On August 6th and 9th of 1945, the United States dropped atomic bombs over the Japanese cities of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, causing significant death and destruction in both areas. To this day, the bombings remain history's only acts of nuclear warfare.

Many things are known about the sequence of events leading up to the dropping of the bombs, known as "Little Boy" and "Fat Man," which were loaded onto airplanes on the North Field airbase on Tinian Island, part of the Northern Mariana Islands to the south of Japan.

Until recently, though, few photographs were available documenting the final preparations before the bombings. But newly declassified pictures shed additional light on the hours leading up to the nuclear attacks, showing how and where the bombs were loaded.

These chilling photos show us what it was like to prepare for one of the most important moments in modern history.

(First seen on AlternativeWars.com)

Soldiers check the casings on the "Fat Man" atomic bomb. Multiple test bombs were created on Tinian Island. All were roughly identical to an operational bomb, even though they lacked the necessary equipment to detonate.

On the left, geophysicist and Manhattan Project participant Francis Birch marks the bomb unit that would become "Little Boy" while Norman Ramsey, who would later win the Nobel Prize in Physics, looks on.

A technician applies sealant and putty to the crevices of "Fat Man," a final preparation to make sure the environment inside the bomb would be stable enough to create a full impact once it detonated.

In July 1944, 19-year-old Tom Scardino was wounded twice in one day fighting the Germans in Normandy. Seventy years later, he still finds it too painful to talk about some of the things he saw during his month in combat, which is why even his immediate family members know almost nothing about his experience during one of the pivotal events of the deadliest conflict in history.

At 89 years old, Scardino has agreed to share his story for the first time in an emotional interview with Business Insider.  

When the Japanese bombed Pearl Harbor on December 7, 1941, a 16-year-old Scardino was too young to enlist with the older boys in his neighborhood in Hoboken, New Jersey.

“A couple of guys joined the Marines right away,” Scardino recalled. “We were happy for them. This was ’42, and in the latter part, at the end of the year, we got word that both got killed in Guadalcanal.”

Their deaths made him more eager to join up, but his father refused to sign papers that would have allowed him to volunteer at 17 years old. A tailor by trade, he was desperate to keep his son home to help with his business. When Scardino was drafted at 18, his father convinced an optometrist to write a note to draft officials falsely claiming that Scardino, who wore glasses, was going blind.

He gave Scardino the note in an envelope to deliver, but Scardino had other plans.

“When I passed [the draft review] I came home to my sister and father. I said, ‘I’m 1A, I gotta go,’” Scardino recalled, referring to a classification term meaning that a draftee is available immediately for military service. “[My father said,] ‘What do you mean you’re 1A? Didn’t you show them the envelope? I said, ‘Yeah, but the officer said don’t worry about it, if he’s blind we’ll put him in the front.’ I made that up. I was gung ho. I wanted to go.”

Assigned to the U.S. Army’s 90th Infantry Division, 359th Infantry Regiment, Scardino arrived in Britain on March 23, 1944, after a 22-day voyage across the Atlantic. For two months, his unit continued training with frequent marches and maneuvers — while wondering where and when they'd land in France to wrest the continent out of German hands.

D-Day

On June 1, 1944, the unit transferred to a ship that was oppressively hot and cramped.

“We were in a goddamn sardine can,” he recalled. They were supposed to embark on their mission June 5, but bad weather prolonged the invasion until the following morning.

By then, Scardino and his comrades were willing to do anything to get out of the close confines of the crowded ship they’d been stationed on for six days, even if it meant being thrown into battle.

“We were really hopped up and glad to go,” he said. “There was no second thoughts.”

The ship stopped a short distance from the shore of Normandy, where the soldiers, seasick from the rough current in the channel, climbed down ropes to small landing craft that would deliver them to the beaches for the assault.

It was a five to seven-minute ride in the landing craft to Utah Beach, where the first waves of troops with the 4th Infantry Division had already landed.

Scardino expected that  some of the 42 soldiers in his landing craft would become casualties that morning.

“No one talked, not a word, but you used your eyes,” Scardino explained of that short trip to the beach. “A couple times I stared at a guy and this is my thought as I’m looking: ‘Is it you or is it me?’”

Scardino's first sergeant ordered the soldiers in his landing craft to run as fast as they could toward the top of a hill at the end of the beach. He urged them not to stop for any reason, not even to assist a fallen comrade. Their rifles were no match for the German machine gun emplacements firing down at the beach.

“My first thought was, ‘Tommy, you’re not coming back, but you’re going to go down fighting,’” Scardino said. “I just didn’t want to show I was scared, but I was.”

When the craft landed, Scardino ran through ankle-deep water onto the sand as fast as he could, dashing the 50-75 yards across the beach. He was scrawny and only 140 pounds, yet lugged an eight-pound rifle and 90 pounds of equipment on his back.

The German guns were firing from a rise above the beach. They were shrouded in thick smoke, and Scardino saw some Americans fall, including one man he trained with who got struck in the head. But Scardino made it safely to a ditch along a road that provided him temporary cover.

“I still have the smell in my nose," Scardino said. "Of death – the flesh, the blood.”

One of the first soldiers to join Scardino was a paratrooper from the 101st Airborne Division, who jumped in the ditch from the inland direction after parachuting behind enemy lines hours earlier. Scardino's first sergeant also joined him there, in addition to his best friend since basic training, a street-smart 18-year-old from Chicago named Donald.

They reorganized and then crossed a marshy area, where they saw more carnage. “The guys that went before us, there were Germans all over that goddamn creek, on the roads. They [the Americans] all were killed.”

Hedgerows

After that, a “mixed bag” of infantry soldiers, paratroopers, and even armed farmers advanced across flooded fields and an endless succession of six-foot high hedgerows, lines of dense shrubs and trees dividing various farmers’ properties. 

Out of the 42 men in his outfit who had come ashore with him, 14 were killed or wounded by the afternoon of June 6th, according to Scardino.

Because the hedgerows were sharp with thorns, the soldiers had to move single-file through small openings. 

"Now, if the Germans were on the other side, they would gun you down, but we used to send guys out to see if it was clear," Scardino recalled. "The scouts used to go out and say, 'That row is clear.' Okay, we moved up another hedgerow.”

For roughly 15 days, the unit spent the majority of its time in hedgerows, guarding the perimeters in shifts at night while the others slept. Scardino stuck close to his friend Donald, who grew so frustrated from German shelling that he threw away his shovel rather than use it to dig foxholes.

“He said, ‘I don’t need this. I’m not going to dig my grave,’” Scardino recalled.

The only respite from the hedgerows came when the soldiers reached occasional villages, where they would spend a day or two clearing buildings of German snipers before moving onward.

“This is what was hurting: You didn’t stop for a minute," Scardino said. "You didn’t take a deep breath and say, 'OK.' You figured any minute you're going to get killed. That was our thought. Donny used to say, 'Keep going Scar, keep going.'”

But Donald was killed 10 days after D-Day. “When I heard he got it I cried,” Scardino said. “Now I’m pissed off and then the only one that calmed me down was the first sergeant. He said, 'Yankee, you have to wipe it off. It was not your turn, it was his turn.' But I didn't believe that. I was mad.”

Around June 22 the unit reached a village that was more stubbornly defended by the Germans than all the rest. "It was like a headquarters to them or something," Scardino said. The Americans became pinned down for so long that they were holding up the supply lines behind them and running low on ammunition. They finally cleared the town by fighting house-to-house.

This part of his story Scardino will always keep to himself; he choked up immediately upon mentioning the battle and couldn't continue.

“That hurts so bad when I think about it,” he said. “How do you kill a man you never knew?"

Scardino declined to say anything more about this. “This is why I never told anybody or my kids," he added. "I keep seeing that guy, his whole face all the time.

“I’ve never confessed that as long as I’ve lived, and I lived with it,” he finally said after a long pause, before agreeing to skip to later parts of his story.

St. Lo

Scardino's unit had two men assigned to a Browning Automatic Rifle (BAR) light machine gun, one to operate it and another soldier to carry the ammunition. After the BAR gunner was killed in a firefight, the ammunition man, who had been separated from his own division since D-Day, didn’t pick up the BAR.

Seeing the need for someone to give covering fire from a pile of stones where the BAR gunner had fallen, Scardino abandoned his rifle and took up the light machine gun himself. From then on, he served as the unit’s BAR gunner.

On July 3, the unit advanced on the Normandy town of St. Lo, a key objective for the Allies on their way to central France.

The Germans at St. Lo relied on a notoriously effective 88-millimeter artillery gun, a class of weapon called "eighty-eights" by the Americans who had gotten used to its distinct sounds since D-Day. "When that came, man you hit that ground fast,” Scardino said. 

“It was worse than D-Day,” he said of St. Lo. “I mean, on D-Day we were worrying about the big bunkers and all that stuff. Now you’re fighting tanks, you’re fighting artillery, the eighty-eights were coming in and they were deadly."

