Obituaries

June 4, 2006
General von Kielmansegg, a NATO Leader, Dies at 99

By DENNIS HEVESI

Gen. Johann-Adolf Count von Kielmansegg, a German panzer division
officer during World War II who became commander in chief of NATO forces
in Central Europe during the height of the cold war, died on May 26 in
Bonn. He was 99.

His son Hanno von Kielmansegg of Celle, Germany, confirmed the death.

General von Kielmansegg's posting to the highest military command of the
North Atlantic Treaty Organization in 1966, a time of constant tension
with the Soviet Union, was viewed as a benchmark in the rehabilitation
of West Germany from the infamy of the Nazi era.

In the NATO post, General von Kielmansegg took command of Western
Europe's first line of defense against the Communist bloc: 500,000
American, British and West German troops posted from Switzerland to the
Baltic.

The general, then 59, seemed an appropriate choice. He had been close to
the group of German officers who unsuccessfully tried to assassinate
Hitler in 1944. He had insisted that Germany's postwar military be
subject to civilian control. He had rebuked revisionist claims that the
Holocaust was an act of war.

General von Kielmansegg, scion of a long line of landowners, scholars,
Lutheran prelates and soldiers, was born on Dec. 30, 1906. He was 20
when he entered officer training. As a lieutenant, he first served in
the cavalry, as had his father.

By the start of World War II, he was commander of a panzer, or armored,
division. In 1940, he took part in the German invasion of France,
sweeping around the Maginot line's obsolete fortifications in eastern
France and rushing to the English Channel. After fighting on the Russian
front, he joined the General Staff in Berlin.

By then he was a friend of Col. Claus von Stauffenberg, leader of the
officers' plot to kill Hitler. The plan was to detonate a bomb in a
briefcase placed under a conference table near Hitler's seat. The
attempt, on July 20, 1944, failed when a Hitler aide moved the
briefcase. The bomb went off, but Hitler was only superficially wounded.

General von Kielmansegg, then a colonel, was jailed by the Gestapo and
kept in handcuffs for two months before being released for lack of
evidence. In 1965, he told a New York Times reporter that he had been
aware of the plot but not involved in its planning. "The plotters set a
good example to the army," he said, "because these men put their lives
on the line against the dictator."

Restored to tank duty, he fought the American Army in western Germany,
escaping after his unit was defeated but later surrendering to American
forces near Berlin.

After the war, Count von Kielmansegg worked for a German publishing
company. But in 1950 he was summoned by Theo Blank, Bonn's first postwar
defense minister, to help draft a plan to resurrect the German Army.
General von Kielmansegg, like other high-ranking officers, feared that
the officer corps could again become a state within a state; they
insisted on civilian control. "What you want is a democratic-thinking
army," he said.

>From 1955 to 1958, the general served as West Germany's military
representative to NATO. And on June 28, 1966, he became commander of
NATO forces in Central Europe, given the post after President Charles de
Gaulle of France withdrew French forces from the alliance. The choice
fell to Bonn because it had contributed the largest number of troops in
the sector.

Three years earlier, respect for General von Kielmansegg was bolstered
when he condemned the notion of a general amnesty for Nazi war
criminals, as a professor at Hamburg University had proposed in a widely
publicized article. The professor, Peter R. Hofstatter, wrote: "Hitler
and the National Socialist state had declared a quasi-state of war on
the Jews. The killings were executed by men in uniforms of a nation that
was in a state of war." The article prompted large protests. General von
Kielmansegg declared the professor's ideas "not reconcilable with the
honor of a soldier."

Besides his son Hanno, he is survived by another son, Peter of
Heidelberg; two daughters, Levine Lehnoff of Bonn and Ulrike Holle of
Essen; 12 grandchildren and 15 great-grandchildren. His wife of 67
years, Baroness Mechthild Dinklage, died in 2000.

This guy was a Flying Tiger!!!!! I didnt know that!

http://www.latimes.com/news/obituaries/la-me-older20jun20,1,6890651.story?ctrack=1&cset=true

Charles Herman Older, 88; L.A. County Judge Presided Over Manson Murder Trial
By Jocelyn Y. Stewart, Times Staff Writer
June 20, 2006

Los Angeles Superior Court Judge Charles Herman Older had been on the bench only a few years when the trial of accused mass murderer Charles Manson landed in his courtroom. By the time the 10-month, highly publicized trial ended, he was a veteran.

