WHAT YOU MUST KNOW

Caroline Harrington Bradburn Bradford playfully poses with her cousin; 1944.  Caption reads: St. Michael's Catholic Church Carnival. Ridge, MD. Norman Delozier - cousin - and Caroline Bradburn. Carolina Harrington Bradburn Bradford was born 6 February 1925 in Ridge, Maryland.  She attended St. Michael's Elementary School and then Great Mills High School for two years, before moving to Washington D.C., where she graduated from Central High School in June 1942 . On 16 September 1942, at the age of seventeen, Bradford entered nursing school at Garfield Memorial Hospital.  When the United States Cadet Nurse Corps was established in 1943, Bradford's class was encouraged to join, which most of them did.  In the spring of 1944, Bradford was sent to Children's Hospital in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, and then to St. Elizabeth's Hospital in Washington, D.C. to study psychiatry, after which she returned to Garfield Memorial Hospital and was then transferred to Newton D. Baker ...

Boone family of Arlington/Gilliam, West Virginia.  The photos starting with my grandparents, Benjamin Franklin and Lilia Idonia Atkinson Boone were taken in the spring of 1942.  There is a printed developing date of August 20, 1942. That is two years to the day before I was born. His grandfather died in January of 1944 and I was born in August of that year.  I am one of the younger of all of the first cousins whose grandparents were Lily and Ben.  WWII was raging in the spring of 1942. We know it was spring because Grandma's snowball bush is in full bloom.  I believe it is the Easter gathering of the Boone family in 1942.  There are about 50 stairs leading up from the 'bottom' where the cars were parked.  The Company Store was not far from where the stairs started at the bottom.  There's a creek that runs through the bottom. Dora worked at the store. I wonder who is sitting on the porch? I'll caption the photos over the next few days as this will ...

Edna Jo Campbell. August 28, 1920 - April 28, 2018. Funeral service for former Lawton resident, Edna Jo Campbell, 97, of Duncan was at 2:00 p.m. on Friday, May 4, 2018, at Whitt Funeral Home Chapel with Rev. Randy Southerland, pastor of New Hope Baptist Church West, officiating. Burial will be in the Walters Cemetery under the direction of Whitt Funeral Home. Mrs. Campbell passed away on Saturday, April 28, 2018, in Duncan, Oklahoma. Edna Jo was born on August 28, 1920, in Walters to Kenneth E. and Marie (Duncan) Otis. She grew up in Walters and graduated from high school in 1936. She married Captain William Arthur Reynolds on October 5, 1940.  William served as a pilot in World War II and lost his life on November 2, 1944, in an air raid over Germany.  She married Walter H. Campbell on February 16, 1955. Walter passed away on April 30, 1988.  Edna Jo was a member of the First Christian Church for many years where she taught vacation bible school and the beginners Sunday ...

The Egtved Girl. (c. 1390–1370 BC) was a Nordic Bronze Age girl whose well-preserved remains were discovered outside Egtved, Denmark in 1921.  Aged 16–18 at death, she was slim, 1.6 metres (5 ft 3 in) tall, had short, blond hair and well-trimmed nails. Her burial has been dated by dendrochronology to 1370 BC.  In the coffin, the girl was wrapped in an ox hide.  She wore a loose, short tunic with sleeves reaching the elbow.  She had a bare waist and wore a short string skirt.  She had bronze bracelets, and a woollen belt with a large disc decorated with spirals and a spike.  At her feet were the cremated remains of a child aged 5 to 6. By her head there was a small birch bark box that contained an awl, bronze pins, and a hair net. Before the coffin was closed she was covered with a blanket and an ox hide.  Flowering yarrow (indicating a summer burial) and a bucket of beer made of wheat, honey, bog-myrtle and cowberries were placed atop.  Her distin...

Tony Bennett, who died on July 21, 2023, at 96, was a WWII veteran.  Born Anthony Dominick Benedetto on August 3, 1926, in New York City, he was drafted into the U.S. Army in Nov. 1944 during the final stages of WWII.  In Jan. 1945, Benedetto was assigned as a replacement infantryman to the 255th Infantry Regiment of the 63rd Infantry Division, a unit filling in for the heavy losses suffered in the Battle of the Bulge.  He moved across France and later into Germany. In March 1945, he joined the front line of what he would later describe as a "front-row seat in hell.  He and about 1,000 other troops were later taken off the front lines to watch  Bob Hope perform at a USO show.  All the GIs loved him so much for boosting our dismally low morale," Bennett wrote.  He became a big part of the reason I went into show business because, at that moment, he made me realize that the greatest gift you can give anyone is a laugh or a song." Towards the end of the w...

