Seventy-four years ago, the events of World War II were the daily concern of everyone in the United States. Hundreds of correspondents, photographers and field artists braved enemy fire, slept in foxholes and suffered bitter cold and unbearable heat in their effort to chronicle events on the war. Some became prisoners of war, a few were killed.
With a pantheon of talent including Edward R. Murrow, Ernest Hemingway, Joe Rosenthal, Robert Capa and Bill Mauldin reporting news of World War II, reporting the war surpassed all previous war coverage. 
For the first time, new technologies enabled almost instantaneous transmission to a waiting audience back home. Radio listeners heard the voice of Edward R. Murrow, speaking from a London rooftop during a German air raid, and newspapers ran stories and pictures from battles in the Pacific and European theaters, sometimes only hours after the reporters witnessed the scenes. And for the first time, women covered the war, earning the respect of their male colleagues for insightful, accurate coverage.
As many reporters covered battles won and lost, the greatest number of articles being printed in the United States were human-interest pieces, most popularized by Ernie Pyle, a reporter/war-correspondent who focused on individual soldiers' stories, using full names and hometowns to humanize those fighting. These articles did not attempt to valorize the soldiers but rather show them as people with hopes, fears, and quirks which he felt accurately represented what was happening on the front.
This was an important distinction from official dispatches issued by the White House and other governmental agencies which were vague, often only listing names of battles, the outcome, and information regarding casualties.
Ernest Taylor Pyle was born on Aug. 3, 1900, on the Sam Elder farm, located south and west of Dana, Indiana, where his father was then tenant farming. Pyle, the only child of Will and Maria Pyle, disliked farming, once noting that 
"anything was better than looking at the south end of a horse going north." After his high school graduation, Pyle - caught up in the patriotic fever sweeping the nation upon America's entry into World War I - enlisted in the Naval Reserve. Before he could complete his training, however, an armistice was declared in Europe.
In 1919, Pyle enrolled at Indiana University in Bloomington with no particular vocational ambition. All he knew was that he heartily disliked the rigors of working his family's farm, and anything else had to be better. Learning from a friend that journalism courses were a cinch, he enrolled in the university's journalism curriculum as a means to escape the plow. He ended up enjoying his classes, but just short of finishing his journalism degree in 1923, he left the university to accept a reporter's job at the La Porte Herald.
His stay in La Porte was short. Within six months, a connection from his university days helped him get a job in Washington D.C. with the Washington Daily News. From there he went on to short stints with two newspapers in New York, and by 1928 he was back at the Washington Daily News as a copy editor.
In Washington, he met Geraldine "Jerry" Siebolds, and they married on July 25, 1925. "Jerry" suffered from intermittent bouts of mental illness and alcoholism, resulting in a rocky and tempestuous marriage. The next year, Pyle quit his job, and they crisscrossed the country for two years, covering over 9,000 miles. In 1928 he returned to The Washington Daily News, and for the following four years, he served as the country's first and best-known aviation columnist.
In 1932 Pyle once again became managing editor of The Washington Daily News. Two years later he took an extended vacation in California to recuperate from a severe bout of flu. Upon his return, to fill in for the paper's vacationing syndicated columnist Heywood Broun, he wrote a series of 11 columns about his stay in California and the people he had met there.
The series proved unexpectedly popular with both readers and colleagues. G.B. Parker, editor-in-chief of the Scripps-Howard newspaper chain, said he had found in Pyle's vacation articles that "They had a sort of Mark Twain quality and they knocked my eyes right out". On August 2, 1935, the day before his thirty-fifth birthday, he and Jerry started an epic journey of five years, during which they crossed the continent twenty times, touched down at least three times in every state, and visited every country but two in the Western Hemisphere. "We have worn out two cars, five sets of tires, three typewriters, and pretty soon I'm going to have to have a new pair of shoes" he later wrote. He filed something like 2.5 million words. The results were immensely popular and breezily chatty vignettes about his encounters with sheepherders and lumberjacks, celebrities, farmers, and hotel bellhops.
With the advent of World War II, Pyle's fortunes began moving upward, first by inches and then by quantum leaps. Initially, he had been too preoccupied with his nomadic pursuits of local color to pay much heed in the late 1930s as Hitler's aggressive grab for lebensraum (additional territory considered necessary for national survival) moved Europe toward a continent-wide conflict. But the German invasion of Poland in September 1939 suddenly changed all that. Pyle's ambition became that of being a war correspondent. However, it wasn't until late 1940 that he finally arrived in England to begin his career as a wartime columnist.
There Pyle experienced his first significant taste of success with his accounts of the devastating effects of the 
Luftwaffe's relentless bombing raids on Great Britain's citizens during "The Blitz". Witnessing a German fire-bombing raid on London, he wrote that it was "the most hateful, most beautiful single scene I have ever known." A book of his experiences during this time, "Ernie Pyle in England," was published in 1941. However gratifying all this might have been for Pyle, the most impressive chapter in the story of his rise did not really begin to unfold until he and other members of the wartime press landed with American troops in North Africa in November 1942.
As his daily columns on Allied operations in Africa started finding their way into print back in the United States, Pyle's reputation soared like a meteor. Almost overnight he became the most talked about, sought after, and revered member of his profession. The veteran Colliers reporter, Quinton Reynolds, called him "unquestionably the greatest correspondent in Africa."
An editor for the Indianapolis times declared his column "the hottest feature we've got," and an assistant editor whose paper did not have the good fortune to be carrying his column confessed to Pyle, "I wish to God I had you".
But perhaps the most singular manifestation of Pyle's escalating fame was the ordinary soldier's curiosity about him. The question most commonly asked by enlisted men at the front, whenever they encountered members of the press, was, "Do you know Ernie Pyle?".
Pyle interrupted his reporting several times during the war with leaves to return home to care for his wife while they were still married. After his return to the United States for a vacation, he wrote to his college roommate, Paige Cavanaugh: 
"Geraldine was drunk the afternoon I got home. From there she went on down. Went completely screwball. One night she tried the gas. Had to have a doctor." The two were divorced on April 14, 1942. They remarried by proxy while Pyle was in Africa on March 10, 1943.
After Africa, Pyle went on to cover the Allied invasion of Sicily and Italy and in mid-1944 was with American forces as they established a foothold on the beaches of Normandy and began the march toward Paris to drive the Germans from France. With each change of venue, his reputation seemed to wax only more. By early 1945, having won a Pulitzer Prize the previous year, this one-time travel columnist, who had once had trouble interesting newspapers in his work, was being carried in nearly 400 American dailies plus nearly 300 weekly publications.
The explanation for Pyle's success as a war correspondent contained several elements. He had a low-key and self-effacing manner of dealing with people that enabled him to elicit the makings of a story, where a more aggressive approach might have failed. He also instinctively knew how to spot a story's potential in situations that most journalists would have dismissed as too trivial to deal with. An equally important ingredient to the success of Pyle's columns was what he once called their "worm's-eye view of the war".
Also contributing to his popularity was the matter-of-fact and sometimes beguiling simplicity of his journalistic style, which imbued his words with a remarkably graphic sense of the horror and waste of the war, without engaging in histrionics or being maudlin. This is not to say that his columns did not on occasion draw tears.
Although Pyle's columns covered almost every branch of the service - from quartermaster troops to pilots - he saved his highest praise and devotion for the common foot soldier. "I love the infantry because they are the underdogs," he wrote. "They are the mud-rain-frost-and-wind boys. They have no comforts, and they even learn to live without the necessities. And in the end, they are the guys that wars can't be won without."
Noble Prize-winning author John Steinbeck, a Pyle friend, perhaps summed up the reporter's work best when he told a Time magazine reporter: "There are really two wars and they haven't much to do with each other. There is the war of maps and logistics, of campaigns, of ballistics, armies, divisions, and regiments - and that is General George Marshall's war.
"Then there is the war of the homesick, weary, funny, violent, common men who wash their socks in their helmets, complain about the food, whistle at the Arab girls, or any girls for that matter, 
and bring themselves through as dirty a business as the world has ever seen and do it with humor and dignity and courage - and that is Ernie Pyle's war."
Despite the warmth he felt for the average G.I., Pyle had no illusions about the dangers involved with his job. He once wrote a friend that he tried "not to take any foolish chances, but there's just no way to play it completely safe and still do your job."
Returning to the United States in the late summer of 1944 after witnessing the liberation of Paris, Pyle knew this much-needed respite from the war, however much he wished otherwise, must be only temporary. By early the next year, having succumbed to the Navy's urging, he agreed to cover operations in the Pacific. "I'm going simply because there is a war on and I am part of it," he wrote.
By the time he accompanied a group of Marines on their landing at Okinawa early in April 1945, he was beginning to take a decidedly more optimistic view of his work. Even the premonition of his own death begins to fade, and shortly after his Okinawa sorties he observed in a letter, "I feel now that at last, I have a pretty good chance of coming through the war alive." 
Then on April 17, 1945, he arrived on the recently occupied island of Ie Shima and the next day set out with some soldiers in a Jeep to survey the terrain, which still contained pockets of Japanese resistance. Suddenly, the party encountered a Japanese machine gun, and its withering fire quickly drove them to dive into a ditch. Pyle briefly lifted his head from the ditch to look, and seconds later an enemy bullet entered his left temple just under his helmet, killing him instantly.
Pyle was buried with his helmet on, among other battle casualties, with an infantry private on one side and a combat engineer on the other. The men of the Army unit he was covering erected a monument, which still stands, at the site of his death. Its inscription reads, "At this spot, the 77th Infantry Division lost a buddy. Ernie Pyle, 18 April 1945."
