World War II (1939-45)

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    Putin Is Ready to Carve Up the World. Trump Just Handed Him the Knife.

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    Washington and Moscow have been repairing relations at breakneck speed, comparable only to the speed at which the Trump administration is breaking things at home. After meeting with Secretary of State Marco Rubio in Saudi Arabia on Feb. 18, the Russian foreign minister, Sergei Lavrov, said the two sides had resolved to “eliminate impediments” to improving bilateral relations, a phrasing that sent chills down the spines of Russian exiles — myself included — who have sought what at the time seemed like safe harbor in the United States.Of course, Russia’s president, Vladimir Putin, has his sights set on much more than a bunch of political exiles. And his negotiations with President Trump about Ukraine are not just about Ukraine. Putin wants nothing less than to reorganize the world, the way Joseph Stalin did with the accords he reached with Franklin D. Roosevelt and Winston Churchill in the Crimean city of Yalta in February 1945. Putin has wanted to carve the globe up for a long time. Now, at last, Trump is handing him the knife.How do I know Putin wants this? Because he has said so. In fact, he, Lavrov and a cadre of Kremlin propagandists and revisionist historians haven’t shut up about Yalta for more than a decade. After illegally annexing Crimea in 2014, Putin addressed a gathering celebrating the 70th anniversary of the accords; it culminated in the unveiling of a monument to the three Allied leaders.His reverence for the Yalta accords goes beyond the glorification of the once-mighty Soviet Union and its leader Stalin; he believes that the agreement those three heads of state struck — with the Soviet Union keeping three Baltic States it had annexed as well as parts of Poland and Romania, and later securing domination over six Eastern and Central European countries and part of Germany — remains the only legitimate framework for European borders and security. In February, as Russia celebrated the accords’ 80th anniversary, and prepared to sit down with the Trump administration, Lavrov and the official Russia historians reiterated this message in article after article.This week, Alexander Dugin, a self-styled philosopher who has consistently supplied Putin with the ideological language to back up his policies, sat down for a long interview with Glenn Greenwald, the formerly leftist American journalist. Dugin affably explained why Russia invaded Ukraine: because it wanted and needed to reclaim its former European holdings but realistically could attempt to occupy only Ukraine. He also laid out potential pathways to ending the war. At the very least, he said, Russia would require a partition, demilitarization and denazification of Ukraine. He was purposefully using the language the Allies applied to Germany in Yalta.On X, where Dugin has been hyperactive in the last weeks, he is even bolder. In the lead-up to elections last week in Germany, he posted, “Vote AfD or we will occupy Germany once more and divide it between Russia and USA.” (A German journalist friend sent me a screenshot asking if the post was real — German journalists are less accustomed to the unimaginable than Russian ones.)We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      More Than 150 World War II Bombs Found Under Playground in England

