Wwii

A plaque near the entrance on the sprawling grounds of the Santa Anita racetrack is the sole reminder of the track's place in World War II history as the nation's largest assembly center for Japanese Americans on their way to internment camps. Although the prestigious Breeders' Cup World Championships unfolded Friday and Saturday at the landmark racetrack, 67 years ago a darker chapter unfolded at the site. The horses were moved out, the track was shut down and the park's extensive grounds provided the massive space needed by the War Department to temporarily house thousands of people of Japanese decent.

Tule Lake Segregation Center in Tulelake, Calif., just south of the Oregon border, was the largest of the 10 relocation camps across the country where Japanese Americans were rounded up and held during World War II. Now the story of the former camp will be told through traveling exhibits and a restored building at what has become a national historic landmark. The National Park Service awarded $1.4 million in grants Tuesday to fund projects in seven states to help tell the story of the 120,000 detainees scattered nationwide.

When they first came to this corner of Wyoming 69 years ago, shops and restaurants in the tiny town of Cody hung banners warning "No Japs Allowed. " A local newspaper announced their arrival with the headline, "TEN THOUSAND JAPS TO BE INTERNED HERE. " But this weekend, as hundreds of Japanese Americans interned during World War II at the Heart Mountain Relocation Center returned, many for the first time, new signs greeted them: "Welcome all Japanese Americans. Congratulations. " Photos: Heart Mountain reunion They returned to see the land, now fields of lima beans and alfalfa, and to see the opening of a long-awaited museum at the site that will preserve their stories.

Dog-tired, Capt. Abe Baum was snoozing on the hood of a military vehicle when he was shaken awake and summoned to a superior's tent. With worry on their faces, his unit's top officers were clustered around Gen. George S. Patton Jr., who had just issued a secret order for what some historians later described as one of the most ill-conceived missions of World War II. Baum, then a 23-year-old New Yorker, would become known for brilliantly executing his...

Barbara Lauwers Podoski, who launched one of the most successful psychological campaigns of World War II, which resulted in the surrender of more than 600 Czechoslovakian soldiers fighting for the Germans, died of cardiovascular disease Aug. 16 at the Veterans Affairs hospital in Washington, D.C. She was 95. One of the few female operatives in the Office of Strategic Services, the wartime predecessor to the CIA, she found creative ways to undermine...

Bill Geary, 88, a cattle rancher from Montana, paused Saturday to look at pictures and maps detailing the carnage of the World War II battle on the island of Peleliu. Geary, who fought there as a Marine, was succinct in his assessment. "It was a nasty place," he said as he walked a passageway dubbed the Hall of Heroes aboard the amphibious assault ship named for the battle. What was nasty about it? Geary was asked. "Everything," he said, "absolutely everything." It was a morning of remembrances for Geary and 10 other Marine veterans honored in San Diego as members of the 12th Defense Battalion, a unit of the 1st Marine Division, the division that led the U.S. assault on the Japanese garrison.

Michael Kuryla Jr., one of 317 sailors who survived the sinking of the ill-fated Navy cruiser Indianapolis during World War II and later bonded with other activists to exonerate their ship's captain, died of cancer Oct. 3 at his home in Bartlett, Ill. He was 84. Kuryla found strength from his fellow stranded Navy comrades floating in shark-infested waters of the Philippine Sea for nearly five days in 1945. Their ship, the cruiser Indianapolis, sank in just 12 minutes after being hit by two Japanese torpedoes shortly after delivering the atomic bomb that would level Hiroshima.

Regarding "Remembering the Heartache of Terminal Island," July 28: Italian alien fishermen also had to leave Terminal Island, as well as Japanese nationals (alien enemies) and their dual-citizen Japanese American children. It's easy enough to raise $200,000 for a propaganda museum, when every person of Japanese descent (alien or American-born dual-citizen Japanese), received $20,000 each for "human suffering." Now they must try to justify the unjustifiable by continuing to pervert history, falsify events and revise WWII history.

While Christopher Knight's commentary on the proposed World War II memorial being placed on the site of the present Rainbow Pool exposes some of the politics that may have played into the site selection process (what a shocker), his article has more invective and hyperbole than rational thought on why it's a bad location for the memorial ("Damage to a Prime Piece of Real Estate," July 19). Anyone who has walked the length of the National Mall between the Washington Monument and Lincoln Memorial knows what a lonely, empty space of land it is. The proposed WWII memorial is aesthetically well-suited to the location and vice versa, and is in keeping with the existing Washington architecture (unlike the Vietnam War Memorial, which nonetheless has become a cultural touchstone cherished by the public and art critics alike)

Former enemies and allies somberly marked the 70th anniversary of the start of World War II on Tuesday, underlining the need to remember the bloodiest conflict of the 20th century so as not to repeat it. Russian Prime Minister Vladimir Putin, whose country sided with Nazi Germany during the initial invasion of Poland in 1939 before later opposing Germany, said the war and its causes needed to be studied from all perspectives. "We should examine everything which ended up bringing about the tragedy of Sept.

