🇺🇸A kid from Chicago was about to endure unimaginable suffering. At Midway, a 23-year-old American pilot escaped his burning torpedo bomber and parachuted into the Pacific. For years, the U.S. Navy believed he had simply vanished in battle. Then Japan surrendered, and a captured report revealed the horrifying truth: The enemy had taken him alive... His name was Wesley Frank Osmus, but everyone called him "Wes". --------------------------------------------------- Follow @Vanguard_WW2 to discover more extraordinary - and heartbreaking - stories from World War II. --------------------------------------------------- "Wes" was a Chicago kid who had joined the Naval Reserve in March 1940 to help pay his way through college. His instructors quickly recognized a talented and promising young aviator and encouraged him to enter flight training. "Wes" earned his wings in 1941. He could have returned to university. Instead, he chose to remain in the Navy. On June 4, 1942, Ensign Osmus took off from USS Yorktown in a slow and increasingly obsolete TBD Devastator, accompanied by his radio-gunner, Benjamin Dodson Jr. About 14 miles from the Japanese carrier fleet, Zero fighters riddled their aircraft and set a fuel tank ablaze. Burning gasoline began spreading through the plane. "Wes" desperately called Dodson over the intercom. There was no answer. Osmus bailed out. Dodson, probably dead or gravely wounded, disappeared into the Pacific with the burning aircraft. Japanese sailors spotted "Wes" during his descent and hauled him aboard the destroyer Arashi. Wounded and badly burned, the young pilot was beaten, humiliated, and tortured. Threatened with decapitation, he was forced to reveal information about the American carrier force. That evening, Arashi’s captain ordered his execution. A sailor struck "Wes" in the neck with a fire axe. The first blow failed to kill him, leaving the wounded American desperately clinging to a steel chain over the destroyer’s stern. A second blow ended his struggle. His body disappeared into the Pacific. After the war, American investigators questioned surviving Japanese sailors and reconstructed the murder. No one was ever prosecuted: the captain who ordered it and most of those involved had already died. Wesley Osmus received the Navy Cross posthumously. The U.S. Navy later placed the Chicago kid’s name on a warship: USS Osmus. His remains were never recovered. But his story was. May he rest in peace forever.

Five years ago today, 13 brave American service members were taken from their families and their country by an Islamic terrorist in Kabul, Afghanistan. We will never forget them, and never again allow our men and women in uniform to be so utterly betrayed.

There is a famous photograph from the Korean War of a young Marine officer scrambling over a seawall, rifle in hand, leading his men off the boats and into the fight at Inchon. The man in that picture, Lieutenant Baldomero Lopez, was dead within minutes of it being taken. He is one of the very few people on earth photographed in the last moments of his own life while earning the Medal of Honor. Lopez was a Tampa kid, the son of Spanish immigrants, sharp enough to earn his way into the Naval Academy at Annapolis. By September 1950 he was a Marine first lieutenant, and he came ashore in the assault waves at Inchon, the daring amphibious landing that turned the whole war around. That is where the photographer caught him, going up and over the seawall at the head of his platoon, straight into the teeth of the beach defenses. The beach was a mess of enemy bunkers and pillboxes, and one of them had his men pinned down with automatic weapons fire. Lopez did what a good officer does. He went after it himself. He crept up alongside the position, pulled the pin on a grenade, and raised his arm to throw it into the gun port. At that exact instant an enemy gun caught him, hitting him in the shoulder and the chest. The wounds knocked him backward, and the live grenade fell out of his hand and dropped to the ground right next to his own Marines. He was badly hit, bleeding, in shock. His arm no longer worked well enough to pick the grenade back up and throw it clear. He had a couple of seconds and one terrible decision to make. He could roll away and try to save himself, and let the grenade go off among his men. Or not. Lopez pulled the grenade in underneath his own body, wrapped himself around it with a sweep of his ruined arm, and took the entire blast into himself. It killed him. It saved the men around him. He was twenty five years old. His parents received his Medal of Honor. And that photograph of him going over the wall has hung in Marine Corps history ever since, a young officer forever frozen at the front of his men, seconds from giving up everything so they could live.

