Freedom’s Voice The Monthly Newsletter of the

Military History Center 112 N. Main ST

Broken Arrow, OK 74012 http://www.okmhc.org/

“Promoting Patriotism through the Preservation of Military History”

Volume 6, Number 11 November 2019

Veterans Day – November 11

United States Armed Services Days of Observance

The most significant Day of Observance in November is Veterans Day on November 11. The other important Day of Observance is the Marine Corps Birthday on November 10.

"The willingness with which our young people are likely to serve in any war, no matter how justified, shall be directly proportional to how they perceive the veterans of earlier wars were treated and appreciated by their nation."

– George Washington

Vice President Mike Pence places a wreath at the Tombs of the Unknowns on Veterans Day – Arlington National Cemetery

Duty and fidelity at the Tombs of the Unknowns very minute of every hour of every day

Honor Company, 3rd Infantry “Old Guard” Regiment

Thanksgiving Holiday

The MHC will be closed on Thanksgiving Day.

November 28

Best Wishes for a blessed holiday.

Salute to Veterans Concert

On Sunday, November 10, the MHC presented its fourth annual Salute to Veterans Concert at Kirkland Auditorium in Broken Arrow. BG Tom Mancino (U.S. Army, Ret.), President of the MHC, served as master of ceremonies. The event was opened by the Broken Arrow High School JROTC Color Guard posting the colors. Dr. Clarence Oliver offered the invocation. Maggie Bond, Miss Broken Arrow-2019, then sang two popular songs of the World War II period.

Broken Arrow High School JROTC Color Guard presenting the colors

Mr. Johnny Parks, a Broken Arrow City Councilor and Army veteran of the Vietnam Era, gave an address on his experiences as a member of the Honor Company of the 3rd Infantry “Old Guard” Regiment.

The concert was presented by Tulsa Community Band un-der the direction of Principal Conductor Martha Kramer, Assis-tant Conductor JoAnn Johnson and Associate Conductor Pam Terhune. Tulsa Community Band was organized in 1938 as the American Legion Band. The Band currently has eighty-five members, both professional and amateur. They perform throughout northeast Oklahoma. The Band played numerous patriotic pieces during the concert and was a big hit with the concert attendees.

World War II veteran, Frank Riesinger, guest conducted the band playing “Stars and Stripes Forever”. The concert was closed with Ms. Bond singing “Amazing Grace” and “God Bless America”. BG Mancino closed the event by recognizing the veterans in attendance by the periods of their service – World War II to the present. Altogether, it was a superb event, argu-ably the best one yet.

Mr. Johnny Parks

The Tulsa Community Band presents Frank Riesinger with an appreciation award

Tulsa Community Band – Ms. Kramer conducting

MHC docent, Dennis Hoch, accompanied Ms. Maggie Bond singing “Amazing Grace”.

MHC volunteers, Claudia Price and Susan Virdell, and Executive Assistant, JeanE Bailie at the information table

The MHC extends the sincerest “thank you” to everyone

who came out to take part in this special event honoring our veterans and enjoying a fabulous concert of patriotic music. We also thank all the volunteers who assisted with the event. A very special “thank you” goes out to MBS, Incorporated (Metro Appliances & More and Hahn Appliances) for sponsoring the concert and for all those businesses that purchased advertise-ments in the program. We salute MHC Board member, Keith Browne, who put together the exceptional event.

MHC Birthday

On November 9, the MHC celebrated its sixth birthday. The core of the Museum’s collection was assembled over many years by Col. Robert W. Powell (USAF, Ret.). For several years, he displayed his collection at Memorial High School in Tulsa and later in a Tulsa office building. At the June 2013 Flag Day event, he deeded his large collection to the Military History Museum. With the transfer of ownership of the collection and occupancy of the newly rehabilitated building at 112 N. Main Street, the Museum was anxious to get going. The collection was moved and setup at the new location. On November 9, 2013, the Museum was officially opened with a grand open house, attended by an estimated 200 guests.

