Now watching 30 Seconds Over Tokyo at 3:00 PM Michigan time on this Veteran's Day.

For those of you who have never seen this movie, it was made in 1944 and is about the Doolittle Raid. Spencer Tracy plays Doolittle. The movie title is taken from the book with the same name.

http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0037366/

Still have tears in my eyes after watching the History Channel's program on Roy Allen. I'm sure they will show it again. If they do you gotta watch it. Very moving.

On June 14, 1944, pilot Roy Allen and the 10-man crew of his B-17 embarked on a mission over Nazi-occupied France that was supposed to be a milk run. Instead, it proved more dangerous than anything they ever imagined. Blasted by flak, Roy was forced to parachute into France. Trapped behind enemy lines, a 21-year-old schoolteacher-- French Resistance patriot Colette Florin--saved his life. On his way back to England, a traitor within the Resistance betrayed Roy. Captured by the Gestapo, tortured, imprisoned, and labeled a terrorist by the Nazis, he became one of 168 Allied airmen transported across Europe on a nightmare rail journey to Buchenwald Concentration Camp. In the heart of the Nazi empire, the only thing that kept them alive was each other. It's a human story of courage and loss, determination and sacrifice by ordinary people whose lives were profoundly altered by war.

1942 : Germans take Vichy France

On this day in 1942, German troops occupy Vichy France, which had previously been free of an Axis military presence.

Since July 1940, upon being invaded and defeated by Nazi German forces, the autonomous French state had been split into two regions. One was occupied by German troops, and the other was unoccupied, governed by a more or less puppet regime centered in Vichy, a spa region about 200 miles southeast of Paris, and led by Gen. Philippe Petain, a World War I hero. Publicly, Petain declared that Germany and France had a common goal, "the defeat of England." Privately, the French general hoped that by playing mediator between the Axis power and his fellow countrymen, he could keep German troops out of Vichy France while surreptitiously aiding the antifascist Resistance movement.

Petain's compromises became irrelevant within two years. When Allied forces arrived in North Africa to team up with the Free French Forces to beat back the Axis occupiers, and French naval crews, emboldened by the Allied initiative, scuttled the French fleet off Toulon, in southeastern France, to keep it from being used by those same Axis powers, Hitler retaliated. In violation of the 1940 armistice agreement, German troops moved into southeastern-Vichy--France. From that point forward, Petain became virtually useless, and France merely a future gateway for the Allied counteroffensive in Western Europe, namely, D-Day.

The History of Veterans Day on the History Channel

http://www.history.com/minisite.do?content...me&mini_id=1085

Am trying to find out more and will post it here when I do, but received the following email from Al Kincer:

One of Ed Jackson's brothers, the youngest, was killed near Luxemburg. He is buried in the American Cemetery and Memorial in Luxemburg. Do you think any of our Belgian Friends are taking care of his grave. If so I am sure Ed would like to know of it. AL