Eleanor Roosevelt, who frequently quoted Pyle's war dispatches in her newspaper column, My Day, paid tribute to him there the following day: "I shall never forget how much I enjoyed meeting him here in the White House last year," she wrote, "and how much I admired this frail and modest man who could endure hardships because he loved his job and our men."
Though newspapers reported that Geraldine "took the news bravely," her health declined rapidly in the months following Pyle's death. She died on November 23, 1945.
The infantrymen who received Pyle's body after his death found in his pockets a draft of a column he intended to release when the war in Europe ended. In that column, Pyle wrote that he would not soon forget "the unnatural sight of cold dead men scattered over the hillsides and in the ditches along the high rows of hedge throughout the world.
"Dead men by mass production - in one country after another - month after month and year after year. Dead men in winter and dead men in summer."
"Dead men in such familiar promiscuity that they become monotonous."
"Dead men in such monstrous infinity that you come almost to hate them."
After the war, Pyle's remains were re-interred at the Army cemetery on Okinawa, and later at the National Memorial Cemetery of the Pacific in Honolulu. In 1983 he was awarded the Purple Heart - a rare honor for a civilian - by the 77th Division's successor unit, the 77th Army Reserve Command.
In 1947 - after the war that brought Pyle such fame and adulation, and two years following his death - his editor, friend, and fellow Hoosier, Lee G. Miller, culled selected columns from Pyle's 5-year journey throughout the Americas with his wife Jerry, and stitched them together into a book titled "Home Country," a posthumous contribution to a familiar and persistent genre of American nonfiction: the roadbook. It became his final legacy, but not his most lasting one.
Grown men have been known to cry while reading Pyle's most widely-reprinted and famous column, "The Death of Captain Waskow," which related the passing of a beloved officer and its impact on his men. 
This column moved a nation and was recreated in the widely-acclaimed movie about Pyle's epic WWII passage through the European theater, called "The Story of G.I. Joe," starring Burgess Meredith, and premiering just 2 months to the day after Pyle was killed in action. Robert Mitchum played Waskow.
In his documentary film, "The Battle of San Pietro," John Huston depicted the action in which Capt. Henry T. Waskow died on December 14, 1943.
The editors of the Washington Daily News devoted their entire front page to the memorializing of Waskow on Jan. 10, 1944. Below is the complete article.
AT THE FRONT LINES IN ITALY, January 10, 1944 - In this war, I have known a lot of officers who were loved and respected by the soldiers under them. But never have I crossed the trail of any man as beloved as Capt. Henry T. Waskow of Belton, Texas.
Capt. Waskow was a company commander in the 36th Division. He had led his company since long before it left the States. He was very young, only in his middle twenties, but he carried in him a sincerity and gentleness that made people want to be guided by him.
"After my own father, he came next," a sergeant told me.
"He always looked after us," a soldier said. "He'd go to bat for us every time."
"I've never known him to do anything unfair," another one said.
I was at the foot of the mule trail the night they brought Capt. Waskow's body down. The moon was nearly full at the time, and you could see far up the trail, and even partway across the valley below. Soldiers made shadows in the moonlight as they walked.
Dead men had been coming down the mountain all evening, lashed onto the backs of mules. They came lying belly-down across the wooden pack-saddles, their heads hanging down on the left side of the mule, their stiffened legs sticking out awkwardly from the other side, bobbing up and down as the mule walked.
The Italian mule-skinners were afraid to walk beside dead men, so Americans had to lead the mules down that night. Even the Americans were reluctant to unlash and lift off the bodies at the bottom, so an officer had to do it himself and ask others to help.
The first one came early in the morning. They slid him down from the mule and stood him on his feet for a moment, while they got a new grip. In the half-light he might have been merely a sick man standing there, leaning on the others. Then they laid him on the ground in the shadow of the low stone wall alongside the road.
I don't know who that first one was. You feel small in the presence of dead men, and ashamed at being alive, and you don't ask silly questions.
We left him there beside the road, that first one, and we all went back into the cowshed and sat on water cans or lay on the straw, waiting for the next batch of mules.
Somebody said the dead soldier had been dead for four days, and then nobody said anything more about it. We talked soldier talk for an hour or more. The dead man lay all alone outside in the shadow of the low stone wall.
Then a soldier came into the cowshed and said there were some more bodies outside. We went out into the road. Four mules stood there, in the moonlight, in the road where the trail came down off the mountain. The soldiers who led them stood there waiting. "This one is Captain Waskow," one of them said quietly.
Two men unlashed his body from the mule and lifted it off and laid it in the shadow beside the low stone wall.
Other men took the other bodies off. Finally, there were five lying end to end in a long row, alongside the road. You don't cover up dead men in the combat zone. They just lie there in the shadows until somebody else comes after them.
The unburdened mules moved off to their olive orchard. The men in the road seemed reluctant to leave. They stood around, and gradually one by one I could sense them moving close to Capt. Waskow's body. Not so much to look, I think, as to say something in finality to him, and to themselves. I stood close by and I could hear.
One soldier came and looked down, and he said out loud, "God damn it." That's all he said, and then he walked away. Another one came. He said, "God damn it to hell anyway." He looked down for a few last moments, and then he turned and left.
Another man came; I think he was an officer. It was hard to tell officers from men in the half-light, for all were bearded and grimy dirty. The man looked down into the dead captain's face, and then he spoke directly to him, as though he were alive. He said: "I'm sorry, old man."
Then a soldier came and stood beside the officer, and bent over, and he too spoke to his dead captain, not in a whisper but awfully tenderly, and he said:
"I sure am sorry, sir."
Then the first man squatted down, and he reached down and took the dead hand, and he sat there for a full five minutes, holding the dead hand in 
his own and looking intently into the dead face, and he never uttered a sound all the time he sat there.
And finally, he put the hand down, and then reached up and gently straightened the points of the captain's shirt collar, and then he sort of rearranged the tattered edges of his uniform around the wound. And then he got up and walked away down the road in the moonlight, all alone.
After that the rest of us went back into the cowshed, leaving the five dead men lying in a line, end to end, in the shadow of the low stone wall. We lay down on the straw in the cowshed, and pretty soon we were all asleep.
"Free State of Jones," released into theaters on June 24, 2016, tells the real-life story of defiant Southern farmer, Newton Knight and his extraordinary armed rebellion against the Confederacy. 
Banding together with other small farmers and local slaves, Knight launched an uprising that led Jones County, Mississippi to secede from the Confederacy. Knight continued his struggle into Reconstruction, distinguishing him as a compelling if controversial, figure of defiance long beyond the War.
Knight is excitingly portrayed by actor Matthew McConaughey. His first wife, Serena, is played by Keri Russell and Gugu Mbatha-Raw as his Negro wife Rachel. Several photographs from the movie appear in this presentation.
Newton Knight was born in November 1837, near the Leaf River in Jones County, Mississippi, a region romantically described in 1841 by the historian J.F.H. Claiborne as a "land of milk and honey." The landscape was dominated by virgin longleaf pines. Wolves and panthers still roamed the land. He married Serena Turner in 1858, and the two established a small farm just across the county line in Jasper County.
Knight, an American farmer, soldier and southern Unionist, was best known as the leader of the 
Knight Company, a band of Confederate army deserters that turned against the Confederacy during the Civil War. Local legends state that Knight and his men attempted to form the "Free State of Jones" in the area around Jones County, Mississippi, at the height of the war, though the exact nature of the Knight Company's opposition to the Confederate government is disputed. After the war, Knight aided Mississippi's Reconstruction government.
Knight has long been a controversial figure. Historians and descendants disagree over his motives and actions, with some arguing he was a noble and pious individual who refused to fight for a cause in which he did not believe, while others have portrayed him as a manipulative outlaw. This controversy was fueled in part by Knight's postwar marriage to a freed slave, which effectively established a small mixed-race community in southeastern Mississippi. The marriage would have been considered illegal as Mississippi banned interracial marriages except from 1870 to 1880 during the Reconstruction era.
Newton was a grandson of John "Jackie" Knight (1773-1861), one of Jones County's largest slaveholders. Newton's father, Albert (1799-1862), however, did not own any slaves and was the only child of 
Jackie Knight who did not inherit any slaves. Newton, likewise, did not own any slaves. Some say he was morally opposed to the institution due to his Primitive Baptist beliefs. As a staunch Primitive Baptist, Newton also forswore alcohol, unlike his father and grandfather. He was probably taught to read and write by his mother.
Knight, like many Jones Countians, was opposed to secession. The county elected John H. Powell, the "cooperation" (anti-secession) candidate, to represent them at Mississippi's secession convention in January 1861. Powell voted against secession on the first ballot, but under pressure, switched his vote on the second ballot, joining the majority in voting to secede from the Union. In an interview many years later, Knight suggested many Jones Countians, unaware of how few options they had, felt betrayed by Powell.
Knight enlisted in the Confederate Army in July 1861. He was given a furlough in January 1862, however, to return home and tend to his ailing father. In May 1862, Knight, along with a number of friends and neighbors, enlisted in Company F of the 7th Battalion, as they preferred to serve together in the same company, rather than with strangers.
Throughout the summer and fall of 1862, a number of factors prompted desertions by Jones Countians serving in the Confederate Army. One factor was the lack of food and supplies in the aftermath of the Siege of Corinth. Another involved, reports of poor conditions back home, as small farms deteriorated from neglect.
