all about combat in the face of desperate odds,” Graff wrote in Smithsonian Magazine in 2020. “It’s a clear homage to the epic air battles seen in movies from the 1950s and 1960s.”

The Rebels suffer catastrophic losses, and the Death Star raid, just like in 1943, teeters on the brink of failure, “until a pivotal moment when [the] Millennium Falcon comes diving out of the ‘sun,’ a trick as old as military aviation itself,” Graff concluded.

Born in Pásztó, Hungary, on June 18, 1929, Tibor Rubin was 13 when the Nazis sent him to Mauthausen concentration camp in Austria. He survived 14 months before the U.S. Third Army liberated the camp. His family was less fortunate — his stepmother and sister died in Auschwitz and his father perished in Buchenwald.

In 1948 Rubin emigrated to the United States, working first as a shoemaker and then a butcher in New York City. He also strove to fulfill a promise that “if the Lord helped me go to America, I’d join the Army.”

He failed the language test in 1949 but enlisted after a second try. In July 1950 Private First Class “Ted” Rubin was shipped to Korea as a member of Company I, 8th Regiment, 1st Cavalry Division.

Holocaust survivor, Medal of Honor recipient’s story comes to life in graphic novel

There he discovered the persistence of American anti-Semitism, particularly from his sergeant, Arthur Peyton, who made a policy of “volunteering” him for the most hazardous missions. During one, Rubin defended a hill against waves of attacking North Koreans for 24 hours.

“I didn’t have too much time to get scared,” he explained afterward, “so I went crazy.” For that and other outstanding actions two of Rubin’s commanders recommended him for the Medal of Honor, but both officers were subsequently killed and Peyton “lost” the paperwork.

That October the United Nations forces were advancing into North Korea when the Chinese intervened, reversing fortunes in Korea for the second time since the war began. Manning a lone machine gun, Rubin covered his regiment’s retreat until the ammunition ran out. He was shot in the chest, arm and leg, and was captured.

It wasn’t until April 20, 1953, that Rubin was released in a prisoner of war exchange. Although sick and weak, he claimed that Chinese treatment, harsh though it was, was a cakewalk compared to Mauthausen, from which he’d developed survival techniques that came into play again, such as stealing food and medicine from his captors or using maggots to treat gangrenous wounds, all of which he did for fellow POWs as “mitzvahs” (good deeds).

Learning that he was not yet an American citizen, the Chinese repeatedly offered to repatriate him to Hungary if he wished. Given the oppressive Communist regime there, Rubin declined.

After his honorable discharge with two Purple Hearts, Rubin attained citizenship and settled in Long Beach, California, mainly working at a liquor store with his brother Emery. After meeting him at later reunions, however, veterans of I Company and men who knew him in captivity began a campaign to get Rubin the recognition they thought he’d long deserved.

Finally, in 2005, President George W. Bush presented him with the Medal of Honor, with a citation that described all he’d been witnessed to have done:

“Corporal Tibor Rubin distinguished himself by extraordinary heroism during the period from July 23, 1950, to April 20, 1953, while serving as a rifleman with I Company, 8th Cavalry Regiment, 1st Cavalry Division in the Republic of Korea. While his unit was retreating to the Pusan Perimeter, Corporal Rubin was assigned to stay behind to keep open the Taegu-Pusan Road link used by his withdrawing unit.

During the ensuing battle, overwhelming numbers of North Korean troops assaulted a hill defended solely by Corporal Rubin. He inflicted a staggering number of casualties on the attacking force during this 24-hour personal battle, single-handedly slowing the enemy advance and allowing the 8th Cavalry Regiment to complete its withdrawal successfully.

Following the breakout from the Pusan Perimeter, the 8th Cavalry Regiment proceeded northward and advanced into North Korea. During the advance he helped capture several hundred North Korean soldiers. On October 30, 1950, Chinese forces attacked his unit at Unsan, North Korea, during a massive nighttime assault. That night and throughout the next day, he manned a .30 caliber machine gun at the south end of the unit’s line after three gunners became casualties. He continued to man his machine gun until his ammunition was exhausted. His determined stand slowed the pace of the enemy advance in his sector, permitting the remnants of his unit to retreat southward.

As the battle raged, Corporal Rubin was severely wounded and captured by the Chinese. Choosing to remain in the prison camp despite offers from the Chinese to return him to his native Hungary, Corporal Rubin disregarded his own personal safety and immediately began sneaking out of the camp at night in search of food for his comrades. Breaking into enemy storehouses and gardens, he risked certain torture or death if caught. Corporal Rubin provided not only food to the starving soldiers, but also desperately needed medical care and moral support for the sick and wounded of the POW camp. His brave, selfless efforts were directly attributed to saving the lives of as many as forty of his fellow prisoners.”

Rubin’s nephew, Robert Huntly, who was inspired by him to join the Army, described him as having a Hungarian accent and a Jackie Mason sense of humor.

Tibor “Ted” Rubin, the only survivor of the Nazi genocide to earn the Medal of Honor, died in Garden Grove, California, on December 5, 2015.

Traversing five miles across treacherous mountainous terrain, Marines battled against blizzard conditions that cut visibility to almost zero. Temperatures oftentimes plummeted to 30 below.

Despite bullet wounds and a broken arm suffered during a previous engagement, Lee, along with his unit, went on to relentlessly engage the enemy while under intense fire. By the end, their exploits would help preserve a crucial evacuation route for American troops fighting as United Nations forces. Approximately 8,000 men were saved from certain death or imprisonment at the hands of the Chinese.

Born on January 21, 1926, in San Francisco, the slight-of-build Lee — all of 5-feet-6 inches tall and roughly 130 pounds — is believed to be the first Asian-American officer in Marine Corps history. Still, Lee “brought outsized determination to the battlefield,” according to an account in the New York Times.

Lee, who enlisted in the Marines at the end of World War II, told the Los Angeles Times in 2010 that he identified most with the Corps due to its reputation of being first into battle.

“I wanted to dispel the notion about the Chinese being meek, bland and obsequious,” he said.

Lee was assigned during WWII as a Japanese language instructor in San Diego. Swallowing his disappointment at not being sent to the Pacific, he chose to remain in the Marine Corps after the war and commissioned as an officer in 1946.

As the U.S. entered into the Korean War in June 1950, Lee was placed in charge of a machine gun platoon that was tasked with advancing deep into North Korean territory.

Before the fighting began, many of Lee’s fellow Marines questioned whether he was capable of killing Chinese soldiers. Behind his back some even used racial epithets, calling him a “Chinese laundry man.”

For Lee, the questioning of his devotion to his nation was ludicrous.

“I would have … done whatever was necessary,” he told the Los Angeles Times. “To me, it didn’t matter whether those were Chinese, Korean, Mongolian, whatever — they were the enemy.”

Lee’s Chinese ancestry, however, came as a boon on the night of November 2, 1950. Conducting a solo reconnaissance mission amid heavy snowfall, he began to lob grenades and fire rounds at the enemy with the intent of exposing the location of Chinese soldiers who were firing upon his men.

Undetected, Lee crept up on the enemy outpost and utilized his working knowledge of Mandarin to confuse the enemy combatants, who hesitated briefly as Lee called out in their native tongue, “Don’t shoot, I’m Chinese.”