Since then, the Museum’s name has been changed to Mili-tary History Center. In the meantime, the collection has grown tremendously, as veterans or their families have generously donated their personal artifacts or collections. However, our mission – “Promoting Patriotism through the Preservation of Military History” – remains unchanged. We are grateful to all who have supported the MHC.

Support the Military History Center

Remember AmazonSmile, when you do your Christmas shopping.

AmazonSmile enables shoppers to select a charity to which Amazon will contribute a small percentage of a shop-per’s purchase. To take advantage of the program, sign on to AmazonSmile and select “Military History Center Broken Arrow” as the charity you want to support.

When you shop, you MUST log onto AmazonSmile to receive the benefits of the program. If you logon and shop at regular Amazon, no money will be paid to your charity.

To date, Amazon has contributed more than $100 million to the program. So, if you haven’t already done so, go to AmazonSmile now, designate MHC as your favorite charity and begin shopping.

Rose District Veterans Banners

The Military History Center and Blue Star Mothers of Amer-ica have sponsored seventy banners honoring local veterans during 2019 Veterans Day. The banners are installed on lamp posts in Broken Arrow’s Rose District. Banners honoring COL Robert W. Powell (Air Force – World War II and Korea), founder of the MHC, and SSGT Paul Collins (Army – World War II) are installed on lamp posts in front of the MHC. Anyone interested in having a future Memorial Day banner for a family member, contact BG Tom Mancino at (918) 794-2712 for details.

Royce Caskey, DAV Service Officer, Honored at the MHC

On November 7, Oklahoma Lieutenant Governor Matt Pin-nell and Mr. Brian O’Hara from Oklahoma First District Con-gressman Kevin Hern’s office presented DAV Counselor Royce Caskey with Oklahoma and Congressional Certificates of Appre-ciation for his continued years of service assisting veterans. Broken Arrow City Councilor and MHC Board member, Debra Wimpee, Broken Arrow City Manager Michael Spurgeon, Bro-ken Arrow Community Liaison and MHC Board member, Jen-nifer Sweezy, were among the distinguished guests at the presentation. Mr. Caskey works out of the veteran’s service office located within the MHC.

Ms. Debra Wimpee, Lieutenant Governor Matt Pinnell, Royce Caskey, City Manager Michael Spurgeon and Mr. Brian O’Hara

LT Governor Pinnell, Royce Caskey, his daughter, Debbie, grand-daughter, Isabella, and son-in-law, David Rollandini

Meet the Docents

Matthew Edward McHaney

Matthew Edward “Matt” McHaney was born at Casper, Wyoming, on December 30, 1963. He grew up in Denver and graduated from Pomona High School in 1982. He joined the Army in 1983. He was trained as an infantry rifleman and later won his parachutist’s wings. Much of his military service was involved in the War on Drugs. He served with 3rd BN, 327th In-fantry Regiment, 101st Airborne Division as a military policeman in El Salvador, Nicaragua, Honduras and Panama. The 3/327 IR was part of Joint Task Force-Bravo, which operated out of Soto Cano Air Base, Honduras, and was overseen by U.S. Southern Command. Their mission was to locate poppy fields and burn them and to locate drug “factories” and destroy them. Matt separated from the Army in 1990 as a staff sergeant. Matt was employed by the federal Bureau of Prisons at the federal prison at Englewood, Colorado, during 1990-93. After-wards, he worked as a bill collector for several firms. From 2006 until his retirement, Matt worked for the Scott Lowrey law office, a debt collection firm. In 2009, he was transferred to the firm’s Tulsa office as general manager. He retired in March 2019. Matt has been an MHC docent since August 2019. He lives in Broken Arrow.

John Samuel Croft

John Samuel Croft was born at Columbus, Ohio, on Febru-ary 7, 1950. After graduation from Whitstone High School, he entered Ohio State University, where he graduated with a Bachelor of Science degree in geology in 1972. He also went through the Ohio State ROTC program and was commissioned a first lieutenant in the Air Force upon graduation.

