NEW ORLEANS - Full military honours will be given to a Louisiana sailor whose remains have been identified more than 75 years after the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor.

The remains of Navy Seaman 2nd Class Charles C. Gomez Jr., of Slidell, were accounted for Sept. 19, the Defence POW/MIA Accounting Agency announced Friday.

Gomez was assigned to the USS Oklahoma battleship on Dec. 7, 1941 when Japanese aircraft attacked it at Ford Island, Pearl Harbor. Among the more than 2,300 American military personnel killed that day were 429 USS Oklahoma crewmen, including then-19-year-old Gomez.

His family was informed of the identity match earlier this week.

"I still can't believe it," said Charles Fogg, Gomez's nephew. "It's unbelievable after all this time."

Fogg, 65, of Pearl River, Louisiana, never met his uncle but often heard his mother and her siblings talk about him during family gatherings.

"As a kid, I'd often hear my grandpa say, 'Pray for my son to be found.' I guess I was 6 or 7 at the time. But it all comes in God's time I guess," he said.

Until now, Gomez's remains had been interred among 46 plots at the National Memorial Cemetery of the Pacific, known as the Punchbowl, in Honolulu, Hawaii. His name is recorded on the Walls of the Missing at the site. Officials say a rosette will be placed by his name to indicate he has been accounted for.

Fogg said the DPAA took DNA samples from his mother and one of her brothers to help identify the remains.

"We were hoping the identification would happen in their lifetime," he said. "We almost made it. Both of them recently passed away."

Fogg said a memorial service will be held at the Veterans Administration facility in Slidell on June 3, 2019, on what would have been Gomez's 97th birthday.

"That gives us time to really plan it and line things up right and give family time to get here. We're really excited about it. He's going to get full military honours," he said. "We're looking forward to it. It's a sad but exciting time, knowing that he's finally coming home."

Simcha Rotem, last surviving fighter in the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising of 1943, died in Jerusalem Saturday at the age of 94.

Rotem, born in Warsaw in 1924 as Kazik Ratajzer, was active in Zionist youth movements by his early teen years. He was 15 when World War II broke out and Nazi Germany invaded Poland.

Early in the war German bombs destroyed his family’s home, killing several family members including his brother and grandparents. He and his mother were wounded.

In 1942 Rotem joined the Warsaw Ghetto’s Jewish Combat Organization, or ZOB, which was committed to armed resistance against the Nazis.

In April 1943 the Nazis began efforts to empty the Ghetto of its remaining occupants, leading to the outbreak of combat, with Rotem fighting under one of the leaders, Marek Edelman.

The insurgents preferred to die fighting instead of in a gas chamber at the Treblinka death camp where the Nazis had already sent more than 300,000 Warsaw Jews.

Speaking at a 2013 ceremony in Poland to mark the 70th anniversary of the uprising, Rotem recalled that by April 1943 most of the ghetto’s Jews had died and the 50,000 who remained expected the same fate.

Rotem said he and his comrades launched the uprising to “choose the kind of death” they wanted.
“But to this very day I keep thinking whether we had the right to make the decision to start the uprising and by the same token to shorten the lives of many people by a week, a day or two,” Rotem said.

“At the first moment when I saw the great German force entering the Ghetto, my first reaction, and I’m sure not just mine — I felt we were nothing,” Rotem recalled in a testimony to the Yad Vashem Holocaust Memorial Museum. “What could we do with our pathetic, almost non-existent weaponry, when faced with the tremendous German firepower, with light canons and tanks and armored personnel carriers and a huge infantry force numbering hundreds, hundreds if not thousands…I felt utterly helpless.”

But that feeling was followed by “an extraordinary sense of spiritual uplifting…this was the moment we had been waiting for…to stand up to this all-powerful German.”

However Rotem noted the rebels had no illusions about their chances. “We’d kill as many of them as we could but we knew our fate was completely clear.”

Thousands of Jews died in Europe’s first urban anti-Nazi revolt, most of them burned alive, and nearly all the rest were then sent to Treblinka.

A man who saved hundreds of Jewish children during the Second World War has died at the age of 108.

Georges Loinger was born in Strasbourg in 1910 and became a member of the French Resistance during the war.

He was serving with the French army in 1940 when he was taken prisoner by the Germans and sent to a prisoner of war camp.

