Wartime

'Life During Wartime' MPAA rating: Unrated Running time: 1 hour, 37 minutes Playing: In selected theaters

Argentine veterans of the bitter war over the Falkland Islands said Monday that they had no sorrow over the death of Margaret Thatcher, who launched British forces to recapture the South Atlantic islands more than three decades ago. “She won't be remembered as someone who has contributed anything to peace,” Mario Volpe, president of the Center for Malvinas Veterans, told  Agence France-Presse . The islands are known by Argentines as...

Straightforward and solid but only mildly involving, "Winter in Wartime" is the coming-of-age story of a Dutch teen boy, set during the final months of World War II. Director Martin Koolhoven elicits strong performances in the handsomely photographed feature but fails to sustain tension, creating a work that's smooth and reassuring, never truly gripping. Based on a 1972 children's novel by Jan Terlouw, the film avoids troubling ambiguities, resolving each challenge or conflict almost as soon as it arises.

This month 75 years ago, the people of Nanking, China's ancient capital city, were in the midst of one of the worst atrocities in history, the infamous Rape of Nanking. The truth of what actually happened is at the center of a bitter dispute between China and Japan that continues to play out in present-day relations. Many Chinese see Japan's election last month of ultraconservative nationalist Shinzo Abe as prime minister as just the latest in a string of insults. And it was recently reported that Japan is considering rolling back its 1993 apology regarding "comfort women," the thousands of women the Japanese army sexually enslaved during World War II. In 1937, the Japanese Imperial Army, captured Nanking on Dec. 13. No one knows the exact toll the Japanese soldiers exacted on its citizens, but a postwar Allied investigation put the numbers at more than 200,000 killed and at least 20,000 women and girls raped in the six weeks after the city fell.

It was strange enough last month when an 85-year-old retired farmer in Iowa received a letter his brother had sent in 1943 when he was stationed at California's Camp Roberts. It was stranger still when, a few weeks later, Camp Roberts got a letter sent in 1944 to a woman who had worked at the Red Cross hospital there. The hospital was leveled decades ago. Postal authorities are mystified. More than 96% of the mail is delivered on time, said James Widgel, a spokesman for the U.S. Postal Service.

The movie begins with grainy war footage that has become all too familiar: Battleship Row belching thick, black smoke over Pearl Harbor; bombs dropping from the bellies of warplanes; American soldiers opening up on an unseen enemy in the jungles of Vietnam. And then comes what is perhaps the most jarring image of all: the superintendent of the U.S. Military Academy at West Point, Lt. Gen. William J. Lennox Jr., discussing combat ... and poetry. Poetry?

For years the stories of pain and patriotism, of loss and heroism, have been locked away in a storage facility in Washington, D.C. But now a massive collection of American wartime correspondence from the Revolutionary War to the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan is on the verge of finding a permanent home that will provide greater access for students, historians and the general public. Author and historian Andrew Carroll, who has gathered 90,000-plus wartime letters since 1998, has reached an agreement to donate the ever-growing collection to Chapman University in Orange County.

Just finished reading your editorial "The Role of the Press in Wartime" (Feb. 18). The press in both wartime and in peacetime continues to perform very well. Its function is vital to the nation at all times. We desperately need the continued asking of the "hard and probing questions" if our government is to adequately represent and govern our society. Americans should be closing ranks in support of our so very effective free press. H.J. BENGEL, Westminster

In the San Francisco office of Touche Ross, accountants are working on calculations that they hope will lead to the perfect zero. When they succeed--and they must no later than Nov. 30--they will have written the final balance on what once was the greatest industrial empire in the western United States. It has been nearly five years since the task of parceling out Kaiser Industries' remaining $20 million of assets was assigned to the accounting firm.

'Of Gods and Men' MPAA rating: PG-13 for a momentary scene of startling wartime violence, some disturbing images and brief language Running time: 2 hours Playing: At Landmark, West Los Angeles

BEIJING - Newly installed Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe was quoted Monday saying that he would revisit a 1995 apology made by his nation's government for suffering caused in World War II. Although other Japanese officials have suggested retracting apologies for wartime horrors, the words coming from Abe himself are bound to inflame anti-Japanese sentiment in China and the Korean peninsula and put the new government off to a bad start with...