That pause allowed just enough time for Lee’s unit to reposition and drive back the Chinese. For this, Lee was awarded the Navy Cross, the second-highest honor a Marine can receive.

“Despite serious wounds sustained as he pushed forward, First Lieutenant Lee charged directly into the face of the enemy fire and, by his dauntless fighting spirit and resourcefulness, served to inspire other members of his platoon to heroic efforts in pressing a determined counterattack and driving the hostile forces from the sector,” his citation reads.

Less than a month later, while Lee was still recovering in a field hospital from a gunshot wound to the arm he sustained during the early November fighting, the Chinese launched its Second Phase Offensive — aimed at driving the United Nations out of North Korea. Tens of thousands of Chinese forces converged on the mountainous region near the Chosin Reservoir, overrunning the nearly 8,000 American troops stationed there.

Undeterred by his wounds, Lee “and a sergeant left the hospital against orders, commandeered an Army jeep and returned to the front” to link up with the 1st Marine Battalion, according to the New York Times. Lee’s arm was still in a sling.

Using only a compass to traverse the snowy mountain terrain, Lee and his 500 Marines managed to find and reinforce the surrounded Americans, repeatedly driving back Chinese soldiers, according to the Times, and ensuring “the vastly outnumbered Americans were able to retreat to the sea.”

The fighting was so fierce that roughly 90 percent of Lee’s rifle company was killed or wounded, but thanks to Lee’s indefatigable efforts, the evacuation route remained open.

“Certainly, I was never afraid,” Lee told the Washington Post in 2010. “Perhaps the Chinese are all fatalists. I never expected to survive the war. So I was adamant that my death be honorable, be spectacular.”

Lee survived the war, retiring from the Marines in 1968 after serving in Vietnam as an intelligence officer. In addition to the Navy Cross, Lee was awarded a Silver Star and two Purple Hearts.

The men he commanded never forgot their officer.

“I didn’t care what color he was,” Ronald Burbridge, a rifleman in his unit in Korea, said in an interview for a 2010 Smithsonian documentary.

“I have told him many times, thank God that we had him.”

That region of the island was used as a staging area for Japanese forces to regroup and launch further attacks, particularly against the tenuously held Allied airfield dubbed Henderson Field.

Through miscommunication and miscues, that reconnaissance mission quickly turned deadly.

“On September 27, a message from the group was either misinterpreted or ambiguous, leading division headquarters to believe they had crossed the river and were fighting there,” according to the National WWII Museum. “This resulted in the order for three companies of 1st Battalion, 7th Marines [to go ashore] via landing craft on a beach west of Point Cruz to enter the attack from the rear.”

On that date, Petty Officer in Charge Douglas Munro led the group of 24 Higgins boats and deposited nearly 500 Marines on the beachhead with the mission to wipe out the Japanese staging area.

Within an hour of landing, however, the Marines were in danger of being pushed back into the sea amid crushing Japanese bombing raids and gunfire.

The Higgins crews were still refueling when they received the message that the Marines needed to withdraw immediately. When asked by his commanding officer if the Coast Guardsman was able to go back and extract the overwhelmed Marines, the 22-year-old Munro reportedly gave a confident, “Hell, yeah!”

Born to an American father and British mother in October 1919, the then-19-year-old Munro enlisted with the U.S. Coast Guard in August 1939 as war loomed and the likelihood of an impending draft all but certain.

But his journey from enlistment to combat in the Pacific was not linear.

“Coast Guard training in the latter part of 1939 was virtually nonexistent,” according to the museum. Sworn in on September 18, Munro and 18 other recruits “were sent to Air Station Port Angeles, where the staff there were clueless as to what was to be done with them. For three days they peeled potatoes, mowed grass, and helped with boat maintenance.”

After three days of menial labor, Munro was selected to be a crewman aboard the Coast Guard cutter USCGC Spencer, and the following year transferred to the transport ship USS Hunter Liggett to train as a coxswain for landing craft.

With the U.S. entry into the war, Munro was headed for the Pacific — and Guadalcanal.

After participating in several landings during the Guadalcanal campaign, on September 27 Munro did not hesitate.

“The Marines were being driven back to the beach and many did not have radios to request assistance,” according to the USO. “A single ‘HELP’ spelled out in T-shirts on the ridge near the beach sent a loud and clear signal to those looking on.”

“Under constant strafing by enemy machine guns on the island, and at great risk of his life, Munro daringly led five of his small craft toward the shore,” according to his Medal of Honor citation. “As he closed in on the beach, he signaled the others to land, and then in order to draw the enemy’s fire and protect the heavily loaded boats, he valiantly placed his craft with its two small guns as a shield between the beachhead and the Japanese.”

As he used his landing craft to shield the beleaguered Marines from withering enemy fire, an enemy bullet struck the base of Munro’s skull. His best friend and fellow crewman Raymond J. Evans grabbed the wheel and continued Munro’s mission until the Marines were safely back at the Allied-held location of Lunga Point.

It was there that Munro briefly regained consciousness and asked his final question: “Did they get off?”

Evans replied that they had, with Munro reportedly dying with a smile on his lips.

Munro was posthumously awarded the nation’s highest military honor in May 1943, with President Franklin D. Roosevelt presenting the Medal of Honor to Munro’s parents, James and Edith.

And with that final dispatch, war correspondent Floyd Gibbons — armed with nothing but his pen and paper — strolled into a melee of artillery and machine gun fire.

This dispatch would later help to shape the ethos of the United States Marine Corps and more than a century on, define the public’s view of the “Devil Dogs.”

A seasoned reporter for the Chicago Tribune, the charismatic Gibbons had reported on the Pancho Villa expedition in 1916 and the sinking of the RMS Laconia in 1917 before accepting his latest assignment as one of only 36 American reporters officially accredited in World War I.

As a noncombatant, Gibbons ignored the request that he stay back and joined a Marine attack on June 6, 1918, through the waist-high wheat toward the woods some several hundred yards away.

By early June “more than 2,000 German soldiers with at least 30 machine guns had ensconced themselves in Belleau Wood, and another 100 Germans with at least six machine guns held Bouresches,” recalled historian David John Ulbrich. All awaited the Marines.

As the Marines advanced, the enemy fire “was more than flesh and blood could stand,” Col. Albertus W. Catlin wrote in his memoir “With the Help of God and a Few Marines.” Catlin was awarded the Medal of Honor in 1914 for action in Vera Cruz and led the Sixth Regiment at Belleau Wood.

With no defense Gibbons was eventually cut down — bullets striking his left arm, left shoulder blade and left eye.

Made to lie in the field for three hours until the safety of darkness, Gibbons wondered if he was dead. With his left hand and arm numb and his left eyeball split in half and lying on his cheek, Gibbons used his right hand to pinch himself for reassurance. He was indeed still alive.

The news censor, however, incorrectly believing Gibbons to be dead, “concluded that it would be a crime to cut the last dispatch of Gibbons’s life, so he decided to let it go through as written,” according to an account in the Washington Post.

When he sent his final dispatch, Gibbons had expected the word “Marines” to be omitted. Up until that point no correspondent was permitted to name which troops were on which fronts due to wartime censorship.

