Friends of the National World War II Memorial

03/18/2023

Today we remember four extraordinary individuals who were awarded the Medal of Honor for their actions on March 18, 1945 (US Army PVT William D. McGee, US Army Col. Jack LeMaster Treadwell, US Army PFC Frederick C. Murphy, US Army CPL Edward G. Wilkin), as well as 1LT Jack Warren Mathis for his actions on March 18, 1943.

03/18/2023

On March 16/17, 1945, 331 American B-29 bombers launched a firebombing attack against the city of Kobe, Japan. This raid was executed by all three wings of the XXI Bomber Command, namely the 73rd, 313th, and 314th bombardment wings. It was flown in honor of Brigadier General LaVerne Saunders, who was, at the time, recuperating in Walter Reed General Hospital from injuries he sustained during an aircraft accident. The raid targeted four key areas: the northwest corner of the city, the area south of the main railroad line, the area northwest of the main railroad station, and the area northeast of the third target. Of the city's residents, 8,841 were confirmed to have been killed in the resulting firestorms, which destroyed an area of three square miles and included 21% of Kobe's urban area. At the time, the city covered 14 square miles. More than 650,000 people had their homes destroyed, and the homes of another million people were damaged.

280 Japanese fighters were spotted during the raid, 96 of which engaged the B-29 bombers in 104 attacks. This constituted the highest proportion of fighters sighted to those attacking than previously experienced during a night raid. Despite this, no bombers were lost due to enemy defenses. Three bombers were lost during the raid, but the reasons for their losses are unknown.

03/17/2023

The Ludendorff Bridge (sometimes referred to as the Bridge at Remagen) was a bridge across the river Rhine in Germany that was captured by United States Army forces in early March 1945 during the Battle of Remagen, when it was one of the few remaining bridges in the region and therefore a critical strategic point. Built during World War I to help deliver reinforcements and supplies to German troops on the Western Front, it connected Remagen on the west bank and the village of Erpel on the east bank between two hills flanking the river.

Midway through Operation Lumberjack, on March 7, 1945, the troops of the 1st U.S. Army approached Remagen and were surprised to find that the bridge was still standing. Its capture, two weeks before Field Marshal Bernard Montgomery's meticulously planned Operation Plunder, enabled the U.S. Army to establish a bridgehead on the eastern side of the Rhine. After the U.S. forces captured the bridge, German forces tried to destroy it many times.

It finally collapsed on March 17, 1945, 10 days after it was captured. 28 Army engineers were killed in the collapse, and 63 were injured. Of those who died, 18 were missing but presumably had drowned in the swift current of the Rhine. The bridge, while it stood, and newly established pontoon bridges enabled the U.S. Army to secure a bridgehead of six divisions, about 125,000 troops, with accompanying tanks, artillery pieces, and trucks, across the Rhine. Capturing the bridge hastened the war's conclusion. After the war, the bridge was not rebuilt. The towers on the west bank were converted into a museum, and the towers on the east bank are now a performing arts space.

03/17/2023

Happy St. Patrick's Day from the Friends of the National World War II Memorial!

Photo: While a piper plays, a special rum ration is issued to men of the 2nd Royal Inniskilling Fusiliers to mark St Patrick’s Day in the Anzio bridgehead, Italy, March 17, 1944.

03/17/2023

Florence Ebersole Smith Finch (October 11, 1915 – December 8, 2016) was a Filipino-American member of the World War II resistance against the Japanese occupation of the Philippines.

Prior to the Japanese invasion of the Philippines, Finch was working at the G-2 (Intelligence) Headquarters of the U. S. Army in Manila. There she met her husband, an American sailor named Charles Smith, who would be killed in action in the Philippines in 1942.

While working as a stenographer for the army intelligence headquarters in Manila when it fell to the Japanese, she convinced the occupying forces that she was Filipino and got a job writing gas rationing vouchers, which she cleverly used to aid the resistance movement. Her job enabled her to divert fuel supplies and sabotage Japanese shipments.

She later smuggled food to starving American prisoners before being caught by the Japanese army and tortured, confined to a two-by-four-foot cell. Despite being tortured with electric shocks, Finch refused to talk. She survived only to be sentenced to hard labor, and when American troops finally freed her on February 10, 1945, Finch reportedly weighed just 79.8 pounds.

Following the war, she moved to Buffalo, New York, where she joined the U.S. Coast Guard. In 1947 she received the Medal of Freedom, the nation’s highest award to a civilian.

She died on December 8, 2016, in Ithaca, New York. Finch was given a military funeral with full honors in April 2017.