Knight was enraged when he received word that Confederate authorities had seized his family's horse. However, many believe Knight's principal reason for desertion was his outrage over the Confederate government's passing of the Twenty Negro Law. This act allowed wealthy plantation owners to avoid military service if they owned twenty slaves or more. An additional family member was exempted from service for each additional twenty slaves owned. Knight had also received word that his brother-in-law, Morgan, who had become the head of the family in Knight's absence, was abusing Knight's children. Morgan's identity has since been lost, but he is thought to be Morgan Lines, a day laborer, and convicted murderer.
Knight was reported AWOL in October 1862. He later defended his desertion, arguing, "If they had a right to conscript me when I didn't want to fight the Union, I had a right to quit when I got ready." After returning home having deserted in the retreat following the defeat at Corinth, Knight, according to relatives, shot and killed Morgan.
In early 1863, Knight was arrested and jailed, and possibly tortured, by Confederate authorities for desertion. His homestead and farm were destroyed, leaving his family destitute.
As the ranks of deserters swelled in the aftermath of the Siege of Vicksburg, Confederate authorities began receiving reports that deserters in the Jones County area were looting and burning houses. A local quartermaster, Capt. W. J. Bryant reported that "The deserters have overrun and taken possession of the country, in many cases exiling the good and loyal citizens or shooting them in cold blood on their own door-sills."
Gen. Braxton Bragg dispatched Maj. Amos McLemore to Jones County to investigate and round up deserters and stragglers. On October 5, 1863, McLemore was shot and killed in the Ellisville home of Amos Deason, and Knight was believed to have pulled the trigger.
On October 13, 1863, the Knight Company, as it was called, a band of guerillas from Jones County and the adjacent counties of Jasper, Covington, Perry, and Smith, was organized to protect the area from Confederate authorities. Knight was elected "Captain" of the company, which included many of his relatives and neighbors. The company's main hideout, known as "Devils Den," was located along the Leaf River at the Jones-Covington county line. Local women and slaves provided food and other aid to the men. Women blew cattle horns to signal the approach of Confederate authorities. From late 1863 to early 1865, the Knight Company allegedly fought fourteen skirmishes with Confederate forces. One skirmish took place on December 23, 1863, at the home of Sally Parker, a Knight Company supporter, leaving one Confederate soldier dead and two badly wounded.
During this same period, Knight led a raid into Paulding, where he and his men captured five wagonloads of corn, which they distributed among the local population. The company harassed Confederate officials, with numerous tax collectors, conscript officers, and other officials being reported killed in early 1864. 
In March 1864, the Jones County court clerk notified the governor that guerillas had made tax collections in the county all but impossible. A letter dated February 13, 1864, from a Union scout addressed to Maj. Gen. John M. Palmer of the Union Army was discovered in 2016 by a historian working in the National Archives. It estimates the Knight Company's numbers to be as high as 600 and confirms their intention to join up with the Union Army. The exact number is still a matter of debate, in light of an interview Knight gave after the war stating, "There was about 125 of us, never any more."
By the spring of 1864, the Confederate government in the county had been effectively overthrown. Lt. Gen. Leonidas Polk wrote Confederate President Jefferson Davis on March 21, 1864, describing the conditions in Jones County. Polk stated that the band of deserters were "in open rebellion, defiant at the outset, proclaiming themselves 'Southern Yankees,' and resolved to resist by force of arms all efforts to capture them." On March 29, 1864, Confederate Capt. Wirt Thomson wrote James Seddon, Confederate Secretary of War, claiming the Knight Company had captured Ellisville and raised the U.S. flag over the courthouse in Jones County. He further reported, "The country is entirely at their mercy." Union Gen. William Tecumseh Sherman received a letter from a local group declaring its independence from the Confederacy. In July 1864, the Natchez Courier reported that Jones County had seceded from the Confederacy.
Gen. Polk initially responded to the actions of the Knight Company by sending a contingent under Col. Henry Maury into the area in February 1864. Maury reported he had cleared the area, but noted the deserters had threatened to obtain 
"Yankee aid" and return. Shortly afterward, Polk dispatched a veteran contingent of soldiers led by Col. Robert Lowry, a future governor who would later describe Knight as an "ignorant and uneducated man." Using bloodhounds to track down guerillas in the swamps, Lowry rounded up and executed ten members of the Knight Company, including Newton's cousins, Benjamin Franklin Knight and Sil Coleman. Newton Knight, however, evaded capture. He later stated his company had unsuccessfully attempted to break through Confederate lines to join the Union Army.
By April 1865 the Confederate rebellion had been crushed and the American Civil War was finally over. Mississippi was occupied by Federal troops sent to maintain order and to protect the civil rights of former slaves. Capt. Newton Knight was called into service by the United States Army as a commissioner in charge of distributing thousands of pounds of food to the poor and starving people in the Jones County area. Knight also led a raid that liberated several children who were still being held in slavery in a nearby county. Like many Southern Unionists, he supported the Republican Party, namely the Reconstruction administration of Governor Adelbert Ames. As conflict mounted between white neo-Confederate resistance (the Ku Klux Klan) and the Republican Reconstruction government, Ames appointed Knight as Colonel of the First Infantry Regiment of Jasper County, an otherwise all-black regiment defending against Klan activity.
In 1870, Knight petitioned the federal government for compensation for several members of the Knight Company, including the ten who had been executed by Lowry in 1864. He provided sworn statements from several individuals attesting to his loyalty to the Union, including a local judge and a state senate candidate. But the Federal Court of Claims ruled that "the evidence fails to support the allegation of the petition that the Jones County Scouts were organized for military service in behalf of United States or that they were in sentiment and feeling throughout the war loyal to the Government of the United States."
At great personal danger, Knight became a strong supporter of the Republican Party. In 1872, he was appointed as a deputy U.S. Marshal for the Southern District to help maintain the fragile democracy.
In the statewide elections of 1875, however, violence and election fraud kept most blacks and Republicans from voting. Democratic candidates committed to "white rule" were swept into office. White terrorists shot out the windows of the Governor's Mansion to intimidate Republican Gov. Adelbert Ames, Ames pleaded for federal troops to help keep order, but President Ulysses S. Grant refused. Ames tried organizing a state militia to protect the voting process. But the tide had already turned against Republican rule in Mississippi, and Ames was forced to resign. He lamented that blacks "are to be returned to a condition of serfdom - an era of second slavery." Blacks could not vote freely in Mississippi again for nearly 100 years.
By the mid-1870s, Knight had separated from his wife, Serena, and married Rachel, a woman formerly enslaved by his grandfather. During the same period, Knight's son, Mat, married Rachel's daughter, Fannie, and Knight's daughter, Molly, married Rachel's son, Jeff. Newton and Rachel Knight had several children before her death in 1889. Newton Knight died on February 16, 1922 at the age of 84. Under the Mississippi Constitution of 1890, it was a crime for whites and blacks to be buried in the same cemetery. Yet even in death, Knight was defiant. He left careful instructions for his funeral and was buried on a high ridge overlooking his old farmstead in a simple pine box beside Rachel, who had died in 1889. The inscription on his tombstone reads, "He Lived for Others."
Much has been written about Newton Knight-some pro, others con, a few balanced. In 1935, Knight's son, Thomas Jefferson "Tom" Knight, published a book about his father, "The Life and Activities of Captain Newton Knight." Tom Knight portrayed his father as a Civil War-era Robin Hood who refused to fight for a cause with which he did not agree. The book noticeably omits Newton Knight's post-war marriage to Rachel.
The 1942 James H. Street novel, "Tap Roots," is loosely based on the Knight Company's actions. Though the book is a work of fiction, the novel's protagonist, Hoab Dabney, was inspired by Newton Knight. The book was the basis of the 1948 film, "Tap Roots," which was directed by George Marshall, and starred Van Heflin and Susan Hayward.
In 1951, Knight's grandniece, Ethel Knight, published "The Echo of the Black Horn," a scathing denunciation of Knight and the Knight Company. Dedicating the book to the Confederate veterans of Jones County, Ethel Knight portrayed Newton as a backward, ignorant, murderous traitor. She argued that most members of the Knight Company were not Unionists, but had been manipulated by Knight into joining his cause.
In 2003, historian Victoria Bynum's book "The Free State of Jones" was published by the University of North Carolina Press. This book provides a broader view of the Knight Company, taking into account the economic, religious and genealogical factors that helped shape the views of Civil War-era residents of the Jones County area. Bynum provides numerous examples of Knight stating his pro-Union sentiments after the war, and notes the influence of the staunchly pro-Union Collins family, many of whom were members of the Knight Company. She also brings to light the many women and slaves who provided assistance to Knight and his men.
In 2009, Sally Jenkins and John Stauffer published "The State of Jones," which elaborates on Knight's pro-Union sympathies and presents evidence that his views on race played a significant role in his actions during and after the war.
The USS Laffey (DD-724) was laid down 28 June 1943 by Bath Iron Works Corp., Bath, Maine. She was launched 21 November; sponsored by Miss Beatrice F. Laffey, daughter of Medal of Honor recipient S1c Bartlett Laffey. Commissioned 8 February 1944, Cdr. F. Julian. Becton as her first "Captain".
After shakedown, the Laffey traveled the world in the war effort. She was off the beaches of Normandy on D-Day. Off Cherbourg, France where an unexploded shell bounced off her hull above the waterline and did little damage. Rescuing a badly wounded Japanese pilot off the Philippines. Firing support in Leyete Gulf and Ormoc Bay. Transported intelligence to McArthur in the Philippines. Supported landings at Mindoro and Luzon, Iwo Jima, and Kerama Retto.