Scardino remembers it as a rainy day, filled with the sound of the eighty-eights. “It's always raining in France,” Scardino recalled.

He was running through the grass to get into position with his BAR when a German bullet struck his hand.

A medic bandaged him up in a farmhouse alongside other wounded Americans. But after an enemy counterattack left the farmhouse behind enemy lines, a French civilian evacuated the walking wounded to another building, where Scardino and six other Americans crowded into a hiding space in a basement filled with cognac.

From the hiding spot, Scardino could hear the distinctive sound of the German eighty-eights impacting nearby. The last thing he remembers is the house caving in from a direct hit and someone cutting away at his pants, which were then on fire.

“I thought I was gone. That’s the day I always visualize in my mind – that burning feeling on my legs and all,” he said.

Scardino doesn’t remember being conscious again until the following morning, when he woke up naked on a stretcher atop a jeep, with a blanket shielding him from the rain. Another wounded man lay on a stretcher next to him.

The next thing he remembers is waking in a hospital with his right arm and right leg covered in a cast. Shrapnel from the German eighty-eight round had embedded in both limbs and shattered bone. “I said, ‘Okay, I know I’m going home,’” Scardino recalled of his first thoughts. “But the other part, the infuriating part, was the fact that I’m a cripple.”

Home

But Scardino was wrong; he made a full recovery. Although his hopes of playing major league baseball were gone, doctors installed metal in his arm that allowed him to bend his elbow enough to become a professional bowler later in life. 

While stationed at Fort Meade, Maryland late in the war, Scardino befriended a sergeant named Fred who had a very different reason for leaving France after D-Day.

When military officials learned that two of Fred's brothers had been killed in action and a third was a prisoner of war, they ordered him to return to England for a period of rest. After his arrival, they broke the news and told him he’d never go back to the front.

Fred also had a sister named Flora, who he introduced to Scardino. The trio went to dances together, sparking a relationship that culminated in Scardino's marriage to Flora.

After he was discharged from the army in January 1946, he went back to work as a tailor with his father. But he later regretted that he didn’t stay in the army.

The Scardinos had six children and settled in Mineola, Long Island. He still doesn’t know the fate of the six Americans he hid with in St. Lo when the eighty-eight round struck.

“Everything was so fast. It was 1, 2, 3,” he recalled of that moment 70 years ago. He never kept in touch with any of his comrades.

In 2009, Scardino was walking in an airport in Italy on vacation when he saw a face he instantly recognized.

He stopped. I stopped. And I just walked over to him," Scardino said of that encounter. "I said, 'Is your name Murdott? He said, 'Yeah, are you the kid from New York? I said, 'Yeah.' I grabbed him. I thought he was dead. I thought they blew his head off at the beach. That morning when I was running up I turned my head, he was to my left. I saw the helmet fly off.

Murdott explained that a bullet had indeed struck him at Utah Beach, but his helmet somehow saved his life.

Nowadays, Scardino feels proud that he participated in D-Day. “I truthfully feel very honored to know that I was part of history,” he said.

But when a local school principal recently introduced him as a war hero to a gathering of students, Scardino felt embarrassed.

"This is their generation, that's it. This is their life. I don't know if they care or not."

SEE ALSO: A young army officer copes with the brutal opening days of Iraq's insurgency

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Since 1979, at least 38 of 66 suspected Nazi war criminals and SS guards forced out of the United States collected millions of dollars in American Social Security payments, an Associated Press investigation has found.

Here are brief profiles of seven of them:

Martin Hartmann

Hartmann is one of the most recent suspects to leave the US.

He volunteered for the SS in 1943 and was assigned to one of the Death's Head battalions. Those were the units that ran the Third Reich's system of death and concentration camps.

He served as a guard at the Sachsenhausen concentration camp outside Berlin.

He was stripped of his U.S. citizenship in 2007 after reaching an agreement with the Justice Department. In the agreement, he admitted to his Nazi past even though records obtained by the AP showed he disclosed his SS service to American authorities before he entered the United States.

Hartmann, 95, lives in Berlin.

Jakob Denzinger

In 1942, at age 18, Denzinger began serving in a Death's Head unit. He was posted at several camps, including the Auschwitz death camp complex in occupied Poland.

He settled in Ohio after the war and became a successful plastics industry executive.

Years later, the Justice Department uncovered his past.

In 1989, as US prosecutors prepared their case to strip Denzinger of his citizenship, he fled to Germany. He later moved to Croatia.

Denzinger, 90, refused to discuss his past with an AP reporter. "I'm not interested," he said.

Martin Bartesch

Bartesch was working as an apartment building janitor when US authorities uncovered incriminating evidence: As a guard at the Mauthausen concentration camp in Austria, Bartesch had shot and killed a French Jew.

Bartesch feared "financial ruin," according to his family, who denied he had done anything wrong at Mauthausen. He signed an agreement to leave the US.

He traveled to Austria in 1987 on a valid passport. Two days after landing, under the terms of the deal, his US citizenship was revoked.

The US refused the Austrian government's demands to take him back. The attorney general at the time, Edwin Meese, eventually apologized to Austria.

Arthur Rudolph

Rudolph, one of the Germany's most prominent rocket scientists, was brought to the US after World War II because of his technical skills.

But Rudolph signed a settlement agreement with the US in 1983 following an investigation into his use of slave laborers at a Nazi rocket factory.

Rudolph traveled on his US passport to West Germany in 1984. Then he went to the US General Consulate in Hamburg and renounced his citizenship.

The West German government protested, but Rudolph remained there.

He was eventually granted German citizenship and collected US Social Security benefits until his death in 1996.

John Avdzej

The Nazis installed Avdzej as a regional mayor in occupied Belorussia, where he aided the Germans in the arrest and execution of thousands of Jews.

When he immigrated to the US, Avdzej said he'd been a farmer and tradesman in Poland during the war.

But when the Justice Department uncovered evidence about his role as a Nazi collaborator, Avdzej agreed to leave and renounce his US citizenship.

Embedded in the agreement was a provision that stated "there is no basis under US law for limiting in any way Avdzej's receipt of Social Security benefits."

Avdzej arrived in West Germany in 1984. The West German government protested, but he stayed. He died in 1998 at 93.

Wasyl Lytwyn

Lytwyn served in a Nazi SS unit that took part in the destruction of the Warsaw Ghetto in 1943 — an assault that killed as many as 13,000 Jews.

But when he immigrated to the US in 1957, he denied any affiliation with the SS.

He found work as a shipping clerk in Chicago.

Lytwyn agreed to leave the United States in 1995 after he admitted that he concealed his SS service. The settlement agreement stated his Social Security benefits would not be affected.

Lytwyn, 93, is believed to living in Ukraine.

Peter Mueller

Peter Mueller was born in Yugoslavia but his service as a Nazi SS guard won him German citizenship.

Mueller immigrated to the US in 1956 and settled in Skokie, Illinois.

Then the Justice Department caught up with him.

Mueller admitted he served as an SS guard in the Natzweiller concentration camp in France, watching over prisoners who worked in a stone quarry and in an underground mine.

He voluntarily returned to Germany 1994. Mueller, 90, lives in a nursing home in Worms, Germany, according to family members.

___

Source: Investigative case files, court and government records, historical documents, and AP research and interviews.

SEE ALSO: Dozens of former Nazis collected millions in Social Security payments

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A team of researchers from the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) have discovered a pair of historically significant vessels sunk during World War II's Battle of the Atlantic off of the coast of North Carolina. 

The two vessels are the German U-boat 576 and the freighter Bluefields. The ships, lost for more than 70 years, have been discovered approximately 30 miles off of the North Carolina coast in an area known as the Graveyard of the Atlantic. 

The discovery of U-576 and Bluefields draws attention to the scope of the Battle of the Atlantic, which took place between the Allies and the Axis powers across the entire width of the ocean's northern half. 

“Most people associate the Battle of the Atlantic with the cold, icy waters of the North Atlantic,” David Alberg, superintendent of NOAA’s Monitor National Marine Sanctuary, said in a press release. “But few people realize how close the war actually came to America’s shores. As we learn more about the underwater battlefield, Bluefields and U-576 will provide additional insight into a relatively little-known chapter in American history.”

The sinking of U-576 and Bluefields occurred minutes apart on July 15, 1942.

On that day, a group of 19 merchant ships were being escorted by the US Navy and Coast Guard from Norfolk, Virginia to Key West, Florida to deliver cargo for the war effort. It was off the coast of Cape Hatteras that U-576 attacked the convoy.

During the ensuing chaos, U-576 sank the Bluefields and was able to severely damage two other vessels.

However, the Nazi submarine was itself sunk during an aerial bombardment from a US Navy Kingfisher aircraft that provided support to the convoy, and a barrage from the deck guns of the merchant ship Unicoi. 

The skirmish resulted in the death of all 45 members of the submarine crew along with our Allied casualties. 