03/16/2023

21-year-old Corporal Edward Burckhardt of Yonkers, New York, claimed that this kitten "captured him" on the battlefield at Iwo Jima in March 1945. Both survived the battle and the war! (United States Marine Corps)

03/16/2023

USS Tautog (SS-199), the second Tambor-class submarine, was the first ship of the United States Navy to be named for the tautog, a small edible sport fish. She was one of the most successful submarines of WWII. Tautog was credited with sinking 26 Japanese ships, for a total of 72,606 tons, scoring second by number of ships and eleventh by tonnage, earning her the nickname "The Terrible T." Of the twelve Tambor-class submarines, she was one of only five to survive the war.

Tautog's assignment for her tenth war patrol took her to the cold waters of the northern Pacific near the Kuril Islands. The submarine topped off with fuel at Midway and entered her patrol area on March 5, 1944. Her only casualty of the war occurred that day. While several members of her crew were doing emergency work on deck, a giant wave knocked them all off their feet and swept one man, Motor Machinist's Mate R. A. Laramee, overboard. A search for him proved fruitless.

As the sub headed homeward on the night of March 16, Tautog made radar contact with a convoy of seven ships off Hokkaidō. She maneuvered into position off the enemy's starboard flank so that two ships were almost overlapping and launched four torpedoes. After watching the first one explode against the nearer ship, Tautog was forced deep by an es**rt but heard two timed explosions and breaking-up noises accompanied by more explosions. The American submarine pursued the remaining ships and attacked again from their starboard flank, firing three torpedoes at a medium-sized freighter and four at another ship. A Japanese destroyer closed the submarine, forced her deep, and subjected her to a depth charge attack for one and one-half hours. Tautog was officially credited with sinking Shirakumo and the passenger/cargo ship Nichiren Maru, bringing her total for the patrol to five ships for 17,700 tons (reduced postwar to four for 11,300), one of the most aggressive and successful of the war.

03/16/2023

Army Col. Ruby Bradley entered the U.S. Army Nurse Corps (ANC) as a surgical nurse, and she would retire as one of the most decorated women in U.S. military history.

Bradley was serving as a hospital administrator at Camp John Hay in the Philippines when the Japanese Army took her prisoner only three weeks after the attack on Pearl Harbor in 1941. She was eventually interned with other prisoners of war (POWs) at the Santo Tomas Internment Camp in Manila.

While at the camp, Bradley immediately began providing medical attention to other prisoners, smuggled food to those who needed it and often went hungry to make sure others didn’t. She lost so much weight that she was able to smuggle outdated medical equipment and supplies into the camp by hiding them under her clothes without raising suspicion.

Throughout her 37 months in captivity, Bradley worked on 230 major surgeries and delivered 13 babies. By the time the camp was liberated in February 1945, Bradley weighed only 84 pounds. She had given most of her daily rations to the children in the camp. The other POWs called Bradley and her fellow nurses "Angels in Fatigues.”

After WWII, Bradley continued her career in the Army and earned a Bachelor of Science degree from the University of California just four years after the end of the war. She would go on to also serve in the Korean War, eventually being promoted to the rank of colonel before retiring in 1963. She received 34 decorations, medals and awards throughout her career, including the Bronze Star Medal.

03/15/2023

Silvestre Santana Herrera of Chihuahua, Mexico, a Private First Class in the U.S. Army received the Medal of Honor for his extraordinary actions in Mertzwiller, France, on March 15, 1945.

Herrera served in Company E, 142d Infantry, 36th Infantry Division. On March 15, 1945, the U.S. Army began Operation Undertone, an attack on German positions in the Alsace region of France. After Herrera's one-man charge on an enemy stronghold resulted in the single-handed capture of eight enemy soldiers, his unit was attacked by a second across a minefield. Herrera again single-handedly took on the enemy, losing both his legs beneath the knees to mine explosions yet continuing to provide covering machine gun fire that allowed his comrades to overrun the enemy position in a flanking action clear of the minefield.

The nation's highest military decoration was presented to PFC Herrera during ceremonies at the White House. President Harry S. Truman awarded him the medal on August 23, 1945. A year later, the Government of Mexico presented Herrera with its Order of Merit (First Class). Herrera died on November 26, 2007, at his home in Glendale, Arizona. He was the only living person authorized to wear both the Medal of Honor and Mexico's Order of Military Merit (First Class) at the time of his death. A legend in the state of Arizona, he was honored by the city of Phoenix officially renaming the portion of 3rd Street that runs from Indian School Road North into the park "S. Herrera Way."

03/15/2023

Francis Junior Pierce of Earlville, Iowa, a Pharmacist’s Mate First Class in the U.S. Navy, was awarded the Medal of Honor for his extraordinary actions during the Battle of Iwo Jima on March 15, 1945.

