Everand Logo

Welcome to Everand!

  • World War II

    OLD SOLDIERS NEVER DIE

    Jul 06, 2021 5 minutes
    STORY AND PHOTOS BY BARBARA NOE KENNEDY

    I LEARNED AS A CHILD that Douglas MacArthur was a hero. He had, after all, rescued my mother, Leanne Blinzler Noe (and her sister Ginny and father Lee and thousands of other Allied civilians), from Santo Tomas Internment Camp in Manila at the end of World War II. My mother wrote a letter of gratitude to the general in 1957, to which he responded briefly but sincerely on his official letterhead—and which she has gifted me.

    On a recent trip to the MacArthur Memorial in Norfolk, Virginia, I tell the chief archivist, James Zobel, about that letter. “Wait a minute,” he says, clacking frantically on his computer. He dashes inside a mammoth vault of boxes containing millions of MacArthur-related documents and pulls one out. He lifts a pile of papers, and there, on top, my heartbeat

    You’re reading a preview, subscribe to read more.

    More from World War II

    World War II2 min readInternational Relations
    City Under Siege
    LIKE WASHINGTON D.C., Saint Petersburg—later renamed Petrograd, Leningrad, and currently back to Saint Petersburg—is an artificial capital city that was constructed mainly for political reasons. Both cities were also built in swampy locations that wo
    World War II3 min read
    Lightning Strikes
    IF YOU ASK ME, World War II’s coolest airplane is the Lockheed P-38 Lightning. It looks like something a kid might have doodled in a notebook while daydreaming in class. I became enthralled with the airplane in junior high when I read a book by Marti
    World War II2 min read
    War In The Jungle
    THE 1944-45 ALLIED RECONQUEST of Burma differed from other major Allied campaigns of World War II in that, in contrast with the campaign in North Africa, the invasions of Sicily, Italy, Normandy, and Southern France, and the American is landhopping c

    Related