NOAA hopes that the discovery of the vessels will provide greater context and information for historians studying World War II. The Battle of the Atlantic was the single longest operation of the war, with U-boats consistently approaching US shores. But much of its history remains obscure due to the paucity of archaeological records and the difficulty of reaching or even locating crucial wrecks. 

The discovery has further significance since the site is protected under international law as a war grave for the German sailors. Because of this, the remains of U-576 will remain undisturbed at the bottom of the ocean.  

SEE ALSO: This chart shows the astounding devastation of World War II

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The Swedish military is currently hunting what it has described as a mysterious foreign vessel that is violating the country's territorial waters. Swedish authorities aren't sure what they're looking for— or even how many vessels they're looking for. Confirmed details are scarce, but it's at least possible they're looking for a Russian submarine, a possibility that has led Swedish military planners to consider using "armed force" to coerce the vessel into surfacing.

The Swedes want to pull off one of the most difficult naval maneuvers of all: capturing a submarine. This is so difficult the CIA spent six years trying to raise a wrecked Soviet sub from the ocean floor in the late 1960s and early 1970s — which is a less outlandish endeavor than trying to bring in a live, functioning one.

No Soviet or Russian submarine has ever been captured. A Japanese midget submarine was taken after running aground duirng the Pearl Harbor raid during World War Two. But only one Axis sub was actually boarded on the high seas during the war, and its story demonstrates the near impossibility of taking an enemy vessel whole.

U-505 sits in Chicago's Museum of Science and Industry, with 70-year-old bullet holes tracing the outline of a sloping chrome-colored hull. Visitors can tour its cramped interior with guides who indicate where a series of self-destruct charges were hidden to be used in the the unthinkable and nearly unprecedented event of an enemy boarding. After a top-secret military and intelligence effort spanning several months, the entire mission was in danger even after American sailors set foot on the defeated U-505 150 miles off the coast of West Africa on June 4, 1944.

Capturing a submarine is remarkably difficult. A dedicated captain will sink his vessel rather than let it fall into enemy hands, and a hull breach or badly placed depth charge could wreck the ship before it is even in a position to be boarded. Here's how it was done in the case of U-505.

U-505 was captured based on intercepted German communications suggesting U-boats would be operating near Africa, about 150 miles off the coast of present-day Cape Verde, in May 1944. A so-called "hunter-killer" force called Task Group 22.3 — under the command of Rear Admiral Daniel Gallery and the USS Guadalcanal carrier group — was dispatched to the U-boats' suspected area of operation with the express objective of capturing rather than destroying an enemy sub. 

The hunt for U-505 depended on an intercepted message decrypted as part of a joint US-British effort to break German naval codes. Capturing the sub required knowing roughly where the vessel was going to be ahead of time. Even then, Task Group 22.3, which included no fewer than six US Navy ships, had to spend two seemingly fruitless weeks scouring the area for sub activity — a hefty commitment of time and resources even under the best of circumstances.

The searchers nearly ran out of fuel. They encountered U-505 only by luck, and they were fortunate not to accidentally destroy the ship in the initial confrontation. One of the Guadalcanal's escorts "made sonar contact on an object just 800 yards away on her starboard bow. Guadalcanal immediately swung clear at top speed, desperately trying to avoid getting in the way, as Chatelain and the other escorts closed the position," according to a US Navy description.

The six American vessels attempted to enclose the U-boat. The Chatelain dropped a depth charge designed to explode only on contact; the Guadalcanal scrambled two of its planes to track the ship and fire on the water to mark its expected position. A round of depth charges from the fast-closing Chatelian persuaded the sub to surface.

"Just six and one-half minutes after Chatelain's first attack, U-505 broke the surface with its rudder jammed, lights and electrical machinery out, and water coming in," the Navy's account reads.

The American fleet was still vulnerable to an underwater attack. One of the escort ships swept the sub's deck with machine-gun fire; another fired a warning torpedo. A boarding party from the USS Pillsbury attempted to land on the enemy ship only when it showed no apparent signs of activity. And even then, those self-destruct charges threatened to bring the whole operation down while killing every member of the boarding team.

But the German crew surrendered peaceably, and the sub turned out to be a cryptological bonanza, with encrypted typewriters that included the cypher keys that German vessels planned to use for the next two months of the war.

But any number of factors could have doomed the hunt for U-505.

The sub's crew was demoralized — it knew it was under enemy pursuit, and one of its commanding officers committed suicide in the vessel's control room shortly before U-505 was captured. A more skilled or committed crew might have opted to destroy the sub entirely, and an ill-placed depth charge from a US ship could have accidentally ended the operation for good.

This doesn't mean the Swedes can't catch their alleged Russian sub. As Reuters reports, the country's military is considered to be skilled in anti-submarine warfare.

However, Sweden sold off or retired many of its submarine-hunting helicopters in 2008; that same Reuters article says some of them are currently in a Swedish museum. The sub hunt is the biggest Swedish military operation since the Cold War, but it involves just five anti-submarine corvettes working in a vast and rocky Scandinavian island chain prone to bad weather.

Luck might be on Stockholm's side, and the search is understandable even if it returns empty-handed. Sweden wants to prove it takes violations of its sovereignty seriously. And the actual capture of a Russian sub, which could yield substantial intelligence or valuable captives, would give Sweden and its allies an indispensable and perhaps unprecedented degree of leverage over Russian President Vladimir Putin.

Even so, the odds are against a Swedish Armed Forces whose leadership already seems exasperated by the task before it. Whatever Sweden is hunting most likely will not surface until it is back in friendly waters, making the search effort seem like a semi-farcical hunt for nothing.

SEE ALSO: A D-Day Veteran Tells The Story Of His 4 Weeks In Combat For The First Time

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At least 1,000 former Nazis were recruited by the CIA and FBI to spy on behalf of the United States during the Cold War, The New York Times reported Monday. 

The article comes ahead of the release of a book written by Times reporter Eric Lichtblau titled “The Nazis Next Door: How America Became a Safe Haven for Hitler’s Men.”

As the book and the article explain, ex-Nazis were hired by American spy agencies at the height of the Cold War for their intelligence value against the Russians, providing leads to agency officials on communist "sympathizers." 

High-ranking SS officers like Otto von Bolschwing, mentor and top aide to Adolf Eichmann, a main architect of the "Final Solution," were protected by leading intelligence officials like J. Edgar Hoover at the FBI and Allen Dulles at the CIA. 

Records also show that some Nazis were not only recruited as spies, but were actively relocated to the US by the CIA. Von Bolschwing's son, Gus von Bolschwing, who moved to New York City in 1954 along with his father, told The Times that he didn't think his father's relationship with the CIA was "consistent with our values as a country."

Perhaps this is why the spy agency sought to keep its extensive collaboration with ex-Nazis a secret for so long. According to The Times, in 1980, FBI officials refused to tell even the Nazi hunters in the Justice Department what they knew about 16 suspected Nazis living in the United States. Agencies continued to conceal the government's ties to former Nazis still living in the US as recently as the 1990's. 

Unsurprisingly, many of the ex-Nazis recruited proved to be incompetent and untrustworthy. Some were pathological liars and embezzlers, while others turned out to be double-agents for the Soviet Union, The Times reported. 

None of the spies are known to be alive today. 

Check out the report at the Times >

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The gate at the Dachau concentration camp is infamous for a couple of reasons.

One is that Dachau was the first Nazi concentration camp. The other is its gate, where prisoners were greeted with the words “Arbeit macht frei”, or “Work will make you free”.

Here’s how it looks at the moment:

Someone stole the "Arbeit macht frei" gate at the Dachau concentration camp @BILDhttp://t.co/ACb7PTrY7Rpic.twitter.com/8v7y3mf8Vr

— Ken Olsen LATimes (@KenGOlsen) November 2, 2014

Somebody has stolen the entire gate, which is made of wrought iron and measures 190cm by 95cm.

Not surprisingly, the theft has horrified pretty much everyone, especially Dachau memorial director Gabriele Hammermann who told news agency DPA that gate is “the central symbol for the prisoners’ ordeal”.

The camp was set up in 1933 and more than 40,000 of its 200,000 prisoners died there before it was liberated by US forces in 1945.

Security guards noticed the gate was missing yesterday morning and said the thief would have had to climb over another gate to get to it.

The memorial deliberately decided against surveillance as it as it didn’t want to turn it into a “maximum-security unit”.

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Even at 108 years old, America's oldest living military veteran is enjoying the spotlight on his service and doesn't seem to be slowing down.

Richard Overton, an Army veteran of World War II now living in Austin, Texas, still enjoys cigars and whiskey.

From The Houston Chronicle in November 2013: "He drives and walks without a cane. During a television interview in March, he told a reporter that he doesn't take medicine, smokes cigars every day and takes whiskey in his morning coffee. The key to living to his age, he said, is simply 'staying out of trouble.'