That is where this story begins.
Commander Frederick Julian Becton, Captain of the destroyer USS Laffey (DD 724), took the radio message his communications officer handed him on April 12, 1945, but the concerned look on the young officer's face made Becton suspect that it was not good news. Laffey, an Allen M. Sumner-class destroyer, had been screening the heavy fleet units that were bombarding Okinawa in close support of the ground forces ashore. 
She was the second U.S. destroyer to bear the name Laffey; the first ship had been lost off Guadalcanal in 1942.
The message told Commander Becton to detach his ship from the screening force and proceed at once to the huge naval anchorage at Kerama Retto, where he was to go alongside the destroyer Cassin Young and take aboard her fighter-director team. That could mean only one thing: Laffey had drawn duty on the radar picket line - the most dangerous, deadly and unwanted assignment in the Okinawa campaign as far as Navy personnel were concerned.
Shortly after dawn on April 13, Becton brought his ship into the crowded harbor at Kerama Retto. Many of the ships anchored there had been battered by kamikazes while on radar picket duty. Although Laffey's crew had encountered suicide bombers at Leyte, Mindoro, Luzon and Iwo Jima, they had never before seen so many damaged ships in one place. The crewmen began to imagine what might happen to them when they went out to their assigned picket station. Morale was low, and it only got worse when they received news that President Franklin D. Roosevelt had died the day before.
As soon as Laffey tied up alongside Cassin Young, the fighter-director team of two officers and three enlisted men reported aboard, carrying with them special electronic gear. 
Three hundred rounds of 5-inch ammunition were also loaded aboard so that Laffey would sail with full magazines of all calibers. As Laffey prepared to depart, the skipper of Cassin Young offered some advice to Becton: 'Keep moving and keep shooting. Steam as fast as you can and shoot as fast as you can.'
A gun captain from the destroyer Purdy, which was anchored nearby, also offered his thoughts about picket duty. Purdy had been struck by a kamikaze on April 12, killing 13 and wounding 270. He told the Laffey crewmen: 'You guys have a fighting chance, but they'll keep on coming till they get you. You'll knock a lot of them down, and you'll think you're doing fine. But in the end there'll be this one bastard with your name on his ticket.' After all the horrific stories the crew had heard while in the anchorage, they were almost relieved when Laffey steamed north toward her assigned area, radar picket station No. 1.
On April 14, Laffey, accompanied by LCS 51 (landing craft, support) and LCS 116, arrived on station 51 miles north of Point Bolo on south-central Okinawa, 
which was used as a reference point in aligning the 16 picket sectors. Laffey relieved the destroyer-minelayer J. William Ditter (DM 31), whose skipper informed Becton by radio that during his time on station no kamikazes had entered the area, nor had any been detected by radar.
Becton hoped his ship would be as lucky, but at the same time, he felt he should speak to his crew about the battle that was bound to come. He pressed the microphone button, and throughout the ship boomed the familiar words, 'This is the captain speaking.' Becton warned his crew not to expect the same kind of luck Ditter had had. He told them that he expected to see plenty of Japanese but that he had confidence in the crew's ability. They had tangled with the enemy before and won. They were now going to make the Japanese wish they had never heard of USS Laffey. In conclusion, Becton said: 'We're going to outmaneuver and outshoot them. They are going to go down, but we aren't.'
A short while later three bogeys appeared on the radar scope, but Laffey had no Combat Air Patrol (CAP) planes with her. Fifty miles to the east, however, there was a group of CAP planes with the destroyer Bryant (DD 665) on picket station No. 3. Becton requested their assistance, and the fighter-director team sent them toward the Japanese. All enemy planes were shot down. Not long after that, the radar operator reported eight more enemy aircraft approaching, and again Becton requested Bryant's CAP planes. The fighter-director team vectored them in, and they destroyed all the aircraft. By the end of Laffey's first day on picket duty, 11 planes had been shot down, but Laffey's gunners had not yet fired a shot.
No enemy action occurred the next day, Sunday, April 15. The crew's routine was broken only when Laffey was ordered to steam a few miles east to investigate a patrol plane's report that a downed Japanese aircraft was in the water. The plane was found with its dead pilot still strapped in the cockpit. Laffey's crew recovered an aircraft code book and other miscellaneous items that they would turn over to the intelligence section ashore, then sank the plane.
Monday morning began quietly on radar picket station No. 1. The whole crew was able to eat breakfast without any interruptions from the enemy. Then, at 8:25 a.m., the radar operator reported a solid cluster of pips too numerous to count approaching at 17,000 yards. It was a group of 165 kamikazes and 150 other enemy aircraft coming in fast from the north. The fighter-director team's two officers requested more help from CAP. They were informed that fighters would be sent to intercept the huge onrushing formation, but it would take time for the CAP planes to arrive in the area. Meanwhile, Laffey and her two support craft would have to deal with the enemy on their own.
At 8:30, four Aichi D3A 'Val' dive bombers broke off from the oncoming group and headed for Laffey, which was steaming along at flank speed. Two came in from the bow and two from the stern in a coordinated attack. Becton ordered hard left rudder, bringing the destroyer broadside to the planes, and the two forward 5-inch guns downed two of the Vals at about 3,000 yards. The stern 5-inch gun shot down the third kamikaze, and the 20mm and 40mm mounts downed the fourth with an assist from the gunners on LCS 51.
There was no time to rejoice over that success, however, because two more attackers, Yokosuka D4Y 'Judy' dive bombers, were coming in fast - one from the starboard beam and one from the port beam. When the Judy on the starboard side got within range of the 20mm and 40mm guns, it was torn apart by converging fire and crashed into the sea. The gunners' attention then shifted to port to assist with the second Judy, as it came in bobbing and weaving. The Japanese pilot strafed the ship, peppering the superstructure and wounding several men. The 20mm and 40mm guns finally downed the plane about 50 yards out, but just before hitting the water, the pilot released a bomb that sent shrapnel flying everywhere, wounding several more men and knocking others off their feet. The explosion also knocked out the SG radar, which was needed to detect low-flying aircraft.
The next attacker, another Val, came streaking in on the port beam. All three 5-inch guns opened fire, and as the plane came closer, the 20mm and 40mm mounts joined in. It looked as if the pilot was aiming to slam into the aft 5-inch gun, but he came in just a bit high and only grazed the top of it before smashing into the sea off the starboard side, killing one man in the gun crew. The eighth attacker, a Judy, came skimming in low over the water on the starboard beam.
The 20mm and 40mm guns were hitting the plane, and finally, after a hit in the gas tank, the Judy burst into a fireball and crashed into the sea. Laffey's crewmen felt as if they had been battling the enemy for hours, but it was only 8:42, just 12 minutes since the attacks had started.
There was a respite of about three minutes before the next attacker, another Val, came boring in off the port bow. The portside guns raked the plane, which shuddered and twisted but kept coming, even as gasoline poured from one wing tank. The pilot cleared the portside 20mm and 40mm mounts and crashed into the 20mm mounts amidships, killing three gunners before sliding into the sea. Flaming gasoline was everywhere, and black smoke engulfed the area. Two 40mm mounts were wrecked and out of operation, as were two 20mm mounts.
The ammunition racks around the gun tubs were filled with clips of shells, which were in danger of exploding due to the heat. Damage-control crewmen began to heave the clips over the side of the ship. Some of them were so hot that the men had to protect their hands with rags. As some of the ammunition exploded and blew holes in the deck, flaming gasoline poured into a magazine below. Fortunately, the ammo was packed in metal cans that resisted the heat until a damage-control party arrived and hosed down the containers, thereby avoiding disaster.
Communications were knocked out in the forward engine room, but that did not present a problem for the moment. The engineers decided to adjust the ship's speed according to the sound of the gunfire they heard. If it was loud and fast, they would increase the speed. A more immediate problem was the smoke and fumes being sucked into the engine rooms by the ventilators. Machinist's Mate John Michel, in the aft engine room, shut down the supply fans. The temperature soon reached 130 degrees and kept climbing as Michel worked his way through the dense smoke, located the controls for the exhaust fans and turned them on. The smoke began to clear and the temperature began to fall. Knowing that the smoke would undoubtedly attract more kamikazes, Becton reduced the ship's speed to avoid fanning the flames.
Just as the crew was beginning to get the situation under control, two more kamikazes, both Vals, struck. One came in from astern low and fast, just a few feet above the water. The gunners of the three after 20mm mounts hit him with accurate fire, and parts of the plane broke off, but the pilot kept boring in. He plowed through the three mounts, killing the gun crews, and rammed into a 5-inch gun. The bomb he was carrying exploded, causing the plane to disintegrate and throwing gun captain Larry Delewski clear of danger. Fortunately, he was unhurt. Another man was blown overboard, but he was picked up by LCS 51, along with another crewman who had gone overboard earlier.
Flaming gasoline covered Laffey's fantail and aft gun mount, sending more black smoke billowing into the air. The fires threatened a magazine below the mount, so firefighters flooded it, preventing an explosion that could have torn the ship apart. The situation was about to get worse, however, because the 11th kamikaze came crashing aboard at almost the same spot. That plane's bomb wiped out the mount's gun crew and wounded several others. The damage-control parties had no time to take a breather.
