PLANT CITY — Veterans who sailed aboard a destroyer that shuttled dignitaries to the Japanese surrender in 1945 met at a local hotel to look back at ship’s storied history.

Tributes to fallen heroes, camaraderie, laughter and a few tears were all a part of the 14th reunion of various crews who served on the USS Rogers – a ship that saw its share of action over four decades.

The reunion at Red Rose Inn and Suites was organized by David Vick, a Plant City minister who served on the Rogers as a mess cook during World War II.

“We’re not getting any younger and need to get together before time runs out. There will never be a better year than 2011, marking the 70th anniversary of the bombing of Pearl Harbor.” said Vick, who with his wife Shirley called all crew members they could find.

The nearly 400-foot ship that was christened in 1944 also saw action in the Korean and Vietnam wars. It was transferred to the Korean navy in 1981, and taken out of service in 1999.

A handful of the former crew members attending the Plant City reunion, including Vick, were aboard the Rogers when it sailed into Tokyo Bay at the conclusion of WW II. The ship ferried American and Japanese dignitaries onto the USS Missouri for the surrender that brought history’s bloodiest war to an end.

Eighty-eight-year-old Third Class Seaman Jack Kurtzer of Delray Beach, was a guest speaker at the reunion banquet and spoke of his recollections as the sonar man who received the radio message that peace was at hand.

“I was the captain’s talker and was on the ship’s bridge with him when we received the message to pick up American naval and Japanese dignitaries, taking them into Tokyo Bay for the signing of the documents of surrender. I was also with the captain and signal man on the bridge on Sept. 2 so was one of three men who first got a view of entering Tokyo Bay on that momentous occasion,” he recalled.

The ship, first launched in 1944, was named in honor of brothers, Edward, Jack and Charles Rogers, who died side by side in 1943 on the Navy heavy cruiser USS New Orleans at the Battle of Tassafaronga.

The Rogers’ younger brother, 78-year-old Howard Rogers, said the brothers first saw combat at the Dec. 7, 1941 Pearl Harbor attack. Charles was badly burned but refused hospital treatment, said Rogers, a retired pastor who lives in Flagler Beach.

“Shortly afterwards they sent a letters home that included their church tithes which they sent home on a regular basis saying, ‘We are prayed up, paid up and ready to go!’ That meant they were ready to die together if necessary. In the end, they did stay together and die together, and now they live together forever more. The boys were all Christians and their actions inspired me to become a pastor,” Rogers said.

The USS Rogers continued to serve on the front line of American defense.

In Korea, it bombarded enemy forces on shore, said James Bryan, a seaman first class. At the end of the war, the crew members received the Korean equivalent of the Freedom Medal and a letter of thanks from the South Korean president, Bryan said.

Rogers veteran Roy Bahalyar recalled his service during the 1961 Cuban missile crisis.

He recalled that the crew braced for Armageddon but “thank God they came to their senses before nuclear meltdown.”

During the mid- to late-1960s, the USS Rogers saw action in Vietnam and aided the USS Enterprise in 1969 after the aircraft carrier’s deck caught fire from a rocket that left its mount on an F-4 Phantom.

The vets saw old movies of their ship, shared war stories and saw a replica of Jolly Rogers flag that was flown on board the USS Rogers and a depth charge.

At the end of the reunion, two recently deceased original crew members who served in WW II were honored with folded flags presented to family members. Vick read the names of the Rogers brothers and shipmates who died over the years as a replica of the ship’s bell tolled.

The veterans and their families sang the gospel favorite, “Amazing Grace.”

Then they released balloons with a prayer for each man who served on the Rogers.

Their next reunion will be in 2013 in Chattanooga, Tenn.

At the National World War II Museum in New Orleans, a sign asks the question that most visitors probably ask themselves: Why is New Orleans the host city for a museum dedicated to World War II?

The answer is simple. It was home to the man who, as Supreme Allied Cmdr. Dwight Eisenhower once put it, “won the war for us.”

Andrew Jackson Higgins, who died this week in (Aug. 1) in 1952, was the founder of Higgins Industries, a New Orleans-based shipbuilding firm that built the famous “landing craft, vehicle, personnel,” better known as the LCVP, but best known as the “Higgins boat.” The Higgins boat was a shallow-draft craft that could carry soldiers and equipment from offshore transport ships right up to the shoreline, allowing them to disembark quickly.

