VA's online legacy project adds names of 210,000 vets lost overseas
The Veterans Legacy Memorial was launched in 2019 and creates websites recognizing the lives of deceased veterans, allowing relatives to update the online memorials with details for their service, post-military work and family history.
The scope of the project now includes more than 10 million names and has roughly doubled in the last two years, with the addition of millions of veterans buried in private cemeteries worldwide to existing lists of individuals interred at VA and military sites.
Trump proclaims Thursday as day for US to celebrate victory in WWII
The expansion announced this week includes names from 26 overseas cemeteries and memorials administered by the American Battle Monuments Commission.
ABMC acting Secretary Robert Dalessandro said in a statement that the Veterans Legacy Project update 'adds new resources to honor our nation's veterans from all wars and brings their stories to those who aren't able to visit our sites overseas.'
President Donald Trump this week issued a proclamation recognizing May 8 as the 80th anniversary of the end of European hostilities in that conflict.
In addition to the approximately 93,000 WWII veterans added to the veterans project, about 94,000 other names added to the list are of Americans missing in action overseas or buried at sea. Those individuals are honored in a series of overseas memorials overseen by the monuments commission.
'The brave Americans resting in ABMC cemeteries and whose names are inscribed on memorials around the world sacrificed their lives to liberate allied countries and to protect our nation's interests,' said acting Under Secretary for Memorial Affairs Ronald Walters in a statement. 'It's our honor to preserve their legacies.'
Officials in recent months have also updated the legacy project to allow veterans to provide details of their life and service before they pass away. Information on the 'Your Story, Your Legacy' effort is available on the project's website.
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Boston Globe
2 hours ago
- Boston Globe
Sneaking into the Spy Museum's new vault
As with most museums, a vast majority of those objects are not on display. And until a few weeks ago, they were far away, stored at a location outside the capital -- making it a challenge for museum historians to reach the objects for study and preservation. Advertisement In 2020, the museum began consolidating its collection in its new building, a project that it completed this year. Get Starting Point A guide through the most important stories of the morning, delivered Monday through Friday. Enter Email Sign Up Many of the artifacts in the vault came from one man: H. Keith Melton, a founding board member of the museum, who became one of the world's renowned spy collectors. He is not a former intelligence agent himself; rather, he made his money as one of the country's largest McDonald's franchise owners. A condition of his donation, which he first pledged in 2016, was that the collection would eventually be moved to the museum itself, Melton said. 'To properly care for, maintain, catalog, access the artifacts, they needed to be on the premises,' Melton said in an interview. 'You can't deal with it remotely. Artifacts need care and feeding and vigilance, and they need to make sure they're not deteriorating ." Advertisement The collections team at the International Spy Museum recently opened the doors to its den of secrets, offering a reporter and photographer a look at tools of the trade that, like much of spycraft itself, are kept out of public view. There are roughly 4,000 books in the vault, most of them donated by Melton. The most treasured of these is a World War II-era briefing book created by MI9, a wartime branch of British intelligence, to get Americans up to speed on its top secret espionage innovations. It includes designs for cameras disguised as cigarette lighters, coat buttons and gold teeth concealing compasses, and maps printed on clothing. Laura Hicken, the museum's collections manager, estimated that there were fewer than 20 copies of this book in the world. Among the museum's newest acquisitions are original courtroom sketches by William Sharp, an illustrator who died in 1961. One is of Rudolf Abel, the Soviet spy who operated undercover in the United States for almost a decade and who was portrayed by Mark Rylance in the 2015 Steven Spielberg thriller 'Bridge of Spies.' In the drawings, Sharp portrayed Abel as looking stressed. 'For us, where so much of our history is told through gadgets and weapons and concealment devices, this is so incredibly personal and such an intimate look into the consequences of the things we cover,' Hicken said, referring to the sketch. (The museum, which is recognized by Guinness World Records as the world's largest espionage museum, has come under criticism in the past for sanitizing the unethical behavior of spy agencies.) Advertisement Another set of Sharp-penned sketches is from the trial of Ethel and Julius Rosenberg, who were arrested in 1950 for espionage and executed in 1953. The drawings feature Judge Irving R. Kaufman, who sentenced them to death, and an unguarded Ethel Rosenberg, whose culpability has come under doubt in the last decade. The Spy Museum has also received gifts and loans from international governments. The South Korean government, for example, lent items said to have been seized from a North Korean spy who crossed into the south. Among these is a pen that, when clicked a certain way, would have been capable of injecting a paralyzing agent into an unsuspecting victim, as well as a code sheet that spies could use to communicate with someone equipped with a counter code sheet. The German government lent an army propaganda rocket from the early 1940s. These were launched over Russian soldiers on the battlefield, where they would eject pamphlets encouraging them to abandon Josef Stalin. According to a translation, the pamphlets inside the rocket say: 'Red Army men! You will not experience peace, you will not return to your home. Stalin will not allow this because he knows that any Red Army soldier who has been in Europe will pose a threat to the Stalinist system.' Sitting on top of a large shelf is a couch that belonged to Robert P. Hanssen, a former FBI agent who spied for Moscow off and on for decades. Hanssen died in 2023 in his Colorado prison cell. Melton also persuaded Hanssen's family to donate other items, including a suit and watches. The museum has no shortage of knives, some of which are hidden in spatulas and boots. But there are less subtle blades, including one developed by the Office of Strategic Services, a precursor to the CIA, to be a combat weapon. Advertisement 'There are a lot of challenging elements to our collection because so much of it was meant to kill or destroy or distract,' Hicken said. 