John was sent to Columbus, Mississippi, for pilot training, but with the end of the Vietnam War, the Air Force had no need for additional pilots. He was given a choice of several other Air Force professions and selected Titan II missiles. He was sent to Shepherd AFB, Texas, to train as a missile combat crew commander. After training, he was posted to Vandenburg AFB, California, and later to McConnell AFB near Wichita, Kan-sas. During this time, his wing participated in the Olympic Are-na Missile competition in California. In 1975, his wing won best in the Strategic Air Command (SAC). In 1976, his missile com-mand won best crew in SAC. John separated from the Air Force in 1977 as a captain.

While in the Air Force, John continued to work on his mas-ter’s degree, and in 1978, he received a Master of Science de-gree. John came to Tulsa in 1978 to work for Texaco. He later worked for Unit Drilling and finally for Stratland Exploration from which, he retired in June 2018.

John has been an MHC docent since December 2018. He lives in Broken Arrow.

This Month’s Featured Exhibit

The MHC’s newest exhibit is the Holocaust Exhibit. Artifacts include a schematic of the Dachau crematorium build-ing and a SS guard’s helmet from Dachau (both on loan from the Sherman Miller Museum of Jewish Art), a repro-duction Kapo armband such as worn by Jewish ghetto police or Kapos and a cap of the type worn by prisoners in concentration and slave labor camps, (both on loan from John Jeffries), a leather cigarette case made by a former Dachau prisoner for SGT Paul Collins after the camp’s liberation (donated by Ken Collins), a pair of German straw overboots made at the all-female slave labor camp at Ravensbrϋck (donated by Mary Beth Allen) and a Holocaust photo album (created and donated by Ken Cook). We need many more Holocaust artifacts, so if anyone has any such artifacts or knows anyone who does, the MHC would be grateful if they could be donated for this exhibit.

Holocaust Retrospective

One of the pillars of Nazism was hatred of Jews. With Adolph Hitler’s ascension to power as the chancellor of Germa-ny in January 1933, Nazi anti-Jewish dogma became govern-ment policy. In the beginning, Hitler’s plan was for German Jews to emigrate voluntarily. By the end of 1933, 65,000 had left. This was not fast enough nor in numbers acceptable to Hitler. To get the Jews out of Germany faster, propaganda that systematically demonized them was increased and laws were passed that removed Jews from German society, commerce and the professions relegating them to common laborers. Laws were progressively enacted depriving Jews of their rights up to and including citizenship. Jews were commonly accosted on the streets or in their homes, beaten and sometimes mur-dered. Jewish men were randomly arrested on any pretext and sent to Dachau, the first concentration camp constructed, with-in months of Hitler coming to power. It was intended primarily to house so-called enemies of the state, not specifically for Jews. However, tens of thousands of Jews were incarcerated at Dachau. At first, those who survived were generally released after a few months on the promise they would leave Germany.

Hitler’s plan for voluntary Jewish emigration was only par-tially successful. In order to be allowed to leave Germany after 1933, Jews had to forfeit all their property including real estate, financial investments, cash and personal property. This plunged them into poverty. They were allowed to take only a tiny amount of cash and luggage out of Germany. The Nazis didn’t seem to realize this was counter-productive, or if they did, they didn’t care. During the 1930s, Europe, the Americas, Australia and many other countries were in the grip of the Great Depres-sion. Countries were not interested in admitting poverty-stricken immigrants, who in many, if not most, cases would end up on welfare rolls. Moreover, many countries, including the United States and the United Kingdom had restrictive immigra-tion laws at the time. The United States had passed the John-son-Reed Act in 1924, which severely restricted immigration and established country quotas. Germany’s quota was 25,957, increased to 27,370 in 1938 after Germany annexed Austria.