In the early 1970s the case was as bizarre as anything the city had seen until then: Manson and his LSD-dropping followers — mostly young women — told of committing gruesome murders in the name of starting a race war, showed up in court with shaved heads and Xs on their foreheads, and sometimes chanted nonsensically, in keeping with what Older would call Manson's "twisted philosophy."

"That's what made the murders possible: 'There is no wrong, and whatever we do is right,' " Older later told The Times.

Older, whom Manson once tried to attack with a pencil, and who sent a Times reporter to jail for contempt after the trial for failing to reveal a source, resulting in a change in the state Constitution, died Saturday. He was 88.

Older died of complications from a fall at his home in West Los Angeles, said longtime friend and former law partner Edward Cazier.

"He presided over the trial in a very firm, dignified way, and he tried to be fair to both sides, with no preexisting bias," said Vincent Bugliosi, the prosecutor in the Manson trial.

Older was born in Hanford, Calif., on Sept. 29, 1917. He later moved to Los Angeles with his family and graduated from Beverly Hills High School.

"He was a Renaissance man," Cazier said. "He was, in addition to his wartime and judicial exploits, an accomplished watercolorist and a very good golfer."

After graduating from UCLA in 1939, he joined the Marine Corps Reserve but later resigned his commission and joined the Flying Tigers, a covert group of American pilots recruited by Claire Lee Chennault to fly for the Chinese government in its war with Japan.

Chennault "was a hard-bitten character who knew what he was there for and how to beat the Japanese," Older recalled in a 1991 Times article. "I can't recall anybody who I would rather have as our group leader than Chennault."

According to his family, Older had more than 18 enemy kills, and was the third highest-scoring Flying Tiger ace. Later, Older served as a major in the Army Air Forces, fighting in the China-Burma Theater.

In 1943, Older married Catherine Day. The couple had three daughters: Catherine Lapat of Port Townsend, Wash.; Nancy Yarbrough of Henderson, Nev.; and Victoria Currie of La Jolla. Older's wife and daughters survive him.

In 1952, after serving in the Korean War, he received his law degree from USC and, in 1967, Gov. Ronald Reagan appointed Older to the bench.

Manson and three of his followers — Susan Atkins, Patricia Krenwinkel and Leslie Van Houten — were tried for the gory cult killings of actress Sharon Tate, Leno and Rosemary La Bianca and four others in 1969.

The trial was a daily parade of the bizarre, with Manson's followers maintaining their reverence for him and his so-called teachings and Manson continuing with his behavior.

One day during the trial, Manson asked Older for permission to examine a witness after his attorneys had declined to do so. When Older denied the request, Manson launched into a tirade. The judge warned Manson that he would have Manson removed if the outburst continued.

"I will have to have you removed if you don't stop. I have a little system of my own," Mansion replied, according to a 1970 Times article.

Then Manson leaped across the table, placing his foot on the table in an apparent effort to propel himself toward the bench. As deputies restrained him he shouted "someone should cut your head off."

Older was not harmed.

"It was an important case on a number of grounds, in that it involved a number of defendants with extremely aggressive defense council and, of course, a horrendous crime," said Cazier, "and there was the contest with the press over whether a reporter should be required to divulge his source for a news story."

That debate came to a head after the trial, when Older ordered Times reporter Bill Farr jailed for contempt. Farr had initially covered the trial for the Herald Examiner when he obtained and published an account of a witness who said the Manson family had planned to kill such entertainers as Frank Sinatra and Elizabeth Taylor.

Older had imposed a gag order on the case and sought the source of the leak. Farr cited the California "shield law," which he believed protected reporters from naming sources. When Farr later left journalism for a brief time to work as a spokesman for the district attorney's office, Older ordered him to reveal the source. Farr refused and served 46 days in jail. U.S. Supreme Court Justice William O. Douglas ordered Farr released while the U.S. 9th Circuit Court of Appeals considered the case.

"There is no need to attach any nobility to what I did," Farr told The Times. "All good reporters feel the same way about protecting news sources."

