|
|
Post by bixaorellana on Dec 30, 2018 15:20:13 GMT
|
|
|
|
Post by lagatta on Dec 30, 2018 17:43:21 GMT
Yes, I didn't quite know where to put him. I've known people like that (from historical research and related activities) but few are left.
I'm glad that this gentleman has had a good long run!
What should be named after him? A school, obviously, but what else?
|
|
|
|
Post by bixaorellana on Jan 7, 2019 18:21:51 GMT
Rosalyn Terborg-Penn, a historian who helped bring to light the long-suppressed role of black women in the women’s suffrage movement, died on Dec. 25 ...
Dr. Terborg-Penn, a professor of history at Morgan State University in Baltimore for more than three decades, was the author of seven books, most notably, “African American Women in the Struggle for the Vote, 1850-1920” (1998).
It was one of the first book-length examinations of black women in the suffrage movement, and it challenged the existing narrative that was dominated, and framed, by white activists like Susan B. Anthony and Elizabeth Cady Stanton.
Dr. Terborg-Penn’s book was a counterweight to “History of Women’s Suffrage,” a six-volume work, begun in 1881, that was edited by Anthony, Stanton and Matilda Joslyn Gage. That opus more or less erased from the picture the many black women who Dr. Terborg-Penn said had attended suffrage meetings, organized suffrage clubs and promoted the cause. ...
Black women, she said, were shunted aside in the history books because their goals had diverged from those of the white, mostly upper-middle-class women who had led the charge. ...
The racial split became glaringly obvious in 1913, when the white organizers of a major suffragist parade in Washington ordered black participants to march in the rear.Source of the above: www.nytimes.com/2019/01/04/obituaries/rosalyn-terborg-penn-dead.html & if you can't get through the paywall: en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rosalyn_Terborg-Penn
|
|
|
|
Post by kerouac2 on Jan 7, 2019 18:29:11 GMT
I think I must have a different definition of the word hero.
|
|
|
|
Post by bixaorellana on Jan 25, 2019 5:20:10 GMT
Charles Kettles ~ January 9, 1930 -- January 21, 2019
On May 15, 1967, amid punishing fire from the North Vietnamese, then-Army Maj. Charles S. Kettles piloted his helicopter in once, twice, a third time and then a fourth to deliver reinforcements to the outnumbered members of the 101st Airborne Division, and to evacuate the wounded and the dead.
He made the final trip alone after learning that eight men remained behind, having been unable to board helicopters in the previous round. “If we left them for 10 minutes,” Mr. Kettles later said, “they’d be POWs or dead.”
Mr. Kettles was credited with saving the lives of 44 men and received the Distinguished Service Cross, the military’s second-highest award for valor, for his actions. Nearly half a century later, the award was upgraded to the Medal of Honor. sourceIf you can't get past the Washington Post paywall to read the rest of the article above, try this one: www.military.com/daily-news/2019/01/23/medal-honor-recipient-charles-kettles-dies-89.html
|
|
|
|
Post by bjd on Jan 25, 2019 7:20:33 GMT
I think I must have a different definition of the word hero. Me too. Whatever the bravery in the people mentioned in this thread, I get a bit annoyed about people being called heroes when they just happened to be in the wrong place at the wrong time and survived. |
|
|
|
Post by bixaorellana on Jan 25, 2019 17:16:24 GMT
Thank you both for your contributions to this thread.
I don't see how the people I've cited were passive in their situations.
