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‘Papa Jake' Larson, D-day veteran and TikTok star, dies aged 102

‘Papa Jake' Larson, D-day veteran and TikTok star, dies aged 102

The Guardian21-07-2025
D-day veteran ″Papa Jake″ Larson, who survived German gunfire on Normandy's beaches in 1944 and then garnered 1.2 million followers on TikTok late in life by sharing stories to commemorate the second world war and his fallen comrades, has died aged 102.
An animated speaker who charmed strangers young and old with his quick smile and generous hugs, the self-described country boy from Minnesota was 'cracking jokes til the end,'' his granddaughter wrote in announcing his death.
Tributes to him quickly filled his Story Time with Papa Jake TikTok account from across the United States, where he had been living in Lafayette, California. Towns around Normandy, still grateful to Allied forces who helped defeat the occupying Nazis in the second world war, paid homage too.
'Our beloved Papa Jake has passed away on July 17th at 102 years young,' granddaughter McKaela Larson posted on his social media accounts. 'He went peacefully.'
'As Papa would say, love you all the mostest,' she wrote.
Born on 20 December 1922, in Owatonna, Minnesota, Larson enlisted in the National Guard in 1938, lying about his age as he was only 15 at the time. In 1942, he was sent overseas and was stationed in Northern Ireland. He became operations sergeant and assembled the planning books for the invasion of Normandy.
He was among the nearly 160,000 Allied troops who stormed the Normandy shore on D-day, 6 June 1944, surviving machine-gun fire when he landed on Omaha Beach. He made it unhurt to the bluffs that overlook the beach, which were studded with German gun emplacements that killed many soldiers.
'We are the lucky ones,' Larson told the Associated Press at the 81st anniversary of D-day in June, speaking among the graves at the American cemetery overlooking Omaha Beach.
'We are their family. We have the responsibility to honour these guys who gave us a chance to be alive.'
He went on to fight through the Battle of the Bulge, a gruelling month-long fight in Belgium and Luxembourg that was one of the defining moments of the war and of Hitler's defeat. His service earned him a Bronze Star and a French Legion of Honour award.
In recent years, Larson made repeated trips to Normandy for D-day commemorations.
In his TikTok posts and interviews, Larson combined humorous anecdotes with somber reminders about the horrors of war.
Speaking to AP on the three years he was in Europe, Larson said he is 'no hero.' Speaking in 2024, he also had a message to world leaders: 'Make peace not war.'
He often called himself 'the luckiest man in the world,' and expressed awe at all the attention he was getting. 'I'm just a country boy. Now I'm a star on TikTok,' he told AP in 2023. 'I'm a legend! I didn't plan this, it came about.'
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I predicted dad's death & deadly disaster before it happened…now I see dead people – how you can use psychic abilities
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  • The Sun

I predicted dad's death & deadly disaster before it happened…now I see dead people – how you can use psychic abilities

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CHRISTOPHER STEVENS reviews last night's TV: Astonishing reason 4,000 Japanese kamikaze pilots were picked to die during the Second World War
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time15 hours ago

  • Daily Mail​

CHRISTOPHER STEVENS reviews last night's TV: Astonishing reason 4,000 Japanese kamikaze pilots were picked to die during the Second World War

