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The Christy Collection
Incredible Military Stories
Interesting Facts About the Korean War
Sixty-eight years ago, the Korean War began and threatened to turn into WWIII. Here are five basic facts, some small, some large about the Korean War. Korean War & Prisoners of War Tens of thousands of South Korean troops were taken prisoner by the North during the war. Many never returned South. Most are presumed dead, though word has gotten through that many still live as senior citizens in North Korea to this day. Likewise, many North Korean and Chinese were taken prisoner by American,...
World War II Veterans
How Many World War II Veterans are Still Alive Today? According to Pew Research, the number of living WWII veterans dropped to under 300,000 in 2020 from over 930,000 in 2015. The oldest of these veterans is Lawrence Brooks, an Army veteran born in Louisiana in September 1909, drafted at the age of 31, and sent to the Pacific front with the 91st Engineers. One of the 1.2 million African-Americans served during the war, PFC Brooks mainly cooked and cleaned for his superior officers. The...
Fascinating Facts About The Film “Saving Private Ryan”
One of the most accurate and raw depictions of World War II can be found in the film Saving Private Ryan. This film portrayed the terror and chaos that typifies war, rather than the sanitized and unrealistic images that Hollywood tended to put out in past films. Opening scene capturing D-Day, storming the beaches of Normandy, FR. With the realism portrayed in the film, there were many behind-the-scenes tricks that director Steven Spielberg employed to ensure that the ageless footage and...
Teenage Sisters Persuaded German Soldiers
Jannetje Johanna "Hannie" Schaft and Truus and Freddie Oversteegen When the Nazis steamrolled into the Netherlands in May of 1940, Jannetje Johanna "Hannie" Schaft and Truus and Freddie Oversteegen were just 19, 16, and 14 years old, respectively. As for the Oversteegen sisters, their mother, Trijn, had left their father years before. Freddie states of this, "She was just fed up one day - we lived on a large ship in Haarlem, but my father never made any money and didn't pay anything for the...
Explaining U.S. Coast Guard Operations
While being one of the smaller branches of the United States Armed Forces, the U.S. Coast Guard is vital to the United States defense and broader protection. Coast Guard operations range from air and sea rescues to drug trafficking interceptions. The U.S. Coast Guard were also a vital force in the support of D-Day, Vietnam War brown water operations and protection services in the Persian Gulf. Missions of the United States Coast Guard Broadly, the Coast Guard is responsible for three...
What is the New United States Space Force?
If you haven’t been paying attention to military news for the last few years, you could easily be forgiven for asking, ‘What is the Space Force?’ Though it sounds like something out of a cheap science fiction novel, it constitutes a significant proportion of the ongoing defense budget. President Donald Trump instituted several changes in the Department of Defense policy during his tenure as commander-in-chief of the United States Armed Forces, but none more dramatic than creating a new branch....
Unbroken by Laura Hillenbrand
On June 23, 1943, three American soldiers had been drifting in the Pacific Ocean for twenty-seven days. The rafts were deteriorating, their bodies were covered in salt sores, and they didn't know it at the time, but there would be another twenty days of drifting ahead for them. Only two of the three would survive. One of them was former Olympic runner Louis Zamperini whose life would never be the same. Laura Hillenbrand's Unbroken is an amazing study in resilience, defiance, and strength...
Joachim Ronneberg (1941–1945) – The Man Who Crippled The Nazi Atomic Bomb Project
The plan was audacious, requiring a midnight parachute jump onto a snow-covered mountain plateau, cross-country skiing in subzero temperatures and an assault on an isolated, heavily guarded power plant in southern Norway. And the stakes, though no one in the five-man commando team knew it at the time, were spectacular: Destroy the Nazis' sole source of heavy water, a recently discovered substance that Hitler's scientists were using to try to develop an atomic bomb or risk the creation of a...
On Desperate Ground by Hampton Sides
On October 15, 1950, General Douglas MacArthur, Supreme Commander of UN troops in Korea, convinced President Harry Truman that the Communist forces of Kim Il-sung would be utterly defeated by Thanksgiving. The Chinese, he said with near certainty, would not intervene in the war. As he was speaking, 300,000 Red Chinese soldiers began secretly crossing the Manchurian border. Led by some 20,000 men of the First Marine Division, the Americans moved deep into the snowy mountains of North Korea,...

Many articles contained in this Blog were written by Together We Served’s former Chief Editor, Lt Col Michael Christy, and published in TWS’s Dispatches Newsletter.