“Because the censor let Gibbons’s dispatch go through, all correspondents were given the same privilege,” the Post continued.

For three days, reports of Marines in action at Belleau Wood went uncensored, and the American public, hungry for news of the war, were regaled with stories of the Devil Dogs as they fought in close-quarters combat with fixed bayonets, and, “worst of all,” historian George B. Clark noted, “machine guns at point-blank range.”

“For all intents and purposes, the old warriors of the U.S. Marine Corps were virtually wiped out,” Clark wrote. The Marines suffered 4,000 casualties and 1,000 killed — a 55 percent attrition rate — losing more men in this single campaign than in all its previous existence.

The dispatch from Gibbons, who would live another 21 years after the engagement, gave full credit to the 9,500-strong 4th Marine Brigade, altogether ignoring the U.S. Army’s 2nd Division of the American Expeditionary Forces who fought alongside the Marines. Even before the conclusion of the battle on June 26th, thanks to Gibbons getting past the censor, the legend of the Marines at Belleau Wood emerged.

Remembered for their gritty, victorious stand some 105 years ago, Belleau Wood stands immortal in Marine Corps lore.

“The Germans were good,” Clark wrote. “The Marines were better.”

Few questions in military history are more loaded.

“It’s no secret that MacArthur was and is a polarizing figure,” Barbara Noe Kennedy wrote in World War II magazine. “A brilliant tactician, revered for helping to win World War II and overseeing the successful Allied occupation of postwar Japan, but also a man who could be vain, arrogant, suspicious and insubordinate.”

To be sure, multitudes of American service members fondly remember the Army general for his variation on the “island hopping” strategy along the northern coast of New Guinea, which brought about great advances with relatively light casualties. Or for his later landing at Inchon in 1950, which did much to turn the tide of the Korean War.

Many others, however, remember how seriously MacArthur, who claimed to understand the mind of his enemies, underestimated his opponents in the Philippines in December 1941, the North Koreans in June 1950 and the Chinese in November 1950. Those miscalculations loom large, especially to those soldiers and Marines who suffered the consequences.

So what was he? A mastermind? A megalomaniac? One of the greatest — if not the greatest — general in American military history? A genius, albeit a flawed one?

A nation hungry for heroes embraced MacArthur as “Destiny’s Child,” the “Lion of Luzon,” the “Hero of the Pacific,” according to military historian Richard B. Frank.

“In 1945, a pollster asked Americans to name the greatest American general of the war. MacArthur won hands down, with 43 percent,” Frank wrote in a 2018 History Net article. “Only 31 percent chose Ike. George S. Patton Jr. came in a distant third at 17 percent.”

A different perspective on MacArthur’s genius allegedly came from one of his opponents, as described in Kunlun, the magazine of the Chinese People’s Liberation Army. After occupying Seoul on Jan. 7, 1951, General Peng Dehuai halted to plan the next “phase” of his offensive.

Soon afterward the Soviet ambassador to North Korea arrived and announced that he had just learned that “the Americans are prepared to completely withdraw following our retaking of Seoul,” that United Nations forces were “now faced with an overall situation of total collapse,” and added that he could not understand why the Chinese had suddenly stopped their pursuit when “the Korean War can be over in one go at it.”

Peng replied that after three consecutive offensives, his troops needed to rest and regroup at a time when his ability to resupply them had been hobbled by U.N. air attacks. Furthermore, he added, “the enemy could use the narrow, long terrain and his sea and air superiority to land in our rear at any time and that is extremely dangerous.”

“What’s more,” he concluded, “the enemy is absolutely not going to make any overall withdrawal. This is a fake impression that is to lure us southward. I, Peng Dehuai, am not MacArthur. I will not be taken in by this!”

One other man who was not overawed by the head of the Far East Command was, of course, President Harry S. Truman, who relieved him of command of U.S. forces in Korea.

The events leading to that extraordinary decision are presented in great deal in a 2008 book by Korean War veteran Stanley Weintraub, “MacArthur’s War: Korea and the Undoing of an American Hero.”

In essence, the growing disagreement between MacArthur and his commander in chief came to a head in March 1951 when House Minority Leader Joe Martin, R-Mass., sent MacArthur a copy of his speech advocating for an invasion of the Chinese mainland by Chiang Kaishek’s forces from Taiwan, in concert with a U.N. offensive in Korea.

MacArthur, who in 1950 had declared his willingness to use “our virtual monopoly of the atom bomb” against the Chinese if need be, wrote to Martin of his wholehearted agreement: “As you point out we must win. There is no substitute for victory.”

When Martin released the letter to the press, it made MacArthur’s endorsement of his plan public — and in public conflict with Truman’s strategy of limiting the war to stopping the Communist advances in Korea without escalating it into a global conflict.

Fellow generals, such as George C. Marshall, knew that MacArthur had committed an act of insubordination. So, for that matter, did MacArthur, who on April 9 remarked to Maj. Gen. Edward M. Almond, “I have become politically involved and may be relieved by the president.”

Indeed, on April 11, 1951, President Truman announced on the radio that “General of the Army Douglas MacArthur is unable to give his wholehearted support to the policies of the United States Government and the United Nations on matters pertaining to his official duties.” Truman added that he was replacing MacArthur with Lt. Gen. Matthew B. Ridgway.

In standing up for his constitutional authority as commander in chief, Truman knew he had committed political suicide. His successor, Dwight D. Eisenhower — who had served for six years on MacArthur’s staff — proved to be no more impressed with MacArthur than Truman had been.

“I wouldn’t trade one Marshall for fifty MacArthurs,” Eisenhower said, adding, “My God! That would be a lousy deal. What would I do with fifty MacArthurs?”

Far from fading away, however, MacArthur continues to endure as a larger-than-life figure, revered by some, derided by others — most recently, in James Ellman’s 2023 book, “MacArthur Reconsidered,” which reassess the commander in a more negative light.

And so the debate will continue, quite possibly with a little more restirring of the pot. One certainty is that any attempt to balance his accomplishments against his failures, concluding with the image of a “flawed genius,” is likely to be the minority viewpoint.

Editor’s note: This story has been corrected to reflect House Minority Leader Joe Martin’s state representation as Massachusetts.

Serving in the U.S. Army Air Force during the Second World War, Finnegan was a passenger of an A-20 Havoc, when, for “unknown reasons, this plane was forced to ditch in the ocean off the north coast of New Guinea,” according to an account published by the Defense POW/MIA Accounting agency. “Both engines failed at low altitude, and the aircraft’s nose hit the water hard.”

“And my uncle, they called him — Ambrose, they called him Bosie… and he became an Army Air Corps, before the Air Force came along, he flew those single engine planes as reconnaissance over war zones,” Biden said during remarks at the United Steelworkers Headquarters in Pittsburgh.

“And he got shot down in New Guinea, and they never found the body because there used to be a lot of cannibals — for real — in that part of the New Guinea.”

Biden’s claim contradicts the DPAA report, which notes that “Three men failed to emerge from the sinking wreck and were lost in the crash. One crew member survived and was rescued by a passing barge.”