About 523,000 Jews lived in Germany at the beginning of 1933. When Germany closed emigration in October 1941, about 163,000 Jews remained in Germany, including Austria. Most would perish in the Holocaust. About 120,000 had been able to settle in the United States, 52,000 in the United King-dom. In France, Belgium and the Netherlands, about 30,000 were accepted in each of the countries and about 55,000 went to Palestine. Several thousand emigrated to countries in east-ern Europe, where most were later caught up in the Holocaust and perished as did most of those who had settled in France, Belgium and the Netherlands. As the German army occupied countries in eastern Europe, millions of Jews came under Ger-man control. Emigration was no longer a viable solution.

The Holocaust or Shoah (the Hebrew word for catastrophe) can be dated from June 22, 1941, with the German invasion of the Soviet Union. Before that date there had been no deporta-tions or mass killings of Jews, and the Germans had not con-structed, or even imagined, a single killing center. From that date, mass killings began in the Soviet Union, including annexed

eastern Poland. By the end of 1941, around a million Jews had been killed in the Soviet Union. Most were murdered by mass shootings at killing pits throughout the German and Romanian occupied areas. Before the year was over, mobile gas vans had been introduced to supplement the shootings. By the end of the year, gassings had begun at the first Polish killing center at Chelmno, and deportations from Germany, Austria and Bohe-mia to ghettos in Poland and the Soviet Union had begun.

By late December 1941, with the war in the Soviet Union not going as expected and with the United States now in the war, Hitler decided that under cover of world war the “final solution of the Jewish question” would be total extermination. He put Reichsführer SS Heinrich Himmler in charge of the Final Solution. Himmler commanded all the police in Germany from the local cop to the state security police. His SS (Schutzstaffel or Protection Squadron) was responsible for all concentration camps, labor camps and killing centers as well as the Jewish ghettos in Poland and the Soviet Union. By the end of 1942, over two million Jews had been gassed in the killing centers in Poland. The months of August, September and October 1942 were the most intensive killing period of the Holocaust. During those three months, the Germans murdered 1.32 million Jews or about 15,000 murders per day, every day, just at Treblinka, Sobibor and Belzec. By May 1943, eighty per cent of the Jews killed in the Holocaust were already dead. By November 1944, when the gassings were stopped at Birkenau, the Germans had murdered the great majority of the Jews of eastern Europe and well over a million from central and western Europe.

When Americans think of the Holocaust, they invariably think of the concentration/slave labor camps in Germany such as those liberated by British and American army units in the final weeks of the war. This is an illusion. As terrible as those camps were, they were not strictly extermination camps and didn’t come close to the level of atrocities perpetrated at the killing pits and killing centers in eastern Europe. Here again, when Americans think of the killing centers, they persistently and erroneously call them concentration camps. The Germans built six killing centers, all in Poland – Chelmno, Belzec, Sobibor, Majdenek, Treblinka and Birkenau (Auschwitz II) – for the ex-press purpose of murdering Jews. Except for the large Ausch-witz-Birkenau slave labor complex and killing center, they were very small, but deadly effective killing centers – death factories, not concentration nor any other kind of camps. Well over three million Jews were shipped to the killing centers by trains from collection points in western and central Europe and from ghet-tos in the East – 278 in Poland alone – with only a relative few having seen a concentration or labor camp. All, but a relative few sent to Birkenau, who were temporarily spared as slave laborers, were gassed as quickly as possible after their arrival.

Most of the approximately one and a half million Jews mur-dered at killing pits in the Soviet Union and Soviet annexed eastern Poland were murdered within walking distance of their homes. Others were taken to the killing pits in horse drawn carts or short truck rides. None had spent a day in a concentra-tion or labor camp, and with only few exceptions, not even in a ghetto. The killing teams swept into the numberless cities, towns, villages and Soviet collective farms killing the Jews as quickly as they could organize an aktion (action), a euphemism

for mass murder. The Germans always spoke or wrote euphe-mistically about the Holocaust. They used words like action, final solution, resettlement or deportation rather than speak or write the real meaning – extermination.