About two minutes later, another Val came gliding in from astern, probably because the guns were out of commission there. The pilot dropped his bomb and sped away. The bomb detonated on the stern just above Laffey's propeller, severing the electrical cables and hydraulic lines that controlled the ship's rudder mechanism. The rudder jammed at 26 degrees left, and the ship began to steam in a circle, still able to maintain speed but without control. Although crewmen began to work on it at once, their efforts were fruitless. The rudder was jammed tight and could not be moved.
The smoke and flames must have indicated to the attackers that Laffey was nearly done for, but they did not ease off. Two more planes came roaring in from the port quarter, and every gun that could be brought to bear on the attackers poured out a steady stream of flak, but to no avail. The first plane slammed into the aft deckhouse, exploding in a ball of fire. Seconds later, the other plane crashed into the ship in almost the same spot. Gasoline from both planes produced roaring fires that covered the whole aft part of the ship.
Machinist's Mates George Logan and Stephen Waite, who had been battling fires in the aft living spaces, became trapped when the escape hatches buckled. They went to the emergency diesel generator room and secured the watertight door behind them. There was no light or ventilation and no way out, but there was a telephone that still worked, and they got through to the aft engine room. John Michel went to work again, this time with some help from Machinist's Mate Buford Thompson. They chiseled a hole through the bulkhead and passed an air hose in to the trapped men. Meanwhile, Machinist's Mates Art Hogan and Elton Peeler used cutting torches to make a hole in the deck and then pulled Logan and Waite to safety.
At the same time, a Nakajima Ki-43 'Oscar' was streaking in from the port bow with a CAP Vought F4U Corsair on its tail. The port side 20mm and 40mm mounts were sending up a steady barrage while trying not to hit the Corsair. This Japanese pilot did not drop down and ram the bridge but zoomed up and over it, shearing off the port yardarm on Laffey's mast, which came crashing down to the deck, taking the American flag with it. As the Corsair zoomed by, it hit the air-search radar antenna and knocked it to the deck below. After he cleared Laffey, the Japanese pilot lost altitude quickly and crashed into the sea, while the Corsair pilot managed to pull up and bail out before his plane hit the water farther away. Signalman Tom McCarthy saw Laffey's colors fall to the deck and wasted no time in remedying the situation. He grabbed a new flag from the flag locker, shinnied up the mast and attached the new colors with a piece of line.
As he watched the Corsair chase the last attacker, Becton realized that his CAP planes, which had been spread thinly and even lured out of position at times, were now beginning to furnish some close support. That did not mean that Laffey was out of trouble, however. As if to prove the point, another Judy came in fast on the port beam, with a Corsair hot on its tail. The portside 20mm and 40mm mounts and the Corsair were hitting the Judy, which splashed into the water about 50 yards away from Laffey. Shrapnel from the Judy's bomb severed all communications to Laffey's two remaining 5-inch guns, as well as wounded the crews who were still working the hot 20mm and 40mm guns. Three Gunner's Mates were also wounded.
Ensign Jim Townsley quickly jury-rigged a substitute system for communicating with the gun mounts. With a microphone strapped around his neck and plugged into the ship's loudspeaker system, he climbed atop the pilothouse, from where he could see the onrushing attackers, and directed the gunfire from there. The 17th attacker was eliminated as he bore in from the starboard side. The plane took a direct hit from a manually trained 5-inch gun, with an assist from the 20mm and 40mm mounts.
Two more kamikazes, both Oscars, came streaking in, one from the starboard beam and one from the starboard bow. The attacker on the starboard beam was hit with a 5-inch round head-on in the propeller and engine and blew apart. Mount captain Warren Walker shouted: 'We got the SOB! What a beautiful sight!' Meanwhile, another gun had the other attacker in its sights as the plane came diving in. Even though the electrical controls were out and the gun was being operated manually, it took only two rounds to finish off the attacker. As the plane exploded, the gun's trainer, Andy Stash, yelled excitedly: 'We got him! We got him! Did you see that bastard explode?'
In the brief lull that followed, assistant communications officer Lieutenant Frank Manson arrived on the bridge to report to the skipper. When Mason finished talking, he hesitated a bit and then added:
'Captain, we're in pretty bad shape aft. Do you think we'll have to abandon ship?' Becton quickly replied: 'Hell no, Frank. We still have guns that can shoot. I'll never abandon ship as long as a gun will fire.' Relieved, the Lieutenant went back to his duties.
The battle was not over yet. The 20th attacker, another Val, came gliding in from dead astern. Both the sun and the thick smoke helped to conceal the plane from the gunners. The pilot dropped his bomb, blasting an 8-by-10-foot hole in the already battered fantail. As he passed low over the length of the ship, he clipped off the starboard yardarm. He didn't get far; a Corsair seemed to come out of nowhere to shoot him down several hundred yards off the starboard bow. Shrapnel from the bomb hit the emergency sickbay that the ship's medical officer, Lieutenant Matt Darnell, had set up topside. Fragments severed the tips of two of the doctor's fingers. Bandaging the bloody stumps, he calmly asked the astonished pharmacist's mate who was assisting him, 'Who's next?'
The 21st attacker, another Val, strafed the ship as it came in off the starboard bow, aiming straight for the bridge. Seaman Feline Salcido, the bridge lookout, did not think that the captain saw the plane coming. He put his hand on the back of Becton's neck and shouted, 'Down, captain, down!' As they both crouched low, a violent explosion rocked the bridge. The plane had dropped a bomb, killing one 20mm gun crew and wounding members of another nearby crew. That Val did not get away either; a Corsair pounced on him and finished him off.
The last plane was a Judy, which strafed Laffey as it came in from the port side. Although the port 20mm and 40mm guns put out a steady stream of fire, the attacker kept getting closer. Just when it seemed that the gunners were goners, a Corsair came roaring in with all guns blazing and blew up the Judy in midair.
By the end of the 22nd attack, the situation aboard Laffey was critical. The fires still raged, the stern was down due to flooded aft compartments, many guns no longer functioned and the rudder was still jammed at 26 degrees. Amid all the confusion and noise, Becton heard what sounded like many planes diving at once. Laffey could not absorb any more punishment. Sonarman Charlie Bell, Becton's telephone talker, provided him with the encouraging news he so desperately needed. 'Captain, look what's up there,' he said, pointing skyward. The weary skipper looked up to see 24 CAP Marine Corsairs and Navy Grumman F6F Hellcats just arriving to lend a hand to the few planes already on station. The Japanese had had enough and were hightailing it out of the area with the CAP planes in hot pursuit.
Laffey's crewmen could not contain their jubilation. Shouts of 'Get the bastards! Rip 'em up! Nail 'em!' rose above the din of the receding battle. It was finally over, and the grim toll was staggering: 80 minutes of continuous air attack, 22 separate attacks, six kamikazes crashed into the ship and four bomb hits. But Laffey's gunners had shot down nine attackers. The ship's casualties totaled 32 dead and 71 wounded. Amazingly, eight guns were still able to fire. LCS 51 came alongside to help fight the fires, but the little vessel had also been hit and could only offer limited help.
The destroyer-minesweeper Macomb took Laffey in tow and headed for the Kerama Retto anchorage shortly afternoon. The tugs Pakana (ATF 108) and Tawakoni (ATF 114) were dispatched to bring in Laffey. Using pumps, they got the flooding under control aboard the badly damaged ship. The jammed rudder caused towing problems, but it was still possible to maintain a forward speed of 4 knots.
At 6:14 the following morning, April 17, Laffey entered the harbor at Kerama Retto. Men gazed in amazement at the battered newcomer. It just did not seem possible that a ship could have taken so much punishment and survived; one kamikaze hit was often enough to sink a ship. Laffey's escorts on radar picket station No. 1 had also suffered during the agonizing ordeal. LCS 51 had a 7-foot hole in her port side amidships, and three of her sailors had been wounded. LCS 116 had suffered topside damage, along with 17 dead and 12 wounded.
Shortly after sunrise, when Laffey was safely at anchor, the crew went aboard the tug Tawakoni for breakfast, their first real meal in almost 24 hours. Later that morning, a chaplain came aboard to conduct services for those killed or missing in action.
By April 22, six days after her ordeal on the picket line, Laffey had undergone enough repairs to depart for Saipan. At Saipan more repair work was performed, especially on the battered fantail. Laffey's next stop was Pearl Harbor, where the crew was warmly welcomed and entertained while the ship underwent further patching to ensure its safe passage back to the West Coast.
On Friday, May 25, 1945, Laffey moored at Pier 48 in Seattle, WA. 39 days after her fight for survival on radar picket station No. 1. Before additional repairs were begun, the battered ship was thrown open for viewing by the public.
Some naval officials believed that defense workers had been easing off in their production efforts since V-E Day on May 8, and they had been searching for a way to remind everyone that the war was far from over. After seeing Laffey's condition, everyone got the message loud and clear.
For her outstanding performance on the picket line, Laffey was awarded the Presidential Unit Citation. Eighteen members of her crew received Bronze Stars, six received Silver Stars, two received Navy Crosses and one received the Navy Commendation Medal.
This article was written by Dale P. Harper and originally appeared in the March 1998 issue of World War II magazine.
The causes of the Vietnam War trace their roots back to the end of World War II. A French colony, Indochina (Vietnam, Laos, & Cambodia) had been occupied by the Japanese during the war. In 1941, a Vietnamese nationalist movement, the Viet Minh, was formed by Ho Chi Minh to resist the occupiers. A communist, Ho Chi Minh, waged a guerilla war against the Japanese with the support of the United States.