Michael Novosel had already been to two wars before Vietnam even started. Son of Croatian immigrants, raised in Pennsylvania during the Depression, he joined the Army Air Corps ten months before Pearl Harbor and by 1945 he was a captain flying B-29 bombers over Japan. He flew in Korea too. By the early 1960s he was a lieutenant colonel in the Air Force Reserve and a commercial airline pilot with a family, a man who had absolutely nothing left to prove. And then, at 41 years old, he decided he had to go to Vietnam. The Air Force had no room for another senior officer, so Novosel did something almost nobody does. He gave up his lieutenant colonel's rank, took a big step down to become an Army warrant officer, and went to fly helicopters. Not gunships. Dustoff, the unarmed medevac Hueys that flew into hot landing zones to pull out the wounded. He was old enough to be the father of most of the men he flew with, and he flew two tours. On October 2, 1969, near the Cambodian border, a group of South Vietnamese soldiers was surrounded by several thousand North Vietnamese in a fortified training area. They were out of ammunition, their radios were dead, and they were pinned in the open. Novosel flew in with no gunship cover and no fire support, alone, and went to work. He skimmed the ground under continuous machine gun fire while his crew hauled wounded men aboard. Six times the fire was so heavy it drove him out of the area, and six times he circled around and came back in from a different direction. When communication was gone, he flew low circles over the battlefield just to show the scattered men where to gather. Near the end, a wounded soldier lay right next to an enemy bunker. Novosel backed his helicopter in, tail first, hovering toward the enemy gun to reach the man. As they pulled the soldier aboard, automatic weapons opened up at point blank range, tore into the aircraft and wounded Novosel, and he lost control for a sickening moment before catching it and clawing back into the sky. He made 15 separate runs into that field. When it was done, he had saved 29 lives in a single day. President Nixon put the Medal of Honor around his neck in 1971. But the number that really tells the story is the one from his whole career. Over two tours, Michael Novosel flew 2,543 medevac missions and carried out more than 5,500 wounded human beings. One of the men he pulled out of a hot zone was his own son, also a Dustoff pilot in Vietnam. The very next week, his son flew in and rescued him after he was shot down. A father and a son, taking turns flying into hell to bring each other home. He stayed on flying duty for 42 years, the last World War II aviator still flying in the US military, and retired in 1984. He died in 2006 and lies in Arlington. In 2023 the Army renamed its home of Army aviation, Fort Rucker, in his honor. It is Fort Novosel now, named for a man who traded a colonel's rank for the chance to go back into the fire unarmed and bring the wounded out.

84 years ago today, a pilot running out of fuel made a decision that won the Pacific War. Most Americans have never heard his name. June 4, 1942. Six months after Pearl Harbor, Japan's navy is undefeated. Four of the carriers that burned Pearl, Akagi, Kaga, Soryu, and Hiryu, are steaming toward Midway to finish off the US Pacific Fleet. At 7:52 AM, Wade McClusky launches from USS Enterprise leading 32 Dauntless dive bombers. Here's the detail nobody mentions: McClusky is a fighter pilot. He'd been given the air group weeks earlier and had barely flown a dive bomber in combat. Now he's leading every SBD the Enterprise has at the most important target in the Pacific. 9:20 AM. He arrives at the intercept point where the Japanese fleet is supposed to be. Empty ocean. Nothing for miles. The Japanese had turned. Nobody knew where. And now McClusky owns the worst math problem in naval aviation: his fuel is bleeding away, and every minute he keeps searching, he condemns more of his own pilots to ditch in open water where nobody will find them. Doctrine is clear. Turn back. McClusky keeps going. He works a search pattern, squeezing miles out of dying fuel tanks. 9:55 AM. Far below, a single Japanese destroyer is cutting a white scar across the ocean at flank speed. It's the Arashi, racing to rejoin the fleet after depth-charging the American submarine Nautilus. Think about that. A failed sub attack is about to give away the entire Japanese navy. McClusky reads the wake like an arrow and follows it. 10:02 AM. The horizon fills with the entire Japanese strike force. Four carriers, their decks crammed with planes being refueled and rearmed. Fuel lines snaking everywhere. Bombs stacked in the open. And here's the miracle: the sky above them is empty. Minutes earlier, American torpedo squadrons had attacked at sea level and been annihilated. Torpedo 8 lost all 15 planes. One survivor, Ensign George Gay, watched what came next while hiding under his seat cushion in the water. Those doomed pilots dragged every Japanese fighter down to the waves. The door upstairs was wide open. 10:22 AM. McClusky pushes over from 14,500 feet. Both squadrons follow him down onto Kaga. It's actually a mistake, doctrine said split the targets, but Lt. Dick Best catches it mid-dive, pulls out with two wingmen, and goes after Akagi alone. His single bomb pierces the flight deck into the packed hangar. It's enough. By 10:28, Kaga, Akagi, and Soryu, the third hit simultaneously by Yorktown's bombers, are floating infernos. Six minutes. Three carriers that attacked Pearl Harbor, gone. Hiryu follows them to the bottom that evening. The cost of McClusky's gamble was real. Many Enterprise bombers never made it home, some shot down, others swallowed by the sea when their tanks ran dry. McClusky himself was jumped by two Zeros on the way out, took five bullets through his shoulder, and still flew his shot-up Dauntless back to the Enterprise. Admiral Nimitz said McClusky's decision "decided the fate of our carrier task force and our forces at Midway." Japan never won another major battle. One borrowed pilot. One destroyer's wake. One choice to keep flying when every gauge said go home.