'We have powders that were meant to be tipped into gas tanks that would essentially erode the gas tank very quickly so you could disable somebody's vehicle.' Also in the vault are several items that once belonged to Tony Mendez, the celebrated CIA officer who was played by Ben Affleck in the 2012 Academy Award-winning movie 'Argo.' Mendez was particularly known for disguises, exfiltration and forgery. One drawer in the vault includes wigs he designed and a pair of shoes with lifts inside to make the wearer appear significantly taller. In addition, there's a self-portrait of Mendez, a former board member of the museum, depicting several aspects of the 'Argo' story, which involved Mendez's plan to rescue American diplomats trapped in Iran in 1980. 'Everything in our collection is two things,' Hicken said. 'The purse actually conceals a camera. The pen conceals a microdot viewer. The shoe has a knife in it.' This article originally appeared in
The Hill
5 hours ago
- The Hill
The extraordinary life of a girl called ‘Champ'
CHICAGO — As I write this, people are gathering in Chicago to bury an Ohio coal miner's daughter who came to this city in the early 1950s. They are celebrating a social worker and community activist who has affected thousands of lives over the last eight decades in this city. As the Sun-Times reported, her 'backbone and willpower fueled positive change in Chicago for decades.' Angela Piazza Turley was a force to be reckoned with — both the irresistible force and the immovable object when it came to fighting for others. She was also my mother. The writer George Bernard Shaw once said that unreasonable people expect the world to conform to them. He then added that that was why all history is made by unreasonable people. My mother was one of those brilliantly unreasonable people. As the baby of five, I spent much of my early years clinging for dear life on my mother's skirts as she confronted slum landlords, abusive husbands, and gang bangers in the Uptown area of Chicago. Time and again, I would squeeze her hand with that look of 'what do we do now?' She already seemed to know what to do. Growing up in a coal mining town in Ohio, my mother knew poverty and prejudice. She would never forget either. It created a solid core within her, harder and tougher than anthracite coal. Some nights, she would go to sleep looking at the burning crosses on the nearby hill, a message from the local Ku Klux Klan that she and the other Italians were not welcome in the valley. She learned that you had to fight for a better life. Her father, Dominick, was one of the earliest organizers of the United Mine Workers until he contracted black lung. At Yorkville High School, she was called 'Champ' for her feisty, indomitable energy. She had a certain tomboy beauty with olive skin and penetrating hazel eyes. Courtesy of Jonathan Turley After World War II, she caught the attention of a young veteran, Jack Turley. This string-bean Irish street kid making scraps as a photographer was not exactly what my grandparents had in mind for a suitor. He faced an insurmountable wall of separation policed by my pint-sized Sicilian grandmother, Josephina. The two gradually came up with a way to meet that even my grandmother could not refuse: doing crosswords in the bay window of their grocery store. It worked. She believed in him, and, when he said he wanted to be an architect, they decided that he should study under arguably the most famous architect of the time: Mies van der Rohe, who developed the modern steel and glass structures that transformed cities. It was an act of sheer hubris, if not insanity. The two arrived late on a snowy night in Chicago with $1.37 in their pockets. They stopped in a shop and ordered the only thing that they could afford: a cup of coffee. Before they left that night, my mother had a job as a waitress. He would become one of Mies's closest associates and, after his death, a partner at Skidmore Owings and Merrill, who helped design some of the most famous buildings in Chicago and around the world. With my parents' success came the ability to help others. They founded organizations that would have a significant impact on this city, including one of the first inner-city community credit unions to provide local businesses and families access to loans. She was president of Jane Addams Hull House and the founder of an array of organizations that fought for better housing, education, and safety for the poorest of the city. She helped create one of the first shelters for abused women and a group to maintain support for our public schools. She ran for city council in the 46th Ward, and the Chicago Tribune described her as the 'scrapper' from Uptown seeking to transform the poorest areas into decent places to live. She was all that — fearless; the embodiment of pure will. I remember going into slums with her as she faced down violent landlords and pimps. On one occasion, she and other mothers literally chased pimps and gang bangers out of a playground and a low-income building. I can still see the face of one pimp as a mix of amazement and amusement at this tough Sicilian mother with two young children in tow, pushing him into the street. I looked at her with that same 'What do we do?' look, but she did not flinch. She had that crazy Sicilian look that said, 'I am ready to go all the way, are you?' I was convinced that we were dead. But he never came back. My parents' success also gave my mother the opportunity to have something she