It was, in other words, the perfect craft if an army needed to invade enemy territory from the sea. And as it happened, on June 6, 1944 — better known as D-Day — an allied invasion force needed to cross the English Channel and land on the beaches of Normandy, France, in order to reclaim the European continent from the armies of Nazi Germany, which had controlled most of Europe since 1940. As Eisenhower also said, “If Higgins hadn’t designed and built those LCVPs, we never could have landed over an open beach. The whole strategy of the war would have been different.”

The Higgins boat evolved from his earlier Eureka boat, which had helped oil drillers maneuver along the coastline of the Gulf of Mexico and the Mississippi River. The Eureka featured a recessed propeller built into the boat’s hull, which enabled it to maneuver in shallow waters where thick flora and other submerged objects rendered most boats useless. The Eureka also had a flat bow that allowed it to run right up to riverbanks and then easily disengage.

In 1938, Higgins’ boats came to the attention of the U.S. Marine Corps, which was dissatisfied with its Navy-designed amphibious landing craft, and in tests the Higgins boat easily outperformed its naval competition. The one drawback was that both soldiers and equipment had to unload over the sides of the boat, which was cumbersome, slow and increased their exposure to enemy fire. So a ramp was added at the bow, which dropped once the craft had landed, allowing men to exit quickly. The Higgins boat was born.

It was a major reason the Normandy invasion was successful. That invasion finally gave the allies a foothold in Europe, which, at least on the Western front, turned the tide of World War II, as even Adolf Hitler, who sarcastically called Higgins “the new Noah,” learned to his dismay.

Like many World War II veterans, 87-year-old Florentino Castillo hasn’t talked much about his war experiences. More than 60 years after he entered battle, the memories are still hard for him to describe.

But Castillo’s family want his story to be known as the Silver Star veterans now wages another silent battle, this time with lung cancer.

Born in Texas and raised in New Mexico, Castillo was 18 when drafted in to the Army in 1942.

As a member of an artillery platoon, he wasn’t among those who had to secure the beach in Normandy, France, but he arrived soon after as part of the 150,000 Allied soldiers who took part in the early June 1944 invasion. In one of the few times he’s talked about the war, Castillo told his children about seeing bodies of American soldiers floating all around his landing craft. He and his fellow soldiers had to move bodies out of the way to land ashore.

Early in the fighting, among the hedgerows of the French countryside, Castillo, whom his fellow soldiers nicknamed “baby” for his young age and youthful appearance, would face the most frightening experience of his life.

Pinned down by sniper fire, he was among a small group of soldiers who went out to bring the sniper down. As they neared the area where the sniper fire was coming from, Castillo said he spotted a little, black-and-white dog. Castillo credits the dog for saving his life, because it showed him where the German sniper was in the trees.

“I fired a shot and ran like hell,” Castillo said.

Castillo didn’t run far and returned to fire five more shots at the sniper, one of them killing the German officer. This led to the surrender of the other German soldiers under the dead officer’s command.

For his actions, Castillo was awarded a Silver Star in the field by Gen. Dwight Eisenhower. For Castillo, the ceremony was not so much memorable for getting the medal from the supreme commander of Allied forces in Europe, but because he got to enjoy coffee and doughnuts.

It would be one of the few moments of pleasure for Castillo as he figures he went all over central Europe fighting on the front lines until the final surrender of Germany in May 1945. Everywhere he went, there was death and destruction.

“It’s hard to talk about,” Castillo said, “all I went through and what I saw.”

His daughters, Gloria Hernandez and Terry Apodaca, said their father has told them about he and other soldiers having to eat their k-rations huddled behind the carcass of a bloated, dead cow, as a precaution against sniper fire.

The happiest moment for Castillo was getting word that the war had ended and he could go home, completing three years and 11 months of military service.

Castillo does become emotional recalling his homecoming Nov. 18, 1945. After arriving in Hatch by bus, he returned to his parent’s home at night. Castillo’s eyes well with tears as he remembers the scene and has to pause to compose himself.

From a large family, Castillo and was one of five brothers who all went to war and who all made it home.

After his return, he reunited with his high school sweetheart and they married. Besides his daughters, Castillo and his wife Susie also raised three sons – Danny, Michael and Bobby. After his return, Castillo went back into the family business of growing chile and cotton.