Kamikaze: An Untold History (BBC4) How much do you want to die for your country? Please tick the applicable box: 'Strongly desire', 'Desire', or 'Negative', and hand your application form to the admin officer. Astonishing almost beyond belief, this was the question posed to Japanese air force pilots during World War II, as revealed in Kamikaze: An Untold History. Slightly less surprising, since armies are the same the world over, their answers were largely ignored as officials selected the fliers who would attempt to crash their planes into Allied aircraft carriers and other ships. Instead, kamikaze pilots were chosen according to their exam results. Those with the highest marks were excused suicide duties, since their intellect made them too valuable. The ones with the lowest scores were also not picked, because they had not earned the right to sacrifice themselves. But nearly 4,000 Japanese men, average age 21 and four months, did fly kamikaze missions between October 1944 and August 1945. This grimly fascinating documentary tried to explain the mentality, not only of the pilots who flew to certain death, but of the nation that encouraged them to do it. As Japanese newsreels showed the pilots sharing a solemn ceremonial drink — lemonade, since they had sworn off alcohol — and radio announcers read out the young men's wills, a cult of kamikaze gripped the country. Their self-immolation became a symbol of what was expected from every citizen, and the slogan '100 million kamikaze' was a national catchphrase. The pilots were known as 'war gods' and 'mighty eagles'. 'Your divine battle will be known for eternity,' declared the newsreader on one piece of archive footage. Workers wore white bandanas in their honour. It seems incomprehensible, until we realise that many of the young men didn't want to die at all. They simply felt they had no choice. One man who wasn't picked said he saw a comrade receive his orders to 'volunteer' with horror: 'My parents didn't send me to university to die,' the doomed man howled. Another survivor, Hijikata Toshio, bravely marked his questionnaire 'negative'. He was engaged to be married, and his ambition was to be a maths teacher, he said. 'Taking a bullet from an enemy is one thing but blowing myself up didn't seem right.' Most of the veterans, filmed over several years, were in their 90s. One, an American sailor named Seth Irving who described waves of kamikaze planes divebombing his fleet, was 103. By the end of the war, so many Japanese aircraft had been destroyed that the pilots were sent out in trainer biplanes with explosives strapped to their fuselage. Slow and cumbersome, they were easily shot down. Survival had become a matter of chance. One pilot, Arai Toshio, played rock-paper-scissors with a fellow flier, for the right to die in their last remaining plane. He lost . . . and lived to be 99.