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      The devices found during construction work were practice bombs, which can be harmful. Officials said there could be more.More than 150 bombs from World War II have been found under a children’s playground in northern England, with concerns that more may remain, officials said.The bombs were discovered as a construction project was underway to renovate the Scotts Park playground in Wooler, a small town in Northumberland, England, that is near the border with Scotland. BBC reported that workers had found a “suspicious object” on Jan. 14 while digging foundations. It turned out to be a practice bomb, or a nonexplosive bomb that is used for training but can still be harmful.The Wooler Parish Council enlisted Brimstone Site Investigations, a company that specializes in unexploded ordnance, to investigate the site, council officials said in a news release.Brimstone arrived on Jan. 23 for what was supposed to be a two-day survey, “but it soon became apparent that the scale of the problem was far greater than anyone had anticipated,” the parish council wrote.On the first day, Brimstone identified an additional 65 practice bombs, each weighing 10 pounds, as well as smoke cartridges.On the second day of work at the site, Brimstone recovered an additional 90 practice bombs and safely removed them to a designated storage area, the council wrote.Practice bombs that were discovered at Scotts Park playground.Mark MatherThe BBC reported that the Ministry of Defense had ordered a full survey of the site.Though the bombs are practice bombs, “they do still carry a charge” and require removal by specialists, the parish council’s release said, adding, “These have been found with their fuse and contents still intact — and the detonator burster and smoke filling in particular can still be potentially hazardous.”A spokesperson for the Northumberland County Council called the discovery “unexpected.”Mark Mather, an official in Wooler, told the BBC that about a third of the park had been cleared and it was possible there were more bombs.“It’s quite something to think the children have been playing on bombs,” Mr. Mather said.Mr. Mather said that Wooler had been a training center for the Home Guard, a volunteer citizen militia considered the last line of defense against the Germans during World War II.“After the war, it looked like they just buried all the ordnance in one of the pits,” Mr. Mather said.The Ministry of Defense said that a team had visited the site twice in January, the BBC reported, but it did not offer further details.The Wooler Parish Council said it hoped contractors could resume work in April once the site had been declared safe.Brimstone, the Ministry of Defense, Mr. Mather, the Wooler Parish Council and the Northumberland County Council did not immediately respond to requests for comment. More

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      Her Brother Disappeared in War 80 Years Ago. She Finally Got to Say Goodbye.

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      Margery Hop Wong last saw her older brother Sgt. Yuen Hop in 1943. He was a soldier missing in action, until researchers solved the mystery behind his death.When Margery Hop Wong bade her older brother goodbye in 1943, she was just a 12-year-old girl who loved it when he took her for joy rides in his used convertible around the apple orchards their family worked.Yuen Hop left their home in Sebastopol, Calif., a small town 55 miles north of San Francisco, at 19 to join the U.S. Army. His little sister never saw him again. She knew he had died in the war, but she did not know how. Or where. Or what had happened to his body.On Friday, Ms. Wong, now 94, sat in the front pew of a mortuary just south of her home in San Francisco, her brother’s remains in a casket draped in an American flag. Younger generations of the Hop family and military veterans filled the rows behind her as a singer led the group in “Amazing Grace.”For 80 years, Sergeant Hop was lost. Now, he was found.Yuen Hopvia the Hop familyMs. Wong was the youngest of seven children born to Gin and Chan Hop, immigrants from China who spoke Cantonese and struggled to communicate with their American-born children, who grew up speaking English.Life was difficult because of anti-Chinese sentiment fueled by the Chinese Exclusion Act, passed by Congress in 1882 to dramatically restrict Chinese immigration. Chinese immigrants were regularly prohibited from living or working where they wanted, Ms. Wong recalled in an interview. She said her brother was proud to have scraped together money working as a mechanic and drying apples to buy a used convertible and tried to make life fun for his brothers and sisters.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      Bob Fernandez, Who Survived Pearl Harbor as a Teenager, Dies at 100

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      Mr. Fernandez was a 17-year-old sailor aboard the U.S.S. Curtiss when Japanese forces attacked. He had recently canceled a trip to Hawaii for the 83rd anniversary of the bombing.Robert Louie Fernandez, one of the last known American survivors of the bombing of Pearl Harbor, died on Wednesday, just days after the 83rd anniversary of the attack, in Lodi, Calif. He was 100.Mr. Fernandez, known as Uncle Bob to friends, family and even some strangers, died at the home of his nephew Joe Guthrie, who confirmed the death. “I promised him 10 years ago that he could die in my home, and that’s what he did,” said Mr. Guthrie, who became his uncle’s caretaker in 2022, after his dementia diagnosis. “He died loved and happy.” Born in San Jose, Calif., in 1924, Mr. Fernandez enlisted in the U.S. Navy in August 1941, when he was 17 years old. He was stationed aboard the U.S.S. Curtiss at the Pearl Harbor naval base on the island of Oahu in Hawaii, where he served as a mess cook and ammunition loader, according to military records. In a video biography filmed in 2016, Mr. Fernandez said he had joined the Navy to see the world. “I just thought I was going to go dancing all the time, have a good time,” he said, adding: “What did I do? I got caught in a war.”Mr. Fernandez had planned a trip to Hawaii for an event last Saturday commemorating the 83rd anniversary of the bombing, but his health started to deteriorate a few weeks ago, according to his family.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      Madeleine Riffaud, ‘the Girl Who Saved Paris,’ Dies at 100