A member of the Veterans of Foreign Wars Post 1208, Castillo was among the first group of to take an Honor Flight to the World War II Memorial in Washington, D.C.

“He’ll say he’s not a hero,” Apodaca said. “He is a hero in our eyes.”

WILLMAR — After he pledged to speak 400 times in 20 years about the horrors of World War II, Larry Tillemans hit his mark June 2. He continued his mission Wednesday afternoon at the Willmar Rotary Club meeting with his 408th speaking event.

Tillemans, of St. Joseph, spoke to a crowd of more than 100 in Willmar about his time in the service and the year he spent working in the courtroom as a clerk typist during the Nuremberg War Crimes Trials in 1945.

“There is nobody left to talk about it,” the 85-year-old Tillemans said. “You can’t deny if there is somebody who has seen it — it carries a little more weight.”

Tillemans sat through “the trial of the century” in Nuremberg, Germany, from 1945 to 1946 as 24 high-ranking officers of the Nazi party were tried in a series of trials for alleged war crimes, crimes against peace, and crimes against humanity.

Tillemans said 360 witnesses took the stand during the 218 days that led to the convictions and eventual executions for some of the men who gave the orders to kill more than 10 million men, women and children.

“It was an eerie feeling for a 19-year-old kid walking in front of that group of guys,” Tillemans told the crowd Wednesday at the Kandi Entertainment Center.

A 1944 graduate of Minneota High School, Tilleman, standing at 5 feet 9 inches tall weighing 145 pounds, told the Army he could type 42 words per minute and was soon assigned to the Third Army stationed in Dachau, Germany.

After the war, about 1,000 soldiers from the Third Army were sent to help at the trials — 20 of them as typists.

But it wasn’t until 1991 when Tillemans got the call to begin his journey across Minnesota to help teach others about what took place during the Holocaust.

While spending one month in the Otter Tail County Jail for drunken driving, Tillemans said he had a vision of a Catholic priest who risked his life helping prisoners in the Dachau concentration camp.

Motivated by the priest, Tilleman quit drinking and pledged to speak 400 times because he said people should not forget and he was discouraged that schools teach very little about the war.

He has spoken at prisons, churches and many schools over the last 20 years. He said because of the graphic photos of dead and severely starved Jewish prisoners and the religious context he uses, that he has to tame down some of his school presentations, “and that disappoints me,” he said.

“Everybody needs to know what took place,” Tillemans said.

Tillemans, who spoke twice a week for 20 years, hit his 400th presentation on June 2 in Paynesville and will be in St. Paul today speaking to Jewish organizations about his experience during the war trials.

“What I get most out of it is being able to tell people about the horrors of war and the concentration camps,” Tillemans said. “I really hope people don’t forget.”

YORK, Maine — Last week, World War II photographer’s mate Ed Bulber crossed the country from California to York to visit friend and fellow veteran Robert Fallavollita of Airport Drive.

What’s so unusual about this weeklong visit is that the men haven’t seen in each other in 66 years. The Internet helped reunite them.

Bulber, 83, and Fallavollita, 84, spent the war developing film taken by other Naval photographers, including photos of Gen. Douglas MacArthur in 1945 aboard the USS Missouri, signing Japan’s surrender documents that ended World War II. They also photographed plane crashes at their base, and flew along coastlines and other terrain taking photos for government maps.

Both are Massachusetts natives — Fallavollita is from East Boston and Bulber grew up in Somerville — and each enlisted in the Navy at age 17 and attended boot camp in New York, where they became friends.

When Fallavollita joined the Naval Air Station Whidbey Island Photographer’s Unit in Washington State, he encouraged Bulber to apply. The only problem was, unlike Fallavollita, Bulber had no photography experience. He may have owned an old Brownie camera, he said, but that was all. He decided to try anyway, and be truthful.

“‘I don’t know a damn thing about photography,’” Bulber said he told the officer who was interviewing him.

Instead of being turned away, Bulber was appointed to the unit. They wanted someone they could train their way, he said.

One memorable experience was when they photographed the local coastline in an attempt to locate a spy thought to be hiding in a boat, they said.

“During the war, the government knew where every fishing boat was,” Fallavollita said.

