http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=R57NHRko_u4

U.S. Navy Lieutenant Otis Wheeler, Jr. describes a time during World War II when he and his fellow soldiers had to fly a search and rescue mission on Christmas Day–a mission in which he was the only one to return from. View more veterans’ stories at the Veterans History Project and see more interviews conducted by the Missouri Veterans History Project.

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Lieutenant Describes His Wartime Christmas appeared first on Witnify.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OnDgn2srSzs

Paul Hackett was a Storekeeper 2nd class on the USS Mindanao when the ammunition ship USS Mount Hood exploded on November 10, 1944. All crew members aboard the USS Mount Hood that day were killed in the explosion. The Mindanao was only 350 yards away from Mount Hood at the time of the blast. Recalls Hackett: “It was a beautiful day and we were getting ready for the weekly captain’s inspection of the ship. At approximately 8:50 there was a terrible explosion. I thought we’d been torpedoed.” Of seeing the damage, Hackett says: “The Mount Hood was a 14,000 ton cargo ship which was taken and assumed by the navy sometime around July 1st of ’44, and it was carrying somewhere in the neighborhood of four thousand tons of various explosives, ammunition. And when the dust covered the ship had just completely disintegrated and the pieces they found out of it, the largest was a 10′x16′ sheet of steel.”

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Soldier Remembers the USS Mount Hood Explosion appeared first on Witnify.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1-vcErOPofQ

Admiral Grace Hopper joined the U.S. Navy in 1944 at the age of 37. She was one of the first programmers of the Harvard Mark I computer and wrote the first compiler for a computer programming language. When asked by Letterman how she knew so much about computers then, Hopper responds: “I didn’t. It was the first one”. In this video, Admiral Hopper explains to David Letterman what a nanosecond is: “When an admiral asks you why it takes so damn long to send a message via satellite, you point out to him that between here and the satellite there are a very large number of nanoseconds”.

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Admiral Grace Hopper Explains Nanoseconds appeared first on Witnify.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IhsMl-wb64o

On October 12, 2000, the USS Cole was attacked by suicide bombers in the port of Aden, Yemen, while refueling. Al Qaeda later claimed responsibility for the attack, which killed 17 sailors and injured another 39. Chief Petit Officer Sean Taitt remembers being injured in the bombing: “It took me hours to get just to the second deck from the third deck. It should only take you maybe 30 seconds up the ladder well.” With his leg badly damaged, Taitt says of his inability to help his fellow sailors: “At that point, I felt that I had failed rather than being a survivor.”

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Soldier Recalls Attack on USS Cole appeared first on Witnify.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Om-RkdIlKZU

Kirk Lippold was commander of the USS Cole when it was attacked on October 12, 2000, while refueling in the port of Aden, Yemen. Lippold was in his office when the attack happened, and recalls rushing to open the door of his office: “This huge cloud of grey smoke just silently washed over me.” Of seeing the site of the attack, he says: “It was as if a giant had taken their fist, punched it into the ship and then pulled it back out… The amount of devastation inside that ship was beyond anything the Navy had seen or experienced since kamikaze attacks in World War II.”

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USS Cole Commander Remembers Attack appeared first on Witnify.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=471noSZ7z94

World War II veteran Harold Ward, who served with the U.S. Navy, experienced the attack on Pearl Harbor firsthand. Ward recalls observing the entire attack from his battle station on the U.S.S San Francisco, describing it as both “scary” and “awesome.” Ward later goes on to explain what his assignment was when the U.S. officially entered the war after the attack.

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An Eyewitness to Pearl Harbor appeared first on Witnify.

“It was as though the curtain was about to go up on one of the biggest shows in history, and I was part of the cast! I knew it was going to be a small part, but the overriding sense of it all was that I was there!”

Raymond L. Acosta, part of the Naval Officer in Charge (NOIC) group of the U.S. Navy during the Normandy Campaign, gives his firsthand account of the wide range of emotions he felt as a young man getting the news that he and his fellow troops would be heading to Utah Beach on D-Day:

Raymond L. Acosta with fellow seaman in front of temporary dugout in Utah Beach. June 1944.

I was five days into my 19th birthday as we approached the Normandy coast on June 5, 1944 – and completely unaware of what was to happen on the beaches…Just before dawn, in the cool air of the pitch black night, I was suddenly numbed by the enormity of what was about to happen. It was as though the curtain was about to go up on one of the biggest shows in history, and I was part of the cast! I knew it was going to be a small part, but the overriding sense of it all was that I was there!

Infantry transferring from LCVP onto larger LCI, prior to Normandy Beachhead assault on D-Day.

It all started seven months earlier, when I arrived near Roseneath, Scotland, aboard QE1, as a Navy radioman, assigned to the Commander of the Eleventh Amphibious Force (later annexed to the Naval-Officer-in-Charge, Utah Beach – (NOIC- Utah Beach). On May 16, 1944, after six months of duty in Wales and England, we were all assigned aboard Liberty Ship S/S Robertson. For three weeks we remained on board as a ‘sealed ship’, sailing back and forth between Penarth (Wales) and Plymouth (England). A most boring tour of duty, if you ask me. But then we heard, that we were to be part of a vast mobilization of allied forces getting ready to invade the European continent…we knew it was going to happen soon, but the big question remained: where.

Infantry troops, on board transport ship, preparing for the Normandy landing.