Historians have said that losing the Philippines in the early stages of World War II was a defining event in the career of Gen. Douglas MacArthur. The same could be said of Edwin Ramsey. But Ramsey couldn't admit defeat. After MacArthur's retreat in early 1942, Ramsey, an officer in the 26th Cavalry Regiment of the U.S. Army, joined the Philippine resistance. He eventually headed a guerrilla force that grew to 40,000 enlisted men and officers, supplying crucial intelligence that helped lay the foundation for MacArthur's triumphant return more than two years later.

NEW YORK - In the mid-1950s, Japanese artist Kazuo Shiraga took action painting to new heights. Though trained as a traditional brush painter, he tossed them. He tried painting with his fingers, then in public performances he spread paint on paper or canvas with his bare feet. In more elaborate versions, he suspended himself from overhead ropes and swung his body freely, his feet swirling the paint below. "It was by removing himself from his training that he was able to fully express himself," says Ming Tiampo, co-curator of a new exhibition at the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum featuring Shiraga and fellow members of the Gutai Art Association.

KYAN KHINN SU, Myanmar - No matter what anyone else says, antique-aircraft buff David Cundall remains adamant about finding valuable World War II Spitfires buried somewhere in Myanmar. The 63-year-old English farmer and aviation fan told reporters in Yangon this week that he would continue his search even though his main sponsor had backed out. Cundall has already led a 21-member team digging and surveying for several weeks this year near Yangon's international airport in Mingaladon, convinced that dozens of the planes were buried unassembled in wooden crates at the end of the war in 1945.

George Aratani, a Los Angeles businessman who donated millions of dollars to Japanese American causes, and with his wife endowed the nation's first academic chair to study the World War II internment of people of Japanese descent and their efforts to gain redress, has died. He was 95. An entrepreneur who founded the Mikasa china and Kenwood electronics firms, Aratani died Tuesday at Santa Monica-UCLA Medical Center of complications of pneumonia, his daughter Linda Aratani said. He had lived at the Keiro nursing facility in Lincoln Heights since last summer.

WASHINGTON -- Democratic Sen. Frank Lautenberg of New Jersey, the last of the World War II veterans in the Senate, is retiring at the end of this term, he said Thursday. Lautenberg, who turned 89 last month, had been planning to run for reelection in 2014. This year, however, Cory Booker, the mayor of Newark, indicated interest in the job and began forming a campaign committee to explore the option. Booker is not the only potential candidate, and the prospect of an open Senate seat could set up a scramble among Democrats.

For a long time, the story of the four chaplains was everywhere. In classrooms, posters showed the men of different faiths, arms linked in prayer, braced against the waves engulfing the deck of their torpedoed troop ship on Feb. 3, 1943. They had given their life preservers to frantic soldiers and urged troops paralyzed with fear to jump into the icy North Atlantic before they were sucked down by the sinking ship's whirlpool. A postage stamp in 1948 honored the two Protestant ministers, the Catholic priest and the rabbi.

Commemorative wreaths will be placed Saturday to honor members of the Netherlands armed forces and Dutch civilians who died during World War II in the Netherlands East Indies. They will be placed at the base of the American flag at Los Angeles National Cemetery, Sepulveda Boulevard at Constitution Avenue in Westwood. The event, sponsored by the Comite 15 Augustus 1945, will be at 10:30 a.m. on Saturday. For further information, call (310) 398-5837.

If Miramax was the house that Quentin Tarantino built, is Weinstein Co. the house that Tarantino will save? That answer may become clearer next weekend when the director's 153-minute, campy World War II action movie "Inglourious Basterds," starring Brad Pitt, opens. A lot more than the fate of the free world is riding on whether Tarantino's renegade soldiers succeed in their mission to kill Hitler. A hit could give Bob and Harvey Weinstein some much needed breathing room and perhaps quiet -- at least temporarily -- speculation that their production company is on the ropes.

She was a star player of the All-American Girls Professional Baseball League , the pioneering women's league that kept baseball alive during World War II. When the league folded after the war ended, she, like other women players of the day, packed her groundbreaking history away, along with her glove, bat and baseball uniforms. But with the 1992 release of the hit film "A League of Their Own" about the short-lived women's league, Lavone "Pepper" Paire Davis, an All-Star catcher and gritty clutch hitter, was rediscovered, becoming a popular speaker and tireless promoter of women in professional sports.

WASHINGTON - For a dwindling group of aging Philippine World War II veterans, the battle to gain recognition for their service goes on. The veterans, many in their 80s and 90s, thought they had won a decades-long struggle when President Obama signed legislation in 2009 providing one-time payments for helping U.S. troops fight the Japanese. Philippine veterans who are U.S. citizens can receive $15,000, and noncitizens, including those living in the Philippines, $9,000. But more than half of the 43,083 applicants were turned down, most because their wartime service could not be verified by U.S. military records.