"I may drink a little in the evening too with some soda water, but that's it," Overton told Fox News. "Whiskey's a good medicine. It keeps your muscles tender."

In addition to his somewhat unorthodox habits, Overton stays busy throughout the day — trimming trees, helping with horses, and never watches television, according to Fox.

Born May 11, 1906, he is believed to be the oldest living veteran, although it is impossible to verify because not all veterans are registered with the Department of Veterans Affairs. He served in the South Pacific during the war before selling furniture in Austin after discharge and later working in the state Treasurer's Office, according to The Chronicle.

"I've gotten so many letters and so many thank yous and I enjoy every bit of it, but I'm still going to enjoy some more," Overton told The Chronicle.

Mr. Richard Overton, the oldest living veteran. Kids, do not play on his lawn. pic.twitter.com/VQ0twXRdi1

— Patrick Chovanec (@prchovanec) November 10, 2014

Paul Szoldra originally wrote this report.

NOW: How New York's Veterans Day Parade Became 'America's Parade'

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"Raising the Flag on Iwo Jima"— the black and white photo depicting five Marines and a Navy corpsman planting a US flag after a bloody battle for the island — may be the Second World War's most iconic photo.

Fifty years after its capture, the Associated Press wrote that it may be the world's most widely reproduced.

A Twitter account dedicated to sharing historical photos recently shared the photograph along with the names and status of its subjects.

The men who raised the flag on Iwo Jima in Joe Rosenthal's iconic photo from 1945. pic.twitter.com/Dk0DPI6VIf

— ClassicPics (@History_Pics) November 14, 2014

Though the image is one of triumph, it was taken just days into a battle that would last more than a month.

Half of the six soldiers depicted died — among 6,821 Americans — on the very same island they claimed as part of the US' island-hopping strategy of claiming the Pacific theater; Franklin Sousley, Michael Strank, and Harlon Block all left their lives in Iwo Jima.

The longest-lived was John Bradley, the only non-Marine, who died in 1994. The AP photographer behind the image, Joe Rosenthal, died in 2006. He'd been too nearsighted for military service, but had an eye for a photograph that would earn him a Pulitzer Prize the year it was taken.

It's worth noting that the tweeted photo contains an error. For a time it was thought that the soldier on the far right was Henry Hanson (he, too, would die on Iwo Jima). The sixth man was in fact Harlon Block.

SEE ALSO: We spoke to 2 veterans who served in World War II as teenagers — and here's what they remember most

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Did I join my local VFW when I returned? Hell no. But here’s why we need a reformed VFW.

There was a time when our country assumed no social responsibility for the men they sent to war. These men returned injured, broken, and sick, and virtually zero benefits existed for them — no Veterans Administration, no G.I. Bill, nothing.

The service members of these wars were expected to simply return, and get on with their life even though they had suffered lost limbs, fatal diseases, lost eyesight, and debilitating “shell shock.”

By 1899, American veterans had enough, and the first local chapters of the Veterans of Foreign Wars were founded in order to lobby Congress for the benefits they deserved. These early chapters were erected in Ohio, Pennsylvania, and Colorado. By 1936, the VFW had over 200,000 veterans in its ranks.

Since then, many important benefits that we modern veterans often take for granted were fought for and won, such as the Montgomery G.I. Bill, which sent thousands of World War II vets to college and essentially created the American middle class. We have the VFW to thank for compensation for veterans who inhaled fatal chemicals like Agent Orange in the jungles of Vietnam.

When veterans of all wars are laid to rest and an American flag is draped over their coffin and a rifle squad respectfully renders a salute, we have the VFW to thank. When Gulf War veterans returned sick with cancer, the VFW lobbied for the compensation they needed.

Did I join my local VFW when I returned? No. It’s insulting and damaging that it still has a separate “auxiliary” wing for women.

When my generation of veterans faced the astronomical increase in college costs, the VFW helped deliver the post-9/11 G.I. Bill, which has propelled countless Iraq and Afghanistan vets into some of the most elite universities in our nation.

The VFW has done a lot, we owe them much. However, recently, many young veterans of the current wars have sharply criticized the VFW for not modernizing and for excluding women, and rightly so.

The VFW deserves this criticism. In fact, some veterans have gone so far as to suggest that the VFW is no longer needed, that it is obsolete. It almost is, and if the VFW doesn’t fundamentally change its ethos and command climate, it will die on the vine. But I hope it doesn’t die. We need it because it still offers veterans tremendous benefits and is a beacon of progress in the history of veterans affairs in the United States.

Specifically, there are four reasons why the VFW requires our help in its fight for survival:

1. Brick and mortar. One can never underestimate the power of an actual physical space, a real place to gather, to display and pay respect to our common symbols of service. Local VFW chapters might be a little run down, and many remain small, smoke-filled drinking halls, but the fact is that their brick-and-mortar presence is a permanent reminder to our communities, especially during peacetime, that wars were fought and the men and women who fought them live among us. These physical spaces are a bridge to the civilian world we must inhabit upon our departure from active duty. Imagine what these places could be with a little modernization?

2. Local chapters. Many of the new veterans service organizations are nationally and virtually based; in other words, they lack local chapters. Every community in America is different: Some are rural, many are urban, most are something in-between. It is still common, as it was during World War II, for service members from the same small community to be sent together to the front; men and women from a small corner of Kansas likely fought in the same area in Iraq or Afghanistan.

Local chapters are also able to better gauge the needs of their specific community; they can raise money for and support the causes their communities care about. Local is always better in my mind, and the VFW has a solid local presence, and genuine strength in its local autonomy.

3. An established chain of command. Frankly, I am tired of some modern veterans groups who possess one very charismatic leader, and little more. Alternatively, the VFW has had, since its creation, a strict chain of command, which many young veterans can appreciate. Even though the VFW is shamefully lacking in female leadership at any level, it is democratic in its establishment. No single “rock star” makes the decisions.

4. Sheer lobbying power. Let’s face it, barbecues, camaraderie, and gyms are nice. But when things really go bad, when the policymakers on Capitol Hill think it’s a good idea to close commissaries, or not fund the VA properly, or refuse to hire veterans, we need to lobby Congress and we need professional lobbyists to do it for us. As much as I respect and honor the work that has been done by the many modern veterans organizations created by Iraq and Afghanistan veterans, the influence of the VFW to lobby on Capitol Hill is still powerful.

Members of the VFW include former presidents, such as Theodore Roosevelt, Dwight D. Eisenhower,  George H. W. Bush, and Al Gore. It has a National Legislative Service in Washington to maintain a strong D.C. presence, advocate for veterans’ needs, and provide testimony to Congress. It remains one of the largest veterans service organizations in the country.

When service members returned from World War II, they returned to a nation that went to war with them, much of the U.S.’s population served in some shape or form. These veterans did not feel the same isolation that our Iraq and Afghanistan vets have felt.

We returned to a nation that did not experience the war the way we did. This isolation has caused many of us to form our own veterans service organizations out of a sheer need to survive. Some run races together, some work out together, some band together to elect veterans to office, some farm together, some fight for gender equality, and some come to the rescue during natural disasters. We need these new organizations.

However, the VFW is also still needed by young veterans; we cannot simply discard the decades of thankless work, time, and manpower that older vets have put into making the VFW a powerful force, simply because it has not kept pace as fast as it should. In fact, the VFW’s established and traditional chain of command mechanism is the very thing that will ensure young Iraq and Afghanistan veterans someday lead local chapters, as well as the entire VFW.

Did I join my local VFW when I returned? No. It’s insulting and damaging that it still has a separate “auxiliary” wing for women. Why are the auxiliaries for family members still gender specific? However, with some old-fashioned leadership, and infiltration of its archaic ranks by young veterans, specifically female combat veterans, the VFW could become a modern force of strength for veterans in local communities throughout our nation.

The VFW knows it is in trouble. John W. Stroud, the commander-in-chief of the VFW, recently published a direct order to modernize to all his chapters. In it he states:

The fact remains that the stereotypical, dingy, dark and smoke filled VFW Post and canteen do exist, but they have no benefit to our organization, provide no aid to our mission nor to the veterans we strive to help and serve. Accordingly, I am charging my current Department VFW Commanders to be advocates of change and to challenge the officers of the subordinate units within their command to be more than officers — challenge them to be leaders cognizant of the current challenges today’s veterans face.

We can’t give up on the VFW; we must accept the torch as it is passed to us. And if the VFW does not voluntarily pass it, we must seize it.

This right and burden is now ours, and we have much to learn from the World War II, Korean, Vietnam, and Gulf War vets who inhabit these chapters; and they have much to learn from us.

Visit your local VFW, and if the members think you don’t belong there, continue to sit at that dark bar until they do. Infiltrate the ranks and run for leadership positions; write about your local chapter, volunteer there; offer your ideas. Don’t allow them to tell you your youth is a disadvantage; instead, politely advise them that your youth is exactly what’s going to save them.