|
|
|
|
Post by cheerypeabrain on Feb 23, 2019 8:42:15 GMT
I don't know where to put this post so if it's in the wrong place please feel free to delete it and I'll repost in the appropriate thread... Most Brits will be aware of this story. We've been watching it develop on breakfast tv. In 1944 an 8 year Tony Foulds was playing on a park with his friends when a badly damaged American bomber, returning from a raid flew over on one spluttering engine. The pilot may (Tony believes) have been going to try to land on the park but because of the children playng in the area he flew on...already very low he was unable to avoid trees in his path. The final engine failed and the plane crashed killing all 10 crew. Tony has tended the memorial and visits the spot most days, talking to the men he considers saved his life (he became somewhat of a local celebrity but is a very quiet, unassuming chap). He bumped into a breakfast tv presenter out walking his dog and they got talking (as you do) and things escalated from there. Tony dearly wished for some sort of tribute to be paid to these brave airmen on the 75th anniversary of the event, he REALLY wanted a fly-past . These airmen represent the sacrifice made by men and women from America who came to our aid during the war...indeed they symbolise the bravery and sacrifice of all of our allies in the conflict. Yesterday he got his wish. www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-england-south-yorkshire-47323045I'm a pacifist but I can respect these men, and understand how much this country owes to others. |
|
|
|
Post by mossie on Feb 23, 2019 16:25:43 GMT
This moistened my eyes, and also brought back strong memories that I have of seeing a Fortress go down on top of the inland cliff which now stands above the Eurotunnel terminal near Folkestone. They had been attacking the Doodlebug sites in the Pas de Calais and we had been able to see them being shot down by the Jerry flak over there. I was with one of my friends and saw this Fortress circle low firing off red Very lights over the airfield at Hawkinge about 3 miles away and then disappear below the horizon. From where we were in the valley we couldn't see the airfield and we immediately set off on our bikes towards the column of black smoke which marked the site. When we got there the RAF ambulance had arrived and they had just loaded one survivor, while several airmen or soldiers were no doubt trying to locate any other survivors. We found morphine ampoules scattered on the road, but were chased away by the soldiers. The aircraft had landed on the top of the cliff and the tail was left up there, but the rest had gone over the edge and was scattered down the bank looking like a rubbish tip. Now 86 I still have vivid memories of those days but no PTSD which the papers are saying many people suffer from today, incredible.
|
|
|
|
Post by bixaorellana on Feb 23, 2019 16:30:20 GMT
 Perfectly placed, dear Cheery. It's not only impressive that a little boy grew up to honor the memory of the men in that plane his whole life, but that he was joined by so many others who understood his sentiments. |
|
|
|
Post by lagatta on Feb 24, 2019 1:00:49 GMT
Yes, that was lovely, as was Mossie's story. There are other places, in northern France and Belgium, where it is painful to walk because of all the young souls dead too soon in the two world wars.
I remember getting absolutely undeserved praise and free drinks in Dieppe and where the Canadian forces fought in the Netherlands. I wasn't even born. My father had an absolutely legitimate medical exemption - so he became a war worker in Ottawa, as was my mum, and that is how they met.
|
|
|
|
Post by bixaorellana on Feb 22, 2020 3:52:42 GMT
|
|
|
|
Post by bixaorellana on Apr 22, 2020 14:42:52 GMT
Walentyna Janta-Polczynska, Polish War Heroine, Dies at 107Walentyna Janta-Polczynska, among the last surviving members of the Polish government in exile, which was formed after Nazi Germany invaded Poland, died on April 2 in Queens. She was 107....She also performed two intelligence roles for the Polish Resistance. In one, she translated and prepared reports by Jan Karski, the underground courier who was among the first to deliver eyewitness accounts of atrocities against Jews in the Warsaw ghetto before they were deported to extermination camps.In her other intelligence role, she helped organize Dawn, a clandestine radio station that broadcast to Poland from an intelligence complex in England. She was one of its first announcers. <-- click Story above is from NYTimes. If you cannot access it, go here: www.thefirstnews.com/article/us-daily-publishes-life-story-of-late-polish-war-heroine-12173
|
|
|
|
Post by questa on Apr 23, 2020 14:17:56 GMT
I think that 'Remarkable People' would fit the description, rather than Hero.