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      Madeleine Riffaud, a swashbuckling French Resistance hero who survived three weeks of torture as a teenager and went on to celebrate her 20th birthday by helping to capture 80 Nazis on an armored supply train, and who later became a crusading anticolonial war correspondent, died on Nov. 6 at her home in Paris. She was 100.Her death was announced by her publisher, Dupuis.Ms. Riffaud was propelled into the anti-Nazi guerrilla underground in November 1940 by a literal kick in the backside from a German officer. He sent her packing after he saw Nazi soldiers taunting her at a railway station as she was accompanying her ailing grandfather to visit her father near Amiens, in northern France.“That moment,” she said in a 2006 interview with The Times of London, “decided my whole life.”“I landed on my face in the gutter,” she told The Guardian in 2004. “I was humiliated. My fear turned into anger.”She decided then and there to join the French Resistance.“I remember saying to myself,” she said, “‘I don’t know who they are or where they are, but I’ll find the people who are fighting this, and I’ll join them.’ ”Madeleine with her father, Jean Émile Riffaud, in about 1925. Mr. Riffaud, who had been wounded in World War I, was a pacifist.Fonds Madeleine RiffaudShe connected with the Resistance in Grenoble, France, at a sanitarium where she was being treated for tuberculosis. She had contracted the disease while studying midwifery in Paris.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      There Will Always Be a Trump. That’s Only Part of the Problem.

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      Because we forget history, we forget that the American experiment cannot succeed without constant, courageous leadership. Our nation is not inherently good and our high ideals are often eclipsed by our baser nature. This has been true since our founding, and it is true now.We also know that if American ideals depend on a single party for their protection, then that effort is doomed to fail. It’s not that America is one election from extinction. Our nation is not that fragile. But it can regress. It can forsake its ideals. And millions of people can suffer as a result.I’m writing those words in the context of a presidential contest that already represents a national failure. Even if Kamala Harris wins on Tuesday, there should be relief, not lasting joy. The United States will have come within an eyelash of electing a man who tried to overturn an election to cling to power.While Donald Trump’s individual actions were unprecedented, the idea that a critical mass of Americans would embrace a demagogue should not be a surprise.Last week, I helped host a fireside chat with Susan Eisenhower, the founder and expert in residence at the Eisenhower Institute at Gettysburg College. She’s also Dwight D. Eisenhower’s granddaughter. During our conversation, she told a story that I’d forgotten — one with direct relevance to the present moment.In the aftermath of World War II, there was intense interest in General Eisenhower’s potential political career. He’d never voted before he left the Army in 1948. Both parties courted him, but the Republican Party needed him.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      ‘The Safekeep’ Is a Story in the Shadow of Anne Frank