After his release Farr worked to establish the principle that a reporter had a right to protect sources. That battle led to the strengthening of the shield law. In 1980, a ballot measure was passed that made the shield law part of the state Constitution.

Years after the trial, Theo Wilson, a celebrated national trials reporter for the New York Daily News, wrote about the Manson trial, a trial "where everybody went a little bonkers — judge, jury, reporters, lawyers, deputies and spectators."

One daily spectator, Julie Shapiro, had attracted attention for coming to the courtroom in a see-through blouse without a bra. Older ordered a deputy to tell the woman not to come to court without a bra, and she obeyed. But later she angrily called the prosecutor a liar and deputies arrested her on Older's order, Wilson recalled.

"As Julie was being hustled out, obviously startled that she had created such an uproar, she plaintively asked reporters: 'What's the matter? Why can't I stay here? I'm wearing a brassiere,' " Wilson wrote in a 1994 Times article.

Throughout the trial, Older remained "very meticulous in his demeanor," Bugliosi said. "He was very formal and he measured his words very carefully."

Here's a link.. http://www.acepilots.com/cbi/older.html

SAN FRANCISCO - Photographer Joe Rosenthal, who won a Pulitzer Prize for his immortal image of six World War II servicemen raising an American flag over battle-scarred Iwo Jima, died Sunday. He was 94.
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Rosenthal died of natural causes at an assisted living facility in the San Francisco suburb of Novato, said his daughter, Anne Rosenthal.

"He was a good and honest man, he had real integrity," Anne Rosenthal said.

His photo, taken for The Associated Press on Feb. 23, 1945, became the model for the Iwo Jima Memorial near Arlington National Cemetery in Virginia. The memorial, dedicated in 1954 and known officially as the Marine Corps War Memorial, commemorates the Marines who died taking the Pacific island in World War II.

The photo was listed in 1999 at No. 68 on a New York University survey of 100 examples of the best journalism of the century.

The photo actually shows the second raising of the flag that day on Mount Suribachi on the Japanese island. The first flag had been deemed too small.

"What I see behind the photo is what it took to get up to those heights — the kind of devotion to their country that those young men had, and the sacrifices they made," Rosenthal once said. "I take some gratification in being a little part of what the U.S. stands for."

He liked to call himself "a guy who was up in the big leagues for a cup of coffee at one time."

The picture was an inspiration for Thomas E. Franklin of The Record of Bergen County, N.J., who took the photo of three firefighters raising a flag amid the ruins of the World Trade Center on Sept. 11, 2001. Franklin said he instantly saw the similarities with the Iwo Jima photo as he looked through his lens. Franklin's photo, distributed worldwide by the AP, was a finalist in 2002 for the Pulitzer Prize in breaking news photography.

The small island of Iwo Jima was a strategic piece of land 750 miles south of Tokyo, and the United States wanted it to support long-range B-29 bombers and a possible invasion of Japan.

On Feb. 19, 1945, 30,000 Marines landed on the southeast coast. Mount Suribachi, at 546 feet the highest point on the island, took four days for the troops to scale. In all, more than 6,800 U.S. servicemen died in the five-week battle for the island, and the 21,000-man Japanese defense force was virtually wiped out.

Ten years after the flag-raising, Rosenthal wrote that he almost didn't go up to the summit when he learned a flag had already been raised. He decided to up anyway, and found servicemen preparing to put up the second, larger flag.

"Out of the corner of my eye, I had seen the men start the flag up. I swung my camera and shot the scene. That is how the picture was taken, and when you take a picture like that, you don't come away saying you got a great shot. You don't know."

"Millions of Americans saw this picture five or six days before I did, and when I first heard about it, I had no idea what picture was meant."

He recalled that days later, when a colleague congratulated him on the picture, he thought he meant another, posed shot he had taken later that day, of Marines waving and cheering at the base of the flag.

He added that if he had posed the flag-raising picture, as some skeptics have suggested over the years, "I would, of course, have ruined it" by choosing fewer men and making sure their faces could be seen.

Standing near Rosenthal was Marine Sgt. Bill Genaust, the motion picture cameraman who filmed the same flag-raising. He was killed in combat just days later. A frame of Genaust's film is nearly identical to the Rosenthal photo.

