American Legion Burbank

New Zealand cooks prepare a meal for troops in the trenches, while a few soldiers seemingly of the 4th Battalion, Rifle Brigade, assist, Beaudignies, France, 29... October 1918. The liberation of Beaudignies, and the nearby fortress town of Le Quesnoy on 4 November, hold a special significance in New Zealand's military history. This is not merely because it was the last major action by the New Zealanders in the Great War the armistice followed a week later but also because of the particular way the latter town was captured. When the New Zealand Division attacked on 4 November, its units quickly by-passed Le Quesnoy and pushed further east on what was to be the New Zealanders' most successful day of the whole campaign on the Western Front. It advanced 10 kilometres and captured 2000 Germans and 60 field guns. The attack cost the lives of about 90 New Zealand soldiers virtually the last of the 12,483 who fell on the Western Front between 1916 and 1918. In 2000, the neighbouring town of Beaudignies renamed its village square 'Place du Colonel Blyth' in honour of one of its liberators, L.M. 'Curly' Blyth, a young subaltern in the 3rd New Zealand (Rifle) Brigade, who was among the attacking troops. At the time of his death on 10 October 2001, at the age of 105, Lieutenant-Colonel Blyth was one of the last two remaining veterans of the New Zealand Expeditionary Force. His longevity afforded him a special prominence as a symbol of New Zealand's liberation of the Le Quesnoy area. Photographer: Henry Armytage Sanders Image courtesy of the Alexander Turnbull Library, National Library of New Zealand Colour by Benjamin Thomas

A big happy 97th birthday to my dear friend, mentor and fellow Marine (Corporal) Woody Williams. As a man and the oldest living Marine Medal of Honor recipient,... the world is truly blessed to have such an incredible human being. We love you Woody and stay safe cruising the town on your slingshot! See more

On this day in 1944, USS Frank E. Evans is launched. The destroyer’s service would tragically come to an end during the Vietnam War when she accidentally collid...ed with the Australian carrier HMAS Melbourne. Seventy-four sailors were killed that day, but they were never added to the Vietnam Veterans Memorial Wall. But why? As it turns out, the collision occurred just outside the Department of Defense’s designated combat zone. Some people today are working to get the Lost 74 added to the Vietnam memorial, arguing that a mere technicality should not be used to exclude these sailors. So what happened? And why is there a controversy? Frank E. Evans had arrived in Vietnam in May 1969, where it participated in the war effort for about a month before leaving to retrieve more supplies. During this resupply trip, the destroyer was asked to take part in a training exercise in the South China Sea. But wasn’t Evans officially slated to return to Vietnam after the training exercise? Much of the dispute about the memorial seems to center on the answer to that question. Certainly everyone expected that Evans would return. The destroyer had merely been restocking supplies when it got sidetracked by the training exercise. Either way, trouble hit during the early morning hours of June 3, 1969. Evans was engaged in anti-submarine training exercises with HMAS Melbourne. At 3:00 a.m., the captain of Melbourne ordered Evans to move into a plane guard station. The captain of Evans was not on deck when the order was given. He was asleep! He’d left two inexperienced officers in charge with instructions to wake him if there was a change in formation. If only they had done so. Instead, those officers were apparently confused about where Melbourne was and what they were supposed to do. They should have turned to port and circled back to take up their position. Instead, they turned to starboard, putting themselves in Melbourne’s path. Things played out badly from there. The two ships collided, and Evans was sliced in half. The impact was so rough that it threw one of Evans’s lookouts off the American ship and onto the flight deck of the Australian carrier. Evans’s bow sank in less than 3 minutes, killing most sailors aboard that section of the boat. In the meantime, the Australian crew was working to save the remaining Americans. It was all very quick, Australian Captain John Stevenson would recall, very chaotic, but organized as far as the Melbourne was concerned. They all knew what they were doing. The stern half of the Evans was secured to the ship, and people hopped over the edge to help survivors back onto Melbourne. It was an incredible sight to behold, one eyewitness would agree. The back half of the destroyer was being tied to the starboard side aft of the Melbourne . . . . It was hard to believe what I was witnessing. Half a ship . . . gone! The Melbourne crew pulled American sailors from the water or transferred them from Evans. The search continued for 15 hours, but only 199 survivors were ultimately found. Seventy-four Americans had been killed, including three brothers from Nebraska who had asked to serve together, all aboard the same ship. After surviving an epic sea battle in 1945 off Okinawa, in which she had repulsed 150 kamikaze planes, shooting down 50, one historian concludes, the Evans ignobly went to her death through poor navigation. Adding insult to injury, the names of those lost still have not been added to the Vietnam Veterans Memorial Wall. --------------------------- If you enjoy these history posts, please see my note below. :) Gentle reminder: History posts are copyright 2013-2020 by Tara Ross. I appreciate it when you use the shar e feature instead of cutting/pasting. #TDIH #OTD #History #USHistory #liberty #freedom #ShareTheHistory