|
|
|
|
Post by kerouac2 on Jul 16, 2020 16:50:53 GMT
|
|
|
|
Post by bixaorellana on Jul 18, 2020 14:35:58 GMT
|
|
|
|
Post by bixaorellana on Dec 16, 2020 5:47:14 GMT
Janine de Greef, Belgian who helped smuggle downed Allied airmen to safety, dies at 95Janine de Greef was a 14-year Belgian schoolgirl when the Nazis invaded her country in May 1940. With her youth proving an effective cover, she became at 16 a member of the Belgian resistance, helping smuggle hundreds of downed Allied airmen, mostly British but including 108 Americans, south through Nazi-occupied France to neutral Spain.If you can't get past the paywall: {Spoiler}{Spoiler}Janine de Greef, Belgian who helped smuggle downed Allied airmen to safety, dies at 95
By Phil Davison
Dec. 15, 2020 at 12:05 p.m. CST
Janine de Greef was a 14-year Belgian schoolgirl when the Nazis invaded her country in May 1940. With her youth proving an effective cover, she became at 16 a member of the Belgian resistance, helping smuggle hundreds of downed Allied airmen, mostly British but including 108 Americans, south through Nazi-occupied France to neutral Spain.
The de Greef family — her father, mother and elder brother — were credited with saving more than 320 of the 800 or so Allied airmen who survived being shot down over Belgium.
At every step, Ms. de Greef was in danger of capture, even execution by the Gestapo, a fate which befell many of her Belgian comrades, some 250 of whom died in Nazi concentration camps.
During her trips through France toward the Pyrenees mountains and Spain, she was often aided by local guerrillas of the French resistance. She was believed to be among the last surviving members of the “Comet Line,” the clandestine Belgian resistance network founded in 1941 by 24-year-old Belgian nurse Andrée “Dédée” de Jongh, to spirit allied airmen through Nazi lines to safety in Spain and eventually to Britain.
Ms. de Greef, 95, died Nov. 7 at the Brussels care home where she had spent the last decade. The French-based Les Amis du Réseau Comète (Friends of the Comet Network, or Line) announced the death but did not provide a cause.
By the time she was 19, she had made more than 30 dangerous trips by train, tram, bicycle or on foot, from France to the Spanish border, with Allied airmen “under her wing.” She often pretended to be their daughter or little sister.
Before they embarked on their life-or-death voyages, she would teach the airmen, all carrying false passports her father and brother had forged, basic answers in French or German if questioned. She told American airmen never to juggle change in their pockets, which Europeans rarely do, never to chew gum and always to avoid a swaggering walk and instead comport themselves like someone whose country has been militarily occupied.
As a teenager, Janine de Greef helped downed Allied airmen escape Nazi-occupied France during World War II. (Family photo)
Once she had escorted small groups of airmen to the last “safe house” in France, below the foothills of the Pyrenees that straddle the French-Spanish border, she often walked or cycled with them to meet Basque mountain guides who would take them on a grueling several-day walk over the mountains, evading first the occupying Nazis in France and later Spain’s paramilitary police.
Although Spain’s dictator at the time, Gen. Francisco Franco, had shrewdly declared himself neutral in the war for his self-preservation, he was an extreme right-winger who strongly admired Hitler. Many Allied servicemen, French resistance leaders or French leftists got thrown into prison camps if caught entering Spain.
Those airmen who were guided safely over the Pyrenees by Basque guides, who knew the terrain because they had long been engaged in contraband, were then picked up by agents of what was then Britain’s MI9 wartime intelligence service, set up specifically to rescue the airmen. The agents then gave the servicemen diplomatic shelter in the British embassy in Madrid before taking them south to Gibraltar, a British colony, for flights back to Britain and, for Americans, on to the United States.
One of the British airmen Ms. de Greef saved was Sgt. Bob Frost, a rear-gunner whose Wellington bomber was shot down by antiaircraft fire in 1942 while on a raid aimed at the German industrial city of Essen.
Frost and his crew bailed out by parachute, and he landed in a field at Kapellen, Belgium, where a local farmer sheltered him and got a message to the local resistance to help him. An agent of the Comet Line smuggled him to Paris where, to his shock, he was passed on to Ms. de Greef.
She already had false papers for him, told him to keep quiet, just smile and let her do the talking if they were approached by Germans. She linked up with three other airmen and they set off by train from Paris to Saint-Jean-de-Luz in the Basque country of southwestern France.