The AP photo quickly became the subject of posters, war-bond drives and a U.S. postage stamp.

Rosenthal left the AP later in 1945 to join the San Francisco Chronicle, where he worked as a photographer for 35 years before retiring.

"He was short in stature but that was about it. He had a lot of nerve," said John O'Hara, a retired photographer who worked with Rosenthal at the San Francisco Chronicle.

O'Hara said Rosenthal took special pride in a certificate naming him an honorary Marine and remained spry and alert well into his 90s.

Rosenthal's famous picture kept him busy for years, and he continued to get requests for prints decades after the shutter clicked. He said he was always flattered by the tumult surrounding the shot, but added, "I'd rather just lie down and listen to a ball game."

"He was the best photographer," said friend and fellow Pulitzer Prize winning photographer Nick Ut of The Associated Press, who said he spoke with Rosenthal last week. "His picture no one forgets. People know the photo very well."

Ut's 1972 image of a little girl, naked and screaming in agony as she flees a napalm bomb attack during the Vietnam War, stoked anti-war sentiment. But Rosenthal's iconic photo helped fuel patriotism in the United States.

"People say to me, yours is so sad. You see his picture and it shows how Americans won the war," Ut said.

Rosenthal was born in 1911 in Washington, D.C.

He took up photography as a hobby. As the Depression got under way, Rosenthal moved to San Francisco, living with a brother until he found a job with the Newspaper Enterprise Association in 1930.

In 1932, Rosenthal joined the old San Francisco News as a combination reporter and photographer.

"They just told me to take this big box and point the end with the glass toward the subject and press the shutter and `We'll tell you what you did wrong,'" he said.

After a short time with ACME Newspictures in San Francisco in 1936, Rosenthal became San Francisco bureau chief of The New York Times-Wide World Photos.

Rosenthal began working for the AP in San Francisco when the news cooperative bought Wide World Photos. After a stint in the Merchant Marine, he returned to the AP and was sent to cover battle areas in 1944.

His first assignment was in New Guinea, and he also covered the invasion of Guam before making his famous photo on Iwo Jima.

In addition to his daughter, Rosenthal is survived by his ex-wife Lee Rosenthal, his son Joseph J. Rosenthal Jr., and their families.

Rest well, Joe, you have earned it.

From the Daily Telegraph (Filed: 16/08/2006)

Jack Edwards, who has died aged 88, survived the notorious Japanese prisoner-of-war camp and copper mine at Kinkaseki, Taiwan, to become a relentless campaigner for former servicemen and their widows in the Far East.

The greatest triumphs arising from his battles with the British government were the award of pensions to ethnic Chinese veterans and their widows in Hong Kong, agreed in 1991, and the granting of British passports to survivors' wives and widows in the run-up to the handover of Hong Kong to China in 1997. Increasingly exasperated by the government's refusal to give way over the latter issue, Edwards devised a series of elaborate stunts, finally mounting a daily vigil outside Government House in Hong Kong, at which he carried the first Union Jack to be hoisted over Victoria Peak after the Japanese surrender. Eventually he was summoned inside to meet John Major, the prime minister, who was in Hong Kong for final negotiations in early 1996. "Major placed his hand on my arm and said he had some good news," he later recalled. "I said, 'Thank goodness for that.'" Jack Edwards was born at Cardiff on May 24 1918.

Having joined the Royal Corps of Signals, he was a sergeant in Singapore when it fell to the Japanese in 1942. On being taken prisoner, his first job was removing from the beaches the corpses of captives killed by the Japanese at sea and thrown overboard.

Later that year he was transferred from Changi jail to the Japanese colony of Taiwan, then known as Formosa. Kinkaseki, in the mountains near Jiufen, never achieved the notoriety of the Burma railway, but is acknowledged to have been among the most brutal of the Japanese camps. Inmates worked the mine daily in tropical heat until they dropped or died in rock-falls. Those failing to meet the steep production targets were beaten viciously by the Japanese and Taiwanese guards. Malnutrition, beri-beri and dysentery claimed many lives. As the end of the war approached, the emaciated survivors were marched to a mountainside south of Taipei, where they were forced to build a new camp in the jungle. Those who made it to the Japanese surrender - 64 out of an original 526 (though some had been transferred elsewhere) - were "walking on the narrow edge between man and animal," Edwards wrote. "All of us looked ghastly, eyes sunken, mere skeletons, covered with rashes, sores, or cuts which would not heal. Others too far gone to save were blown-up with beri-beri, legs and testicles like balloons."

