Speaking of grandmas, have you heard the joke about grandparents and WWII? No? Well, if you do, be sure to tell me because I’d like to hear it too.
I conduct very few interviews with veterans. The contemporaneous, or near-contemporaneous, record for WWII is so spectacularly deep that latter-day recollections are largely unnecessary for a historian. Of course, in considering any account, I'm look...
Why should the Eisenhower memorial be over twice the size of WWII Memorial? Why should it be so vast as to comfortably house two Lincoln Memorials, two Washington Monuments, and two Jefferson Memorials - all six at once?
Talking about Apple v. Microsoft without mentioning the Internet and the browser is like talking about WWII without talking about the nuke. Framing the conversation just in terms of open v. closed operating systems, the quality of the hardware or sof...
The male role models I had all seemed to have been in the military. My father served in the army. My uncle was in the Marine Corps. Both of my grandfathers served in WWII. There weren't any career soldiers in my family, but when I was young it seemed...
In a WWII radio talk, Lewis champions the well-established idea that actions lead emotions. Although he is making the point with respect to love, he illustrates with the opposite. The Germans hated the Jews, then acted on that. Because they did, thei...
When WWII ended, the Cold War started, and the interest of the Western world was not to completely break Germany. So all those Nazis who had been controlling the country now had the power to rebuild it. I think there were many of them who just contin...
There’s nothing funny about war. Well, aside from this joke Orafoura told me: What did WWI say to WWII? I wish I could tell you the punch line, but the restaurant was so noisy that I didn’t hear it. But I laughed anyway, because I’ll bet it was...
At the time I was writing 'Weedflower,' my friend Naomi Hirahara was writing a book about Japanese-American flower farmers. She knew quite a few elderly farmers and put me in touch with four or five of them who had been in camps during WWII. Some, li...
Longevity is something I never gave a second thought to. I guess it's the shadow of growing up in post WWII, but I never believed I would live past 20. Here I am though... a senior citizen... my voice and heart are stronger than ever, but boredom is ...
I came to my first Colts training camp in July of 1950, and it was murder, absolute murder. We had a coach named Clem Crow who must have been nuts. You got to remember that I'd been a Marine, had gone through basic training and spent 26 months in the...
Delight in smooth sounding platitudes, refusal to face unpleasant facts ... genuine love of peace and pathetic belief that love can be its sole foundation ... the utter devotion of the Liberals to sentiment apart from reality ...though free from wick...
I wonder" he wrote, "if the day will ever come that the loveliest of hymns, , will come into the minds of the people throughout the world to express the German heart. I belive it is the expression of the heart of many Germans...[and]of most people th...
Natasha Romanoff: After WWII, S.H.I.E.L.D. recruited German scientists with strategic value. Dr. Arnim Zola: So I could help their cause. I also helped my own. Steve Rogers: HYDRA died with the Red Skull. Dr. Arnim Zola: Cut off one head, two more sh...
I once asked an old Japanese man why Japan decided to team up with Germany during WWII, and do you know what he told me? Well, you would if you speak Japanese, which I don’t.
We love WWII because the cause was so obviously just, because you can't be a good person and say you wouldn't fight against an evil like that. It was so black and white on our side, and on our side so few died. (Our side meaning the lantern-jawed Joh...