Because the talented athlete had blond hair and blue eyes, the Germans did not suspect he was Jewish and he managed to escape the camp and return to France.

He then joined the Oeuvre de Secours aux Enfants (OSE), a Jewish children's aid society.

Between April 1943 and June 1944, members of the group helped many hundreds of Jewish children escape to Switzerland via its lightly guarded border with France.

Mr Loinger told Tablet magazine in an interview earlier this year: "I threw a ball a hundred metres towards the Swiss border and told the children to run and get the ball.

"They ran after the ball and this is how they crossed the border."

There was also another ruse which involved him dressing the children up as mourners and taking them to a cemetery near the border.

Mr Loinger arranged Jean Deffaugt, the mayor of a French border town, to house the children until it was time for them to go.

He also paid professional guides to help the children across the border.

He told the Tribune Juive that he was successful in his endeavours to save children "because I did not look Jewish".

"Sport made me the opposite of an anguished Jew," he said.

"I walked with great naturalness. Besides, I was rather pretty and therefore well-dressed."

According to Le Monde, the arrival of the children at the border was done under the cover of a summer camp.

Mr Loinger was responsible for saving at least 350 of the children, many of whom had lost their parents to Nazi concentration camps.

They were among 75,000 Jews, including children, who were deported from German-occupied France, in most cases with the cooperation of the French authorities.

He was awarded the Resistance Medal, the Military Cross and the Legion d'Honneur among a number of other awards for his heroism.

The Foundation for the Memory of the Holocaust described Mr Loinger as "exceptional".

Sacha Ghozlan, president of the Union of Jewish Students of France, wrote on Twitter: "Resistant Jew, he saved hundreds of Jewish children from Nazi barbarity by secretly passing them to Switzerland.

"Every testimony of Georges Loinger in a college was an event... May his memory enlighten our commitment."

Mr Loinger died on Friday.

More than 31 years ago, the relationship between the United States and the Soviet Union remained icy, and the Berlin Wall had yet to come down.

U.S. Air Force pilots were engaged in secret reconnaissance missions aboard the legendary SR-71 Blackbird spy plane. Many of those flights occurred over international waters in the Baltic Sea. These sorties were known as “Baltic Express” missions.

The SR-71 pilots would fly their aircraft at high altitudes while gathering imagery on key Russian bases — such as the Soviet Navy’s Northern Fleet on the Kola Peninsula — from international airspace.

During one such mission on June 29, 1987, a Blackbird flown by retired Lt. Cols. Duane Noll and Tom Veltri, experienced an engine failure.

The crew descended to roughly 25,000 feet over Swedish airspace where they were intercepted by two pairs of Swedish air force Saab 37 Viggen fighter jets. The Swedes were more than simply intercepting a wayward aircraft, they were offering defense from any opportunistic Soviets looking to harass an enemy spy plane on the fritz.

Given the tight corridor in the Baltic Sea, accidental airspace violations weren’t out of the realm of possibility. And Soviet fighter aircraft might have been looking for any reason, however slight, to enter into an air-to-air altercation.

This mission remained classified until last year. But with declassification has come official acknowledgement for services rendered.

On Nov. 28, in Stockholm, the U.S. Air Force finally presented four Swedish pilots with Air Medals for their actions back in 1987, according to a video of the ceremony posted by the Pentagon.

"We were performing an ordinary peace time operation exercise,” recalled retired Maj. Roger Moller, one of the Swedish air force pilots. “Our fighter controller then asked me: ‘Are you able to make an interception and identification of a certain interest.’ I thought immediately it must be an SR-71, otherwise he would have mentioned it. But at that time I didn’t know it was the Blackbird.”

Once the Swedish pilots intercepted the damaged SR-71, they decided to render support to the aircraft by defending it from potential third-party aircraft that might have tried to threaten it, according to the Air Medal citation.

The pilots then accompanied the SR-71 beyond the territorial boundaries and ensured that it was safely recovered by American forces.
.....
The presentation of Air Medals to the Swedish pilots represented a measure of gratitude from the U.S. military, as well as a longstanding partnership with Sweden between the countries, U.S. Air Force officials said.

The Swedish pilots also received a painting chronicling their heroics.

Problems with the Littoral Combat Ship program and basic lack ofcommunication between Navy bureaucrats have left the service paying millions of dollars to store dozens of Sikorsky MH-60R helicopters it has no immediate need for. The service has tried to offer a silver lining by saying it will now use the excess choppers to help extend the service life of the two fleets overall by spacing out flight hours across more airframes, but it's not clear how much money it will actually recoup in the process.