On September 2, 1945, hours after the Japanese signed their unconditional surrender in World War II, Ho Chi Minh proclaimed the independent Democratic Republic of Vietnam, hoping to prevent the French from reclaiming their former colonial possession. In 1946, 
he hesitantly accepted a French proposal that allowed Vietnam to exist as an autonomous state within the French Union, but fighting broke out when the French tried to reestablish colonial rule by shelling the city of Haiphong in December 1946 and forcibly reentered the capital, Hanoi. These actions began a conflict between the French and the Viet Minh, known as the First Indochina War (1946-1954) and referred to as the Anti-French War by the Vietnamese.
Beginning in 1949, the Viet Minh fought an increasingly effective guerrilla war against France with military and economic assistance from newly Communist China. Deeply concerned with the spread of Communism, the United States began supplying the French military in Vietnam with advisors and funding its efforts against the "red" Viet Minh.'
With the First Indochina War going poorly for the French, Premier Rene Mayer dispatched Gen. Henri Navarre to take command in May 1953.
Arriving in Hanoi, Navarre found that no long-term plan existed for defeating the Viet Minh and that French forces simply reacted to the enemy's moves. Believing that he was also tasked with defending neighboring Laos, Navarre sought an effective method for interdicting Viet Minh supply lines through the region.
Working with Col. Louis Berteil, the "hedgehog" concept was developed which called for French troops to establish fortified camps near Viet Minh supply routes.
Supplied by air, the hedgehogs would allow French troops to block the Viet Minh's supplies, compelling them to fall back. The concept was largely based on the French success at the Battle of Na San in late 1952. Holding the high ground around a fortified camp at Na San, French forces had repeatedly beaten back assaults by General Vo Nguyen Giap's Viet Minh troops. Navarre believed that the approach used at Na San could be enlarged to force the Viet Minh to commit to a large, pitched battle where superior French firepower could destroy Giap's army.
In June 1953, Maj. Gen. Rene Cogny first proposed the idea of creating a "mooring point" at Dien Bien Phu in northwest Vietnam. While Cogny had envisioned a lightly defended airbase, Navarre seized on the location for trying the hedgehog approach. Though his subordinates protested, pointing out that unlike Na San they would not hold the high ground around the camp, Navarre persisted and planning moved forward.
On November 20, 1953, Operation Castor commenced and 9,000 French troops were dropped into the Dien Bien Phu area over the next three days.
With Col. Christian de Castries in command, they quickly overcame local Viet Minh opposition and began building a series of eight fortified strong points transforming their anchoring point into a fortress by setting up seven satellite positions. Each was allegedly named after a former mistress of de Castries, although the allegation is probably unfounded, as the eight names begin with letters from the first nine of the alphabet (all but F). The fortified headquarters was centrally located, with positions "Huguette" to the west, "Claudine" to the south, and "Dominique" to the northeast. Other positions were "Anne-Marie" to the northwest, "Beatrice" to the northeast, "Gabrielle" to the north and "Isabelle" 3.7 miles to the south, covering the reserve airstrip. Over the coming weeks, de Castries' garrison increased to 10,800 men supported by artillery and ten M24 Chaffee light tanks.
The battle that settled the fate of French Indochina was initiated in November 1953, when Viet Minh forces at Chinese insistence moved to attack Lai Chau, the capital of the T'ai Federation (in Upper Tonkin), which was loyal to the French. As Peking had hoped, the French Commander in Chief in Indochina, Gen. Henri Navarre, came out to defend his allies because he believed the T'ai "maquis" formed a significant threat in the Viet Minh "rear" (the T'ai supplied the French with opium that was sold to finance French special operations) and wanted to prevent a Viet Minh sweep into Laos. Because he considered Lai Chau impossible to defend, on November 20, Navarre launched Operation Castor with a paratroop drop on the broad valley of Dien Bien Phu, which was rapidly transformed into a defensive perimeter of eight strong points organized around an airstrip. When, in December 1953, the 
T'ais attempted to march out of Lai Chau for Dien Bien Phu, they were badly mauled by Viet Minh forces, forcing the garrison to flee towards Dien Bien Phu. En route, the Viet Minh effectively destroyed the 2,100-man column and only 185 reached the new base on December 22, 1953.
Viet Minh commander Vo Nguyen Giap, with considerable Chinese aide, massed approximately 50,000 troops and placed heavy artillery in caves in the mountains overlooking the French camp. On March 13, 1954, Giap launched a massive assault on strong point Beatrice, which fell in a matter of hours. Strong points Gabrielle and Anne-Marie were overrun during the next two days, which denied the French use of the airfield, the key to the French defense. Reduced to airdrops for supplies and reinforcement, unable to evacuate their wounded, under constant artillery bombardment, and at the extreme limit of air range, the French camp's morale began to fray. As the monsoons transformed the camp from a dust bowl into a morass of mud, an increasing number of soldiers - almost four thousand by the end of the siege in May - deserted to caves along the Nam Yum River, which traversed the camp; they emerged only to seize supplies dropped for the defenders.
Despite these early successes, Giap's offensives sputtered out before the tenacious resistance of French paratroops and legionnaires. On April 6, horrific losses and low morale among the attackers caused Giap to suspend his offensives. Some of his commanders, 
fearing U.S. air intervention, began to speak of withdrawal. Again, the Chinese, in search of a spectacular victory to carry to the Geneva talks scheduled for the summer, intervened to stiffen Viet Minh resolve: reinforcements were brought in, as were Katyusha multitube rocket launchers, while Chinese military engineers retrained the Viet Minh in siege tactics. When Giap resumed his attacks, human wave assaults were abandoned in favor of siege techniques that pushed forward webs of trenches to isolate French strong points. The French perimeter was gradually reduced until, on May 7, resistance ceased. The "Rats of Nam Yum" also became POWs when the garrison surrendered.
The shock and agony of the dramatic loss of a garrison of around fourteen thousand men allowed French Prime Minister Pierre Mendes to muster enough parliamentary support to sign the Geneva Accords of July 1954, which essentially ended the French presence in Indochina and the end of the First Indochina War (1946-1954), the precursor to the Vietnam War.
A disaster for the French, losses at Dien Bien Phu numbered 2,293 killed, 5,195 wounded, and 10,998 captured. Viet Minh casualties are estimated at around 23,000. The defeat at Dien Bien Phu marked the end of the First Indochina War and spurred peace negotiations which were ongoing in Geneva. The resulting 1954 Geneva Accords partitioned the country at the 17th Parallel and created a communist state in the north and a democratic state in the south. The resulting conflict between these two regimes ultimately led to the first phase of the Second Indochina War, better known as the Vietnam War, or the American War in Vietnam. It began in 1959 with North Vietnam's first guerilla attacks against the South and ends with the fall of Saigon in 1973. American ground forces were directly involved in the war between 1965 and 1973.
James Helms Kasler was born on May 2, 1926, in South Bend, Indiana and following 30-years of distinguished military service, retired as a U.S. Air Force 
Colonel. Three times he went off to war and three times returned home. During his career, he is the only person to be awarded three Air Force Crosses. He also was awarded two Silver Stars, Legion of Merit, nine Distinguished Flying Crosses, two Purple Hearts, eleven Air Medals and Bronze Star with V for valor. Setting aside recipients of the Medal of Honor, he is the 10th most decorated serviceman in U.S. history. For some, he is known as Indiana's Sgt. Alvin York, the famous hero of World War I.
Shortly after graduating from Shortridge High School, he enlisted in the U.S. Army Air Force in May 1944. He spent his two-year enlistment flying combat missions over Japan as a B-29 Superfortress tail gunner.
Following the war, Kasler attended Butler University in Indianapolis for three years before entering the U.S. Air Force pilot training program in January 1950 and received his wings on March 24, 1951, at Williams AFB, Arizona. Following a brief assignment to Presque Isle, Maine, in November 1951 he was sent to Korea and assigned to the 335th Fighter-Interceptor Squadron, 4th Fighter-Interceptor Group.
Flying the F-86 Sabrejet, Kasler was credited with his first aerial victory on April 1, 1952, downing one MiG-15 near Wongsong-dong and damaging a second east of Sinuiju. He shot down another MiG near Okkang-dong on April 21. The action picked up in May, and he was credited with four more MiG-15s - one of the 4th, two on the 15th. It was on April 25 when he got his 6th in MiG Alley.
He and his wingman, 1st Lt. Albert Smiley, caught several MiGs just as they were returning to their Communist airbase. Kasler got behind the lead MiG, chasing it for about 50 miles on the deck, refusing flight commander Phil "Casey" Colman's request to call it a day. On the MiGs tail, Kasler opened up, and his gunfire tore it apart. Its canopy gone, its pilot engulfed in fire, the MiG arched down in a flaming trail before it splattered in the mudflats just below. 
Kasler pulled back on the stick mightily, to avoid sharing his victim's fate. He cleared and called triumphantly to Colman, "Casey, I'm an ace."
MiGs were routinely piloted by Chinese and Soviet pilots and a U.S. intelligence officer later informed Kasler that the three MiGs he and Smiley killed were the only ones recorded that day.
The officer had another bit of information: One of those three planes had been piloted by the son of Mao Zedong, father of the Chinese revolution and principal founder of the People's Republic of China.
Kasler returned to the United States in July 1952 and during the next 11 years served in Canada, Turner AFB, Georgia, Seymour Johnson AFB, North Carolina, and Breitburg Air Base, Germany, flying a variety of jet fighters. In 1963 he received his Bachelor of Science degree from the University of Nebraska.