Today should be Richard Best Day. Piloting a Dautless dive bomber, he sank two japanese carriers in battle of Midway. He led his squadron in the attack despite an oxygen system malunction that burned his lungs and permanently disabled him. Hall of Fame American Hero. Unbeatable.

Two days ago we lost an American hero. His name was Bruce Crandall, and this is his story 🇺🇸 Before he was a legend, Bruce Crandall was a kid from Olympia, Washington, born in 1933, an All-American high school baseball player who joined the National Guard at 15. The Army drafted him in 1953, trained him as an engineer, then put him in a cockpit. His first real job as a pilot was mapping the parts of the world nobody had charted yet, flying for two years over the open desert of Libya, then over thousands of square miles of unmapped mountains and jungle in Central and South America. He married Arlene in 1956. They would raise three sons. He spent the early part of his career flying toward empty places. Then Vietnam asked him to fly toward the worst one. Sixty years ago, in a clearing called LZ X-Ray, roughly 450 American soldiers were surrounded by an enemy force several times their size. The shooting was so heavy the medevac helicopters turned back. Landing meant dying. Bruce Crandall made a different choice. He was a 32-year-old major flying an unarmed Huey. No guns. No armor that mattered. Just a thin aluminum shell and a decision. He pointed the nose at the hottest piece of ground in the war and went in anyway, with his wingman Ed "Too Tall" Freeman right behind him. Then he did it again. And again. Twenty-two times in a single day. He flew in the ammunition and water that kept the men alive. He flew out more than 70 wounded soldiers, loading them while rounds punched through the airframe, the cargo bay slick with other men's blood. Each run he could have stopped. Nobody would have blamed him. He kept his word to the men on the ground instead: you will be resupplied, and if you fall, we are coming for you. He never fired a shot all day. He saved dozens of lives with nothing but nerve and a helicopter. The men called him "Snake." He went back for a second tour and was shot down in January 1968, this time by friendly bombs falling too close. By the end of the war he had flown more than 900 combat missions. Then he did something quieter that almost nobody talks about. He went home and lived an ordinary life. He retired as a lieutenant colonel in 1977, earned a master's degree, ran a small California town as its city manager, and spent 17 years in the Public Works Department in Mesa, Arizona, fixing roads and keeping the water running. The man who once flew through a wall of fire spent his later years making sure the streetlights worked. It took 40 years for the country to catch up to what he did at X-Ray. In 2007, President Bush hung the Medal of Honor around his neck. If you saw We Were Soldiers, that was him on screen, Greg Kinnear in the cockpit, though the real man was braver than any movie could hold. Col. Bruce "Snake" Crandall died on May 31, 2026, at 93 years old. He outlived the war, the doubts, and most of the men who watched him come screaming back into that valley when no one else would. Some heroes carry a rifle. This one carried the wounded home, then went back to work like it was nothing. Rest easy, Snake. We have it from here. In honor of Lt. Col. Bruce Crandall (1933-2026), the best of us and a true American hero. We won't forget you 🇺🇸