On May 21, 1966, then-Spec. 4th Class Dolby was in the middle of his first tour in Vietnam. He was part of a 1st Cavalry Division platoon on a mission near An Khe when the men walked into an ambush. 
In April 1945, then-2nd Lt. Baker was one of the few black officers serving in the segregated 92nd Infantry Division near the northern Italian village of Viareggio. 
"We thought it was a sacrosanct place," said his wife, Judé McLaughlin. "I can't believe they'd be so cavalier with such an important thing." 
"We didn't know we were making history in those days,'' said his fellow Tuskegee Airman Dr. Harold May on Tuesday outside Trinity Church in Boston, where five Tuskegee Airman attended Mr. McLaurin's funeral.
("They better not have had any biases like that," he says now. "They'd have gotten their [rear ends] kicked.") 
Finn was the oldest of 97 Medal of Honor recipients from World War II still living. He died at a nursing home for veterans in Chula Vista, outside San Diego, according to a Navy statement. 
Finn, who enlisted in the Navy just before his 17th birthday, received the Medal of Honor on Sept. 15, 1942. 
Dad had been involved in radio as an announcer and entertainer virtually since the beginning of the medium, as early as the mid-1920s. By the mid-1930s, he was the promotion and publicity director of WNJO in West Palm Beach, Florida and later of WRBL in Columbus, Georgia. The beginning of the war found him in Columbus, GA just outside Fort Benning, a major training facility for infantry, airborne, and other combat troops. From about March 1941 until May 1942, Dad was a member of the Columbus, Georgia Defense Service Council and Camp Services Committee at Fort Benning as civilian coordinator of entertainment for troops. From May 1942-March 1943, he worked fulltime as WRBL's Director, Soldier and Civilian Morale Department, producing, directing, announcing and sometimes acting in theatrical performances and coordinating other entertainment for the troops.
Mr. Uhl, 92, died May 9 at an assisted living facility in Easton, Md., of complications from a stroke. 
The officer who oversaw the Aberdeen demonstration in 1942 was credited with bestowing on the launcher its enduring nickname. He remarked at the time that Mr. Uhl's launcher resembled comedian Bob Burns's tubular musical instrument, called the "Bazooka." 
Ms. Kamenshek was only 17 when she joined the Rockford, Ill., team in 1943, the first year of the All-American Girls Professional Baseball League. Chicago Cubs owner and chewing gum magnate Philip K. Wrigley established the league to keep baseball before the public eye when male ballplayers were drafted into the military during World War II. 
While serving in the Army Air Forces during World War II, Col. Mahurin flew the P-47 Thunderbolt, a propeller-driven plane equipped with eight 50-caliber machine guns. He used them to devastating effect against the German Luftwaffe. 
Col. Grimes later learned that four of his crewmen were killed in action, but five had survived the crash. "You never stop thinking about it," he said in a 2004 interview. "In my mind, I'm back in the cockpit, left seat, looking at the controls, and I'm dodging and diving around the Nazi fighters, trying to make it to a cloud bank. And I look for every option, but I never come up with anything to save us." 
Mr. Escalante pioneered the use of Advanced Placement, a program of college-level courses and tests designed for high-achieving private schools, to raise standards in average and below-average public schools. His success at Garfield High School, where 85 percent of the students were low-income and few parents had more than a sixth-grade education, suggested that more time and encouragement for learning could trump educational disadvantages. 
Once Mr. Escalante became a national celebrity, rubbing shoulders with Arnold Schwarzenegger and James Cameron on his own PBS series on careers for students who applied themselves in school, he faced resentment from other Garfield teachers. He was quick to tell Principal Henry Gradillas about colleagues selling real estate in the teachers lounge or calling in sick to get a head start on their weekend. He was painfully blunt about the flaws in the teaching methods of other teachers in the math department, which he chaired. 
He disobeyed the orders and instead blew up his own explosives cache and went into hiding. (Much like Dietrich von Choltitz, the German general who refused Hitler's orders to burn Paris.)
Mostly, the Kreisau Circle used its several wartime summits at the von Moltkes' home to map out the democratic Germany they thought would follow the collapse of Nazism. Few in the group lived to see the end of the war, the others having been rounded up and killed. 
Sgt. Howard took charge of the battered platoon and helped organize the overpowered and outnumbered troops into defensive emplacements along a ravine. Sgt. Howard crawled from position to position, resupplying his men with ammunition and directing fire toward the encircling enemy while radioing in fire support from airborne gunships. 
The girls who loved Anne Frank wanted to understand what she went through, in whatever small ways they could. They were prone to melancholy and morbidity; they couldn't believe the atrocities that had happened in their parents' or grandparents' lifetimes. 