There are 12 propositions on the November ballot. Of the propositions on the November ballot, three of them have been officially opposed by all the major Calif...ornia Veteran Service Organizations(VSOs) including The American Legion Department of California. Proposition 15 - Split roll property taxes Prop 15 would amend California’s 40-year-old Prop 13 property tax protections to exclude commercial and industrial properties. It would require business properties to be reassessed at full market value, causing costs to go up on California businesses and then onto California consumers. This will cost everyone in California more. This is the largest tax increase proposed in California history. California is already one of the states with the highest cost of living in the country as well as one of the highest poverty rates. For more information, go to https://noonprop15.org Proposition 21 - Rent control Prop 21 repeals portions of California’s rent control law that protects single-family homeowners and has no plan to build affordable and middle-class housing or deal with the increasing problem of homelessness on our streets. There are no protections for renters, seniors, veterans, or the disabled, and it has no provision to reduce rents. This is the same measure that was on the November 2018 ballot as Prop 10 which was opposed by most of the major veterans' groups snd was defeated by 20% points. For more information, go to https://www.caforresponsiblehousing.org Proposition 23 - Dialysis reform Approximately 80,000 Californians with kidney failure rely on dialysis to stay alive. Proposition 23 would put dialysis patients’ lives at risk and hurt all Californians by making the wait longer to see doctors and increasing health care costs by hundreds of millions annually. This is the same measure that was on the November 2018 ballot as Prop 8 which was opposed by most of the major veterans' groups snd was defeated by 20% points. For more information, go to https://noproposition23.com

#ThrowbackThursday The Battle of New Orleans, 1815 On Dec. 23, 1814, the British army, with 9,000 seasoned veterans, marched to Lake Borgne in southeastern Loui...siana. The combatants could not have known that on Christmas Eve 5,000 miles away in Belgium, the finishing touches were penned to a treaty in the Flemish town of Ghent, ending the War of 1812. On Dec. 28, the British ranks slammed into the American lines with U.S. Marines holding the center. Maj Daniel Carmick, the second-highest-ranking officer in the Corps, veteran of numerous battles and skirmishes, and credited by some as instrumental in establishing the term leatherneck, led a counterattack. His horse was shot from under him. He lost a thumb, part of his hand, and was hit on the forehead by a Congreve rocket, yet he survived. The Battle of New Orleans was actually a series of fights. The final one was on Jan. 8. Marines under U.S. Army MG Andrew Jackson stood behind hastily constructed barricades with a cobbled force of American regulars, militia, Creoles and smuggler Jean Lafitte with his Hellish Banditti pirates along the Rodriguez Canal 4 miles below New Orleans and east of the Mississippi River. The British forces, which included Royal Marines under the command of MajGen Sir Edward Pakenham, made gallant, but costly assaults. By noon, Pakenham lay dead among the 2,036 British soldiers killed or wounded. The Crescent City, with the help of approximately 300 Marines, remained unoccupied by foreign forces.