Frost later made it across the Pyrenees, on to Gibraltar, and finally back to his squadron in England.
Janine Lambertine Marie Angele de Greef was born in Brussels on Sept. 25, 1925, to Fernand de Greef, a multilingual businessman, and his wife, the former Elvire Berlémont, a journalist with the newspaper L’Indépendance Belge.
When Hitler’s forces rolled into Belgium, Janine, her elder brother Frederick (Freddie), her parents and grandmother fled in a convoy with friends and neighbors and settled in Anglet, a town on the Atlantic Ocean in the extreme southwestern point of France. It was also a largely French-Basque town and on the northern edge of the Pyrenees, both of which facts would prove crucial to the family over the next few years.
The family had initially planned to sail from the south of France to the United States but, once in Anglet, they opted to stay and resist the Nazis.
Janine’s mother, known within the network only as Tante Go (Auntie Go), established a chain of “safe houses” around Anglet where Allied airmen could be hidden until agents of the Comet Line could hook them up with Basque mountain guides to make the long, rugged walk over the Pyrenees into Spain.
Albert Johnson, an English civilian who had worked with the de Greef family before the war, stayed with them in Anglet and became a key member of the Comet Line, known in French as le Réseau Comète and in the de Greefs’ native Dutch and Flemish as De Komeetlijn.
When the Comet Line was being increasingly “burnt” — identified by the Gestapo — in 1944, Janine’s parents got her and Freddie to England via Gibraltar while the parents themselves stayed on and survived, thanks to the Allied landings at Normandy that June and the gradual German retreat. When the war was over, Janine and Freddie returned to Brussels to be reunited with their parents.
Ms. de Greef received the British King’s Medal for Courage in the Cause of Freedom, an award to non-British nationals, the U.S. Medal of Freedom as well as Belgian and French awards for her resistance work. Her citation for the King’s Medal read: “In all her work for the Allied cause, Mademoiselle Janine de Greef proved herself to be a most courageous, loyal and patriotic helper.”
She never married and had no immediate surviving family; Freddie died in 1969.
After the war, Ms. de Greef worked for the British embassy in Brussels and was often invited to Britain for resistance commemoration events.
As the British airman Frost recounted in 2015 to the International Bomber Command Centre Digital Archive in Lincoln, England, an American escaping with him once offered his train seat to a young French woman standing in the corridor.
Realizing he had spoken English, a dangerous giveaway, all the escapers froze in silence for a few seconds. But Ms. de Greef created a distraction and defused the situation.
“She didn’t bat an eyelid,” Frost said. “A real heroine, that girl.”
|
|
|
|
Post by bixaorellana on Dec 16, 2020 16:31:39 GMT
And another heroine ~ Lidia Menapace, Who Fought Fascists and Sexists, Dies at 96She was a partisan in northern Italy during World War II and denounced efforts to discount the role of women in the Resistance. She had been hospitalized with Covid-19.If the paywall keeps you out of the article: {Spoiler}Lidia Menapace, Who Fought Fascists and Sexists, Dies at 96
She was a partisan in northern Italy during World War II and denounced efforts to discount the role of women in the Resistance. She had been hospitalized with Covid-19.
Lidia Menapace turned to feminism and pacifism after serving partisan duty during the war.
By Emma Bubola
Published Dec. 14, 2020
Updated Dec. 15, 2020
She hid explosives under her clothes. She delivered maps and antifascist propaganda slipped between the pages of works by Cicero. She brought medicine by bicycle to wounded partisans hiding in the mountains.
Lidia Menapace, as she recounted in a memoir and in interviews, often risked her life as a member of Italy’s clandestine Resistance, fighting German and Italian Fascist forces in World War II. And like those of many female partisans, her contributions were discounted by male members.
After the war, when Italian officials said women should not participate in a liberation parade, she went anyway.
“If there hadn’t been women,” she once said, “there wouldn’t have been any Resistance.”
Ms. Menapace (may-nah-PAH-chay) later turned to the causes of feminism and pacifism. She was an author and essayist, a member of the collective that founded the left-wing newspaper Il Manifesto, and a senator at 82.