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In the early 1940s, Gloria Moore's parents migrated west from Arkansas, seeking – as many Black southerners did at the time – work, and a reprieve from poverty and Jim Crow. They first found jobs working in the wartime shipbuilding industry in Portland, Oregon, before ultimately settling in Russell City – a small, unincorporated community in the San Francisco East Bay, and a bastion of Black and Latino culture and life. There, the Moores bought several acres of land, built a house and raised Gloria and her three siblings. Now 82, Moore remembers life in Russell City as rich, pastoral and communal. The local school, where her mother worked as a cook, had dedicated teachers and an impressive orchestra; the dirt roads that cut through town led to vast oak fields that exploded with wildflowers every spring; and residents always looked out for one another. 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But thanks to the work of a state-wide reparations taskforce, as well as local reparations efforts – including in Hayward, where city and county officials last week committed to allocating $1m to a fund for former residents of Russell City – these little-known stories are coming to light. For the next seven months, these histories are also on display at the Oakland Museum of California (Omca). Through the lenses of history, art, and architecture, Black Spaces: Reclaim and Remain explores patterns of displacement in the San Francisco East Bay as well as the resilience Black communities have shown despite being repeatedly pushed out of the homes and neighborhoods they have built – first from the racist deployment of policies like eminent domain and today through a housing affordability crisis that disproportionally affects communities of color. For museum director Lori Fogarty, it's a narrative with reverberations far beyond the Bay Area: 'This is a very local story, but it's also a national story.' With close proximity to the Bay Area's numerous shipyards and its own railroad stop, Russell City became a hub for Black southerners resettling in California during and immediately after the second world war. Although it was an unincorporated community, and therefore cut off from many of the services provided by the nearby municipality of Hayward, the town developed many of its own institutions, including a school, a fire brigade and a blues club that attracted the likes of Ray Charles and Etta James. Despite this, the city of Hayward, which refused to deliver sewage and garbage services to Russell City despite residents' repeated requests, labelled the city a 'blight' – a term used repeatedly by local governments in the 1950s and 1960s seeking to remove communities of color from certain areas. In so doing, Hayward authorities gained grounds to lay claim over Russell City and force residents, like the grandparents of Marian Johnson, to sell their land for egregiously small sums. Johnson explains that her grandparents bought the land for $7,500, but only received $2,200 from the city in return. For years, she couldn't understand why her grandparents sold the six lots they had purchased for their extended family in Russell City and moved to East Oakland. But once she learned about eminent domain, she realized they had been forced out. 'They bought plots of land so that their children wouldn't have to pay mortgages, so their children could generate generational wealth by not having to pay rent,' Johnson said. 'All of this was stripped from our family.' Today, all that is left of Johnson's family plot is a willow tree planted by her grandfather. 'We would still be there,' she said, thinking of the present that could have been had Hayward not prioritized the development of an industrial park over the homes and livelihoods of more than two hundred families. Johnson's family story is one of those on display at Omca, where visitors are guided through three core elements that have defined the histories of Black displacement in the East Bay: homes and domestic spaces, cultural and communal institutions, and destructive policies. Objects like the suitcase Otis Williams carried with him from Louisiana to the Marin City shipyards and Ernest Bean's 1940 home videos showing women pruning roses in a flourishing West Oakland garden transport viewers to a time of hope and prosperity; documents like a transcript of public hearings held regarding the Russell City redevelopment project and the paltry cheque made out to Johnson's grandfather, Bernice Patterson, for his land serve as stark reminders of the destruction that soon followed. 'It's important to understand that these are lived experiences,' said associate curator of history Dania Talley, who curated the exhibition. In the adjacent hall are three pieces from community collaborators that tell the story of continued displacement in the Bay Area, as well as resistance and hope for the community's future. Particularly striking is the full-scale replica of the East Oakland house that activists with the housing justice organization Moms 4 Housing occupied for nearly two months in 2019. For Carolle Fife, an Oakland councilmember who participated in the 2019 occupation, there is a clear through-line between the forced displacement of Russell City residents in the 1960s and the inaccessibility of housing — especially for people of color — nationwide today. 'This is something historically Black folks have been going through in every urban center, and now even rural spaces throughout this country, because of systemic racism,' Fife said on opening night of the exhibition. Brandi Summers, an Oakland-born sociologist and associate professor at Columbia University, said the severity of the cost-of-living crisis in Oakland has once again forced displacement upon the city's Black residents, who are today moving to more distant suburbs and exurbs, or out of the state entirely. 'A lot of Black people actually don't feel comfortable in Oakland any more, regardless of whether we can actually live here,' said Summers, who also leads the scholar and artist collective Archive of Urban Futures, one of the groups that collaborated on the exhibition. Against the backdrop of that crisis, California has in recent years emerged as a national leader when it comes to acknowledging past harms perpetrated against Black communities. In 2020, the state legislature established a nine-person reparations taskforce. And in 2024, Governor Gavin Newsom allocated $12m to racial justice initiatives and issued a formal apology for California's role in slavery. Individual localities have also engaged with the issue. San Francisco established its own advisory committee, which recommended in 2023 that the city issue individual reparations payments of $5m to qualifying individuals. And last week, Alameda county approved $750,000 in redress funds for former residents of Russell City. Hayward, which in 2021 issued a formal apology for its role in the community's destruction, earmarked an additional $250,000 for the fund. But many activists and community members have expressed disappointment at what they see as insufficient progress, especially after bills that would have issued direct cash payments and enabled those displaced through eminent domain to reclaim lost land failed to pass through the legislature last summer. And for former residents of Russell City, the $1m redress fund is woefully inadequate. 'It is pennies on the dollar for the value of the land that you took,' said Johnson. 'That's just a slap in the face.' AUP's Summers worries that public interest and political favor are turning away from issues of Black equity – especially as the current federal administration targets institutions, such as the National Museum of African American History and Culture, that study and elevate the often-sidelined histories of Black Americans. It is for these reasons, Summers says, that shedding light on the legacies of Black Americans' past experiences of displacement, while still possible, is so critical. 'As funding for the arts and humanities goes, stories that are less known will disappear,' she said. For museum director Fogarty, the fact that Omca is telling histories of Black displacement at this moment is in itself a form of resistance. 'Look at what's happening. There is an overt governmental attack on these kinds of stories,' she said. 'There are many places in this country that this show could not be presented right now.'

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