Retired Major General John Singlaub vividly recalls the day he helped liberate nearly 400 Allied prisoners during World War II. They'd been held for months, beaten and starved by their Japanese captors, and were close to execution when Singlaub and his team freed them.
"It was a great way to end a war," Singlaub says.
Singlaub was one of many veterans of the Office of Strategic Services (OSS) who gathered on Thursday night to share stories of wartime heroism, espionage and covert operations.
The predecessor of the CIA and US Special Forces, the OSS marked the US' first government-wide coordination of strategic intelligence activities.
President Franklin Roosevelt established the OSS on June 13, 1942, just months after the Dec. 7, 1941, attack on Pearl Harbor and the US' entry into World War II. OSS members gathered intelligence against the enemy by working with resistance groups in occupied foreign territories. The OSS also intercepted Axis communications and engaged in psychological warfare against the enemy.
Singlaub said the spirit of the OSS was one of cooperation for the greater good. The team he led to liberate prisoners of war from Hainan Island, off the coast of China, consisted of two interpreters, one Chinese and the other Japanese.
"Countries, boundaries, nationalities -- didn't make any difference," he said.
CONDITIONS: The Russian president said a deal that was scuppered by ‘elites’ in the US and Europe should be revived, as Ukraine was generally satisfied with it Russian President Vladimir Putin yesterday said that he was ready for talks with Ukraine, after having previously rebuffed the idea of negotiations while Kyiv’s offensive into the Kursk region was ongoing. Ukraine last month launched a cross-border incursion into Russia’s Kursk region, sending thousands of troops across the border and seizing several villages. Putin said shortly after there could be no talk of negotiations. Speaking at a question and answer session at Russia’s Eastern Economic Forum in Vladivostok, Putin said that Russia was ready for talks, but on the basis of an aborted deal between Moscow’s and Kyiv’s negotiators reached in Istanbul, Turkey,
In months, Lo Yuet-ping would bid farewell to a centuries-old village he has called home in Hong Kong for more than seven decades. The Cha Kwo Ling village in east Kowloon is filled with small houses built from metal sheets and stones, as well as old granite buildings, contrasting sharply with the high-rise structures that dominate much of the Asian financial hub. Lo, 72, has spent his entire life here and is among an estimated 860 households required to move under a government redevelopment plan. He said he would miss the rich history, unique culture and warm interpersonal kindness that defined life in
AERIAL INCURSIONS: The incidents are a reminder that Russia’s aggressive actions go beyond Ukraine’s borders, Ukrainian Minister of Foreign Affairs Andrii Sybiha said Two NATO members on Sunday said that Russian drones violated their airspace, as one reportedly flew into Romania during nighttime attacks on neighboring Ukraine, while another crashed in eastern Latvia the previous day. A drone entered Romanian territory early on Sunday as Moscow struck “civilian targets and port infrastructure” across the Danube in Ukraine, the Romanian Ministry of National Defense said. It added that Bucharest had deployed F-16 warplanes to monitor its airspace and issued text alerts to residents of two eastern regions. It also said investigations were underway of a potential “impact zone” in an uninhabited area along the Romanian-Ukrainian border. There
A French woman whose husband has admitted to enlisting dozens of strangers to rape her while she was drugged on Thursday told his trial that police had saved her life by uncovering the crimes. “The police saved my life by investigating Mister Pelicot’s computer,” Gisele Pelicot told the court in the southern city of Avignon, referring to her husband — one of 51 of her alleged abusers on trial — by only his surname. Speaking for the first time since the extraordinary trial began on Monday, Gisele Pelicot, now 71, revealed her emotion in almost 90 minutes of testimony, recounting her mysterious
RSS