Shelly Burgoyne-Goode is a former Army officer. She served two tours in Iraq, leading combat resupply convoys to forward units. She is a Tillman Military Scholar, veteran advocate, military blogger, and writer.

SEE ALSO: What vets miss most is what most civilians fear: a regimented, cohesive network that always checks on you

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Trains may seem pretty mundane in the 21st century, when compared with jet aircraft.

These days, trains play a small role in transporting Americans. Things are a bit flashier in Europe and Asia, where they're used for high-speed, comfortable travel.

This contrasts vividly with the previous century, when not just trains but armored trains were a vital piece of machinery in the two largest military conflicts of the era.

The armored train was first seen in the American Civil War, according to The Jamestown Foundation. But the battle-ready form of transportation came to prominence in World War I, when Russia used it as a means of defense during cross-country travel.

The trains were used by most of the European nations fighting in World War II: Poland took advantage of them extensively; Nazi Germany reacted and began using them; and the Russians kept their fleet up. Even Canada patrolled its west coast with one for a time in case of an invasion, according to Canada's Virtual Museum.

These trains were not just armored — they were heavily armed. Cannons, machine guns, anti-aircraft weapons, and even tanks were on board these moving walls of terror.

While the armored train could transport large amounts of firepower rapidly cross country, it also had quite a few drawbacks.

They were hardly stealthy. Their reliance on tracks not only limited where they could go, but it provided the enemy with an easy target: Sabotage the tracks, and you disable the train.

After World War II, automotive technology had caught up sufficiently to render the armored train obsolete. But these insane trains have left an indelible mark on history.

[An earlier version of this feature was written by Alex Davies and Travis Okulski.]

This early Polish train, Smialy, is one of the most famous of the era. The rotating turret on the front helped clear out anything that got in the way.

Here is another shot of Smialy. It was captured by Poland in 1919 but was used in both wars by four different nations: Austria, Poland, the USSR, and Germany.

Source: fsu.edu

Extensive armor plating could withstand a lot of punishment.

Mapmaking graphic artist Martin Vargic's has made an amazing graphic tracking the size of the world's largest armies at different points in time. 

The graphic gives an understanding of the just how mobilized the human race was during World War II — and shows how the size of the wold's largest armies has shunk over time as interstate warfare becomes less common and technology surpasses sheer manpower in military importance. 

It also gives us a chance to compare the size of some of the largest armies at different points in history with one another: the US had about as many troops in 1950, for instance, as China's Ming Dynasty had in 1400.

One loaded choice Vargic made is splitting the world between East and West. The graphic doesn't depict the world's single biggest army at any given time, but the biggest armies in two halves of a divided and sometimes antagonistic world.

In his research, Vargic drew from Encyclopedia Britannica, British think tank IISS, and Wikipedia. The first project listed on his website is a humorous map showing the Internet's biggest traffic drivers as countries drawn to scale.

Another project of his shows what would be left of the world should sea levels rise by 250 to 300 feet, which the Slovakian artist said is realistic should the polar ice caps melt completely.

SEE ALSO: This mythical map of the Internet is brilliant

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The world's most wanted Nazi criminal, Adolf Eichmann's second-in-command, died four years ago in Syria at age 98, the Simon Wiesenthal Center said Sunday, citing the testimony of a former German secret service agent deployed in the Middle East.

SS captain Alois Brunner, described by Eichmann as his "best man," was responsible for the deportation of 128,500 Jews to the death camps.

After World War II, in the 1950s, Brunner fled to Syria, where he reportedly served as a government adviser to President Hafez Assad and is thought to have instructed the regime on torture tactics.

He survived two Mossad assassination attempts and went to his grave utterly "unrepentant," according to Nazi hunter Efraim Zuroff.

"We have received information from a former German secret service agent who had served in the Middle East who said that Brunner was dead and buried in Damascus," Zuroff told The Sunday Express on Sunday.

"Given his age it would not be surprising and the information came from someone who we consider reliable."

Because of the ongoing Syrian civil war, the precise location of Brunner's grave remains uncertain.

Brunner managed to flee Germany because of an identity mix-up that saw fellow SS member Anton Brunner prosecuted and hanged for his crimes. In 1954, using a fake Red Cross passport, Brunner traveled to Rome and later Egypt, where he rented a room from a Jewish family. In 1985 he said they were "quite nice people, really."

After arriving in Syria under the pseudonym of Dr. Georg Fischer, Brunner was said to serve as an adviser to Assad on torture methods, though the information has not been confirmed. The Syrian government shielded Brunner from the various extradition orders.

"He was involved in the harsh treatment of the Jewish community of Syria and was an expert in terror and torture," Zuroff said. "He said himself his one regret was he did not kill more Jews. He was unrepentant."

Brunner was injured in two separate attempts on his life by the Mossad in 1961 and 1980.

"He lived under the false name of Georg Fischer but his presence was no secret. He actually received two letter bombs, apparently from Mossad. He lost three fingers and an eye," Zuroff said.

According to the Simon Wiesenthal Center, Brunner organized the deportations of 47,000 Austrian Jews, 44,000 Greek Jews, 23,500 French Jews, and 14,000 Slovakian Jews to the concentration camps. "The majority were murdered," Zuroff said.

"Among Third Reich criminals still alive, Alois Brunner is undoubtedly the worst. In my eyes, he was the worst ever," Nazi hunter Simon Wiesenthal wrote in his memoirs. "While Adolf Eichmann drew up the general staff plan for the extermination of the Jews, Alois Brunner implemented it."

SEE ALSO: Someone Stole The Gate That Says 'Work Makes You Free' From The First Nazi Concentration Camp

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December 7, 1941 began as a perfect Sunday morning for the troops serving the US fleet at Pearl Harbor.

Under a early morning South Pacific sun, softball teams were lining up on the beach. Pitchers warmed up their arms, while batting rosters were finalized and the wives and kids came over from seaside church services.

They did not know that for hours the Japanese naval fleet and air forces had been speeding across the ocean toward America's Pacific base. There, like a string of pearls draped across the docks and waterfront, was the majority of America's naval might.

The devastating Japanese onslaught began at 7:48 a.m., eventually killing 2,402 Americans and wounding many others, sinking four battleships and damaging many more.

The Pearl Harbor attack spurred America into World War II, leading ultimately to Allied victory over the Japanese in the East and Nazis and other Axis powers in the West. And the country promised never to forget this day of infamy.

Here are photographs from the attack and its immediate aftermath:

On the morning of Dec. 7, 1941, an attack planned by Admiral Isoroku Yamamotoa was carried out to demobilize the US Navy. This picture shows one of more than 180 planes used in the attack.

At 7:00 a.m., an Army radar alert operator spotted the first wave of the Japanese attack force. The officers to whom those reports were relayed did not consider them significant enough to take action. This photo shows an aerial view of Battleship Row in the opening moments of the raid. 

The Japanese aircrews were able to hit most of the American ships on Oahu shortly before 8:00 a.m. Here a Japanese plane flies over Pearl Harbor while black smoke rises from the area. 

The Japanese also took the opportunity to attack military airfields while bombing the fleet anchored in Pearl Harbor. The purpose of these simultaneous attacks was to destroy American planes before they could defensively respond.

There were more than 90 ships anchored in the area that morning. The primary targets were the 8 battleships sitting at Battleship Row in Pearl Harbor. Here is a picture of Battleship Row during the attack.

USS West Virginia (left) pictured here next to USS Tennessee, was one of the first battleships to sink during the attack. The Japanese successfully damaged all 8 battleships. 

At about 8:10 a.m., USS Arizona explodes as the ship's forward ammunition magazine is ignited by a bomb. About half of the total number of Americans killed that day were on this ship. Here is a picture of battleship USS Arizona.

Here is another picture of USS Arizona ... 

Destroyer USS Shaw explodes during the 3-hour Japanese attack. 

There was a short lull in the attack at about 8:30 a.m. The damaged USS Nevada tried to escape down the channel toward the open sea but became a target during a second wave of 170 Japanese planes, hoping to sink her in the channel and block the narrow entrance to Pearl Harbor. The ship was grounded with 60 killed on board.

A Japanese plane dives into flames after it was hit by American naval antiaircraft fire. Fewer than 30 Japanese planes were lost in the attack. 

About 188 American planes were destroyed and another 159 were damaged. Here is a picture of some planes left on Hickam Field near Pearl Harbor. 

Sailors at the Naval Air Station in Kaneohe, Hawaii, attempt to salvage a burning PBY Catalina in the aftermath of the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor. 

People in Times Square, New York buy newspapers with headlines saying, "Japs Attack US." American entered the Second World War after the surprise attack on Pearl Harbor.

Salvage work begins on destroyers USS Cassin and the USS Downes. The Japanese failed to damage any American aircraft carriers, which were surprisingly absent from the harbor. 

A Japanese torpedo plane is hoisted from the bottom of the sea. About 10 percent of Japanese planes were lost on December 7th.