The president’s comments on cannibalism, meanwhile, are not far off. In 1992, nearly half a century after World War II, Japanese historian Toshiyuki Tanaka revealed that he had uncovered more than 100 cases of cannibalism committed by Japanese troops in Papua New Guinea.

“These documents clearly show that this cannibalism was done by a whole group of Japanese soldiers, and in some cases they were not even starving,” Tanaka said.

A translated Imperial Army order from Nov. 18, 1944, described cannibalism as the “worst human crime” and blamed increases in murders and the possession of human flesh by soldiers on a “lack of thoroughness in moral training,” according to the Associated Press.

“In all cases, the condition of the remains were such that there can be no doubt that the bodies had been dismembered and portions of flesh cooked,” one Australian lieutenant recalled after finding the dismembered remains of several comrades.

The military was ultimately unable to recover the remains of the president’s uncle, whose life and service are memorialized on the Walls of the Missing at the Manila American Cemetery in the Philippines.

“President Biden is proud of his uncle’s service in uniform, who lost his life when the military aircraft he was on crashed in the Pacific after taking off near New Guinea,” White House deputy press secretary Andrew Bates told CNN.

“The president highlighted his uncle’s story as he made the case for honoring our ‘sacred commitment … to equip those we send to war and take care of them and their families when they come home,’ and as he reiterated that the last thing American veterans are is ‘suckers’ or ‘losers.’”

Ulm — meager, fairly accurate.

Heilbronn — meager, fairly accurate.

Furth — meager to moderate, inaccurate.

Sindelfingen — moderate to intense, accurate.

And so on through another eighteen cities and towns with reported flak varying from light to heavy, meager to moderate to intense, inaccurate to accurate.

The reported intensity and accuracy of flak varied from man to man in the same crew. There were no standards. How do you measure flak? In some ways the reports may have been a psychological portrait — whoa that was close. When one shell burst right under his plane, a navigator reported, “I thought someone hit me with a baseball bat. The concussion was so terrific.” And a waist gunner, riding through another attack, said, “At 40 degrees below zero, you can sweat.”

Flak hit the big bombers in a rain of steel pellets. It sounded like hail on a tin roof, like BBs rolling around, said the airmen. It could tear into the bomber’s aluminum skin with a “shriek” or a “hissing.” It could splatter the head of your pilot or miss by an inch. Loose, hot steel rattling around, as if your anxieties had taken shape. It was lethal with a randomness that was cruel. They could smell the flak through their oxygen masks.

The German anti-aircraft gunners filled the sky with explosions and steel. Nearly a million men and women were committed to the guns. In the last years of the war, the 88mm guns were grouped in Grossbatterien of twelve, sixteen, eighteen, or twenty-four — a huge shotgun firing thousands of rounds — tons of explosives a minute — four or five miles high. Major targets were surrounded by two hundred guns; oil refineries by 450 guns, and so many guns guarded the factories in the Ruhr Valley that it was known as Flak Alley. The guns had an effect; the Air Force found that flak reduced bombing accuracy by 10 to 20 percent. The big guns rattled the fliers; they were missing their targets.

Each exploding shell launched about 1,500 metal fragments. Some would pass right through the plane, or explode inside, and some shells brought a rain of fire. If they were close enough to see the red center of the dark cloud, they expected to be hit. This could be what hell looks like, thought George McGovern, a B-24 pilot who flew thirty-five missions and was awarded the Distinguished Flying Cross. “Hell can’t be any worse than that.” An unnamed crewman, in another battle, was more direct when he said over the plane’s intercom, “Mary, Mother of God, get me out of this.”

The bombers sometimes returned with hundreds of holes, with engines out or on fire, with ruptured fuel lines and cut rudder cables, with men wounded, maimed, and bleeding to death. On “good missions” with “meager flak” and few of the Luftwaffe’s fighters attacking, bombers and fighters could still be lost or “missing in action.” Seven bombers and four fighters on one mission, nine bombers and three fighters on another “good mission,” as many as ninety-three men “missing.” Telegrams sent to Ada, Oklahoma; Palo Alto, California; Grand Rapids, Michigan; Hillsboro, Texas: “We regret to inform you . . .”

The flak-filled skies followed the bomber crews back to England. When the airmen were flak happy (shaken up), they were sent to flak homes or flak farms on flak leave for a week’s “R & R” (rest and relaxation). At briefings they studied the Flak Zone over a target, looking at the Flak Maps. They carried the word into battle flying B-17s named: Flack Alley, Flack Alley II, Flak Alley Lil’ (2 of those), Flak Alley Lil’ II, Flack Buster, Flak Dancer (2), Flak Dodger (4), Flak Eater, Flak Evader, Flak Fed Gal, Flak Flirter, Flak Fobic, Flak Hack (2), Flak Happy (8), Flak Happy II, Flak Happy Pappy, Flak Heaven, Flak Hopper (2), Flak House (2), Flak Magic, Flak Magnet (2), Flak Magnet II, Flak No. 2, Flak Off Limits, Flak Palace, Flak Plow, Flak Queen, Flak Rabbit, Flak Rat, Flak Rat II, Flack Sack, Flak Sak, Flack Shack (2), Flak Shack (3), Flak Shy, Flak Shy Lady, Flak Suit, Flak-Wolf, Flakstop, Mac’s Flak Shak, Miss Flak, Old Flak Magnet, Ole Flak Sack, Ole Scatter Flak, and so on.

They parodied their fears by singing tunes like As Flak Goes By:

You must remember this

The flak can’t always miss

Somebody’s gotta’ die.

And they carried their fears into their sleep. They had “flak dreams,” said Bud Hutton and Andy Rooney in a wartime book. “You doze off in your sack and pretty soon the F-Ws begin to bore in at you, cannon flashing, and the flak begins to come up in close black puffs; or maybe you find yourself endlessly falling through space, tearing at a parachute which never opens.”

The stories of flak are a literature of near misses, of geometry, chance, and luck. It was a universe in which an inch or two separated life and death or injury.

The Eighth Air Force fed quotes to the press from the pilots and crews of the bombers. The quotes usually said: flak was everywhere, but it missed us. Flak was so thick you could walk on it; the sky was black with flak; we were shot up, but we made it back. Flak grazed my face, my leg, sliced my sleeve and glove to ribbons, but I’m OK. It ripped off my oxygen mask, just missing my Adam’s apple. I can’t figure out how it missed me. It tore a hole in the map I was reading but didn’t touch me.

Kurt Wolf was a tail gunner on a B-17. He was part of the 452nd Bomb Group based just seven miles from the 453rd at Old Buckenham. Wool socks saved his life. He had gotten a pair sent from home. Wool socks were scarce. He was sitting at his gun in the small glass canopy on the tail of the plane when he felt that his right sock had fallen. It had “crawled down in my boot,” he said. At 35 below zero, this could be serious. “I leaned down to pull that sock back up and just as I leaned down . . . a piece of shrapnel took out both those windows where my head was. So that pair of socks saved my life.” That’s how he told the story when he was 87 years old.

The flak stories are like that tale of a fallen sock. The flak was heavy, was accurate, was moderate, light, inaccurate, was everywhere. There was no empty air. The sky was a maze of thick flak smoke. But I’m alive — that was the unstated refrain. And unspoken — for now.