She died on Dec. 7 after being hospitalized with Covid-19 in the northern city of Bolzano, her niece Marta Brisca said. She was 96.
Ms. Menapace was born in the northern city of Novara on April 3, 1924, to Giacomo Brisca, a surveyor with antifascist politics, and Italia Vercesi, a homemaker from a family with anarchist tendencies.
In primary school under Mussolini, teachers instructed her to exalt the regime, the monarchy and the church. But at home, her mother told her to tear apart school reports that classified her as a member of the “Aryan race” because, she told her daughter, “We are not animals.”
Young Lidia understood immediately the injustice of the regime’s new racial laws, which banned her two Jewish friends from going to school.
Her father was sent to concentration camps in 1943 for refusing to submit to the authority of the Republic of Salò, the newly formed Nazi puppet state in northern Italy. He survived and was freed two years later. In his absence, his daughter had joined the Resistance at 19. |
|
|
|
Post by whatagain on Dec 18, 2020 19:17:24 GMT
Great people.
My grand dad was part if a network that helped downed pilots. He always talked about it lightly.
I don't think they laughed all the time.
|
|
|
|
Post by bixaorellana on Dec 18, 2020 20:06:57 GMT
That is something, Whatagain! Do you have any of his stories?
|
|
|
|
Post by whatagain on Dec 19, 2020 2:56:22 GMT
Unfortunately not.
My father knows the name of the network, virtually unknown to all.
The 2 stories i have been told was that once a german officer sat in the best sest of the house and was offered drink. In that seat a pistol was hidden
The second is when a guy came tonthe house to accompany a US to the bext cache.
He was introduced to the pilot who spoke with heavy accent, saying all the time 'yeah'.
Which the belgian took for 'ja' in german, which didn't reassure him.
I think his sister was alsi in the network.
I have to reask Bixa ! In those times (early 70's) nobody talked about war. There was a kind of omerta, nobody wanted to know what the other did, did not, suffered... or benefited during the war.
|
|
|
|
Post by bixaorellana on Dec 19, 2020 3:11:20 GMT
That is certainly understandable, Whatagain. Right now there are a spate of fairly lightweight novels being published with WWII as the theme. On the one hand, it is important history that can't fade away. On the other hand, the idea of it being a trendy theme for beach reading makes me uncomfortable.
|
|
|
|
Post by mossie on Dec 19, 2020 8:08:27 GMT
I still have vivid memories of the war, luckily I was too young to serve, but we tried to do our bit collecting scrap metal and waste paper and buying Savings stamps with our pocket money.
|
|
|
|
Post by bixaorellana on Dec 19, 2020 16:59:56 GMT
Mossie, that kind of consciousness and willing sacrifice are surely yet another form of heroism.
|
|
|
|
Post by questa on Dec 21, 2020 7:24:13 GMT
Warriors have always recounted their deeds and story tellers have always set their tales against a background of war. I was lucky enough to go to Persepolis in Iran one time base of Xerxes and Darius until Alexander the Great destroyed it. Carved into various walls are soldiers' stories, and tales of spies, harlots and wartime adventures. 'Twas ever thus.
|
|
|
|
Post by kerouac2 on Dec 21, 2020 7:54:27 GMT
Heroes are often more interesting when high levels of testosterone were not involved.
|
|
|
|
Post by lugg on Jan 11, 2021 18:53:11 GMT
|
|
|
|
Post by lagatta on Mar 26, 2021 11:49:33 GMT
I don't know where to put the death (at 89) of Nawal Al Saadawi and her legacy, of Arab feminism and in general standing up for the downtrodden. The mods are welcome to find a better place. She visited "altermondialistes" in Montréal and remembered me at a meeting in Paris.
There is a worthwhile obituary in the Economist, if anyone here can post it.
|
|
|
|
Post by lagatta on Mar 26, 2021 14:38:44 GMT
|
|
|
|
Post by bixaorellana on Mar 26, 2021 20:54:47 GMT
|
|
