When the Japanese hit Pearl Harbor, Glenn White was the seventeen-year-old film projector operator at the Strand Theater in Emporia, Kansas.

He dropped out of high school, enlisted in the Marines and deployed to the South Pacific.

Glenn’s company landed on the southern coast of Betio Island, a part of the Tarawa atoll in the South Pacific where the Japanese had an airbase, on the night of November 21, 1943.

They fought the Japanese for twenty-four hours, pushing them back from the beach and reaching the end of the runway.

And through it all, Glenn was in the lead.

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A three-year famine struck Sweden in 1867.

The onset year became known as the Year of Great Weakness.

It was the last famine in Europe to arise from Nature.

It hit hardest in Sweden’s north.

There, the winter’s snow did not melt until late June, delaying the spring planting of crops.

Then, the autumn cold came early, ending the growing season prematurely.

Food was scarce and starvation was rampant.

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It is March 7, 1941.

The White House has received a letter from a young boy living in Augusta, Arkansas.

“Dear President,

I am a little country boy eight years old.

I have been going to school three years, and I am now in the third grade.

I got one spanking when I was in the first grade for talking.

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As Allied armies move deep into Germany, US officials say three million German soldiers have been killed, wounded or captured since D-Day, fulfilling General Eisenhower’s prediction that the Allies would break the German army within a year of the Normandy landings.

Magdeburg, Leipzig and Nuremberg are within the Allies’ grasp and pockets of German resistance behind the front lines are being mopped up.

German radio reports say Soviet forces are within fourteen miles of Berlin.

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It is April 14, 1906.

President Theodore Roosevelt has traveled to the grounds of the US Capitol where he will lay the cornerstone of the Cannon House Office Building.

He had been reelected to office in a landslide sixteen months before as the champion of progressive reforms intended to regulate industry and mitigate the effects of industrial capitalism on individuals and communities.

Roosevelt intends to confront the Gilded Age robber barons and he warns of a future under their control.

These are words which should guide us now:

“[T]he wild preachers of unrest and discontent,

the wild agitators against the entire existing order,

the men who act crookedly,

whether because of sinister design or from mere puzzle-headedness,

the men who preach destruction

without proposing any substitute for what they intend to destroy,

or who propose a substitute which would be far worse than the existing evils,

all these men are the most dangerous opponents of real reform.

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It is July 24, 1864.

James Burgan is a soldier with the 31st Indiana Volunteer Infantry.

He is in a Federal camp near Atlanta and is writing to his sister, Cassie.

From his letter:

‘Those left living of the army had the bloodiest fight on the 22nd of July there has been during the campaign.

Our loss was about fifteen hundred.

The rebs’ loss was about four more thousand.

The fight was about three miles from here.

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It is the summer of 1941.

Helmut is a seventeen-year-old high school student who speaks German, Russian and Ukrainian.

He lives in a village in the Zaporizhzhia Oblast of eastern Ukraine, which was then a part of the Soviet Union.

Hitler has launched his invasion of the Soviet Union, forcing the Soviet army to retreat from eastern Europe.

German troops have followed in their wake and have arrived in Helmut’s village.

They have found him and have assigned him to work as an interpreter for a unit of the SS.

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It is Apr0il 15, 1912.

President Taft and his wife have gone to an evening theater performance.

The afternoon papers had been reassuring.

‘All passengers and crew aboard the Titanic have survived the collision with the iceberg,’ they said.

That would include Taft’s friend and White House aide, Archie.

But as Taft sat in the theater, waiting for the curtain to go up, a White House messenger arrived.

Within minutes, Taft left the theater for the telegraph office in the Executive Office Building and began reading the latest reports.

The afternoon newspapers had been wrong.

Hundreds were feared lost.

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It is May 17, 1943.

Ten US aircraft have taken off from southeast England and are headed across the English Channel to bomb the steel factory at Ijmuiden, a coastal city near Amsterdam.

Their mission was doomed from the start.

As the aircraft crossed the coastline, they encountered heavy barrages of German anti-aircraft fire and they all went down, one by one.

Thirty-seven fliers were lost, including Norris Calkins, the twenty-one-year-old bombardier on board the “Draggin’ Lady."

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President Roosevelt died yesterday in Warm Springs, Georgia, from a cerebral hemorrhage.

Death came suddenly and without warning, depriving the President from witnessing triumphs he has long sought: the Allies’ taking of Berlin, and the opening of the United Nations conference on April 25th.

Roosevelt, age 63, had gone to Warm Springs at the end of March to rest after the recent Yalta Conference with Churchill and Stalin.

Mrs. Roosevelt will fly to Warm Springs to accompany the President’s body on the train trip back to Washington.

Condolence telegrams have poured in from around the world.

American troops are said to be in disbelief that their commander in chief is dead.

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