In February 1966 he went to Tahkli Air Base, Thailand as the operations officer for the 354th Tactical Fighter Squadron of the 355th Wing. While the mission was flying daily over both South and North Vietnam, 
Hanoi was at that time off-limits to U.S. warplanes. Fearing a wider conflict, Robert McNamara, secretary of defense during the Kennedy and Johnson presidential administrations, drew a 50-mile circle around it and a 30-mile ring around the principal harbor.
That restriction was eliminated in June 1966 as American defense chiefs were slowly escalating the war, and had recently decided to broaden the bombing of North Vietnam to include industrial targets like the Hanoi POL (petroleum, oil, & lubricant) facility.
On June 21, Kasler learned of the impending strike and began to select pilots, draw up the precise navigation plans, and studying Hanoi's formidable aerial defenses. North Vietnam had the strongest anti-aircraft defenses in history: over 7,000 AA guns of 37mm or larger, and batteries of radar-controlled SAM's ringing Hanoi.
By midnight on the 28th, their plans were complete, down to detailed route charts, folded accordion-style. Minutes before the 0830 mission briefing, Kasler was invited to lead the mission, much to his surprise, and to the discomfort of
Col. Holt, who otherwise would have led the large raid. The briefing focused on the weather (clear) and winds (light and variable) - both perfect for fighter operations. Both wings, the 355th, and the 388th would approach the target from the south, to minimize the chances of a bomb ending up in the city of Hanoi. Each Republic F-105 Thunderchief carried eight 750-pound bombs.
Kasler rolled down the runway and lifted off at 235 knots. Airborne, he headed north for the rendezvous with the aerial tankers. They refueled uneventfully and were three minutes ahead of schedule. Kasler led the Thuds in a circle to kill the 180 seconds. Twenty minutes later, they were over the Red River and Kasler began to lose altitude, until they were 300 feet off the ground, at the base of "Thud Ridge," the landmark mountain range that ran east-west across North Vietnam's mid-section.
As they dropped tanks, they could see smoke rising up from the POL tanks, already hit by Navy jets. Flak blossomed all around them, even at 300 feet. The NVA gunners must have had their 85mm and 100mm pieces at zero elevation. Amidst the smoke from the target and puffs of anti-aircraft fire, Kasler called for afterburners and went into his bomb run. 
Big fat oil tanks filled his view; he dropped his bombs and rolled away to the right. Turning back, he saw the fuel tanks erupting into huge billowing fireballs, thousands of feet high.
His flight crossed the Red River and the flak gunners switched to fighter-bombers behind him. Flying west, looking for targets of opportunity, he found a convoy of twenty-five trucks. The Thuds blasted them with 20mm cannon fire, destroying at least half of them. He glanced back at Hanoi, now 35 miles behind. A pillar of black smoke towered up, over six miles high.
The Hanoi POL strike was very successful. Over 90 percent of the facility was destroyed and the Vietnamese abandoned it altogether.
On August 8, 1966, on his 91st combat mission, he was leading the formation when his wingman, Fred Flom was shot down. Kasler dropped down and flew low-level cover while awaiting the arrival of a combat rescue patrol. Running low on fuel with just enough to return to base, he instead hooked up with a KC-135 midair refueler and return to look for Flom.
Kasler's F-105 was also shot down over North Vietnam that same day and captured by the North Vietnamese. He was a POW until 4 March 1973. So began six years and seven months of imprisonment by an enemy who knew exactly who he was and why to hate him.
Oddly, it was Kasler's notoriety that saved his life, but it also exposed him to unspeakable torture. His captors gloated. They singled him out. They almost immediately put Kasler on television, so they couldn't kill him without losing face, but they were particularly eager to force a confession or any capitulation, so great would have been its propaganda value.
It was testimony to the ferocity of the air war that another of Kasler's closest friends, Lewis Shattuck, was shot down 
and rescued on Aug 1st and was shot down again, and this time captured, on Aug 11th. And that his friend John Brodak went down Aug 14th.
That's three buddies down within 35 days of one another and serving as POWs from 1966 until 1973.
At one point, during the fall of 1967, Kasler's captors took his clothes and his mosquito net. For three days, they denied him food and water and they beat his back and buttocks with a truck fan belt, every hour on the hour, 6 a.m. until 10 or 11 p.m.
He was tortured repeatedly by his Communist captors, in an effort to get him to cooperate with their propaganda claims. In the early years, the prisoners were kept in isolation and rarely let out of their cells. The Vietnamese used isolation, sleep deprivation, starvation, as well as physical pain to try to break Kasler down. His worst session came in June 1968:
"The Vietnamese were attempting to force me to meet a delegation and appear before TV cameras on the occasion of the supposed 30000th American airplane ever North Vietnam. I couldn't say the things they were trying to force me to say. I was tortured for six weeks. I went through the ropes and irons ten times. I was denied sleep for five days and during three of these was beaten every hour on the hour with a fan belt. During the entire period, I was on a starvation diet. I was very sick during this period. I had contacted osteomyelitis in early 1967 and had a massive bone infection in my right leg."
"They would wrap my leg before each torture session so I wouldn't get pus or blood all over the floor of the interrogation room. During this time they beat my face to a pulp. I couldn't get my teeth apart for five days. My eardrum was ruptured, one of my ribs broken and the pin in my right leg was broken loose and driven up into my hip."
"I lay in agony for six months until I was given an operation in January of 1969."
[Excerpted from pownetwork.org]
Kasler shared the infamous Room 7 of the "Hanoi Hilton" with other great heroes like Robinson Risner, James Stockdale, Bud Day, John McCain, Larry Guarino, and Jeremiah Denton. He never cooperated with the North Vietnamese and survived to return home in March 1973, after six and one-half years in captivity.
For seven long years, his wife Martha, daughter Suzanne and twins Jim and Nanette awaited Kasler's return from Vietnam. 
It came, joyfully and tearfully, on March 8, 1973, at Wright-Patterson Air Force Base in Dayton, Ohio.
The twins were 12 when their father left for Vietnam. They were 19 when the family was reunited. Kasler momentarily mistook his son Jim for Suzanne's husband, John Morris.
The confusion was understandable but short-lived. It is testimony to Kasler's enormous strength, and that of Martha and the kids, that normalcy was incredibly, and almost immediately, restored.
In July 1974 Kasler was assigned as vice commander of the 366th Tactical Fighter Wing at Mountain Home AFB, Idaho and remained in that capacity until his retirement as a 
Colonel on 1 May 1975, in spite of him being in line for an Air Wing command and a brigadier general's star.
He spent the last 39 years of his life as a resident of Momence, an Illinois-Indiana border town where he owned South Shore Golf Course and had interests in banking and real estate, served on a number of boards and received a variety of civic and service awards.
He died on April 24, 2014, at the age of 87, in West Palm Beach, Florida. One obituary read, he joined what Abraham Lincoln at Gettysburg called 'our honored dead.'
Kasler's former cell-mates at Hanoi Hilton, Lewis Shattuck, and John Brodak, were in Indianapolis for the May 16, 2014, memorial service at Crown Hill Cemetery that saluted Kasler in death. It was a grim, gray day, but the rain eased and the sky brightened a bit for the F-15 Eagle flyover when there was a lump in every throat and a tear in almost every eye. Kasler was more than a hero. He was a husband to Martha for 65 years, a father and grandfather.
At his funeral, John Brodak, his voice flush with feeling, said, 'The colonel was my mentor and my hero, the most courageous man I've ever known. He was a fierce warrior and a patriot and I'm proud he called me his friend.'
Brodak is a retired Air Force colonel who flew with Kasler. And for 15 months of the six and a half years, both were North Vietnamese prisoners of war, he was Kasler's cellmate at 'The Zoo' and the infamous 'Hanoi Hilton.'
Kasler's happiest occupation was Grandpa. His six grandchildren served as greeters at his Crown Hill memorial celebration. Each spoke.
One, Ashley Hurley, recalled grandpa's infectious sense of humor and how, when she was little, he would get down on the floor with her and laugh and laugh.
James Kasler was nicknamed "Stoneface" by his Air Force peers, testimony to his toughness, his seriousness of purpose and his mission commitment. But men like Brodak and Shattuck, his wife Martha, kids and grandkids
The details of the heroism that will see Charles Kettles awarded the Medal of Honor at the White House come back clearly and quickly even five decades later.
The White House announced Tuesday afternoon that Kettles would receive the award from President Obama on July 18.
Kettles, 86, recalls the events of May 15, 1967: flying his UH-1 helicopter time after time after time into dizzying, withering fire to save the lives of dozens of soldiers ambushed by North Vietnamese troops in the Song Tau Cau river valley; nursing the shot-up, overloaded bird out of harm's way with the final eight soldiers who'd been mistakenly left behind.
"With complete disregard for his own safety, " the official narrative of that day reads. "Without gunship, artillery, or tactical aircraft support, the enemy concentrated all firepower on his lone aircraft... Without his courageous actions and superior flying skills, the last group of soldiers and his crew would never have made it off the battlefield."
Kettles, born and bred and retired in Ypsilanti, Mich., remembers how he felt after he touched down nearly 50 years ago for the last time, finally safe, unrattled and hungry.
"I just walked away from the helicopter believing that's what war is," Kettles told USA TODAY. "It probably matched some of the movies I'd seen as a youngster. So be it. Let's go have dinner."
Kettles' actions were documented and saluted long ago. He was awarded the second-highest award for bravery, the Distinguished Service Cross. And that, he thought, was that. Kettles completed another tour in Vietnam, retired from the Army as a lieutenant colonel and opened an auto dealership with his brother.