USS Oklahoma, seen in this photo with one of its propellers peeking out of the water, was considered too old to be worth repairing.

A Marine holds a piece of shrapnel removed from his arm following the attack. 

This photo shows sailors participating in a memorial service for the more than 2,400 killed in the attack. 

Robert Johnson and Kamelia Angelova contributed to this report.

SEE ALSO: 'We were lucky': Pearl Harbor vet describes how he survived the infamous attack

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Apart from the AK-47, no other weapon has graced the world’s television screens more in modern times, than the RPG-7. 

Officially known in Russian as the Reaktivnoi Protivotankovii Granatomet (Hand antitank granade launcher), the slender hollow tube with its conical rear and oversized diamond shaped warhead continues to play just as an important role in today’s warfare as its small arms comrade. 

And just like the AK, the reason for this is simple – it’s an easy to operate, reliable, and brutally effective weapon capable of taking out just about all but the latest in modern armor. 

The RPG-7 has established itself as the most dominant shoulder-fired antitank system in the world, and can be expected to continue its reign of destruction well into the coming decades.

The RPG-7 was first introduced Soviet Army service in 1962. It used a design which, like most weapons of that era, could trace its origins to the Second World War, when the Germans began employing simple, cheap and disposable recoilless launchers with an oversized warhead called Panzerfausts.

Consisting of nothing more than a hollow tube with a propellant stick attached to a semi-hemispherical High Explosive AntiTank shaped charge (HEAT), Panzerfausts were employed with great success against Allied armor as they closed in on the Third Reich.

Its design allowed thousands of ill-trained boys and old men of the last ditch VolkSturm units an instant ability to take out tanks and caused great concern whenever armor operated in confined areas, such as forests or cities.

In fact, so disgusted were the Americans at a German technique of destroying a tank, then throwing away the launcher to surrender, that they ordered anyone doing so shot regardless of whether they had their hands up or waved a white flag.

Initially, the Panzerfausts were extremely short range (30 meters), but were worked-up over time by using stronger propellants to 60, 100, 150 and even a 250 meter variant. 

After the Soviets encountered the first versions, they immediately went to work during the conflict trying to come up with their own design, with a primary feature being that it would be reloadable.

The first prototypes were created in 1944 and called the LPG–44. The LPG-44 had a 30mm diameter launcher and weighed 4.4 pounds unloaded, and could fire a PG-70 70mm diameter HEAT round. 

This weapon later received the designation RPG-1, and had a maximum range of 75 meters. Its penetration of 150mm of steel was less than that of the Panzerfaust though, and eventually it was cancelled in 1948.

The next evolution was the RPG-2. Externally, it was similar in size to the RPG-1, but featured some refinements. Most important was a larger 40mm tube (6.4 lbs unloaded), and an 80mm warhead designated the PG-2.  It had double the range, at 150 meters, and fired at a flatter trajectory, giving greater accuracy. It also could penetrate more armor at 200mm. 

Its widespread deployment began in 1954, and this launcher, coincidentally, would be the primary weapon used by the North Vietnamese Army and the Vietcong in the early stages of the Vietnam War against the U.S. 

Also, many more were Chinese manufactured versions and designated the B40. In theatre, this moniker ended up being used just as often as the word RPG when describing antitank weapons used by the insurgents.

Still another deadlier version showed up that asserted itself as THE standard by which all others were measured. Not resting on the RPG-2, the U.S.S.R had begun looking for its replacement as early as 1958.  The result was the little-known RPG-4, which had a 45mm launcher tube and 83mm warhead.

The launcher weighed 10.3 pounds and doubled the range again to 300mm. It could penetrate a little more armor at 220mm and, for the first time in the series, possessed an optical sight. It showed promise, but the RPG-4 quickly disappeared the moment the definitive RPG arrived: the -7 model.

This new design, even as it was being developed at the same time, proved far and away better than the -4 model with double the range at 300 meters for point targets, and out to 500 meters for an area target. 

It too mounted an optical sight which rode on a smaller tube of 40 mm and fired a slightly bigger 85 mm PG -7 HEAT warhead which was capable of penetrating 260 mm of armor.

The standard RPG-7 round, the most widely used variant, and its subsequent improvements share the same basic functions going back to the Panzerfaust. When the round fires, stabilizing fins deploy and impart a slow spin as it streaks through the sky at approximately 965 ft./s.

When it impacts a hard surface, a piezoelectric element in the nose crushes and sends an electrical signal through the round to a fuse at the base of explosives positioned behind a hollow copper cone. 

Once the explosives ignite, it forces the cone to turn itself inside out, shooting forward as a molten, thumb-sized slug of several thousand degrees, where in the case of an armored turret it will bore a similar sized hole through the metal until it reaches the interior.

Inside, it ricochets about along with flaming particles at several thousand miles per hour until it loses energy.  Anything from metal to flesh is torn asunder, leaving nothing but a charred compartment and human remains so scorched and destroyed that most can be washed out with a hose.

This is how a shaped charge works and it all happens in a fraction of a second.  It is a formula that, until advanced ceramics were incorporated into tank armor in the 1970s, forced designers to deal with a vulnerability gap that could be defeated only by designing a tank with such thick armor that its weight left it virtually unable to move.  So it was a welcome respite when the much lighter ceramic became available.

There were other targets the RPG proved just as adept at destroying, the kind that remains vulnerable. Helicopters. In this role, Western forces and America in particular have become all-too-familiar with the RPG-7’s ability. Mainly due to the most famous incident of when a couple of RPGs were employed to take down U.S. Army UH 60 Black Hawks hovering over Mogadishu, Somalia in 1993. 

This episode caused survivors of what was a planned operation to become trapped and forced to engage in some of the toughest close quarters combat seen since the Vietnam War. Later immortalized into a book, then a movie, it became known forever as ‘Blackhawk Down.’

More recently, the RPG-7 was used against U.S. and coalition forces on the streets of Iraq and Afghanistan, with varying results.

Most modern western tanks have shown they are capable of enduring multiple RPG hits and continue fighting, while lighter armored vehicles often use wire mesh cages extending around the bodies to prematurely detonate the round, making it far less effective at penetrating.

Where it continues to cause problems, though, is against the helicopter. Specifically in 2011, when ‘Extortion 17′, a U.S. Army Chinook helicopter carrying 38 personnel and a K-9 dog was downed over Afghanistan with what likely was an RPG-7.

This encounter remains the largest loss of life suffered by the U.S in a single incident during the War on Terror.

There have been attempts over the years to improve upon the RPG-7 by introducing new designs and much larger warheads. 

These have been produced in small numbers and have never even begun to replace the standard RPG, which continues to see developments in the warhead area such as fragmentation, thermobaric and even tandem designs to defeat modern sophisticated armor.

Nevertheless, the launcher tube itself has remained virtually unchanged since 1962, proving it is a design worthy of merit, like the Kalashnikov. And, at just $300 a copy, the RPG-7 remains the gold standard go-to weapon for a soldier or guerrilla looking to unleash a heavy dose of retail destruction at a wholesale price.

SEE ALSO: Here's The Wild Underwater Vehicle Navy SEALs Use On Stealth Missions

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The firing of Chuck Hagel as Secretary of Defense raises more questions than it answers.

Is it correct to blame military failures on the military establishment when the executive has not articulated a foreign policy based upon clear and sustainable national interests? 

Is it proper to criticize the Secretary of Defense for discussing foreign policy issues when the Secretary of State has failed to bring forth a coherent foreign policy?

The state of play in Washington, not only currently, but over the last decade, is that the military is being used to make and execute foreign policy, often on the fly, because the State Department is AWOL.

This change in President Obama’s cabinet is a distraction from having to deal with the dilution of the role of Secretary of State and the Department of State. They fired the wrong guy in the wrong department.

The Department of Defense has 3.2 million employees, including service members and civilians, and an annual budget of about $550 billion per year. Contrast this with the Department of State with 70,000 employees and an annual budget of $57 billion per year.

The Defense Department as it exists today is a relative newcomer on the block, having only been formed in 1947. President Truman signed the National Security Act 1947 which established a unified military command and re-established a foreign intelligence agency, later evolving into CIA.

It also established the National Security Council, National Security Resources Board, and established the Air Force as a branch separate from the Army. It also set up the current Joint Chiefs system and established that the “National Military Establishment” was to be controlled by a single Secretary of Defense.

America certainly was not new to war in 1947 and it certainly had had an established military structure that led it through WWI and WWII. In 1949, the Department of Defense replaced the Department of War. This was more than just a change in name and orientation.

It immediately established defense as an ongoing, growing, and neverending enterprise that arguably contributes to today’s wars without end. Only ten years after this reorganization, President Eisenhower, the former Supreme Allied Commander, warned us against allowing the aggrandizement of the “military-industrial complex.”

What right-minded person would want to take over as Secretary of Defense after losing two wars, sequestration woes slashing your budget, Middle East crises, Russian resurgence, and the economic strength of China and India?