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      In Yael van der Wouden’s debut novel, “The Safekeep,” the writer spins an erotic thriller out of the Netherlands’ failure to face up to the horrors of the Holocaust.The author Yael van der Wouden stood in her slippers at the front door of a canal house in the Dutch city of Utrecht. “Let me prepare you for the journey ahead,” she said, smiling. “There will be a lot of stairs.”She turned and led the way through a long darkened hallway, up a narrow staircase, to another winding hallway, and up more stairs to reach her attic-level apartment in the back of the building.“My landlady calls it ‘het achterhuis,’” said van der Wouden, once inside the cozy interior with slanting roof beams, decorated with books and bric-a-brac. “She’s about 90, and I don’t think she quite understands what that means to me.”“Het Achterhuis,” is the Dutch title of Anne Frank’s famous World War II diary. In English, it is often translated as “the secret annex,” referring to the storage space where the teen diarist and her family hid to escape the Nazis for more than two years. But “achterhuis” is also just a term for the back part of a house, and van der Wouden, who is Israeli and Dutch, does not fault her landlady for missing the reference.“It feels like just another part of existing invisibly, where no one quite thinks about the full effect of their words,” van der Wouden said.“The Safekeep,” van der Wouden’s debut novel and one of six books shortlisted for the 2024 Booker Prize, is full of such clashing perspectives. Words that mean one thing to a character can hold explosive charge for another. Seemingly innocuous objects like silver spoons, or a single shard of broken china, become emotional land mines.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      John Kinsel Sr., Navajo Code Talker During World War II, Dies at 107

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      Mr. Kinsel, who served from October 1942 to January 1946, was part of the second group of Marines trained as code talkers at Camp Elliott, Calif., after the original 29 who developed the code for wartime use.John Kinsel Sr., a World War II veteran who was one of the last surviving Navajo Code Talkers, a group of Marines whose encrypted wartime messages based on the Navajo language helped secure an Allied victory in the Pacific, died on Saturday. He was 107.Buu Nygren, president of the Navajo Nation, announced Mr. Kinsel’s death in a post on social media. No cause was given.An estimated 400 Navajo Code Talkers served during World War II, transmitting a code crafted from the Navajo language that U.S. forces used to confuse the Japanese and communicate troop movements, enemy positions and other critical battlefield information. Mr. Kinsel, who served from October 1942 to January 1946, was part of the second group of Marines trained as code talkers at Camp Elliott in California, after the original 29 who developed the code for wartime use.The code was never broken. A fictionalized version of the codetalkers’ story was depicted in the film “Windtalkers,” directed by John Woo.In an interview in 2019 with The Arizona Republic, Mr. Kinsel remembered training alongside 25 other marines at Camp Elliott, and he recalled working with some of the original 29 to develop additional code, including by working on code words for military words like “tank” and “aircraft.”Mr. Kinsel was assigned to the Ninth Marine Regiment, Third Marine Division, and took part in the battles of Bougainville (in Papau New Guinea), Guam and Iwo Jima. He was never deployed to the front lines, according to the U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs, but he worked with his division headquarters while on Bougainville Island to develop code and transcribe messages.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      Judge Awards Schiele Drawing to Heirs of Merchant Killed by the Nazis

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      The drawing of Schiele’s wife was the focus of a trial at which three parties, all with Jewish roots, argued whether it had been looted by the Nazis and from whom.For three weeks in May a judge in Rochester, N.Y., heard evidence meant to solve the mystery of who really owns a drawing of a smiling woman by the Austrian artist Egon Schiele.For years, the drawing has been in the possession of a foundation named after Robert Owen Lehman Jr., who said he had received the work, “Portrait of the Artist’s Wife,” in the 1960s from his father, a financier who steered the Lehman Brothers investment firm through the Great Depression.But the heirs of two men, Heinrich Rieger and Karl Mayländer, both art collectors who knew Schiele and were killed by the Nazis during the Holocaust, had pursued competing claims to the work as well.During a bench trial at State Supreme Court, the heirs of Rieger, who had been Schiele’s dentist, and the heirs of Mayländer, a textile merchant who is the subject of two Schiele portraits, presented evidence to suggest their relatives had owned the work before chaos and Nazi looting caused countless gaps in the ownership histories of important art.On Thursday, Justice Daniel J. Doyle ruled in favor of the organization founded by the Mayländer heirs, who are now represented by a foundation that pursues the family’s interests. “The evidence presented at trial establishes by a preponderance of the evidence that the Mayländer Heirs have superior title to the drawing,” Justice Doyle wrote in an 86-page decision.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More