Forty years later he recorded his experiences in a book, Banzai, You Bastards! The title, he said, was not intended to be inflammatory, but referred to the only release from suffering, other than death, that the prisoners enjoyed: as the Americans advanced across south-east Asia, bombing raids would force the guards and camp commanders into shelters; the inmates would emerge from their huts and, when no one was looking, cheer on the bombers with borrowed war-cries. On one occasion Edwards was overheard and beaten with bamboo rods.

The book was translated and published in Japan (where Edwards was, in his later years, to make many friends) under the more conciliatory title Drop Dead, Jap! While a PoW Edwards had discovered that a tunnel built into a nearby hillside was to be the prisoners' tomb: orders had been given that, should the Americans land in Taiwan, the PoWs were to be taken there and shot. After the war he returned to Kinkaseki with war crimes investigators, and gave evidence at the subsequent trial in Tokyo.

Edwards spent a year recuperating in London, then returned to south Wales, where he worked in local government; but he was unable to settle, and in 1963 took up a post in the housing department of the Hong Kong administration. There he became active in the Royal British Legion and the Hong Kong Ex-Servicemen's Association.

Among the successful campaigns which he supported were the effort by former "comfort women" to force the Japanese government to admit that their enslavement into prostitution was an official policy, not just a by-product of war; and, in 1986, the granting of British passports to Hong Kong ex-servicemen. He was greatly outraged to discover that ethnic Chinese servicemen, and their widows, were not entitled to war pensions, unlike the British alongside whom they had fought. "When I first learned this, I assumed it must have been a mistake, an oversight," he said later. "When I wrote to the Ministry of Defence and found it was policy, I felt deeply ashamed to be British, though I had always been a patriot."

On having this wrong rectified in 1991, Edwards turned his attention to winning passports for ex-servicemen's wives and widows, whom the British government had decided did not qualify to be part of the scheme which gave citizenship to 50,000 Hong Kong residents before the handover. Edwards argued that a clause offering 6,300 passports in recognition of "special services to the Crown" could be used for the women, but he was repeatedly rebuffed. As well as writing letters to the administration and government, he raised the issue with visiting politicians and eventually won the support of the last governor, Chris Patten. At one point, he ambushed John Major while the prime minister was on an official visit to Tokyo.

In 1995, at the parade down the Mall commemorating the 50th anniversary of VJ Day, he carried a protest banner. By the time of Major's change of heart, Edwards had come to be seen even by some sympathisers as a "difficult" character, with his daily Union Jack vigil outside Government House. But in the wake of the decision, beneficiaries of his campaigns wrote to the South China Morning Post demanding Edwards be given a knighthood.

In the end, he was appointed OBE in the Birthday Honours' List of 1997, to add to his earlier MBE.

Edwards's first marriage did not survive the war. In the 1970s he met Polly Tam So-lan, a former member of a Chinese People's Liberation Army dance troupe. She and Edwards married in 1990, and lived in a flat in Sha Tin new town. Edwards, who spoke fluent Cantonese, insisted on hanging his Union Jack from his window on Remembrance Day. The couple shared a love of dancing, which they practised in their small living-room to recordings of Taiwanese songs.

Jack Edwards, who died on Sunday, is survived by his wife and her daughter by her first marriage.

Now this guy has "balls".

WWII hero Gabaldon dies - Yahoo! News

MIAMI - Guy Gabaldon, who as an 18-year-old Marine private single-handedly persuaded more than 1,000 Japanese soldiers to surrender in the World War II battle for Saipan, has died. He was 80.

Gabaldon died of a heart attack Thursday at his home in Old Town, his son, Tech. Sgt. Jeffrey Hunter Gabaldon, said Monday.

Using an elementary knowledge of Japanese, bribes of cigarettes and candy, and trickery with tales of encampments surrounded by American troops, Gabaldon was able to persuade soldiers to abandon their posts and surrender. The scheme was so brazen — and so amazingly successful — it won the young Marine the Navy Cross, and fame when his story was told on television's "This Is Your Life" and the 1960 movie "Hell to Eternity."