Besides the exponential growth in size and expense that Ike predicted, the continual expansion of the duties of the Department of Defense has promoted a diminution of the culture of the warrior in favor of the culture of management and the corporatization of the US military.

Rather than studying military strategy, DoD senior managers get MBAs. Rather than following Lee, Patton, or Schwartzkopf, they follow Ford, McNamara, and Gates.

Its top-level concerns are more akin to those of a department within a multinational corporation than a national military.

The DoD now has assumed many of the functions of the Department of State with the Joint Chiefs of Staff directly involved in foreign policy formulation and the Department of Defense having its own growing intelligence agency, the Defense Intelligence Agency (DIA.)

These changes in culture and military structure are directly connected to the decline of the Department of State they eventuated and the inability of the Secretary of Defense to actually wage war effectively today.

The exponential growth of Defense has led to atrophy at State. It has led to a State Department unable to develop and articulate foreign policy based upon realpolitik and attainable and sustainable national goals.

Henry Kissinger was quite possibly the last American Secretary of State able to fill the role as required and as it was envisioned. Agree with Kissinger or not, the dominant image is that the Vietnam War was ended by President Nixon and Kissinger.

Who can even name President Nixon’s Secretaries of Defense? Today, Secretary of State is the political position you offer to one of your primary opponents so you can keep them in the game, keep their supporters on board, and keep your friends close but enemies closer.

Secretary of State John Kerry has decades of foreign policy experience from serving on the Senate Foreign Relation Committee, but he is also known for his inability to articulate policy well (hence his 2004 presidential loss.)

Secretary of Defense is no better a job today. It is so undesirable a position that President Obama has twice found Republicans to fill it. It’s no surprise that the first two candidates to replace Secretary Hagel withdrew from the process. The administration has continually undermined and diluted the influence of the position since Robert Gates left.

What right-minded person would want to take over as Secretary of Defense after losing two wars, sequestration woes slashing your budget, bigger fish no one has yet begun to fry, and no clear foreign policy in place? Secretary Hagel’s replacement, Ash Carter, a consummate Pentagon insider, certainly has his work cut out for him. One would find taking over as head coach of the Oakland Raiders a more desirable job.

The Department of Defense’s management and corporate culture may have been necessary for the Cold War, but this culture seems out of step with evolving challenges throughout the world today — Middle East crises, terrorism, insurgencies, Russian resurgence, the economic strength of China and India, technological revolutions, and globalization, among other issues.

These are all problems the State Department should tackle, but its weakness and incoherence prevents it from doing so. What is America doing in the world?

That is a question for State to answer, not Defense.

DoD is ill-suited for developing American policy responses to these issues which require a more multifaceted view and evaluations from different angles.

The military is supposed to be the hammer, and when you walk around with a hammer everything starts to look like a nail.

Unburdening the Defense Department of these problems of state and returning it to acting as a Department of War would allow it to concentrate on being ready to fight and win the nation’s wars if and when that time comes.

Having a State Department that has the size and ability to articulate a foreign policy for the Department of Defense to follow would assist in this task immeasurably. The Department of Defense is a mission-oriented organization and should be taking its orders from the top, not making them up themselves as they go along.

Perhaps the President should have fired his Secretary of State and not his Secretary of Defense. Perhaps the State Department and his own Executive Office of the President could also use the kind of top-to-bottom restructuring currently underway at the Department of Veterans Affairs.

Then he could get to work reestablishing a Department of War to oversee the combat needs to support a new foreign policy. America would be best served with the Department of State conducting matters of state and a Department of War focusing on the things of war.

Colonel Philip Lisagor, US Army (Retired) served 3 tours in Iraq and was part of Charlie Wilson’s war in the mid-1980s, training Mujahedeen in Peshawar, Pakistan. He lives in Northern Nevada where he trains horses and skis when there is snow. He was educated at the University of Illinois and University of Chicago. He was an Ally Fellow at the Harvard-Kennedy School of Government and recently completed an MFA in Writing at Brian Turner’s program at Sierra Nevada College thanks to his GI Bill benefits.

SEE ALSO: Iran is officially a real player in the global cyber war

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BERLIN (Reuters) - A 93-year old man suspected of being a former guard at the Nazi death camp Auschwitz will be tried in the new year, a German court said on Monday.

Nearly 70 years after the end of the Holocaust, in which some 6 million Jews as well as Roma, homosexuals, disabled and political opponents to the Nazis were put to death, most suspects have either died or are unfit for trial.

The court in the northern city of Lueneburg did not identify the accused who will be tried on charges of being an accessory to the murder of 300,000 people.

Hanover prosecutors say the man is believed to have worked as an SS guard at the camp in occupied Poland between September 1942 and October 1944, where he was in charge of counting and managing the money seized from those deported to Auschwitz.

The charges relate to a two-month period between May and July 1944, when an estimated 137 trains arrived at the camp carrying 425,000 people, mostly from Hungary. At least 300,000 of them were murdered immediately.

"The accused knew that, as part of the selection process, those not chosen for work and told they were going to the showers were really going to the gas chambers where they would be put to death in an agonizing manner," the court said in a previous statement issued in September.

Some 16 survivors or relatives of survivors have come forward, the court said. Eight have been accepted as witnesses.

While time is running out for bringing surviving war criminals to justice, Nazi-hunting groups such as the Simon Wiesenthal Center are pushing for the thousands who staffed the death camps and helped transport Jewish victims across Europe to be pursued before it is too late.

(Editing by Robin Pomeroy)

SEE ALSO: A former Mossad agent just revealed the last words of Nazi war criminal Adolf Eichmann

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Shortly after the end of World War II, the scientists who developed the atomic bombs dropped on Japan tried to envision the kind of nuclear event that could lead to the destruction of not just cities, but the entire world.

A recently declassified document shared by nuclear historian Alex Wellerstein gives the verdict that scientists at the Los Alamos laboratory and test site reached in 1945. They found that "it would require only in the neighborhood of 10 to 100 Supers of this type" to put the human race in peril.

In 1945, the Los Alamos scientists concluded it would only take between 10 and 100 "Super" bombs to end the world. pic.twitter.com/01I8ypmIP0

— Alex Wellerstein (@wellerstein) December 15, 2014

They reached this conclusion at a very early point in the development of nuclear weapons, before highly destructive multi-stage or thermonuclear devices had been built. But the scientists had an idea of the technology's grim potential. "The 'Super' they had in mind was what we would now call a hydrogen bomb," Wellerstein wrote in an email to Business Insider.

At the time, the scientists speculated they could make a bomb with as much deuterium — a nuclear variant of hydrogen — as they liked to give the weapon an explosive yield between 10 and 100 megatons (or millions of tons' worth of TNT).

For perspective, the atomic bombs dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki had a yield of around 15 kilotons, or 0.015% of a megaton. These theorized bombs were several orders of magnitude more powerful than those that wrought destruction on Japan earlier that year. 

The apocalypse brought on by these 10-100 super bombs wouldn't be all fire and brimstone. The scientists posited that "the most world-wide destruction could come from radioactive poisons" unleashed on the Earth's atmosphere by the bombs' weaponized uranium. Radiation exposure leads to skyrocketing rates of cancer, birth defects, and genetic anomalies.

The Los Alamos scientists understood the threat that airborne radiation would pose in the event of nuclear war. "Atmospheric poisoning is basically making it so that the background level of radioactivity would be greatly increased, to the point that it would interfere with human life (e.g. cancers and birth defects) and reproduction (e.g. genetic anomalies)," says Wellerstein. "So they are imagining a scenario in which radioactive byproducts have gotten into the atmosphere and are spreading everywhere." 

Wellerstein says that this fear of widespread nuclear fallout was hardly irrational and that concerns over the atmospheric effects of nuclear detonations were "one of the reasons that we stopped testing nuclear weapons aboveground in 1963, as part of the Limited Test Ban Treaty."

Taking both of the estimated scales to the extreme — 100 superbombs yielding 100 megatons of fission each — would result in a total yield of 10,000 megatons. As Wellerstein notes, that's the same amount of fission that Project SUNSHINE determined was enough to  "raise the background radioactivity to highly dangerous levels" in a 1953 study.

That degree of nuclear power — though not necessarily accompanied by the radioactive component critical to meeting the fears documents here — rested in the hands of both the US and Russia during the Cold War.

In recent decades the total yield of US and Russian nuclear weapons has fallen, such that "the threat of over-irradiating the planet is probably not a real one, even with a full nuclear exchange," Wellerstein wrote. "A bigger concern is the amount of carbon that would be thrown up in even a limited nuclear exchange (say, between India and Pakistan), which could have detrimental global effects on the climate."

Back in 1945 the Pentagon had speculated that it would take a few hundred atomic bombs to subdue Russia.

That thought experiment had a strategic bent. But the 1945 estimate seems to have advised caution in the new,  uncertain nuclear age.