Over four years’ time, more Jews died at Auschwitz-Birk-enau, a combination slave labor camp and killing center, than at any other single place. However, almost twice as many Jews were murdered at the other five killing centers from December 1941 through October 1943. By the time Birkenau came fully online in late spring of 1943, about two million Jews had been murdered in the other five killing centers. Most Americans have no knowledge of these other killing centers because, with the exception of Majdenek, the Germans destroyed them after their purpose had been achieved. Moreover, unlike Auschwitz-Birkenau, photographs were strictly forbidden. The Red Army discovered Majdenek in 1944. The Germans had failed to com-pletely destroy the gas chambers and crematoria.

If would have been impossible for the Germans to have ac-complished what they did without the participation of the gov-ernments and people of the countries, which they either occu-pied or were able to influence. Either directly or indirectly, the governments and many of the citizens in every German allied and occupied country, with the exception of Denmark, at one time or another, were participants in some aspect of the Holo-caust. Norway, Belgium and the Netherlands had small indige-nous Nazi parties that were active in identifying Jews and oth-erwise helping the Germans. Norway and Vichy France had pro-Nazi puppet governments. Some countries, the Netherlands, for example, maintained registries of their residents, including personal details, which the bureaucrats made available to the Germans. At the behest of the Germans, police throughout Belgium and France registered Jews, both citizens and refugee Jews. When the Germans ordered deportations, local police in France, Belgium and the Netherlands rounded up Jews and delivered them to the deportation centers. In Vichy France (the unoccupied zone until late 1942), the collaborationist puppet government enacted anti-Jewish laws even before the Germans demanded it. The Vichy government was complicit in deporta-tions, readily delivering Jews within its jurisdiction, especially refugees, to the Germans. After Italy surrendered in 1943, die-hard Italian Fascists, in the areas occupied by the Germans, collaborated with them in sending Jews to Birkenau. In the Soviet Union, the Germans requisitioned local labor to dig the killing pits and to round up Jews and herd them to the pits. Some of the locals did the work reluctantly under threat of death, while many others were willing participants. The Ger-mans regularly used voluntary indigenous auxiliary police to help with the roundups and killings. They recruited hundreds of men from Latvia, Lithuania, Byelorussia (now Belarus) and Ukraine as guards at Auschwitz slave labor complex and the other killing centers. Several European countries had virulent Fascist militias, who eagerly cooperated with the Germans: Slovakian Hlinka Guards, Hungarian Arrow Cross, Romanian Iron Guards and Croatian Ustaše. These militias were active in killing Jews in their countries and some took an active role in the killings in the Soviet Union. Croatia, Slovakia, Hungary, Ro-mania and Bulgaria were German allies and had virulent anti-Semitic governments that collaborated with deporting Jews to

the Polish killing centers, especially Jews from the annexed areas of their countries. Romania was the worst. Romanian soldiers murdered 280,000-300,000 Jews, mostly in southern Ukraine during 1941-42.

Prior to World War II, Poland had the largest Jewish popula-tion of any country in Europe, close to one-third of all European Jews. Polish Jews represented about half of all Jews murdered in the Holocaust, about three million, or ninety-one per cent of the pre-war Jewish population. About a million and a half Jews were murdered in the Soviet Union mostly at killing pits, about eighty-seven per cent of those reachable by Germany and its allies. Within the 1941 borders of Hungary, which included an-nexed parts of Slovakia, Romania and Yugoslavia, 564,000 were killed, about sixty-eight percent of the Jewish population. About three-quarters of them were murdered in an eight-week killing frenzy at Birkenau from May 15 through July 9, 1944.

The Nazis came frightfully close to succeeding in their goal of making Europe Judenfrei (free of Jews) within the areas they controlled. Altogether, they killed, in one way or another, well over sixty per cent of Europe’s estimated 9.5 million Jews, in-cluding about a million and a half children. In doing so, they extinguished the centuries old, vibrant Jewish Yiddish culture of eastern Europe and severely decimated the Jewish communi-ties of western and central Europe especially in Germany, Aus-tria, Czechoslovakia, the Netherlands, Greece and Hungary.

