Today’s video takes us to a forbidding section of the Atlantic Wall, Nazi Germany’s coastal defense scheme that saw artillery batteries, bunkers and other defensive fixtures dot the seaside from Norway to France to keep out any potential liberating forces.…
The sky was clear of enemy aircraft on the morning of Nov. 20, 1944 at Ulithi, the American anchorage and resupply base that kept the fleet moving towards victory over Tokyo in the latter part of the Pacific War. Fleet…
Today people come to Minami Satsuma’s Fukiage Sand Dune for fun and relaxation. At 50 kilometers long, it’s one of Japan’s three biggest dunes and every year hosts a competition that does for sand what Hokkaido does for snow. That’s…
Unfortunately this tank has moved and the museum has apparently closed. When Frank Buckles passed away in 2011, with him went the last first-hand accounts an American Soldier could give of World War I. He was the last living doughboy.…
This Ki-84 / Army Type 4 Hayate (Allied reporting name “Frank”) fighter is inside the Chiran Peace Museum for Kamikaze Pilots, the largest and most comprehensive kamikaze museum in Japan. I shot this as part of an upcoming story about…
Today we’re doing something a little different and will be looking at an odd historic figure who pioneered the whole “Americans visiting Afghanistan for fun or profit” thing. Josiah Harlan was born a Quaker and eventually became an Afghani warlord…
Wandering around a candle-lit ruin in a memorial to the dead was the perfect way to spend the evening before Halloween, though it’s not as spooky or somber as it sounds. The second annual Katashima Taketoro Matsuri (Katashima Bamboo Lantern…
It’s less a castle ruin and more the ghost of a castle ruin. On the Shimabara peninsula there is a series of rises by the sea. The land rises like green walls and forms terraces, layered as they gain height…
The landscape of Germany has inspired many authors and painters. Its medieval ruins, sentinels of an earlier age that have long lost their original purpose and shape but stubbornly still stand, seem to lurk from hills and forests, intriguing passing…
The Road to Vigan Sagada was our last major stop in the mountains but on our way to the northwestern coast we stopped at the Battle of Bessang Pass Memorial, which commemorates a late World War II battle between a…