19 SEPTEMBER – 16 DECEMBER 1944 – BATTLE OF THE HURTGEN FOREST IN WWII. For us the Hürtgen was one of the most costly, most unproductive, and most ill-advised battles that our army has ever fought." – Lieutenant General James Gavin In the longest continuous battle in U.S. Army history, American soldiers of the U.S. First Army fought tooth and nail against entrenched German defenders in the densely wooded terrain of the Hurtgen Forest as the Western Front descended into the harsh winter of 1944.  After the Allied offensives of summer 1944 liberated France, a massive combined Allied force stood near the border of Germany, ready to begin the Rhineland Campaign against the vaunted German defenses of the Siegfried Line (or “Westwall”) along the Rhine River.  The American effort to capture the Hurtgen Forest was initially intended to shore up the Allied right flank as they prepared to attack the urban centers north of it.  The Germans understood that the Hurtgen Forest controll...

Perfectly preserved dinosaur embryo found in China.  Scientists have announced the discovery of a perfectly preserved dinosaur embryo that was preparing to hatch from its egg, just like a chicken.  The embryo was discovered in Ganzhou in southern China and researchers estimate it is at least 66 million years old.  It is believed to be a toothless theropod dinosaur, or oviraptorosaur, and has been named Baby Yingliang.  Researcher Dr Fion Waisum Ma said it is "the best dinosaur embryo ever found in history".  The discovery has also given researchers a greater understanding of the link between dinosaurs and modern birds.  The fossil shows the embryo was in a curled position known as "tucking", which is a behaviour seen in birds shortly before they hatch.  "This indicates that such behaviour in modern birds first evolved and originated among their dinosaur ancestors," Dr Ma told the AFP news agency.  Oviraptorosaurs, which means "egg thief lizards,"...

A 10-year-old stoic Japanese boy standing at attention having brought his deceased baby brother to a cremation pyre in Nagasaki, 1945. Years later, Joe O'Donnell, the American photojournalist who took this photo, spoke to a Japanese interviewer about this photograph:  I saw a boy about ten years old walking by. He was carrying a baby on his back.  In those days in Japan, we often saw children playing with their little brothers or sisters on their backs, but this boy was clearly different. I could see that he had come to this place for a serious reason.  He was wearing no shoes. His face was hard. The little head was tipped back as if the baby were fast asleep. The boy stood there for five or ten minutes. The men in white masks walked over to him and quietly began to take off the rope that was holding the baby.  That is when I saw that the baby was already dead. The men held the body by the hands and feet and placed it on the fire. The boy stood there straight without...

Italian pride and determination. In late September 1943, soon after Italy surrendered to the Allies, Paolo was captured by the Germans at his isolated location on Sazan Island, Albania.  Along with other Italians, he was to be transported back to Italy. But, due to unusual circumstances, that did not happen.  Instead, his return was delayed by two years!  In the  following passage , Paolo describes what he and others faced when they arrived in Belgrade, Yugoslavia.  “It was tremendously cold in Belgrade. There was nothing to eat.  The snow had started to fall, and the camp was a mess. It was an exceptionally large camp.   While in Belgrade, the Germans gave us three choices. The first choice was to fight with them. The second choice was to work for them.  The third choice was to be a prisoner of war. I told Guido and Bernardo that I didn’t want the first two choices and that I wanted to be a POW. So, Guido and Bernardo decided to do the same....

Japanese Battleship Nagato is taken over by the US Navy in Tokyo Bay on August 30, 1945 The high speed transport USS Horace A. Bass APD-124 can be seen alongside in some of the pictures.  One of the first questions asked of the Nagato’s Captain & crew was the whereabouts of Nagato’s sister-ship Mutsu.  On June 8, 1943, Mutsu had sunk in the Hashirajima fleet anchorage when the magazine of her No. 3 turret exploded.  Mutsu's sinking was declared a state secret, surviving crew were sent to locations away from Japan and sworn to secrecy, US Navy Intelligence did not learn of Mutsu’s sinking until after the war. The visible damage on Nagato came from an air raid on July 18, 1945 by USN aircraft from TF38, Nagato was hit by two 500 lb bombs, one of which scored a direct hit on the pilot house & compass bridge, killing Captain Otsuka, the XO, & several others. Afterwards Nagato was disarmed and her ballast tanks were flooded to give the impression she had sank at he...