For years the stories of pain and patriotism, of loss and heroism, have been locked away in a storage facility in Washington, D.C. But now a massive collection of American wartime correspondence from the Revolutionary War to the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan is on the verge of finding a permanent home that will provide greater access for students, historians and the general public. Author and historian Andrew Carroll, who has gathered 90,000-plus wartime letters since 1998, has reached an agreement to donate the ever-growing collection to Chapman University in Orange County.

Even in wartime, anniversaries are significant, which explains why the U.S. Navy launched the USS Bowfin, an attack submarine, on Dec. 7, 1942, one year after the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor and America's entry into World War II. Nicknamed “the Pearl Harbor avenger,” the sub and its crews are credited with nine wartime patrols, during which they sank between 16 and 44 enemy vessels. (The claims vary.) Since 1981, the vessel -- part of what the Navy called its "silent service" -- has welcomed 7 million visitors to its now-permanent home at Pearl Harbor on Oahu . Guests can experience the cramped conditions that submariners endured and tour a dockside museum that details the history of submarines in combat as far back as the Civil War. Outdoors, 52 markers bear the names of the 3,600 U.S. submariners who died during World War II. To commemorate the 70th anniversary of the Bowfin's entry into wartime service, the museum is offering half-price admission -- $5 -- from Sunday-Dec.

My parents can't agree about what to do with the book. My mother has wanted to chuck it from the minute she married my dad in 1969. But my father insists on displaying it, albeit upside-down, on the bookshelf next to his collection of Jewish texts. His uncle, Eddie Cohen, brought the book home from World War II in 1945. As I heard the story, Eddie, my great-uncle, took part in the storming of Omaha Beach and went on to fight in Germany. During one battle, he killed a German soldier and went through his rucksack, claiming the copy of "Mein Kampf" he found inside as his dubious souvenir.

"Simon and the Oaks" is a two-hour theatrical feature that has the kind of emotional and storytelling reach regularly found these days only in cable TV miniseries. It's a warmly done family and personal drama that seems to cover familiar territory, but only up to a point and very much in its own way. Given that "Simon" follows the fortunes of two interlinked Swedish families from 1939 to 1952, it's not surprising that the source material is a bestselling novel, in this case one by Marianne Fredricksson that has been translated into 25 languages and sold more than 4 million copies worldwide.

The SS Lane Victory is San Pedro's other wartime museum ship. The brawny battleship USS Iowa has been a media darling since it was towed to L.A.'s harbor and opened as a museum on July 7. But the Lane Victory, built in Los Angeles in 1945 as an emergency cargo ship and lovingly restored by U.S. Merchant Marine veterans, has been a floating museum since 1989. The ship also served during the Korean and Vietnam wars. And, unlike the Iowa, this one lets you take a spin on it. The ship, a National Historic  Landmark usually found at Berth 46, plans daylong cruises on the open ocean from 9 a.m.-4 p.m. this summer and fall that are designed to re-create the feel of being transported on a cargo ship.

Climb to Conquer Peter Shelton Scribner, $24 This highly readable volume offers an excellent look at the U.S. Army's storied 10th Mountain Division, its long months of training and five-month campaign in the mountains of northern Italy as World War II came to an end.

In the overview "War Turned Impoverished U.S. Into a Superpower" (Aug. 31), Stanley Meisler notes: "Some Americans feared that unemployment and depression would return after demobilization of the armed forces." I think at this point he should have mentioned that it was just this thinking that transformed the War Department into the Defense Department and put us on a permanent wartime economy. RICK SANDFORD Los Angeles

LONDON — Bosnian Serb Gen. Ratko Mladic confronted the accusations against him at the opening of his war crimes trial in The Hague on Wednesday with contemptuous gestures to the court and the victims who had come to see him face justice for atrocities during the 1992-95 Bosnian war. Slowed by age and the hardships of 15 years on the run from the indictment by the United Nations tribunal, Mladic still mustered a hint of his trademark swagger as...

Reality of war Re "Warfare changed, but laws did not," Jan. 15 I served in Vietnam in 1965 and '66. I have one thing to say about today's methods of fighting war: There are no rules of engagement. People can sit in their fancy offices with their fancy law degrees and write out all the legal rules and regulations they want, but when the shooting starts, there is only one thing that matters — stay alive, whatever it takes. If that means innocent people must die, then so be it. That sounds cruel, heartless and dirty, and that is what it is. That is what war is. Maybe it is time to put an end to war. I doubt we are up to that.