They flew along the coast, taking pictures every second, he said. After they developed the film, they cut the photos and glued them to a board to create a photographic map and sent it to Washington, D.C. The spy was caught, they said.

In 1945, after the war’s end, the two men went their separate ways. Bulber got married and continued to serve in the Navy for another year. He flew to Antarctica to take photos for an aerial photographic map of the South Pole. After he left the service, he became a bookbinder and transferred to Sacramento.

Fallavollita also married — he and Lucille Fallavollita have been married 61 years — and went to work as an electrician, initially for Boston Edison. Now retired, the couple spend much of their time in their home on the Nubble peninsula.

It was Fallavollita who found his friend on the Internet. The two spoke through Skype software, which allowed them to get a look at each other after more than a half-century’s separation, and to locate one another at Logan International Airport in Boston.

The first thing Bulber did was to comment on his hair loss, joked Fallavollita. Sitting in Fallavollita’s living room on Friday, they laughed about their service years. On a laptop, they viewed black and white photos taken during the war, the last time they were together.

“This,” Fallavollita said, “is the first time we’ve gotten together since 1945.”

“Je suis un soldat Americain,” or, “I am an American soldier.”

Even more important to say during World War II, perhaps, was “Nous sommes vos amis,” or, “We are your friends.”

These and 26 other statements in French, with their English translations, were on a single typewritten page that was handed out early in the 1940s to such soldiers as Don Miller of Perry Township, Ohio, by the headquarters of the First Battalion, 60th Infantry.

“Subject: French Language,” Miller’s now-yellowed paper says.

“Following is a list of sentences that will be of probable use when landing on French soil.”

The last phrase seemed particularly helpful:  “Bon jour, M’siou!”

That’s “Good morning, Sir!”

Preceding it was an expression of gratitude:  “Merci beaucoup.”

Someone in headquarters apparently had an insistent mother. War is no excuse for failing to say, “Thank you very much.”

Soldier speak

Much of the suggested soldier talk was related to the military effort, of course.

“Quel est votre Regiment?” (“From what Regiment are you?”)

“Ou sont les allemands?” (“Where are the Germans?”)

“Qui va la?” (“Who goes there?”)

“Combien de nitrailleuses a votre Compagnie?” (“How many machine guns has your Company?”)

Some of the sentences are emergency in nature.

“J’ai faim.” (“I am hungry.”)

“Je suis malade.” (“I am sick.”)

“Je suis blesse.” (“I am wounded.”)

And if you ran into some French troops who were collaborating with the enemy, it was handy to be able to tell them “Haut les mains.” (“Keep your hands up.”)

But would you follow that up with the order “Venez avec moi.” (“Come with me.”) Or would you ask politely, “Voulez-vous uno cigarette?” (“Do you care for a cigarette?”)

Peacetime phrases

Indeed, many of the sentences provided to allied troops so many decades ago seem more helpful to tourists today than they would have been to soldiers visiting a war-torn France.

“De L’eau, S’il vous Plait?” (“May I have some water, please?”)

“Quelle heure est-il?” (“What time is it?”)

“Comment allez-vous aujourdhui?” (“How are you today?”)

“Ou ost le Cafe?” (“Where is the cafe?”)

In defense of the French-English translators of the First Battallion — albeit about 70 years too late — it’s obviously tough to handle all foreign-relations situations in 28 sentences.

An email sent to a French news agency stated that the BND recently discovered secret files on Brunner which had mysteriously disappeared in the 1990s.

Brunner, who if still alive would be 99, worked alongside Adolf Eichmann and was commander at the Drancy internment camp north of Paris, where Jews were held prior to being sent to their deaths at Auschwitz. Before arriving in France, Brunner assisted in annihilating Jewish communities in Vienna and Salonica.

The Nazi criminal has been wanted for over 65 years. He was arrested in Vienna by the US army after the war, but managed to escape using a fake identity. Later he was able to reach Syria via Egypt, where he settled down in the 1960s.

In Syria he became “special advisor” to the government and befriended then Syrian President Hafez al-Assad. Brunner was wounded twice during his stay in Syria by parcel bombs sent to him. He lost his left eye and some of his fingers were cut off.

Until this day there are still six countries demanding Brunner’s extradition: Germany, France, Poland, Austria, Czech and Greece. He has been tried in absentia in France twice for crimes against humanity. In 1954 he was sentenced to death and in 2001 he was given a life sentence.