There are reams of documents, thousands of photographs and miles of film that document the Holocaust and the events leading up to it, almost all of which was produced by the Ger-mans themselves. We also have testimony from both victims and perpetrators, which graphically describe what happened.

Although only a relatively small number of Germans directly participated in the killings, every German old enough to under-stand knew that Jews were being deported from Germany and western Europe to some unknown fate in the East. Most were glad to see them go. It’s not known how many Germans knew that Jews were being systematically murdered, but a great many, if not most, did. The vast majority of adult Germans ac-cepted the Nazi government’s anti-Jewish laws and policies. Every German old enough to understand heard Hitler and his minions constantly ranting against Jews. Every German student heard their teachers daily espouse the Nazi’s anti-Jewish dog-ma. The German people were fully aware of the millions of slave laborers working in Germany, Jews as well as non-Jews from the occupied countries and prisoners of war. More than a dozen major concentration/labor camps and their hundreds of sub-camps were located throughout Germany. Millions of Germans lived near enough to the camps to regularly see them and smell the stench emanating from them. Except for young children, very few Germans, who were alive at the end of the war, can claim innocence or ignorance of what was happening, and neither can most people, who lived in the German occu-pied countries. Nevertheless, after the war, the Germans and their foreign collaborators often succeeded in portraying them-selves as victims of the Nazis and claiming ignorance of the crimes against the Jews and other victims of Nazi barbarity.

Seventy-five Years Ago, This Month

Soldiers of the 95th Infantry Division (an Oklahoma Army Reserve Division) in Metz, France, November 22, 1944

Metz fell the next day.

B-29s on Tinian, Mariana Islands – The first B-29 raid on Japan from Tinian was launched on November 24, 1944.

Museum Hours and Admission Fee

Tuesday – Friday: 10:00 – 4:00; Saturday: 10:00 – 2:00 Closed Sunday and Monday and major Federal holidays

Adults – $5.00 Members and Children under 18 – Free

For more information, call (918) 794-2712

www.okmhc.org

Marine Corps Iwo Jima Memorial

For the second time in three years, the Marine Corps has accepted that a second man was mis-identified as one of the Iwo Jima flag raisers. In 2016, after years of research, it was determined that PFC Harold Schultz, rather than Navy corps-man, PO2 John Bradley, was one of the flag raisers. This past October, Dustin Spence, a Sacramento, California, filmmaker and historian, who has studied AP photographer, Joe Rosen-thal’s iconic photograph for years, determined that CPL Harold "Pie" Keller rather than PFC René Gagnon is pictured in Rosen-thal's photograph.

Harold Paul Keller was born at Brooklyn, Iowa, on August 3, 1921. He served in the Marine Corps from January 6, 1942 to

September 19, 1945. He was a Marine Raider and Purple Heart

recipient. CPL Harold Paul “Pie” Keller died at Brooklyn on March 6, 1979. He is buried in Brooklyn Memorial Cemetery.

PFC Harold Paul Keller – ca. 1942

Oklahoma Marine in Korea

PFC Vernon Tsoodle – ca. 1950

Vernon Tsoodle was born between Carnegie and Mountain View (Kiowa County), Oklahoma, on May 13, 1931. He attend-ed the Chilocco Indian Agricultural School north of Newkirk, Oklahoma, where, at age fifteen, he joined an all-Indian com-pany of the 45th Infantry Division, Oklahoma National Guard. In 1949, he enlisted in the United States Marine Corps and the following year was deployed to Korea.

Tsoodle was deployed to Korea with the 1st Provisional Ma-rine Brigade to help defend the Pusan Perimeter. His unit was later sent to northeast Korea as part of the 1st Marine Division located west of Chosin Reservoir. Tsoodle was a member of 1st Communications Battalion, where his job was communications lineman responsible for laying telephone lines.