Chance, fate, luck, and near misses live in the vets’ stories — the pilot assigned to the squadron’s “coffin corner” of the formation whose position is switched at the last moment and is saved, the shards of flak twisting through the airplane cockpit missing by an inch or less, the navigator pulled from the English Channel by an RAF rescue launch seconds before he drowned.

Minutes. Inches. Banal changes that meant life or death. Back in the peacetime world — working nine-to-five, taking children to get shoes — how could the veterans explain that they were only in this life by a few inches? It was as though they’d realized, years before the physicists’ theories, that many universes exist side by side — the world with them and the world without them. They saw it and they had no words for it.

The airmen would be woken up at 3:00 a.m. for breakfast — fresh eggs on mission mornings, “combat eggs,” instead of powdered “square eggs.” Some men didn’t eat a thing, and others ate like it was their last meal. “You could hear a pin drop,” a crewman remembered. “You had a 50 percent chance of returning. You don’t want to think about it, but it’s there.”

My father recalled one morning like this. “They woke us at 3:30 in the morning and told us to get on down to the mess hall. A Maximum Effort has been called. That means any airplane that could fly was going to be in the air. So we all got on our bicycles and went over to the mess hall and got on line. And when I got to my turn to tell the cook what I wanted, he said to me, ‘How do you want your eggs? Scrambled or over easy or what?’ The guy behind me says, ‘I think we’re getting killed today because they never ask us how we want our eggs.’ I thought that was funny, at the time anyway.

“On our way over to the mess hall we saw Royal Air Force bombers returning from missions. They returned and flew over our base. The Royal Air Force bombed the enemy at night. We bombed them during the day. How effective this all was has been written about by many people and nobody really knows. I just know it killed a lot of people.”

The pilot and copilot started the four engines about twenty-five minutes before they took off, running through the checklist. This was a “two-man job,” said B-24 pilot Lieutenant Colonel William E. Carigan Jr. “Both pilots are busy with both hands; the copilot with all the mechanical things — sequences of fuel boosters, primers, energizing and meshing starters; the pilot with mixtures and throttles, which require some touch.” After that, the B-24 required “considerable muscle,” said Carigan. It called for “more muscle to fly than does any other airplane.” It was “sternly unforgiving and demanding.”

As they taxied, the bomb bay doors were open to vent fumes. The lead squadron went first. The control tower fired a flare and the big bombers — thirty-five tons at their maximum “war emergency” weight — began moving down the runway toward take-off speed — 160 mph — just seconds apart, closer than at any airport today. “What sounded like a charging bull was actually more akin to a duck beginning to waddle. It was agonizingly slow,” said pilot Eino Alve. “So, you hunched and rocked back and forth in your seat, in a futile attempt to nudge the plane forward faster. Standing behind you and to your right, the engineer watched the engines’ health on the instruments. The co-pilot watched the airspeed indicator, calling out its advancing numbers: 70, 80, 90 . . . and then you were committed. Even if you lost an engine, you’d have no choice but to try to take off.”

“The doors to the bomb bays close behind you, and you know that you are a prisoner of this ship,” said a reluctant reporter for Yank, the Army’s weekly magazine. “That imprisonment can be broken only by three factors, and they are in order: Disaster by explosion and parachuting to another prison, death, or a safe return.”

This was the life my father lived as a teenager — up at 3:30 a.m., breakfast by 4:00, a briefing at the plane to get the target for the day, long hours in flight, the Luftwaffe sometimes attacking, flying through flak over the target, watching the bombs drop, flying home through more flak and possible fighter attacks, landing to be met by the Red Cross girls with sandwiches, doughnuts, and coffee, and then a shot of whiskey at the “interrogation,” the debriefing. And up again to do it the next day.

Excerpted from “I Will Tell No War Stories” by Howard Mansfield. Copyright © 2024 by Howard Mansfield. Excerpted with permission by Lyons Press.

His father, Pincus Mansfield, had served with the 453rd Bombardment Group of the Eighth Air Force, but, like many veterans, Pincus had never spoken to his sons about his time serving in the flak-filled skies of occupied Europe.

It wasn’t until 65 years on, as Howard and his brother began clearing out their father’s home, did they happen upon a treasure trove of histories past.

“Cleaning up one day, in a small drawer with his cufflinks and tie clips, I found some small, unlined, pocket-sized notebook pages, folded over and tossed aside, sitting as they had for almost sixty-five years,” Mansfield writes in his prologue to “I Will Tell No War Stories.”

“It was an account of each bomber mission he had flown as he had recorded it when he was nineteen and twenty years old. I had no idea such a record even existed.”

Mansfield seamlessly weaves the tracing of his own father’s story with the broader implications of history and memory.

Combat, as Mansfield’s research reveals, and as his father intimately knew, is an “experience so overwhelming that words diminish it, as if trying to draw a frame around the infinite.”

That didn’t stop Mansfield from trying, as he “began to undo the forgetting as best [he] could.” His latest, “I Will Tell No War Stories” is a testament to that.

Can you discuss discovering your father’s war ‘twice’?

The first time I was in Wales — they have these great long-distance paths over there, all throughout the countryside. I was on one that runs along the Irish Sea and one night, I’m in this pub — because that’s where you’re going to be in this little village — and I get talking to this guy. I told him my father flew during the war so he said to me, “You’ve got to come upstairs to our meeting and see this film.” He introduces me as this honored guest because my father flew in the Eighth Air Force during the war.

They showed me this film — “Target for Tonight” — that has stayed with me to this day. It was like no war movie I’d ever seen. It was small. It was quiet. There were no special effects. It was only 45 minutes. But you came away with a real understanding of World War II from the British perspective. But what really came across to me was how unrelenting the industrial bombing was. You got up in the morning and if the weather was good, you’d go out. So at that point, I thought, oh my gosh, I bet my dad lived a life much like that of the film.

The second time just happened a few years ago. My dad never talked about the war just like most of the veterans. There were a couple of hints around the house, an old uniform in the basement, that sort of thing. But during the last year of his life we were cleaning up his home to move him to a veteran’s nursing home, and there was this little diary that he had kept during his bombing missions. They were not supposed to do this of course, it was strictly verboten for airmen to keep diaries at all, but a lot of them did.

I was just astounded to see it folded over and left. It had been sitting like that for 65 years.

From that I was able to start putting together the story of how he had served, where he was, and what he had gone through. He received two Purple Hearts, something that he had never mentioned.

What was your research process like — especially with your father’s records destroyed in the 1973 fire?

At first I was like, “Oh, I’ll request his military records.” But yes, I learned that after the 1973 St. Louis fire they lost maybe 85 percent of the U.S. Army Air Forces’ records from World War I through the early ‘60s. It’s just a phenomenal loss. So I had to put it together from other sources.

So a couple of key things: One, is I remembered the name of his pilot. I found his son who had the same name. I wrote him a letter, an old-fashioned letter, which he answered and called me back. Miraculously he had his father’s pilot logbook, so I had the missions my father flew and I knew when he had been hit because I had his Purple Heart papers, which I also found in his house.

He was in the 453 BG [bombardment group] and a couple of histories have been written on that, which I was able to use. From the Air Force Historical Research Agency I got miles and miles of microfilm. Once I decoded that sort of military way of categorizing things, I was able to see all the planning for the missions.

