There’s a twinkle in Lou Caraker’s eyes when he talks about his grandson, Chip. It’s the pride of a warrior seeing family follow in his footsteps. Chip—Capt. Thomas F. Hancock IV—is a member of the recently established Marine Corps Forces Special Operations Command. Hancock, of Powhatan County, was a graduate of the first class of the Marine Special Operations School in April, after he served two tours of duty in Iraq.

The World War II Round Table of Central Virginia will meet Wednesday at 7 p.m. at St. John Neumann Catholic Church in Father Val Hall, 2480 Batterson Road in Powhatan. Bill Levi, a B-24 navigator flying missions out of Italy, will be the featured speaker. The meeting is open to the public. A $5 donation is suggested. Details, call (804) 363-9274, or visit http://ww2rtcva.com.

With the election of John Andrew Bowersett “Pete” Davies as Culpeper County’s commissioner of the revenue in 1950, Culpeper got a 32-year extension on a family tradition of community service. His mother, Mary Elizabeth Bowersett Davies, and his maternal grandfather, John Andrew Bowersett, had occupied the same post in an unbroken line for a combined 74 years.

Germany’s highest court says it has rejected a request to block the trial of John Demjanjuk on charges that he was an accessory to the murder of thousands at a death camp in Nazi-occupied Poland.

In 1943, when he was 15, Roland John Stoupa dropped out of the eighth grade in his native Cleveland, lied about his age and joined the Army. Enlistees had to be 18, and he also was hiding a punctured ear drum. “However, I was determined to serve my country,“ Mr. Stoupa wrote in a chapter of “America’s Youngest Warriors.“ He also was determined to be one less mouth for his mother to feed after his banker-father died of pneumonia six years earlier, said Mr. Stoupa’s son, Steven Stoupa of Prince George County.

A German court said Friday it has ruled that John Demjanjuk can be tried on charges of being an accessory to the murder of thousands at a Nazi death camp, and that the trial likely will start in early November.

NEWPORT NEWS—Maritime archaeologists tracking the victims of Nazi U-boats during World War II have explored a Navy patrol boat that has been untouched since it sank off the Outer Banks in 1942. The converted trawler YP-389 was found about 18 miles off Hatteras Inlet last month by an expedition led by the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration studying shipwrecks left from the WWII battle for control of East Coast shipping lanes, maritime archaeologist Joe Hoyt said.

The World War II Round Table of Central Virginia will meet Wednesday at 7 p.m., at 3480 Batterson Road, behind Flat Rock Shopping Center in Powhatan County. Ralph Phipps, a Marine who landed on Okinawa during the war, will be the featured speaker. Other Marines from the war also will be honored. The meeting is open to the public with a social to follow. For details, visit http://www.ww2rtcva.com.

Seventy years ago this week, Germany launched a blitzkrieg against Poland. World War II in Europe began. Night fell, and would not lift for six years. Later that month, the Soviet Union invaded Poland from the East. Nazis and communists started the war on the same side. Hitler, not Stalin, broke the bond. Only one year before the invasion, Neville Chamberlain said that the Munich conference with Adolf Hitler secured “peace for our time.“ To the contrary, appeasement only fed Hitler’s appetite. Poland soon felt the jackboot. The Germans put into practice the brutality that would become the Holocaust. At Katyn, the U.S.S.R. massacred the Polish officer corps. No European country suffered more than Poland, and no people suffered more than Jews—not only in Poland but throughout the territory conquered by the Third Reich.

A National Park Service official said yesterday after an evaluation of the National D-Day Memorial that a report would soon be made to the secretary of the interior about its potential to become a national park. It is unclear at this point whether the memorial, which opened in 2001 as a nonprofit, would fit under the umbrella of the park system, said Terrence Moore, chief of park planning and special studies for the Northeast Region.

A 90-year-old former German army officer was convicted Tuesday of murdering 10 Italian civilians who were herded into a barn that was blown up.

Sixty-nine-year-old pilot takes his cousin for a glider flight in memory of her brother who lost his life in a World War II bombing raid over Tokyo. “It was like roaming around in heaven,“ she says.

John Lynwood Smith, a survivor of the World War II German air attack that sank the HMT Rohna, resulting in the largest loss ever of U.S. troops at sea, was laid to rest Sunday in Amelia Presbyterian Church cemetery in Amelia Courthouse. The Winston-Salem, N.C., resident, who retired in 1983 as senior vice president and manager of the Amelia office of Central Fidelity Bank, died Thursday at Forsyth Medical Center in Winston-Salem of complications after surgery for a broken hip. He was 89.

PETERSBURG On the afternoon of Sept. 27, 1944, two men drove from Kassel, Germany, to the town of Nentershausen, about 40 miles away. The men were Herr Hellwig—his first name is not recorded—and Karl Eggert, Hellwig’s driver. Both were members of the Gestapo. Kassel had been bombed that day by American fliers, for the second time in less than a week. And the Gestapo men’s bosses had been encouraging them and other Germans to take action against enemy fliers.

In 1999, Collegiate High School senior Rachel Rosenbaum hit upon the idea of collecting pennies—6 million of them—to try to grasp the number of Jews killed in the Holocaust during World War II. Her grandfather Al Rosenbaum was, with Jay Ipson and Mark Fetter, one of the founders of the Virginia Holocaust Museum, now located in Shockoe Bottom in Richmond. His sculpture of a menorah with six eternal candles stands in the museum and is the center of the museum’s logo. Each candle represents 1 million Jewish dead.