The scientific push to learn more about the destructive weapons that were so hastily researched and used in the 1940s resulted in important insights as to the consequence of their use. Nuclear weapons aren't just horrific on the intended, local scale. They can carry consequences on the planet's ability to foster human life, whether that's by contributing to the greenhouse effect or irradiating it beyond habitability. 

These warnings aside, US did end up detonating a "super bomb" in above-ground tests. The US detonated a 15 megaton device in the infamous Castle Bravo test in 1954. And the Soviet Union's Tsar Bomba, detonated in 1961, had as much as a 58 megaton yield.

SEE ALSO: Here's how the US reacted to China's first nuclear test

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World War II is the deadliest conflict in history.

But the human race still emerged from the war with a few potential advances in hand, among them a cure for syphilis.

The bacteria responsible for the disease was discovered in 1905, and its eventual cure, penicillin, in the late '20s.

But it wasn't until 1943, in the midst of World War II, that doctors at a US Marine Hospital on Staten Island in New York applied the antibiotic to effectively cure four patients suffering from the early stages of the disease.

That October, TIME ran an article about the experiments with the headline "New Magic Bullet," and the next year the doctors published a study on the effectiveness of penicillin injections administered every few hours for eight days.

The development was especially important given the measurable impact that syphilis and other diseases had on the manpower needed to fuel the war effort.

Nearly five percent of draftees in 1942 had syphilis, according to a medical paper published in the journal Military Medicine and entitled "History of US Military Contributions to the Study of Sexually Transmitted Diseases."

When left untreated, the disease causes genital sores before attacking other parts of the body, including the nervous system, to cause a slew of debilitating symptoms and even eventual death. The military's syphilis problem during a major US combat mobilization prompted the War Department "to embark on a massive educational and prophylactic campaign."

Contemporary posters warned that "You can't beat the Axis if you get VD," and that venereal disease makes "a sorry ending to a furlough."

Manpower suffered during World War I from exactly this problem. American soldiers weren't supplied with condoms (something which would change in the next world war), and sexually transmitted diseases as a whole "were the second most common reason for disability and absence from duty, being responsible for nearly 7 million lost person-days and the discharge of more than 10,000 men," according to an article in the Journal of Military and Veterans' Health.

Shortly before that war, syphilis — which first got its name in an Italian poem from the year 1530 — was treated with a medical form of an arsenic compound. Its creator, a German chemist named Paul Ehrlich, won the Nobel Prize in 1908 for his discovery and the drug's effectiveness in the Great War was noted by a medical officer in the United Kingdom's Royal Army Medical Corps.

Still, arsenic was a toxic substance that produced adverse side effects — and it was sometimes used in combination with mercury, which is also poisonous. Penicillin was much easier for the human body to take and the discovery of its effectiveness against syphilis had positive effects that outlasted the second World War.

The disease was "the fourth leading cause of death in the United States before World War II, behind only tuberculosis, pneumonia, and cancer," according to the article in the Journal of Military and Veterans' Health. 

In 1939, 64,000 Americans died from the disease, almost as many as died from diabetes in a recent year. Today, the rate of annual infection is round 13,000 cases for which a cure is available.

The disease has also faded in the American military. In the early years of the Vietnam War, for instance, syphilis represented only one percent of servicemen's cases of sexual infections (though the total rate of these, mostly due to gonorrhea, was actually greater than during World War II).

In 1999, prevalence in the US military was down to 3 cases per 100,000 individuals, close to the civilian rate of 2.5.

The urgency of the US war effort 70 years ago, alongside decades of advances in publish health, reduced the sting of a once-devastating disease in the military and in American society more generally.

SEE ALSO: Dick Cheney had a much different take on the US and torture in 1992

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For those who serve, war is surreal, but celebrating Christmas while in a combat zone can be particularly somber. This time last year, I was on a different continent, and instead of a Santa hat, I wore protective plates and a kevlar helmet.

Just to feel somewhat festive, many of us decorated our vests with battery-powered Christmas lights and placed candy canes in our equipment. Under the threat of imminent danger at our deployed location, Christmas was surreal indeed. But we coped.

The surrealness of celebrating Christmas while in a war is not a new experience. Through American history, our troops have endured the holidays while serving far from home in a lot of different ways. Sometimes highlighted with humor, it has also been cause for melancholy. But in countless cases, there was no celebrating — only danger, fear, and death.

One of the most famous Christmas days in American military history occurred in 1776. That night, Gen. George Washington made his iconic crossing of the Delaware River from Pennsylvania into New Jersey, and marched his army toward Trenton. The next morning, he surprised 1,500 Hessian forces fighting for the British, many of whom were allegedly hungover from holiday celebrations the night before.

The Hessians couldn’t get their units organized in time, and Washington’s army ended up capturing more than a third of the enemy force, suffering only two deaths and five wounded. Prior to the battle, however, the Continental army had suffered some significant defeats and morale was in the gutter. Americans at the Valley Forge winter camp had also been suffering greatly.

Soldiers were dying without proper food, clothing, or other provisions, and the King’s armies (as well as American colonial citizens) suspected the Continentals were near a full defeat. No doubt the poor morale and prospects of another defeat — at Christmas time, no less — weighed heavily on the minds of American soldiers.

But their actions at Trenton, followed by a similar victory at Princeton a week later, electrified people across the colonies. Washington handed two sound defeats to the most powerful fighting force on the planet, and to Americans, independence suddenly became a real possibility. Morale in the ranks shot into the stratosphere and soaring enlistments followed.

The American Civil War was another instance in which US soldiers spent Christmas in conflict. It was a painful time in our history, marked by lofty victory and shocking loss. Probably the most famous Christmas “gift” during the war was from Gen. William T. Sherman to President Abraham Lincoln.

In December 1864, Sherman was reaching the end of his controversial “March to the Sea,” and on the Dec. 22, his army captured the city of Savannah, Georgia. Sherman wrote a letter to Lincoln that read in part: “I beg to present you, as a Christmas gift, the city of Savannah, with 150 heavy guns and plenty of ammunition, and also about 25,000 bales of cotton.” 

Lincoln naturally received the message with great relief, replying, “Many, many thanks for your Christmas gift – the capture of Savannah … the undertaking being a success, the honor is all yours.”

Both Union and Confederate troops found creative ways to celebrate Christmas while on the battlefield. Personal letters of many soldiers describe units erecting Christmas trees and decorating them with stale hard-tack (a large, saltine-like biscuit that served as a form of ration) and salt pork. Carols we recognize today were sung in camps across the continent — tunes such as “Hark, the Herald Angels Sing,” “Jingle Bells,” and “Deck the Halls” — and while cards didn’t enjoy widespread use until the 1870s, elaborate Christmas cards were known to be exchanged.

Perhaps the most eventful Christmas during the Civil War occurred December 1862 during the Fredericksburg campaign. During the Dec. 12 battle on the plains south of town, Union troops, under Gen. Ambrose Burnside, made repeated suicidal assaults against the entrenched southern Army on Marye’s Heights, resulting in more than 12,000 Federal casualties — more than double that of Robert E. Lee’s.

Burnside withdrew after the spectacular defeat, but tried to restore his tarnished reputation the next month in what became known as the “mud march.” In an effort to follow up with a second campaign against Lee, the Union again tried to hit its enemy south of the Rappahannock River, but a brutal two-day rainstorm turned the crossing into a mucky quagmire that swamped horses, artillery, and men in the cold mud.

Resigned to his failure, Burnside again pulled back and was fired by Lincoln soon after. It was a terrible Christmas for the Union army, yet one that the South used to find reason to celebrate.

Fast forward to Dec. 16, 1944 — forever known as the Battle of the Bulge. A legion of Hitler’s troops overran thinly spread American lines along the border areas of Belgium, Luxembourg, and Germany, and advanced toward the port of Antwerp. It was the coldest winter in at least 100 years and temperatures had plunged below zero.

The outnumbered, outgunned, and poorly equipped Americans put up a gallant fight and delayed the Nazi timetable. But casualties were alarming. It would be a terrible Christmas for many families back home.

By Christmas Day, Gen. George Patton and the 3rd Army had swung northward, mounting a major counteroffensive that ultimately pushed the Germans back by New Year’s.

That year though, many American soldiers in Europe spent their time trying to keep warm and ate frozen food (if they had any at all) because they weren’t allowed to light fires. Others on the front lines didn’t even know it was Christmas. Despite the death and devastation, though, combined enemy voices sang versions of “Silent Night” in many locations across the icy lines of battle.

Christmas is indeed a strange time at war. Our troops will often cope in ways that many of us would consider funny, or even morbid, but through our nation’s history, the holidays at war have often been fraught with sacrifice.

This Christmas, take a moment to remember our veterans, as well as those today who are defending our liberties far from home.

Historically, as well as today, our troops have stood guarding the gates of freedom, protecting the things we hold dear, and our way of life, no matter the time of year.

SEE ALSO: Drones are becoming popular Christmas gifts for kids

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