It was primarily the miles and miles and microfiche that gave me a feeling for what it was like — it gave me a real feeling for all the losses of the airplanes. In the book there is a place where I list all the planes and how they were lost. I think it’s just chilling.

As you combed through your own father’s history, ‘undoing the forgetting,’ so to speak, how did your relationship with, or understanding, of him evolve?

By the time I was doing this he had died, but what I came to understand is why he didn’t want to talk about it.

I think there are two things, which was the cause for a lot of his generation. One, is remorse. Remorse about killing.

My father had been dead a year or two and my brother had the last few things in a storage locker. We were going through it and opened up this box that contained these two cassettes. I don’t remember him recording on microfiche and he must’ve just thrown them in a drawer or something. But in it, he talks about, oh my gosh, it was such an incredible thing. He’s home and my brother is 3, 4 years old. They’re watching TV and it’s a dark documentary kind of thing. They’re dropping bombs on cities and my father, who is watching says, “Oh my God.” That always bothered him.

And primarily, Ernie Pyle wrote this so well, and I’ll paraphrase but, “We did this so you don’t have to think about it. Go live in peace. Just go.”

Military history is not always strategy or battle tactics, but the humanity (or lack thereof). Their silence gave us peace. How do you reconcile that as both a son of this generation, but also as a historian?

Well, as a historian, I wish that people would have told us more. And particularly, actually, particularly now, because there’s two things about what happened in World War II that I think people should never lose track of. One was how vast the destruction was in Europe. And the other thing is that this can’t happen again. Just can’t.

I do wish he had told us more at a certain age you know. All the guys on the block where I grew up had been in the Marines, the Navy, the Army. None of them talked about it. Who knows what they had seen or what they had done.

Your words ‘The commemorations and retellings of World War II became part of our forgetting’ bring to mind Milan Kundera’s ‘The Book of Laughter and Forgetting.’ How has the collective memory of World War II diminished or obscured realities?

That’s an immense question. I’d say the films we grew up watching, most of them couldn’t be as fierce as what happened. Every now and then that happens — the recent film “Dunkirk,” the first 20 minutes of “Saving Private Ryan” — but most films have been watered down.

It also becomes kind of this thing that always happens in history where you go from the end, and read back in the beginning, “Oh, of course, we were gonna win.” Which wasn’t the case at all. A lot of things could have broken different ways, so I think it’s very hard to connect with.

I flew in a restored B-17 recently and I got a feel for how incredibly small inside it was. How loud it was to fly in that bomber, but even that was so cleaned up and sanitized. There was no blood. Vomit. Fear. Everything was wonderful. And that’s not the way it was.

You’re up at 20-25,000 feet in the air and then wait, you’re open to the weather? The plane isn’t pressurized?

It was all just physically exhausting. There’s long hours when nothing happens, and then those moments with just everything happens and you can be killed. It’s a very strange mix of tedium and possible death.

You vowed to never write about World War II again after finishing ‘Dwelling in Possibility.’ Do you feel the same sentiment now after?

Yes, I’m tired of having things destroyed. Writing about it was really a very upsetting exercise. You really have to open yourself up to that kind of destruction and suffering and try to portray it honestly.

I’m sure the mental toll of sifting through archives revolving around constant death and destruction, but even then, that in itself gets sanitized.

Yeah, exactly. You mentioned rivet counters — and yes, you gotta have those guys that check things, but sometimes they just get too locked in, lost in the hardware of the whole thing. You miss the point that these were boys flying the hardware.

You have to keep your eye on what was going on.

Sure, you got Charlotte to weave a web of lies to save your life, but Parker Neptune, later dubbed King Neptune, did it the hard way — by raising so much money for the U.S. Navy during World War II that naval officials had no choice but to spare him from his fate on a barbecue spit.

Born in 1942 on the Boner family farm in West Frankfort, Illinois, the Hereford swine caught the attention of a young Patty Boner, who picked the young King Neptune to raise for her local 4-H Club.

It was there that this porker took a patriotic turn. After the fair, the animal was donated to Don Lingle, a naval recruiter in the nearby town of Marion.

With wartime rationing, pork was a precious commodity and Lingle hit upon the idea of auctioning up portions of the piglet for a Navy fundraising dinner.

The story might have ended there if Lingle wasn’t hampered by his conscience and the doe-eyed sweetness of the young Neptune.

According to Atlas Obscura, Lingle found that he couldn’t muster the will to slaughter the pig — describing him in a later interview as “an innocent-looking thing.”

Despite being safe from slaughter, King Neptune was put to good use when the recruiter joined with local auctioneer, L. Oard Sitter. According to Stu Fliege, vice president of the Illinois Historical Society, the pair hatched the ingenious plan of using the Hereford swine to raise funds for the floundering USS Illinois battleship.

Originally slated to be a Montana-class battleship, the vessel rapidly underwent a redesign — to the tune of $125 million — to be fitted as a faster Iowa-class variant.

“On a whim, he draped the pig with a Navy Blue blanket,” wrote Atlas Obscura. “Maybe it was the blanket, or maybe it was the look in his eyes, but bits of Neptune began flying off the stage.”

A hundred dollars went for a leg, $300 for a shoulder. Even his squeal was sold for $25.

By the end of the auction, King Neptune had raised a whopping $11,200. No one demanded their pound of flesh, rather, they happily headed home with a war bond.

The event a smashing hit, Lingle decided to take King Neptune on the road, and as rumors of the pig’s lore spread so too did peoples’ wallets.

By his third appearance, King Neptune was drawing in the likes of $50,000 in bonds, with Illinois Gov. Dwight Green even “buying” King Neptune for $1 million in the name of patriotism.

By war’s end, King Neptune had brought in over $19 million for the Navy — roughly $320 million today.

Unfortunately, despite being a prodigious fundraiser, only 22 percent of the USS Illinois had been completed by 1945. Its plans were soon scrapped.

The rotund Neptune was by then rounding out to about 700 pounds. Fearing the porcine celebrity would make a very large snack for someone, Lingle took the pig to southern Illinois to live at the farm of Ernest Goddard.

“The hog was so fat, the fat had covered his eyes to where they were just little slits, so he couldn’t see where he was going,” Jim Goddard, the grandson of Ernest, told NPR. “So, they would take their cane and tap him on the left shoulder and he’d turn to the right and vice versa. That’s how they guided him around.”

King Neptune continued to live like royalty for another four years on the Goddard farm before contracting pneumonia just shy of his eighth birthday in 1950.

He was given a military funeral and buried just outside of the town Anna, Illinois, under a headstone noting the pig’s efforts “to help make a free world.”

The pig was eventually moved after his gravestone was vandalized and plans for a highway interrupted his long sleep. He now resides in the shade of oak boughs at the Trail of Tears Welcome Center on northbound I-57, according to the U.S. Naval Institute.

Officials identified him as 26-year-old Samuel Wanjiru from Massachusetts and said he was visiting the island with his family. He went missing Wednesday afternoon after going into the water at La Pared beach in Luquillo.

Also on Wednesday, another American tourist died in northwest Puerto Rico after authorities said he rescued his teenage children who had been swept away by heavy surf.