"My plan, as impossible as it seemed, was to get near a Japanese emplacement, bunker, or cave, and tell them that I had a bunch of Marines with me and we were ready to kill them if they did not surrender," he wrote in his 1990 memoir "Saipan: Suicide Island."

"I promised that they would be treated with dignity, and that we would make sure that they were taken back to Japan after the war," he wrote.

The 5-foot-4-inch Gabaldon used piecemeal Japanese he picked up from a childhood friend to earn the trust of the enemy, who believed his story of hundreds of looming troops. In a single day in July 1944, Gabaldon was said to have gotten about 800 Japanese soldiers to follow him back to the American camp.

His exploits earned him the nickname the Pied Piper of Saipan.

The private acknowledged his plan was foolish and, had it not been pulled off, could have resulted in a court-martial. His family suspected his initial disobedience — though they say officers later approved — might have kept him from receiving the Medal of Honor.

"My actions prove that God takes care of idiots," he wrote.

Born March 22, 1926, in Los Angeles, Gabaldon signed up for the service on his 17th birthday and arrived on Saipan on D-Day. His military career was cut short after two-and-a-half years by injuries from machine gun fire. He spent the years that followed running a variety of businesses, including a furniture store, a fishing operation and an import-export firm, and the unsuccessful pursuit of a California congressional seat in 1964.

Services for Gabaldon were to be held Tuesday in Cross City, Fla.

Yep what a man, I noticed he named his son after the actor who played him in the movie "Hell to Eternity".

Ex-nurse thought to be Minnesota's oldest veteran dies

Johanna Berlin was buried Monday near her country church in southwestern Minnesota, just down the road from the farm her parents had built in Heron Lake Township nearly a century earlier.

The rural Lakefield woman's life had been full of independence and moxie. She possessed the tender heart of a devoted Army nurse and was believed to be the oldest war veteran in Minnesota.

Berlin died Thursday at the Royal C. Johnson Veterans Hospital in Sioux Falls, S.D. She was 108.

"Her faith in God was incredible, and it inspired people," said Ed Hansen, a Lakefield funeral director. "Here she was in her 100s, and she was still living in her home. Her attitude in life was fantastic. She always had a smile on her face."

Born in 1898 in Berlin, Germany, Johanna was 13 when she left in 1911 with her parents and younger sister. The family moved to farmland in Jackson County.

Johanna Berlin never married, and she was working as a factory clerk in Sheboygan, Wis., with 10 years under her belt when the Depression wiped out her job.

Berlin took her savings and attended nursing school at Chicago Hospital. She enlisted in the Army in 1943.

"At that point in our country's history, they needed nurses," said nephew Mike Hasara of rural Lakefield.

At age 45, Berlin became an Army nurse, traveling the world to take care of shell-shocked soldiers and Japanese prisoners during World War II and for a few years after. Her job was to help those who had become so battle-fatigued and full of fear that they had trouble functioning. She helped them work through what is now known as post-traumatic stress disorder.

She had gone into training at Camp Pickett in central Virginia in 1943 and later went to Yuma, Ariz., for desert training. Berlin was stationed in Hawaii, the Philippines, Iwo Jima, Johnson Island in the Pacific and Tokyo.

She entered the Army as a second lieutenant and was discharged as a captain.

She returned to Lakefield and became an anesthetic nurse after further training at the University of Minnesota.

Berlin became active in St. Peter Lutheran Church and was a lifelong member of Swen-Rasmussen American Legion and Hansen-Ward VFW in Lakefield.

She was named an honorary commander of the American Legion several years ago.

She never had a driver's license, but that didn't stop her, from learning all of the traffic laws and enforcing them from the back seat, Hasara said.

She never stopped doting on people and animals, her relatives said, from her grandnieces to the goats she bottle-fed after she went to live with her relatives on the Lakefield farm.

Her grandniece MaryAnn Hasara and her husband had welcomed Berlin into their home to live when she was 106.

"You'd come in from the barn, and there she'd be, rocking a goat, having it covered up in her afghan," Mike Hasara said.