However since 1992 no new information on Brunner has surfaced. Despite claims suggesting he was in Syria, information received over six years ago indicates the Nazi criminal was hiding in Brazil.

A US auction house says it has sold the journals written by Nazi death camp doctor Josef Mengele. The sale is drawing criticism from a leader of Holocaust survivors who says the business was profiting off the sale of one of the worst mass murderers in history.

Alexander Autographs, of Stamford, Connecticut, sold the journals Thursday for nearly $300,000, said Bill Panagopulos, the company’s president. Alexander officials said the Jewish buyer wants to remain anonymous and is building a private collection for a museum.

“I am outraged that Mr. Panagopulos and his outfit have profiteered off a sale of materials by one of history’s greatest mass murderers designed to enrich his heirs,” said Menachem Rosensaft, vice president of the American Gathering of Jewish Holocaust Survivors and Their Descendants.

Rosensaft thinks the consignor got the journals from Mengele’s family. He said the journals should have been given to a historical archive for scholars.

Rosensaft said Mengele “selected” his aunt for the gas chambers in 1944, and many other relatives were killed in the Holocaust. He said his mother, who survived, saw Mengele knock a young woman to the ground, put a boot on her chest and hum a song while keeping his foot in place until she died.

Rosensaft also criticized the auction house for selling other Nazi items, saying they could be of interest to neo-Nazis.

Panagopulos said an American company was the consigner that put the journals up for sale. He said his profit would be $15,000 to $20,000 and that he would make a donation to a war memorial.

“I’m not going to the bank on the sale,” he said.

Panagopulos said Rosensaft was the only one he has heard criticism from. He said Mengele’s journals have historical value and that many auction houses deal with Nazi-related items and the buyers are reputable.

Mengele was one of the most wanted Nazi war criminals, a doctor who conducted cruel experiments on twins and dwarves at the Auschwitz concentration camp and killed children with lethal injections. He selected prisoners who would be subjected to his experiments and sent others straight to their death in gas chambers.

His horrors earned him the title “Angel of Death.”

After the war, Mengele fled Germany under an assumed name and ended up in Argentina, a popular refuge for many senior Nazi officials. After eluding capture for 34 years, Mengele drowned in Brazil in 1979.

Buyer: Obligated to show this to the public

The 3,400 pages of journal writings sold Thursday cover 1960 through 1975 when Mengele was hiding in South America. Excerpts from his diaries appeared in 1985 in the weekly German magazine Bunte, which reported Mengele was terrified of being captured and tormented by sleeplessness but remained a Nazi to the end.

In promoting the sale, Alexander said the journals were only sparingly quoted.

“Taken as a whole and carefully read and analyzed, this archive, the vast majority of which has never been published or perhaps even viewed, offers an in-depth view into the cruelest mind of the twentieth century,” the auction house wrote.

The journals detail Mengele’s escape from Germany through bribery and human smuggling, a stint in jail, his arrival in Argentina penniless and his life in a slum. They also cover his racist views, fascination with anatomy and what he calls the shameful peace of World War I.

The buyer spoke on condition of anonymity, saying he didn’t want his private life disrupted. He described himself as the son of a Holocaust survivor who has collected 5,000 original documents related to the Holocaust and plans to open a museum at some point.

“I feel a great obligation this should be shown to the public,” the buyer said.

He said in the right hands the documents can be used as a force for good to counter Holocaust deniers and to reject any philosophy that leads to discrimination.

“I don’t think it’s been intensely scrutinized,” the buyer said of Mengele’s journals. “It’s going to say a lot about his state of mind.”

In the 66 years since the end of World War II, the Allied victory over the Axis powers, though viewed as hard-won, has assumed a certain inevitability. We were always going to win, in other words, no matter how bad it looked at the time.

In fact, noted historian Andrew Roberts says in a new one-volume history of the worst war mankind has ever experienced, that there was nothing inevitable about the conflict’s outcome.

Adolf Hitler and the Nazis could have won, Roberts writes.

And had the Nazis won, as Winston Churchill described it in 1940, “then the whole world, including the United States, including all that we have known and cared for, will sink into the abyss of a new Dark Age made more sinister, and perhaps more protracted, by the lights of a perverted science.”