Meanwhile, almost every week, six or seven operators (of our original group of 35) got assigned to other ships, until there were only 12 of us left on the S/S Robertson. We all felt sad, since we had been together since our radio training at Northwestern University. On June 5, 1944, we set sail for Barry (Wales). During the afternoon, our skipper, Commander Dunn, called for attention and read a message from Rear-Admiral Alan G. Kirk, commanding US Naval Assault Forces. It was a grim message, about what was to be expected from the enemy, in the coming battle. I could feel the adrenalin surging through my whole body (recalling the tragic incidents during ‘Operation Tiger’), but still managed to say to one of my shipmates, with a dry throat, “I guess, this is it !” From that moment on, until two weeks later, I went into a kind of trance, though I was aware of everything that was happening around me, I guess I was unconsciously creating a mental fog to act as a kind of protecting shield. Yet, I was able to write about these historic events in the little diary I carried with me.

American soldiers landing on Utah Beach. (June 6, 1944). Source: Regional Council of Lower Normandy, U.S. National Archives.

This was D-Day, June 6, 1944 – the big day has come! And here we are cruising along to France to set up a Comcenter on the Utah Beachhead (NOIC-Utah Beach). We’re all pretty nervous and jittery, wonder what it will be like when we get there? We’ll sure know within a few hours. So far, only one enemy E-boat contact…everything was black and quiet as we sat top side on the hatch covers preparing our individual gear, when suddenly a battleship opened up nearby with its 12-inch guns, the noise was incredible. Sound waves literally entered our mouth and nose, and hit right into the pit of your stomach. Next, the sky lit up with millions of tracer fire, both sound and sight were truly awesome. It looked, no it was, the world’s greatest fireworks! I remember, feeling uncomfortable, because I thought it was so damn beautiful, how can anything so destructive, be so beautiful? As I was going down the cargo nets on the S/S Robertson’s portside, the chinstrap of my helmet became unhooked and dropped down into the waiting  Landing Craft, Vehicle, Personnel (LCVP), it landed on another guy’s helmet who was sitting in the stern. There was a lot of cursing and yelling, but I was lucky at least to get my helmet back, for sure!

Utah Beach aerial photograph.

We landed on Utah Beach, at 10:30 hours from an LCVP. Two officers, RM 3/C John Besemer and myself, got lost from the bunch, when some German shells started whizzing by, some of which landed too damn close! I got a terrible bruise on my right knee when I fell on one of the steel mats laid out for the tanks, it hurt like hell, but I don’t think they’d award Purple Hearts for tripping over your own feet! We must have hit the sand 12 times before we found the rest of our guys near a German blockhouse. On D-Day 1 we dug our foxholes and started setting up communications and standing radio watch in the enemy bunker, now free from its former occupants. I wish they would get that kraut gun that keeps shelling the beach, he’s getting to be a real pain…the following days were kind of hectic; too many damn enemy guns going off and too many German planes, what a hell of a racket. Impossible to sleep, all you can do is lie in your foxhole and shake all night. This morning I must have jumped into my foxhole for cover 75 times.

Then, they shot down an enemy plane, it was June 8, it was strafing the beach, and the pilot had to evacuate, he parachuted down about 60 yards from us. Some jerk in the bivouac area started shooting at him while he was coming down, and we all yelled to him to quit shooting. The boys from the 2d Naval Beach Battalion got hold of the enemy pilot and hustled him off without much ceremony to the prisoner of war (POW) cage. We then later met the incoming troops and reinforcements, and tank crews rolling by our bunker. We were however still subjected to random attacks by German aircrafts which bombed the beaches at night, since we had no searchlights, we couldn’t see them. An enemy ‘88’ still opens up now and then, and about 40 yards from us, a soldier stepped on a mine and up he went in the air, you still have to watch where you walk around here…German prisoners keep pouring into the cages, they certainly don’t look like supermen anymore.

German prisoners being searched on Utah Beach. June 8-9, 1944.

My ‘private’ foxhole is now four feet deep, and I have stuffed a cot in it, while over it I placed a pup tent. It’s not exactly home, but at least it keeps me dry. The Army boys are always shocked when we tell them we are Navy. We dress like them, eat with them, and who ever heard of sailors living in a foxhole? we’re supposed to be on a ship, sleeping in nice dry and clean bunks! I remember the 4th of July, when we had a grand display of flares with tracers and guns blasting all over the place, without an enemy in sight. I wonder what the German POWs must have thought about us lighting up the whole sky. On July 10, the 2d NBB left us for England…and we all expected to go too, one day or another. I was granted my first leave after approximately nine weeks spent on Utah Beach. Early September 1944, I received my papers, for transferring back to the United States, where I got back September 10, 1944. I managed to survive D-Day.

Find out more about Raymond L. Acosta’s D-Day experience here.

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[Text] ‘Some German Shells Started Whizzing By’ appeared first on Witnify.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oGbEDrH-P8A

The cast and crew of the “Top Gun” explain how a tricky mission inspired the opening scene of the movie and detail what it was like to film on an active aircraft carrier crewed by star-struck sailors. “Top Gun” premiered nationwide on May 16, 1986.

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Cast & Crew Talk Filming on an Aircraft Carrier appeared first on Witnify.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nT70CGh3xHU

Veteran Harry Boland describes the atmosphere in New York City on V-E Day and recalls the fancy dinner he was invited to in celebration of the German surrender.

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Harry Boland Remembers Celebrating V-E Day in New York appeared first on Witnify.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=biQJcgNrwhM

A resident of Abbottabad, Pakistan recalls what he saw when the U.S. military began their operation to capture or kill Osama bin Laden and explains what happened to locals ran toward the compound.

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The Attack on Osama bin Laden’s Hideout appeared first on Witnify.