First Marine Division headquarters was set-up at Hagaru-ri, at the south end of the reservoir, where an airstrip was con-structed. As the situation grew more desperate, everyone available was turned into an infantryman. Tsoodle’s wire team became a .30 caliber machinegun squad of a reinforced rifle platoon responsible for defending the airstrip. During the night of November 28-29, 1950, the platoon helped repel several massed Chinese attacks, which saved the airstrip and thus, most of the 1st Marine Division. PFC Tsoodle received a Bronze Star with Valor Device for his leadership during the attacks.

Much has been written about the brutal cold of Korean win-ters, especially around Chosin Reservoir, to which, veterans who served there can attest. Tsoodle’s description:

“We did not realize how cold it was until we got up there. Tem-peratures of 30 and 40 degrees below zero were common. The ground was so frozen, we couldn’t dig foxholes. We had to lay behind rice paddy dikes and things like that for protection. You couldn’t build a fire because you would give your position away. All you could do was just lay there and endure the cold. I remember being served a wonderful Thanksgiving dinner with all the fixings, but it froze solid while I was eating it. Even had there been no enemy shooting at us, we wondered how we could survive.”

After the war, Tsoodle served as a cryptography clerk at

various Marine Corps bases including the American Embassy in

Tokyo in 1960. He remained in communications and was se-lected to undergo training to become an Operational Commu-nications Chief. While stationed at Marine Corps Air Station, Yuma, Arizona, Tsoodle was ordered to Vietnam, where he served from 1966-67 as Communications Chief for an artillery battery. He was later transferred to the 3rd Marine Amphibious Force Headquarters at Da Nang. After returning to the U.S., he was later ordered back to Vietnam and served there in 1969-70. Tsoodle completed twenty-three years of service that in-cluded three years in the Oklahoma National Guard and twenty years in the Marine Corps. He retired from the Marine Corps as a master gunnery sergeant.

After his military career, Tsoodle worked for the Bureau of Indian Affairs, Anadarko Area Office, Oklahoma, until his re-tirement. In 2009, he was inducted into the Oklahoma Military Hall of Fame and the Chilocco Indian Agricultural School Hall of Fame.

Master Gunnery Sergeant Vernon Tsoodle died at Webster, Texas, on October 13, 2011. He is buried in Rainy Mountain Cemetery at Mountain View, Oklahoma.

Vernon Tsoodle late in life – date unknown

Marines coping with the intense cold near Hagaru-ri December 1950

United States Marine Corps in Art

Last Stand at Bladensburg, Maryland, 24 August 1814 by Charles H. Waterhouse

Battle of Chapultepec at Chapultepec Castle on Chapultepec Hill The Halls of Montezuma – Mexico City – September 12, 1847

U.S. Marines at First Manassas – July 21, 1861

Guns of the Devil Dogs by Charles H. Waterhouse Belleau Wood, France – June 1918

Off the Beach by Matt Hall – Peleliu – September 15, 1944

Chosin Reservoir – Korea – November 1950

On November 10, the United States Marine Corps celebrat-ed its 244th birthday. Over those 244 years, the marines have been sent into the face of danger on numerous occasions. They always got the job done – the few, the proud.

Thanksgiving in Wartime

A group of soldiers having Thanksgiving dinner in World War II

Thanksgiving dinner for the 1st Signal Battalion Hamhung, North Korea – 1950

Members of Det. "A", 5th Special Forces Group, located north of Saigon in War Zone D, line up for a Thanksgiving meal.

Vietnam – date unknown

President George W. Bush surprised the troops of the 1st Armored Division by unexpectedly showing up in Iraq for

Thanksgiving dinner – 2003.

Happy Thanksgiving!

We are thankful for all who serve and all of our many loyal friends and supporters, whose generosity over the years has made possible the success of the Military History Center.

Freedom’s Voice is the voice of MVA, Inc. dba Military History Center, a 501(C)3 private foundation, as a service to its members and supporters. Contents may be reproduced only when in the best interest of the Military History Center. Please direct comments or suggestions to the Editor at newsletter@okmhc.org. Ken Cook, Editor