We came close to sinking into that “New Dark Age” as Roberts shows as in his fine new book, “The Storm of War,” the latest history of the catastrophic war that cost 50 million lives.

Since the Germans had the best weapons, the best army, the best tactics and occasionally the best strategy almost to the end of the conflict, Roberts concludes that they could indeed have won the war, but lost “because they were Nazis.”

In sum, Hitler’s war aims were in the end defeated by a horrible ideology, Nazism, which made heedless destruction its goal, destruction of the Jews and other Nazi racial enemies.

Indeed Roberts examines Nazi mistakes that, if avoided, would have helped Hitler win not just battles but perhaps the war itself. Among those mistakes:

» Hitler should have started the war in 1942 or even 1943 rather than as he did in 1939. A later start, among other things, would have allowed Hitler to develop a powerful surface naval fleet.

» Allowing the British to escape from Dunkirk as France collapsed gave Churchill time to rally England.

» Hitler should have persuaded Japan to attack the Soviet Union rather than the U.S., and worked more closely with his allies in Tokyo and Rome.

» Once his invasion of Soviet Union was under way, Hitler should have made friends with the large non-Russian, initially anti-Moscow populations rather than seeking to destroy them.

In all, Roberts has produced a lucid narrative stream which makes his book flow like a novel. I couldn’t put it down.

Besides making me aware—— again — that Hitler came close to winning world War II, I emerged from “The Storm of War” even more grateful to the dwindling ranks of those who fought the battles of the greatest war.

NEW ORLEANS (AP) — The gray, concrete, heavily scarred slabs that arrived at the National World War II Museum this week are more than just chunks of an old wall to historians.

The slabs are part of Nazi Germany’s Atlantic Wall, a string of defenses ordered by Nazi dictator Adolf Hitler in 1940. The defenses, also known as “Hitler’s wall,” stretched 3,200 miles from France to Norway and were designed to stop, or at least slow, the Allies from advancing inland during an invasion.

Allan Millette, a history professor and director of the Eisenhower Center at the University of New Orleans, said the relic is a portal to studying what happened in 1944 and 1945, when Allied forces penetrated the wall and the tide began to turn against Germany.

“The concept was to build coastal defense, gun positions that could shell ships and places that could cause havoc with landing forces,” he said.

Each of the three sections of wall is 5 ½ feet high, 18 inches thick. Together they total 35 feet long and weigh 22 tons. Shots fired by incoming Allied troops who stormed Utah Beach in Normandy on D-Day, June 6, 1944, have pock-marked the surfaces.

The Normandy invasion created the final land front against Nazi forces. American, British Commonwealth and Free French forces led the assault, joined later by troops of other allied nations. As the new front opened, the Allies were slowly pressing up the Italian peninsula, which was invaded in 1943. On the eastern front, Soviet troops were pushing Germany and its allies out of occupied territories.

Less than a year later, the war in Europe ended with German capitulation in May 1945, though fighting continued in the Far East until Japan formally surrendered on Sept. 2, 1945.

The relics were donated to the museum by the Utah Beach Museum at Sainte-Marie-du-Mont, France. The two museums have a partnership of sorts. The wall was given to the New Orleans museum both as a thank-you for advice and to clear space, said Gordon “Nick” Mueller, president of the New Orleans museum.

The Atlantic Wall was made up of a number of fortifications — mines, pillboxes, tank traps and other things, including the sections of concrete wall.

“There is a misconception that it was one continuous wall,” said Jeremy Collins, the conference programs manager for the museum. “It was actually a series of strong points or fortified points at likely landing sites.”

The sections of wall were used to block easy access for vehicles and prevent them from being able to storm up from the beaches and go inland, he said.

“They especially did not want heavy vehicles to just be able to drive ahead full speed,” Collins said. The walls were designed so the vehicles would be funneled into choke points where heavy defenses awaited them.

The slabs were removed from Utah Beach on June 5, using a huge industrial crane that placed them on flatbed trucks, which drove them to the port where they were crated and placed on a ship. The cost of removal and shipping were between $20,000 and $25,000, officials said.

The wall segments arrived in New Orleans on Wednesday and cleared customs on Friday, museum officials said.

They will be placed on the museum’s “Parade Grounds,” Mueller said, joining a couple of individual bomb shelters already there.