Pierce enlisted in the Navy a week after Pearl Harbor was attacked. He served at the naval hospital on Parris Island until August 1942. In January 1944, he was assigned to the 4th Marine Division, where he was attached to the 2nd Battalion, 24th Marine Regiment. During the Battle of Iwo Jima in 1945, he helped care for and protect wounded Marines and became one of four navy corpsman assigned to a Marine unit to receive the Medal for heroic actions during the battle. He was initially awarded the Navy Cross for his actions on March 15, 1945, and the Silver Star Medal for actions in which he was wounded twice on March 16, 1945.

He was awarded the Medal of Honor for his actions on March 15, 1945. Pierce was honorably discharged from the Navy in December 1945. He then joined the Grand Rapids Police Department and briefly served in the Michigan National Guard from May 1949 to November 1950. He retired from the police department in 1982 and died of lung cancer in 1986.

03/15/2023

On March 14, 1945, Fleet Admiral Chester Nimitz declared, "all powers of government of the Japanese Empire in these islands are hereby suspended," but fighting would continue on Iwo Jima for weeks.

The official flag raising at American Headquarters on Iwo Jima after Nimitz proclaims victory.

03/14/2023

George Phillips of Rich Hill, Missouri, a Private in the U.S. Marine Corps, was posthumously awarded the Medal of Honor for his heroic actions on March 14, 1945, during the Battle of Iwo Jima.

Phillips worked on the railroad before enlisting in the Marine Corps on April 25, 1944, at the age of 17. By March 14, 1945, he was serving as a private in the 2nd Battalion, 28th Marines. During the Battle of Iwo Jima, Phillips was standing guard when a Japanese soldier tossed a hand gr***de toward a group of resting Marines. He sacrificed himself by smothering the hand gr***de with his body to save the lives of his fellow Marines. He was just 18 years old.

He was posthumously awarded the Medal of Honor for his actions on March 14, 1945. Initially buried in the 5th Marine Division Cemetery on Iwo Jima, Private Phillips’ remains were reinterred in Bethel Cemetery, Labadie, Missouri, in 1948.

03/14/2023

Monthly Conference Series | National WWII Memorial

Join us Sat., Mar. 18 for FREE Virtual Conference on WWII!

Don’t forget to register for this month’s FREE online conference on WWII.

Click below to learn more about the Saturday, March 18th presentations moderated by best-selling author and Friends’ Resident Historian Alex Kershaw.

https://www.wwiimemorialfriends.org/monthly-conference-series

Friends of the National World War II Memorial presents a Monthly Conference Series to learn more about the spirit of unity and shared purpose that defined the character of our country during World War II.

03/14/2023

Franklin Earl Sigler of Glen Ridge, New Jersey, a Private First Class in the U.S. Marine Corps was awarded the Medal of Honor for his extraordinary actions on March 14, 1945, during the Battle of Iwo Jima.

Sigler served in Company F, 2nd Battalion, 26th Marine Regiment, 5th Marine Division. On March 14, 1945, Sigler carried out a one-man assault on a Japanese gun position which had been holding up the advance of his company for several days and annihilating the enemy gun crew with hand gr***des. Although painfully wounded during his attack, he directed the fire of his squad and personally carried three of his fellow soldiers who were wounded to safety behind the lines.

President Harry S. Truman presented the medal at the White House on October 5, 1945. Sigler was also awarded the Purple Heart. In June 1946, with the rank of Private First Class, Sigler was discharged from the Marine Corps for disability resulting from his combat injuries. He died on January 20, 1995, and is buried at Arlington National Cemetery, Arlington, Virginia.

03/14/2023

Known as "Amazing Grace, "Commodore Grace Murray Hopper's importance in U.S. naval history is apparent everywhere you turn: a destroyer was named after her (USS Hopper, DDG-70), as was the Cray XE6 "Hopper" supercomputer. As the founder of the COBOL programming language, a precursor to many of the software code approaches of today, her work is legendary among computer scientists and mathematicians.

In 1943, during World War II, she joined the United States Naval Reserves. She was assigned to the Bureau of Ordinance Computation Project, where she became the third programmer of the world's first large-scale computer called the Mark I. When she saw it, all she could think about was taking it apart and figuring it out.

"That was an impressive beast. She was 51 feet long, eight feet high and five feet deep," Hopper said.

She mastered the Mark I, Mark II and Mark III. While trying to repair the Mark I, she discovered a moth caught in a relay. She taped the moth in the log book, and from that, she coined the phrase "a bug in the computer." During her career, she mastered the UNIVAC I, the first large-scale electronic computer, and created a program that translated symbolic math codes into machine language. This breakthrough allowed programmers to store codes on magnetic tape and recall them when needed -- essentially the first compiler.

By the time of her death in 1992, Hopper was renowned as a mentor and a giant in her field, with honoree doctorates from more than 30 universities. She was laid to rest with full military honors in Arlington National Cemetery.