World War Ii

Vietnam veteran John Otte did his best to forget the war. He got married, raised two sons and made a career working at credit unions. But as Otte neared retirement, memories of combat flooded back. Starting in 2005, he filed a series of claims with Veterans Affairs for disability compensation, contending that many of his health problems stemmed from the war. The VA agreed, and now the 65-year-old with two Purple Hearts receives $1,900 a month for post-traumatic stress disorder and diabetes - and for having shrapnel scars on his arms.

Retired Marine Brig. Gen. Gordon Gayle, who received the Navy Cross for leadership and bravery during the assault on Peleliu, one of the bloodiest and most complex and controversial battles fought by Marines during World War II, has died. He was 95. Gayle died April 21 at an assisted-living facility in Farnham, Va., after suffering a stroke, according to the U.S. Marine Corps. As an officer with the 1st Marine Division, Gayle led troops in five key battles in World War II, starting with Guadalcanal in 1942, where Marines, after weeks of fierce jungle fighting, stopped the advance of Japanese troops toward Australia.

With more than 4 million people visiting Yosemite National Park last year ? and that number expected to increase this year ? it's no wonder lodging inside the park is snatched up quickly. "We typically sell out during the summer season," Delaware North Cos. spokeswoman Lisa Cesaro said of its Yosemite accommodations (Ahwahnee Hotel, Yosemite Lodge at the Falls, Curry Village and the housekeeping camp on the Merced River; the Wawona Hotel, and in the back country, Tuolumne Meadows Lodge, White Wolf Lodge and the High Sierra camps)

Like many World War II veterans, he speaks modestly about his service. He is quiet and a polite listener, not the kind to draw attention to himself. But a few months ago, as he visited the National WWII Museum in New Orleans, other veterans noticed his hat emblazoned with his unit's insignia and number. "You see him?" someone asked. "He was in the 442. I've read about them. " Another vet, after spying the hat, walked up to him. "Sir, I just want to shake your hand. " The 442 refers to the 442nd Regimental Combat Team, one of the all-Japanese American units that served with distinction in World War II. The unassuming man turning heads was my father-in-law, Tokuji Yoshihashi.

There's a bit of Edward Gorey-esque glee in the way Kate Atkinson keeps knocking off her main character in "Life After Life. " And yet, she manages to invest these repeated deaths with poetry and emotion. This ingenious narrative conceit - the decision to kill her protagonist and bring her back, again and again - not only illustrates how seemingly small decisions can affect our lives; it also allows us as readers to inhabit a novelist's creative process. This is what writers do: create characters, hit a dead end, then go back and start again.

The U.S. House passed a nonbinding resolution urging Japan to apologize for coercing thousands of women into working as sex slaves for its World War II military. Officials in Tokyo say their country's leaders have apologized repeatedly, but the resolution's supporters say Japan has never fully assumed responsibility. Prime Minister Shinzo Abe caused anger in March when he said there was no evidence that the women had been coerced. Lawmakers want an apology similar to the one the U.S.

The old wounds, physical and spiritual, healed long ago. When Lou Zamperini returned to Japan recently, it was in the spirit of forgiveness and reconciliation. If any American during World War II had earned the right to hate, it was Louis Silvie Zamperini. Once one of America's best track and field athletes, he was beaten almost daily for 2 1/2 years in Japanese prisoner-of-war camps and fed a near-starvation diet.

Samuel Snow, an 83-year-old black World War II veteran who had traveled across the country to receive an apology from the Army for being unfairly convicted on rioting charges, died early Sunday just hours after the ceremony honoring him and 27 of his fellow soldiers. Snow had been admitted to a hospital on the eve of Saturday's ceremony at Ft. Lawton in Seattle.

Re "Revisionism Tokyo-style," Opinion, Jan. 18 Postwar Japan is often juxtaposed with Germany, and for good reason. Tuesday is the 50th anniversary of the Elysee Treaty between France and Germany, which sealed their reconciliation. Meanwhile, Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe is recanting a previous administration's scant "apology" for World War II-era war crimes. Can one imagine German Chancellor Angela Merkel paying homage to Nazi war criminals? If not, why is the world silent when Abe visits the Yasukuni shrine, where the souls of 2 million war dead - including war criminals - are said to be enshrined?

The image is of a lonely Korean woman in her late 60s, working in a back street bar in Shanghai. It could be Manila. Or Taipei. She is quiet. No one asks how she got there, so no one answers. The image and the silence haunt Bok Lim Kim, a La Jolla resident who has for a decade tried to raise awareness of sex crimes committed against Korean and other Asian women during World War II. The euphemism was "comfort girls." In reality, they were sex slaves.