The Pentagon’s Office of the Inspector General became aware of the glut of helicopters during a review of available U.S. Navy and Marine Corps backup aircraft, part of a general push throughout the U.S. military to assess the readiness of aviation units in particular. The same report, which the watchdog published in January 2019, determined that neither service had adequate numbers of F/A-18 Hornet fighter jets or T-45 Goshawk jet trainers to meet operational and training demands, which is hardly surprising given the mountain of existing reporting on the dismal readiness of units equipped with these aircraft. It also criticized the Marines for a lack of oversight of similar backup stocks of armored and other ground vehicles, which may have resulted in wasted funds.

But the case of the MH-60Rs, in particular, the watchdog's findings are especially notable. They not only highlight the often-painful rigidity of U.S. military bureaucracy, but also underscore the reality of second-order impacts of years-long problems with the Littoral Combat Ship (LCS) program.

The LCS program includes two distinct classes of ships, Lockheed Martin’s Freedom-class and Austal USA’s Independence-class. Both types of vessel are capable of carrying an MH-60R helicopter, which is primarily intended to support anti-submarine and general sea control missions. The MH-60R is the latest evolution of the Sikorsky SH-60 Sea Hawk, which is itself a navalized derivative of the UH-60 Black Hawk.

These helicopters can also support boarding operations and special operations forces missions. In recent years, they have also taken on an increasing close-in defense role against potential attacks from small unmanned aircraft and swarms of small boats. They're also set to gain an electronic warfare role with the integration of the Advanced Offboard Electronic Warfare (AOEW) pod, which you can read about more here.

Regardless, what this all means, though is that as of July 2018, the Navy had a requirement for a total of 206 MH-60Rs for operational and training requirements, as well as 29 backup helicopters that it could rotate into service when other choppers to had to go in for major maintenance or were otherwise out of commission. But the service presently has 270 of the R models, 35 more than it says it needs.

As of 2018, the flyaway cost of every new MH-60R the Navy purchased was around $34 million. This means the 35 excess helicopters had cost the service at least nearly $1.2 billion, money that it could have spent on any number of other priorities in the interim.

On top of that, while, the Navy says it has found a need for one more MH-60R, but will still have to pay to store all of the remaining 34 aircraft at least through the 2020 Fiscal Year at a total cost of more than $1 million each year in total. The service will have to pay hundreds of thousands of dollars more annually for routine maintenance and other services to ensure these helicopters retain their operational status. This doesn't account for any upgrades to their systems they might need to keep them relevant in the meantime, either.

Yah, all is good.

I am hoping that I posted a relevant video in relevant thread

You did, well done sir.

War of 1812 battlefield near Kingston to become U.S. historic site

New York state has acquired an island between Kingston, Ont., and Syracuse, N.Y., that was the scene of a War of 1812 battle, with plans to turn it into a historic site.

The Office of Parks, Recreation and Historic Preservation recently announced that it has purchased Horse Island, located off the village of Sackets Harbor, about 95 kilometres north of Syracuse.

Surplus US helicopters are in abundance, could provide solution to Canada's needs:

http://www.thedrive.com/the-war-zone/26 ... cs-debacle



Good article. We could probably get some of them for a great price as it appears the US is willing to deal just get them off their hands. And being navalized that means they're probably already suitable for service aboard existing Canadian ships - don't tell me either that the US Navy and Marines don't put cold-weather service requirements into their equipment orders either because we'd save tons of money on the MH-60R's just by not letting DND Procurement add billions of extra costs for "Canadian kit" into the acquisition. Land-based ones would be able to take up the task of patrolling the Northwest Passage to keep an eye on the multiple foreign submarines, both American and Russian, that will be creeping around up there in increasing numbers as climate change soon makes the waterway open for travel year-round.

Ahh, who am I kidding? Our current government would probably have a major attack of the vapours just because these copters were designed with aggressive defense in mind instead of feel-good spots. Even if the US were selling them off for $1 each just to get them out of their inventory Canada probably wouldn't touch them because it would make us appear too "tough" and not tolerant. Let the Saudis instead of us get them instead just so the multiple options for the Arabs of machine-gunning Yemeni children from the air remain intact and uninterrupted