4 July 2018 Paris France representing The American Legion Paris Post #1

On this day in 1945, Wake Island is finally returned to American hands. The Japanese had been in possession of the island since December 1941. Wake Island had ...not fallen without a fight. That little island is part of a small atoll, lying about halfway between Hawaii and Japan. By the early 1940s, the United States Navy was constructing defenses on the island. The atoll was also a stopping point for some commercial flights. When the Japanese attacked Pearl Harbor on December 7, 1941, Wake Island was thus occupied by civilian contractors, military personnel, and Pan Am employees. Word of that attack came early on December 8, local time, because the island is just to the west of the International Date Line. Would Wake Island be next? The defense battalion was ordered to battle stations and four aircraft were dispatched on patrol. The naval commander on the island, Winfield S. Cunningham, asked the captain of Pan Am’s flying boat if he would patrol the skies as well. Meanwhile, some civilian contractors wanted to pitch in. United States Marines Corps Major James P. S. Devereux would later recall a man who strode up to him and stood at attention: Sir, Adams, former seaman United States Navy, reporting for duty. Sir, can you use me? Another Marine opened a storeroom and handed out weapons to a group of about 50 civilians. Preparations for the Pan Am patrol were still underway when the Japanese attacked. Nobody heard them, Devereux wrote. The surf on the reefs around the island made it hard to hear motors, but even so the Japs took no chances. They cut off their motors and came down on us in a silent glide behind the mask of [a rain] squall. Within minutes, the Japanese had wrecked Pan Am’s facilities. Fuel tanks were aflame, the runway was damaged, and seven of the eight F4F-3 Wildcat fighters on the ground had been destroyed. Dozens were dead. And that was just the first of two waves. Americans on the island were determined to avoid a repeat. When the Japanese returned the next day, we hit them first, Devereux said. The Japanese still did a lot of damage, but this time our Marines were inflicting damage of their own, too. They withstood multiple attacks before December 11. By then, the Japanese thought they’d softened up the island enough to make a landing. They were wrong. As Japanese cruisers and destroyers streamed into the area, Devereux ordered his men to hold their fire until the enemy ships got very close. It seemed to me, he later wrote, that our one slim chance was to draw in the enemy close enough for our 5-inch guns to hit him crippling blows at the start of the attack. It worked! The destroyer Hayate became the first Japanese vessel lost in the war. Meanwhile, several Wildcats were in the sky, scoring hits of their own. They sank the destroyer Kisaragi. The Japanese eventually limped away from the engagement with multiple vessels damaged by aerial bombs and shore batteries. The outnumbered Americans on Wake Island had struck backperhaps the first real blow since Pearl Harbor. That wasn’t the end of the Battle for Wake Island, unfortunately. The Japanese had greater numbers and would eventually take the island on December 23. Military and civilians were taken prisoner. Some were executed. Some were held for the rest of the war. Yet the spirited defense of Wake Island had come at a critical time. Wake’s determined defenders held out, historian Robert J. Cressman writes, and in so doing provided a badly needed lift to American morale, a ray of hope in the midst of dark clouds of despair. --------------------------- If you enjoy these history posts, please see my note below. :) Gentle reminder: History posts are copyright 2013-2020 by Tara Ross. I appreciate it when you use the shar e feature instead of cutting/pasting. #TDIH #OTD #History #USHistory #liberty #freedom #ShareTheHistory Permalink: https://www.taraross.com/post/tdih-wake-island

On this day in 1945, a formal surrender ceremony is held aboard the USS Missouri. Today is the anniversary of V-J Day! On this day, World War II effectively ca...me to an end. It had been less than a month since the bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. The bomb dropped on Hiroshima had been devastating, of course. But the second bomb dropped on Nagasaki wasif anythingeven worse. That plutonium bomb produced an explosion 40 percent bigger than the uranium one dropped on Hiroshima. Perhaps unsurprisingly, then, the bombs prompted the Japanese government to consider surrenderingbut it still wasn’t willing to do so unconditionally. Instead, it sought to ensure that such a document would not compromise any demand which prejudices the prerogatives of His Majesty as a sovereign ruler. Nevertheless, President Harry Truman ordered a halt to the atomic attacks so negotiations could commence. Truman’s Secretary of Commerce later reported that Truman really didn’t want to wip[e] out another 100,000 people . . . . He didn’t like the idea of killing, as he said, ‘all those kids.’ By August 12, the Japanese government had the American reply: The United States would accept surrender, but any future government of Japan must be established by the freely expressed will of the Japanese people. Negotiations dragged on much too slowly. The Japanese government still didn’t answer right away. The days of negotiation with a prostrate and despised enemy, a British ambassador later said, strained public patience. That seems like a bit of an understatement! When the Japanese government failed to respond, conventional bombings resumed. The United States continued to prepare a third atomic bomb, just in case it was needed. And it did something else: The United States began dropping leaflets across Tokyo. The leaflets described the terms that had been offered for ending the war. You don’t think surrender was going to be easy, even after all this, do you? It wasn’t, of course. In Japan, there was one last attempt to stop the surrender. A handful of officers attempted a coup, but they were discovered. In the end, many of those involved in the coup attempt committed ritual suicide. Finally, on August 15, the emperor made an announcement on public radio: Japan would surrender. It was the first time that many Japanese people had ever heard their Emperor’s voice. Can you imagine that? The formal surrender ceremony occurred aboard the USS Missouri on September 2. The ceremony lasted for 23 minutes. General Douglas MacArthur accepted and signed the Japanese surrender as Supreme Commander for the Allied Powers. Admiral Nimitz and representatives from other nations also signed the document. Terms of a final treaty would still need to be negotiated, of course. But, for all intents and purposes, World War II was finally over. --------------------------- If you enjoy these history posts, please see my note below. :) Gentle reminder: History posts are copyright 2013-2020 by Tara Ross. I appreciate it when you use the shar e feature instead of cutting/pasting. #TDIH #OTD #History #USHistory #liberty #freedom #ShareTheHistory

Mike Nolan, a Vietnam veteran and one of Burbank’s most committed and engaged citizens, has passed on and transferred to Post Everlasting. His unwavering devotion to, and sacrifice for, government transparency and our Constitutional principles will never be forgotten