Wwii

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.

The men and women — especially the women — who helped win World War II were remembered Saturday with a wreath-laying next to where wartime B-17 bombers and fighter planes were built. The commemoration took place at Rosie the Riveter Park, an unusual three-acre interpretive center in Long Beach that honors women who worked at the Douglas Aircraft Co. plant and in other defense industries during the early 1940s. Finishing touches were made last month on the $200,000 installation at the corner of Clark Avenue and Conant Street.

John R. Alison Decorated WWII ace fighter pilot John R. Alison, 98, a World War II fighter pilot who helped lead a daring and unprecedented Allied air invasion of Burma, died of natural causes Monday at his home in Washington, D.C., his family said. Alison was a retired Air Force major general and a former Northrop Corp. executive. His wartime achievements included six aerial victories, qualifying him as an ace, according to the Air Force Assn., an independent organization in Arlington, Va., that promotes public understanding of aerospace power.

Every morning, she climbed the wide marble steps of the National Archives in Washington, D.C. Aiko Herzig-Yoshinaga was not trained for this work. She was a homemaker, not a historian. But she had a lifetime of simmering anger and unanswered questions. By lamplight in the grand reading room, she scoured thousands of documents, inventing her own organizing system to keep track of the information she found. She brought home so many copies that she commandeered a bathtub and used it as a filing cabinet.

In one sense, the U.S. solicitor general's recent admission of his office's wrongdoing wasn't really news. After all, commissions courts and investigators long ago established that various government agencies and officials fudged or withheld facts during World War II in order to sweep all people of Japanese descent — American-born citizens as well as immigrants — out of California and parts of three other Western states. Congress, the president, state and local officials and the military rode a wave of war hysteria to support the politically popular but blatantly un-American evacuation and confinement of more than 100,000 Japanese Americans.

Julia Child's wartime spell in the Office of Strategic Services has always seemed the most intriguing chapter in the story of her evolution from the cocoon of her staid, soft-shoe Pasadena upbringing into the iconic French chef who revolutionized American cooking. Serving in that precursor of the CIA not only took her away from her native shores for the first time but also plunged her into two cultures about as different from what she was accustomed to as any you might find. Surely, it was no coincidence that India and China also boasted two of the world's greatest cuisines, so that amid all the culture shock there was also exposure to a panoply of spices and new ways of cooking.

Chiya Yamane shuffles down the hall of the evacuation center, an old lady seeking refuge in a children's school. She is wearing an oversized sweater, her shoulders hunched against the late winter chill that penetrates the Miyako Elementary School where she was brought after the March 11 tsunami tore through her home. She remembers hearing the tsunami warning; then the desperate attempt to get away. "But I'm 84," Yamane said. "And very slow. " It was a rescue worker who appeared in time to carry her on his back, up the mountainside to higher ground and safety.

Japanese Prime Minister Naoto Kan told reporters on Sunday that his country was facing its most difficult challenge since World War II and called on his people to unite in the face of a devastating earthquake and tsunami and potential nuclear crisis. "This is the toughest crisis in Japan's 65 years of postwar history," Kan said during a televised news conference. "I'm convinced that we can overcome the crisis. " The prime minister's remarks came on a day when search-and-rescue teams struggled to reach battered parts of the northeast obstructed by mud and debris and new fears emerged over a meltdown at the Fukushima nuclear complex.

Frank Woodruff Buckles, a onetime Missouri farm boy who was the last known living American veteran of World War I, has died. He was 110. Buckles, who later spent more than three years in a Japanese internment camp in the Philippines during World War II, died Sunday of natural causes at his home in Charles Town, W.Va., family spokesman David DeJonge said. A total of 4,734,991 Americans served in the military during World War I, from 1914 to 1918. "I always knew I'd be one of the last because I was one of the youngest when I joined," Buckles told the New York Daily News in 2008, when he was 107. "But I never thought I'd be the last one. " Earning that distinction resulted in numerous honors for Buckles.

Hisaye Yamamoto, one of the first Asian American writers to earn literary distinction after World War II with highly polished short stories that illuminated a world circumscribed by culture and brutal strokes of history, has died. She was 89. Yamamoto had been in poor health since a stroke last year and died in her sleep Jan. 30 at her home in northeast Los Angeles, said her daughter, Kibo Knight. Often compared to such short-story masters as Katherine Mansfield, Flannery O'Connor and Grace Paley, Yamamoto concentrated her imagination on the issei and nisei, the first- and second-generation Japanese Americans who were targets of the public hysteria unleashed after the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor in 1941.