"Nobody should be sorry or grieving that Johann died," Mike Hasara said at her wake Sunday night. "She lived a good life. ... She was a nice, good-hearted woman."

Frantisek Fajtl

PRAGUE, Czech Republic (AP) _ Czech fighter ace Gen. Frantisek Fajtl, who fought in the French and British air forces against Nazi Germany in World War II, died Wednesday, an official said. He was 94.

He died in Prague's military hospital, said Defense Ministry spokesman Andrej Cirtek.

Fajtl fled Nazi-occupied Czechoslovakia in 1939 and joined France's air force. After France capitulated, he fled to Britain to join the Royal Air Force.

His plane was shot down over northern France in May 1942, but Fajtl escaped to Spain, where he was captured and arrested. He was released after London intervened and was returned to Britain.

He left the RAF in 1944 to help build the Czechoslovak fighter squadron in the Soviet Union.

After returning home, Fajtl was arrested as an enemy of state by the Communist regime in 1950, and spent 17 months in prison. After his release, he was given only menial jobs.

His reputation was fully rehabilitated after the 1989 collapse of the communist regime, and in 2004, he was awarded the highest Czech honor _ the White Lion Order.

Found this in today's paper. I would certainly call this guy a patriot!

Herbert Schaeffer Sieler
1921 - 2006

Our beloved dad, Herbert Schaeffer Sieler, 84, died on Oct. 11, 2006, at St. John's Regional Medical Center after a courageous battle with lung cancer. As honorably and gracefully as he moved through his life, so he did as he entered heaven.

Our dad was born in Mound City, S.D., on Dec. 16, 1921, to Henry and Christina Sieler, who had emigrated to the United States from Russia. His family was one of the original homesteaders and he grew up on this Midwestern farm in a sod and wooden house with six brothers and seven sisters.

Dad was an ordinary and yet an extraordinary human being, a person who offered some of his life's most vital years in the service of his country and who sacrificed his ambitions so others would not have to sacrifice theirs.

His 26 years of meritorious service reflected great credit upon himself, the Air Defense Command and the United States Air Force, from which he retired with the rank of chief master sergeant. He was a veteran of the Korean War, World War II and Vietnam. Dad loved his country and he was a great patriot.

After retiring, he once again selflessly served his country for an additional 22 years in the United States Navy Civil Service, Point Mugu. He was active in the American Legion Post No. 741, Veterans of Foreign Wars Post No. 11424, Moose Lodge No. 561, NARFE (National Association of Retired Federal Employee), AFSA Chapter No. 1311 (Air Force Sergeants Association) and the Camarillo Fishing Club.

He is survived by his two daughters, Sandra Melton (husband John) and Lynn Smiley (husband Jack); three grandchildren, Lauren, Matthew and Joshua, whom he dearly loved; our mom, Viola Sieler; brother Alvin; sister Frieda; and partner, Virginia Stiles. Our dad also leaves behind many, many extended family members and friends who loved him dearly him dearly and who will miss him very, very much.

We now say goodbye to the finest man we have ever known. He has always been there whenever we needed him. He never once hesitated to come when asked. He was the finest example and teacher of integrity, honesty, hard work, and perseverance that one could ever know. He always gave unselfishly, kindly, and with his whole heart to all who passed through his life, if even for a brief moment. He had a great sense of humor and a positive attitude that inspired everyone he met. He is unequaled in our eyes.

It has and always will be our honor to be called his daughters. Goodbye, Dad, we love you.

For those who wish, memorial contributions may be made in Herbert S. Sieler's name to the Catherine Collins Memorial Fund to provide scholarship for nursing students, c/O Ventura College Foundation, 4667 Telegraph Road, Ventura, CA 93003; or the Boy Scouts of American, c/O Ventura County Council, Boy Scouts of American Endowment Fund, 509 E. Daily Drive, Camarillo, CA 93010.

The family expresses its deepest thanks to Dr. Jaz Kaur, Dr. Raj Bhatia, Dr. Richard Rothchild, Dr. Edward Morales, and Dr. Glenn Abergel who went far beyond what medical care could offer and lovingly gave with their whole selves. We also want to thank the many nurses and respiratory therapists on 2 South and in the intensive care unit at St. John's Regional Medical Center, who were always there for our dad and for us. In addition, we especially want to thank the student nurses from Ventura College, who cared for Dad with their loving hands but even more so with their hearts. You have left footprints on our hearts forever.