“This month has been deadly when it comes to beach drownings in the area of Puerto Rico,” said Capt. Jose E. Díaz, commander of the U.S. Coast Guard Sector San Juan. “People need to realize that the situation is serious enough to limit our ability to respond to search and rescue cases with surface vessels without further endangering our crews and assets.”

A high surf advisory was issued late Tuesday for Puerto Rico’s northwest, north and northeast coasts and will remain in effect until late Thursday, with waves of up to 12 feet (4 meters).

Díaz noted that most open ocean beaches in Puerto Rico do not have lifeguards.

On May 4, 1982, a month after forces from Argentina invaded the British overseas dominion of the Falkland Islands and two days after a British task force traversed nearly 8,000 miles to join the fight, an Argentine Exocet missile slammed into the destroyer as it patrolled off Port Stanley in the South Atlantic.

According to the warship’s board of inquiry report released in 2012, “the missile’s impact left a 15 feet by 4 feet hole in the ship’s side and caused widespread minor shock damage.” Fire spread almost immediately throughout the lower decks of the ship.

“My boots were actually melting because the superstructure was getting that hot,” John Miller, a Royal Navy weapons engineer, recalled in an interview with the York Press. “We couldn’t put the fire out. All we could do was close the steel bulkheads down and contain it.”

Of the 300 sailors that manned the 4,100-tonne destroyer, 20 were killed and 26 wounded.

“After some 4 hours firefighting the situation was deteriorating,” the report continued. “Internally the ship was burning fiercely. ... Sheffield’s fighting capability was totally and probably irremediably destroyed.”

It was then, while watching their ship burn, that Sub-Lieutenant Clive Carrington-Wood struck up a tune, bringing the sardonic British sense of humor into full display as he and his fellow sailors sang “Always Look on the Bright Side of Life” — a classic from Monty Python’s “Life of Brian.”

The attack was a blow to British military prestige, especially so after the report found the anti-air warfare officer negligent due to his “lengthy absence” from the ops room, which “meant an important air-defense facility was not manned,” according to a report by The Guardian. Twelve minutes after the impact, the officer was still not convinced that the ship had even been struck, the report added.

But ever the masters of spin — Dunkirk, anyone? — the news of Carrington-Wood’s cheekiness reached the British press and injected some pride back into the British spirit in the aftermath of the attack.

Three weeks later, as the HMS Coventry sank after coming under waves of attacks from Argentine Douglas A-4 Skyhawks, the survivors took a leaf out of Carrington-Wood’s book and hummed, sang and whistled the track as they sat precariously perched in life rafts.

A little more than a month later, British forces prevailed to force Argentina’s surrender, giving new meaning to the notion that “when you’re chewing on life’s gristle, don’t grumble, give a whistle, and this’ll help things turn out for the best.”

In 1986, members of a U.S. Navy helicopter crew stationed aboard the USS America sought to bring a moment of levity to the conclusion of their six-month deployment to the Mediterranean.

With the aircraft carrier John F. Kennedy poised to relieve the Kitty Hawk-class super carrier, aircrewman Brian Christoff and his fellow aviators hatched a plan.

“I was an Aircrewman/SAR Swimmer with HS-11 helo squadron,” Christoff wrote in a since-deleted Facebook post. “The fighter jet jocks got with us and came up with this slant, on an age-old tradition, of releasing a greased pig onto the deck of the relieving ship. Three pigs painted with red, white and blue food coloring and lathered in grease. The Kennedy never [saw] it coming!”

From sling bullets bearing tongue-in-cheek inscriptions of DEXAI (“Catch!” in Greek), to modern day Porta-John art drawn by an ever-imaginative lance corporal, military humor has spanned millennia. The “pig prank” was no exception.

In the video, three pigs can be seen being released from the helo onto the flight deck of the Kennedy, as bewildered sailors below eventually chase after the freed baconated trio.

With the helicopter departing after dropping its “artiodactyl payload,” the Kennedy can be heard radioing, “Appreciate it. We can return the favor when we see you next.”

It is unclear if the favor was ever returned.

*No animals were harmed in the making of this film.

But can any of the other branches promise to make you a king? Considering a series of unusual events in the 1920s, the Marine Corps might be able to.

In a stranger than fiction, yet true turn of events, one stocky, blonde haired, blue-eyed Marine from a small coal mining town in Pennsylvania went from a simple gunnery sergeant to the king of the island of La Gonave, Haiti.

Sgt. Faustin Wirkus’ ascent from a poor “breaker boy” — separating coal from slate — to king, is the stuff of Marine Corps legend.

“I had to go to work in the collieries,” Wirkus later wrote. “There was no escaping the sequence of that rule … but there was a different idea in my mind. … In the little time I had been in school, it had become foggily known to me that somewhere out beyond the dust, the rattling collieries, and the grimy shacks of Dupont [Pennsylvania], was a world full of thrill and the glory of being alive.”

For Wirkus, the path to that thrill and glory lay in becoming a U.S. Marine. By age 18 the teen ran away from home to become one of “The Few.”

In 1915 he was among the first outfits of “Leathernecks” sent to Haiti to restore order, according to his New York Times obituary. It was during his first tour that Wirkus fell in love with the island, returning for duty on and off for several years before, in 1920, he established a fortuitous friendship while serving at the tiny outpost of Anse à Gallet.

That day, according to a 1931 Time article, Wirkus witnessed a tax collector arrest a Haitian woman for “voodoo offenses.” The woman, the magazine wrote, claimed that she was Queen Ti Memenne of La Gonave. Although initially transferred to Port-au-Prince to stand trial, the queen was eventually freed due to Wirkus’ pleas for leniency.

Five years later, the Haitian-obsessed Wirkus once again applied for duty on the island. His superiors, according to the Marine, “thought of La Gonave as the butt-end of the world,” yet granted his request. Made resident commander of La Gonave, Wirkus returned to the island in April 1925.

“During his tenure, he saved the Haitian government thousands of dollars by exposing graft in tax collection and ensured the island farmers were given fair tax assessments. He also oversaw the construction of the first airfield and directed the first census,” according to Marine Corps records.

Wirkus’ practical reforms quickly endeared him to the 12,000 inhabitants of La Gonave, but that endearment would go one step further.

According to local superstition, “a previous ruler of the island had borne that name [King Faustin I] and, according to legend had vanished in 1848 with the promise that his descendant of the same name would return to take his throne,” according to a New York Times report.

By candlelight on the evening of July 18, 1926, Queen Ti Memenne crowned the gunnery sergeant Faustin II, the “White King of La Gonave.” Carried from the houmfort, or voodoo temple, a blood sacrifice was made via a rooster — The New York Times story claimed it was a goat — as the crowd shouted “The King! Long live King Faustin!” to the more than slightly confused Marine.

“They made me a sort of king in a ceremony I thought was just a celebration of some kind,” the flabbergasted Marine recalled. “I learned later they thought I was the reincarnation of a former king of the island who had taken the name of Faustin I when he came into power. The coincidence was just good luck for me.”

Wirkus reigned for an incredible three years while still serving in the Marines. He was eventually recalled to Port-au-Prince after Haitian officials expressed “jealousy” over Wirkus’ successes.