Almost 21 million residential customers of Southern California Gas Co. will see their monthly bills increase by about 5%, or $1.94, now that state utility regulators have approved a four-year plan to guarantee revenue collected by the nation's largest natural gas distribution network. The California Public Utilities Commission on Thursday granted the unit of San Diego-based Sempra Energy a rate increase totaling $1.95 billion for 2012 through 2015. The amount is $84.83 million more than current revenue but $154 million less than the company asked for at the start of a lengthy legal proceeding, the commission said.

Vietnam veteran John Otte did his best to forget the war. He got married, raised two sons and made a career working at credit unions. But as Otte neared retirement, memories of combat flooded back. Starting in 2005, he filed a series of claims with Veterans Affairs for disability compensation, contending that many of his health problems stemmed from the war. The VA agreed, and now the 65-year-old with two Purple Hearts receives $1,900 a month for post-traumatic stress disorder and diabetes - and for having shrapnel scars on his arms.

Giulio Andreotti, the seven-time Italian prime minister who dominated Italian politics after World War II, but was tainted by accusations of Mafia ties, died in Rome on Monday after suffering from respiratory problems. He was 94. A lawmaker who lived through Italy's monarchy and its fascist era and sat in every Italian parliament since 1945, Andreotti had a career so intertwined with the country's 20th century history that when he faced trial for seeking favors from Cosa Nostra, the entire system was on trial too. "Andreotti was politics," Pier Ferdinando Casini, head of the Italian centrist Democratic Center Union party, said Monday.

Alan Wood never claimed to be a hero, but he did play a supporting role in one of World War II's most stirring moments. It was at Iwo Jima on Feb. 23, 1945. Straining into the wind, five Marines and a Navy corpsman planted the Stars and Stripes on the rocky peak of Mt. Suribachi. As the flag unfurled, Associated Press photographer Joe Rosenthal captured what may have been the war's most iconic image, a shot that inspired monuments and made the Iwo Jima flag-raisers instantly famous.

World War II and its aftermath loom large in the endlessly rich expanse of 20th century Japanese cinema. But no major Japanese director was as visibly affected by this defining trauma as Masaki Kobayashi (1916-96). An art history student, Kobayashi decided to take up filmmaking when the Pacific war broke out, convinced that cinema was a more urgent medium for a time of crisis. Mere months after securing an apprenticeship at the Shochiku studio, he was conscripted into the Japanese Army in Manchuria, where, as an act of resistance, he refused to rise above the rank of private.

I feel compelled to respond to Bill Watters' letter of April 7 regarding Japanese internment during World War II. First, he seemed to have missed his history lessons as many of these internees were U.S. citizens. Second, if their "spartan" camps provided "medical and social" needs, it is because the internees had to build them from scratch. Third, upon their return they were not compensated. Most lost their homes (forced to sell before being forced to leave), their businesses, property and farms.

Each June, Americans rightfully honor the bravery and sacrifice of the men who invaded Normandy in 1944. Recently, however, this celebration has too often lapsed into a solipsistic and deeply flawed revision of the U.S. role in World War II, which leads to equally self-congratulatory but far more dangerous conclusions about America's purpose in the world today.

The first time I met A.J. Liebling was when I went to work at the New Yorker in 1946, shortly after being discharged from the Army. He did not immediately recognize me as one of the Greatest Generation (I was in civilian clothes), but he knew my work for the magazine and he invited me to lunch. He looked like an owlish Humpty-Dumpty, round in head and body, and he wore round, wire-rimmed eyeglasses and walked pigeon-toed with a kind of dainty deliberation.

George McArthur, who covered the Vietnam War for the Los Angeles Times as Saigon bureau chief after spending two decades as a foreign correspondent for the Associated Press, died Friday. He was 88. McArthur died at a hospice in Fairfax County, Va., of complications from a stroke he suffered more than two weeks earlier, said his wife, Eva Kim McArthur. "He stood out among Vietnam War reporters for being level-headed at a time when other reporters were obsessed with being pro-war or anti-war," said Bob Gibson, who was foreign editor of The Times when he hired McArthur in 1969.

Twenty years ago, veteran caver Chris Nicola received an offer from a Ukrainian friend to explore the well-known gypsum giant caves in the western part of the European country. Nicola quickly accepted the invitation. "My family on my mother's side had Cossack roots and they were known to come from the Ukraine," the New Yorker said over the phone this week. "I thought in the back of my mind I could do some family research. " But his main reason was to visit the 77-mile long Priest's Grotto cave, which is part of an extensive gypsum cave system.