A memorial service celebrating our dad's life will be held at 4 p.m. Monday, Oct. 16, at Pierce Bros. Griffin Memorial Chapel in Camarillo with interment at the Black Hills National Cemetery in Sturgis, S.D.

Arrangements are under the care of Pierce Bros. Griffin Mortuary 1075 E. Daily Drive, Camarillo; phone 1-805-482-2711.

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Earthquake McGoon' finally flying home
Remains of legendary pilot killed 52 years ago being returned to family


Updated: 2:41 p.m. MT Oct 19, 2006
NEW YORK - More than half a century after he died in the flaming crash of a CIA-owned cargo plane and became one of the first two Americans to die in combat in Vietnam, a legendary soldier of fortune known as "Earthquake McGoon" is finally coming home.

The skeletal remains of James B. McGovern Jr., discovered in an unmarked grave in remote northern Laos in 2002, were positively identified on Sept. 11 by laboratory experts at the U.S. military's Joint POW/MIA Accounting Command in Hawaii.

They will be flown back to the mainland next week for a military funeral in New Jersey on Oct. 28, said McGovern's nephew, James McGovern III, of Forked River, N.J.

"Bottom line, it's closure for my family and a great feeling," McGovern said.

Larger than life
Six feet and 260 pounds — huge for a fighter pilot — McGovern carved out a flying career during and after World War II that made him a legend in Asia. An American saloon owner in China dubbed him "Earthquake McGoon," after a hulking hillbilly character in the comic strip "Li'l Abner."

He died on May 6, 1954, when his C-119 Flying Boxcar cargo plane was hit by ground fire while parachuting a howitzer to the besieged French garrison at Dien Bien Phu. "Looks like this is it, son," McGovern radioed another pilot as his crippled plane staggered 75 miles into Laos, where it cartwheeled into a hillside.

Killed along with "McGoon," 31, were his co-pilot, Wallace Buford, 28, and a French crew chief. Two cargo handlers, a Frenchman and a Thai, were thrown clear and survived.

Ho Chi Minh's communist forces captured Dien Bien Phu the next day, ending a 57-day siege that had captured the world's attention. It signaled the end of French colonial power in Indochina, and helped set the stage for the 15-year "American war" that ended with the fall of the U.S.-backed South Vietnamese government in 1975.

Although civilians, the swashbuckling McGovern and Buford, an ex-World War II bomber pilot, were the first Americans to die in combat in the Asian country where war would later take nearly 60,000 American and more than a million Vietnamese lives.

Flying for spooks
It was no mystery in 1954 that the United States was supporting colonial France against Vietnam's communist-led rebellion, and "McGoon" was already famous for his exploits when he was killed.

The only secret was that his employer, a charter airline called Civil Air Transport, or CAT, "was owned by the CIA — lock, stock and barrel," Felix Smith, a retired CAT pilot and McGovern friend, said in an interview in 2002. (It was not until the 1990s that the CIA-CAT connection was finally declassified.)

The CIA is arranging for James McGovern III to fly to Hickam Air Force Base near Honolulu and escort his uncle's remains home, he said.

The CIA did not immediately return a call for comment.

Dr. Thomas Holland, director of JPAC's Central Identification Laboratory, said McGovern was the only the second person ever identified through "nuclear" DNA from a male relative — a particularly difficult task with bones that are decades old. The first was another Southeast Asia casualty identified recently. Most cases rely on mitochondrial DNA, from female relatives.

Heroics began in WWII
McGovern first went to China in 1944, as a fighter pilot in the 14th Air Force's "Tiger Shark" squadron, descended from the famous Flying Tigers. According to Smith, he was credited with shooting down four Japanese Zero fighter planes and destroying five on the ground.

At war's end in 1945, McGovern signed on with CAT, which was under contract to Chiang Kai-Shek's Chinese Nationalist regime, then fighting a civil war against Mao Zedong's communists.

Captured by communist troops after a forced landing, "McGoon" was freed six months later. Colleagues joked that his captors simply got tired of feeding him.