By 1931, King Faustin II was no more, with Wirkus leaving the service and returning stateside. In 1939, he reenlisted with the Marines, serving first as a recruiter in New York before being transferred to the Navy Pre-Flight School in North Carolina.

The Marine and one-time king died in October 1945, leaving behind a wife and a young son — also named Faustin.

The film follows a family through their daily routine. There’s a birthday celebration; the family dog that wants to follow its owners from room to room; a daughter who has sleepwalking issues.

Except these aren’t normal times, and this isn’t a normal family.

The characters in question are Rudolph Höss, the Nazi commandant of the Auschwitz death camp, his wife Hedwig, and their five small children. The family lives an upper-middle-class suburban life, with one small hitch: they share a wall with Auschwitz.

From its opening in 1940 to the camp’s liberation in 1945, over 1.1 million men, women and children were systematically murdered at Auschwitz. More than 11 million were killed in the Holocaust — six million of whom were Jews.

Yet Glazer’s camera never focuses on mass murder. Instead, the viewer is left with only a handful of impressionistic shots — flowers being grown with the ashes of human remains or a shot of water running red as Hoss’ boot heels are cleaned after a day’s “work.”

Viewers never go inside the gates of Auschwitz, but they hear its horrors. The constant ambient soundscape suggests the untold terrors within. Distant gunshots, the hum of machinery, dogs snarling, train whistles and the shrieks of parents separated from children. One never truly sees the Holocaust unfold, which makes Glazer’s portrayal of it all the more of a gut punch.

“Since Rudolph is not affected in his everyday life by what he does or sees within the concentration camp, Glazer would like us to imagine living in the same way as Rudolph,” writer and filmmaker Enid Tihanyi Zentelis wrote for Talkhouse. “Because the Holocaust has been so fully written about and analyzed by historians, it makes for an ideal study of humankind’s ongoing capacity for violence, depravity and staggering lack of empathy, no matter what country or time period we consider.”

Called “a study in extreme cognitive dissonance” by the Guardian, “Zone of Interest” does feature one strand of hope in the form of a young girl.

Shot on a thermal imaging camera, the film pivots from its hauntingly ordinariness to nighttime scenes that follow a young woman moving “almost ghostlike by the camera,” according to the Guardian. “[She] clandestinely moves through a construction site beneath a railway that runs into the camp. She places apples in the earth for the starving prisoners on work duty to find the following day.”

This particular scene is a result of Glazer meeting a 90-year-old Polish resistance fighter by happenstance. The woman, called Alexandria, was just 12 when she began defying the Nazis and hiding apples and other food for the prisoners of Auschwitz.

While speaking to Alexandria, the woman revealed that she had discovered a small sheet of music while laying out food, which turned out to have been composed by an Auschwitz prisoner, composer Joseph Wulf, who survived the war.

“She lived in the house we shot in,” Glazer told the Guardian. “It was her bike we used, and the dress the actor wears was her dress. Sadly, she died a few weeks after we spoke.”

Her defiance, however, became a ray of sunlight for Glazer amid the darkest subject matter.

“That small act of resistance, the simple, almost holy act of leaving food, is crucial because it is the one point of light,” he recounts for the Guardian. “I really thought I couldn’t make the film at that point. I kept ringing my producer, Jim, and saying: ‘I’m getting out. I can’t do this. It’s just too dark.’ It felt impossible to just show the utter darkness, so I was looking for the light somewhere and I found it in her. She is the force for good.”

The seemingly phantom American “Ghost Army” was one of many problems plaguing the Wehrmacht in the summer of 1944. The Germans were not, as they believed, fighting a numerically superior American force, but battling artists, engineers and inflatables.

“The top-secret unit waged war using inflatable tanks and weapons, fake radio traffic, sound effects, even phony generals — all to fool the enemy into thinking that the army was bigger, better-armed, or in a different place than it was,” according to James M. Linn IV, curator at The National WWII Museum.

Now, after nearly a decade of research and grass-roots lobbying on their behalf, the masterful performers of the Ghost Army are slated to receive the Congressional Gold Medal.

Activated on Jan. 20, 1944, the unit known as the U.S. 23rd Headquarters Special Troops was the first mobile, multimedia tactical deception outfit in U.S. Army history. Comprising 82 officers and 1,023 men under the command of Army Col. Harry L. Reeder, this unique, top-secret detachment was capable of simulating two entire divisions — approximately 30,000 men — while being armed with nothing heavier than .50 caliber machine guns, according to The National WWII Museum.

First deployed two weeks after D-Day, the 23rd conducted 22 deception operations over a nine-month period. As the months wore on, the Ghost Army’s tactics became more sophisticated — with a flair of dramatics.

“There is too much MILITARY and not enough SHOWMANSHIP,” Lt. Fred Fox wrote in a memo to the unit’s leaders. “We must remember that we are playing to a very critical and attentive radio, ground and aerial audience. They must all be convinced.”

The mission, then, was never to fight Nazis, but to hoodwink them. Operating that close to the front, however, meant inherent danger.

The unit’s baptism by fire came near the city of Brest, France, on Aug. 23-25, 1944. The battle “marked the first time the 23rd Headquarters Special Troops used visual, radio and sonic deception all together,” according to The Ghost Army Legacy Project.

Their mission in Brest was to exaggerate the size of American forces attacking the city. Outnumbered and outgunned, the 23rd blasted sounds of marching troops and inflated over 200 plastic tanks and trucks to shore up the unit’s size.

“I guess we were successful because the Germans fired upon us,” 100-year-old Ghost Army veteran Bernie Bluestein, who specialized in fake signs and vehicle stencils, told The Washington Post. “We convinced them that we were the real thing.”

The deception proved so authentic that the German general, Hermann-Bernhard Ramcke, surrendered.

The Ghost Army’s final act came on March 18, 1945, when the 1,100-man unit deceived Nazi intelligence about the site and timing of the U.S. Ninth Army’s Rhine River crossing.

Under the cover of darkness, the phantom forces “blared sounds of rumbling vehicles, hammering and even soldiers swearing,” according to the Washington Post. “They radioed false orders to simulate movement to the front and posed as loose-lipped colonels and generals while planting disinformation for German spies to overhear in local bars and cafes.”

The Ghost Army’s contribution to Operation Plunder helped to overcome the final natural obstacle barring the U.S. Army’s way into Germany from the West.

Credited with saving between 15,000 and 30,000 American lives during the final year and a half of World War II, the actions of the secret unit were kept classified until 1996 — in case similar deceit was needed during the Cold War. Their contributions to the war effort only recently began receiving national attention.

“Some of these guys went to their graves without telling anybody in their families what this unit was involved in,” Beyer said.

That vault of secrecy, of course, will be pried open on March 21, when Congress presents the Congressional Gold Medal to the Ghost Army in a ceremony at the U.S. Capitol. Of the unit’s seven known surviving members, Bluestein, Seymour Nussenbaum and John Christman plan to attend.

“I’m certainly happy that it’s happening and they’re giving us a little recognition,” Bluestein told The Post. “But I’m very disappointed that it couldn’t have been a lot earlier when many of these soldiers were still living so they could have accepted and had some recognition the same as I am.”