That's where the story would end, if not for William Vollano, an amateur historian who was interviewing veterans for the Veterans History Project. Vollano's prodding led the Army to reopen Kettles' case and determine that his actions merited the Medal of Honor. Coincidentally, the military is also reviewing the actions of hundreds more troops in the post-9/11 era to see if they, too, should receive upgrades of their service crosses and Silver Stars.
May 15, 1967
On that May morning in Vietnam, Maj. Kettles' and several other helicopter pilots ferried about 80 soldiers from the 1st Brigade of the 101st Airborne Division to a landing zone near the Song Tra Cau River. The river, just eight or 10 feet above sea level, drifted past a 1,500-foot hill.
"Very steep, which set them up for an ambush," Kettles recalls. "Which did happen."
Hundreds of North Vietnamese soldiers, dug into tunnels and bunkers, attacked the Americans with machine guns, mortars, and recoilless rifles.
"Two or three hours after they were inserted, they had been mauled over and the battalion commander called for reinforcements," Kettles says.
Kettles volunteered to fly in reinforcements and to retrieve the wounded and dead. As they swooped in to land, the North Vietnamese focused their fire on the helicopters. Soldiers were killed before they could leap from the aircraft, according to the official account of the fight.
Air Force jets dropped napalm on the machine gun positions overlooking the landing zone, but it had little effect. The attack continued, riddling the helicopters with bullets. Kettles refused to leave, however, until the fresh troops and supplies had been dropped off and the dead and wounded crowded aboard to be flown out.
Kettles ran the gantlet again, bringing more reinforcements amid mortar and machine-gun fire that seriously wounded his gunner and tore into his helicopter. The crew from another helicopter reported to Kettles that fuel was pouring from his aircraft. Kettles wobbled back to the base.
"Kettles, by himself, without any guns and any crew, went back by himself," said Roland Scheck, a crew member who had been injured on Kettles' first trip to the landing zone that day. "Immediately, all the pilots and copilots in the company decided, 'This is Medal of Honor material right there.'"
"I don't know if there's anyone who's gotten a Medal of Honor who deserved it more," he said. "There's no better candidate as far as I'm concerned."
The final run
At about 6 p.m., the infantry commander radioed for an immediate, emergency evacuation of 44 soldiers, including four from Kettles' unit whose helicopter was destroyed at the river. Kettles volunteered to lead the flight of six evacuation helicopters, cobbled together from his and another unit.
"Chaotic," Kettles says. "The troops simply went to the first helicopter available."
Just one soldier scrambled into his helicopter. Told that all were safe and accounted for, Kettles signaled it was time to return to base.
"The artillery shut down, the gunships went back," Kettles said. "No reason for them to stay anymore. The Air Force shut down. We climbed out to about 1,400 feet, a 180-degree turn back toward base camp and the hospital."
That's when word reached Kettles that eight soldiers had been left behind.
"They had been down in the river bed in a last-ditch defensive effort before the helicopters loaded," Kettles said. "I assured the commander I would go back in and pick them up."
Kettles took control of the helicopter from the co-pilot and plummeted toward the stranded soldiers.
The North Vietnamese trained all their fire on Kettles. As he landed, a mortar round shattered the windshields and damaged the tail and main rotor blade. The eight soldiers piled on board, raked by rifle and machine-gun fire. Jammed beyond capacity, the helicopter "fishtailed" several times before Kettles took the controls again from his co-pilot. The only way out, Kettles recalls, was to skip along the ground, gaining enough speed to get the helicopter in the air.
"If not we were going to go down the road like a two-and-a-half ton truck with a rotor blade on it," Kettles says.
After five or six tries, Kettles got off the ground. Just then, a second mortar round slammed into the tail.
"That caused the thing to lurch forward," he says. "I don't know if that helped much. I still had a clean panel, that is, the emergency panel. There weren't any lights.
The helicopter was still doing what it was supposed to do even though it was, I guess, pretty badly (damaged). We got out of there."
The Medal of Honor
Kettles acknowledges it was an extraordinary day, one that he thinks about but doesn't dwell on. He and the other helicopter pilots and crew performed as they were trained, followed orders, completed their mission. Simple as that.
The Medal of Honor, he says, "belongs to them certainly as much as myself. I just happened to be the lead position where the decisions were mine, properly so.
"For them, unfortunately all they could do was follow. And they did. They did their jobs. They're as deserving as I am certainly. That's what it means to me."
For dozens of soldiers, especially the last eight, Kettles' decision kept their names from being etched on the black granite wall of the Vietnam War memorial here in Washington with the 58,000 others who died in the war.
"The eight who got out of there who aren't on that wall," Kettles says. "That's what matters."
By Tom Vanden Brook and Gregory Korte, USA TODAY
Review
The author has a wonderful and engaging writing skill that keeps a reader looking forward to the next page and the next. As he writes of his journey through life, he expertly combines hope, disappointment, forgiveness and most importantly, humor.
Ahern instilled his brand of humor in a collection of amusing stories relaying events over the course of his life and his twenty-two-year police career. These true stories, a combination of weird news and world's dumbest criminals, give an inside look at the humorous side of police work. But the book is much more.
As the name implies, Ahern's book covers the three phases of his life beginning with his adoption, his service in Vietnam with the U.S. Air Force and his 22-year career as a police officer in NYC and later in as a police officer and later detective in the Leesburg (Florida) Police Department. Scattered between these three phases in his search for his birth parents.
Ahern was born in Bay Bridge Hospital in Brooklyn, New York in 1945. He was half African American and half Caucasian. At age 3 he was given up for adoption and fostered by Thomas and Elaine Hackley. His foster father treated him badly and deserted the family a few years later only to return periodically. His foster mother was his anchor, giving him a loving home, human comfort and sound advice as he was growing up.
During his enlistment in the Air Force, one tour was spent in Vietnam where he was assigned various supply missions in Phan Rang and Da Nang airbase. His duties ranged from supply collection and distribution to driving new trucks that had been delivered to South Vietnam ports of entry back to Phan Rang. Then there were always Vietnamese bars and lady hostesses.
He'd plan on making the Air Force career but after failing several promotions in spite of excellent performance ratings (one is printed in his book), he got out and returned to NYC. He got married and after various jobs, was accepted by the NYC Transit Police Dept. After a number of years, he quit after experiencing wholesale police brutality and some racism - both ignored by the brass.
Following numerous jobs and living in different states, he returned to police work when he moved to Florida and joined the Leesburg Police Department, moving through the ranks to detective and department head of numerous divisions.
As for his birth parents, and years of searching, he eventually found both of them. His birth mother was white, his birth father African American and Ahern were the unwanted result of a workplace affair. His mother was married to an NYPD detective who refused to acknowledge him. In a joyous reunion, he met with his mother and the rest of the extended family of half-brothers and sisters. After much research, he found his birth father in North Carolina. When the two met in person, it was perhaps the happiest moment in both their lives.
I really enjoyed the relationships of all the characters in the book. The humor and personality of Ahern made the book. Reading this novel will make you laugh (out loud), cry and think.
Reader Reviews
I have the honor of knowing Pete and calling him a friend. I learned a lot more about Pete from reading his book. You get to see the other side of a Cop. Pete and I worked in the same Police Department. Cops are people too. Some think we are "Super" Human or Just Plain Pigs. We run in as others run out. Why I don't know. Cops and Firemen just do it as part of their job. Pete shows the real side of a Cop.
~Freddy M
After reading "3 - Pete: One Man's Journey," I continue to be profoundly amazed and inspired about the contributions single individuals make to impact the quality of life for those around them. Mr. Ahern's thorough and in-depth autobiography left nothing to the imagination. His incredible recall of facts and circumstances surrounding his life is indeed remarkable. I thoroughly enjoyed reading such an entertaining and inspiring book. There were certain parts of the book that relate to me personally; sections that allowed me to live through his experiences right along with him; sections that conveyed outright laughter and sections that made you both angry and sad about the human experience. I am glad that I purchased this book. It is a must-read and I definitely recommend this valuable reading for all adults. Mr. Ahern is a man of character. Thank you for sharing your story.
~ Patricia McNeary-Calloway
This is a well-written autobiography of an everyday guy that turned the garbage he was handed at birth into gold. It is a real page-turner. I could not put it down until there was no more to read. The facts recounted are explicit in detail, content, and vision.
~Lofton Holder
This book was quite a page-turner for me. It tackles issues that have occurred at historical points in time that remain uncannily relevant today. The writer has a style that captivates the reader. He effortlessly executes this skill with humor which thereby engages the reader to the extent that he or she feels like a present observer (or more like a close friend), as the writer recounts in impressive details, the journey of real-life events. He covers everything from adoption, matters of race, war, dysfunctional relationships, PTSD, life as an NYPD Cop.......the topics are just too extensive to list. The bottom line is that I recommend this book to people both young and old, as there is something in it that will appeal to everyone!!
~M J Allen
About th
e Author
Born in Brooklyn, New York, he was given up for adoption at age 3 months. Lived as a Foster Child until age 17 in the most amazing family and grew up in Jamaica, New York. Served in the U.S. Air Force from 1963 to 1966 with the last year in Vietnam. Entered Law Enforcement in New York City followed by Leesburg, Florida where he specialized in Hostage Negotiations, Crimes Against Children, Crimes against the Elderly and Sex Crimes. Retired in 2002. Married with one son, four stepsons, two daughters and eight granddaughters. Living in Lake County, Florida and an avid Jazz Fan.