had dreamed of as a little girl growing up during the Depression: a beautiful home filled with family. They bought one of the oldest houses in Uptown near the lake, with a room for each of their five children. When she first walked through that house, she stopped in the backyard and smiled as she came face to face with a giant Ohio buckeye. It was love at first sight. She would later fill the house with a steady stream of people who were struggling or foreign students seeking opportunities in the U.S. That house was her projection of herself in this world: a loving and protected space, large and open to others. For her, the house echoed with the dreams of a little girl in the depression; it meant safety, family, and continuity. After my father's death, my mother only had one request — she wanted to die in that house, not some hospital or hospice. She and the house slowly deteriorated together; gradually and inexorably. My siblings and I struggled to keep the old furnace and pipes working, to keep our promise. She would pass in her room with the ivy-framed windows looking out on Hazel Street, just a few days before her 98th birthday. Her death was hardly unexpected. It is a moment that comes for all of us, but few are ready to say goodbye when the time comes. When her health took a sudden turn for the worse, I rushed to the airport to be with her, only to have the airport shut down due to a raging storm. For the first time, she was out of reach. She died as I waited at the gate. My last moment with her had come a week earlier. I sat late at night at the end of her bed, staring at her and trying to hold it together. I had to catch a flight back to Washington in a few hours. I couldn't say a thing; I just looked at her with the same 'What do we do now?' look. I think that somehow, she knew. She suddenly sat up and looked straight at me with those beautiful hazel eyes and smiled. She then threw me a kiss. She then fell back to sleep. It was as if she were saying, 'You're going to be okay. You can take it from here.' And it was the last thing that my mother ever said to me. She had always been there. In the toughest situations from the slums to the streets, I knew that I only had to hold more tightly; hold on to her. We would get out of there … together. She was always my guiding light, my North Star. Now she is gone. What do you do when your North Star supernovas, leaving just a black hole in the very center of your life that seems to suck in the very light around you? 'What do we do now?' She did not have to say. We know now. You hold on tighter to those you love and you stand your ground. Angela left behind five children, 13 grandchildren, and six great-grandchildren. She left a legacy of thousands of lives made better for her being there when they needed her most. This week, we will gather to bid farewell to Angela Turley, but not to her legacy. That will live and grow with the city she loved. Jonathan Turley is the Shapiro professor of public interest law at George Washington University and the author of the best-selling book ' The Indispensable Right: Free Speech in an Age of Rage,' which is dedicated to his mother.
Yahoo
10 hours ago
- Yahoo
Historian wants to return WWII medals to family of N.B. veteran George Mann
A Saskatchewan author and historian wants to return a set of Second World War medals to a New Brunswick veteran's family. John Brady McDonald said the medals belonged to George Mann, who was born in Liverpool, England, in 1905 and moved to Canada after the war. Mann served in the Royal Fleet Auxiliary, which McDonald said was "kind of like the supply chain aspect of the Royal Navy." Mann immigrated to Canada after the war and then married Alice Margaret in Saint John. McDonald's research doesn't say exactly where Mann resided but that he lived in New Brunswick. McDonald has been searching for Mann's relatives since April. He said Mann received the 1939-1945 Star, the Atlantic Star for specific service in the Atlantic Ocean, and the Africa Star for being a part of the campaign in Africa. McDonald said duty in the Atlantic Ocean meant "dodging German submarines and German aircraft trying to take out the convoys that were feeding Britain at the time." Returning veterans' possessions is a project McDonald began in 2022 as a way of honouring military veterans. "That's my way of saying thank you to these veterans and it's something that's very important to me to be able to ensure that our history is not forgotten any more than it already has been," said McDonald, who even covers the cost of framing and shipping the medals. He has returned six sets of medals, a veteran's headstone and a family ration book. But to date, he has never returned anything to family in Atlantic Canada. McDonald got the idea of returning veterans' memorabilia when he learned more about his late grandfather's service. He wants to give families that same experience. "So many times when I've returned medals, not only did they not know that their grandfather served in the Second World War, they don't know what he did." McDonald is a civilian instructor with the Royal Canadian Sea Cadet Corps and he wants to ensure the stories of sacrifices made by veterans are shared. "We need to understand those ancestors of ours, those grandfathers, those great uncles, those fathers who stood up to fascism, who stood up to oppression, who stood up to the ultimate hatred that we had in the world at the time." He is also concerned about medals being sold as antiques in pawn shops or estate sales. "I wanted to make sure that, you know, our veterans' sacrifices weren't in vain," he said. McDonald said the majority of the medals he receives are sent to him by people who stumble across them. The process of finding relatives can be as quick as days or more than a year. He starts with a name and uses online searches and social media to try and track people down. A lot of his "cold" calls go unanswered, which he understands. But when there is an answer, McDonald said relatives have "immense gratitude and appreciation" for his work. He said if anyone has any information about George Mann, they should reach out to him on Facebook or email him at johnbradymcdonald@
