FLASHBACK TO WORLD WAR II
Although now 79 years of age, he began creating his first boat in 1948, when he was only 17. He uses a razor blade, tweezers and sandpaper to carve the pieces and boxes, then sticks his completed product together with balsa wood glue. In total. more than 650,000 matchsticks were used to create an amazing collection of 1,300 scale models. Even 1,200 aircraft made even more realistic appearance to dress the decks of aircraft carriers
- German Wehrmacht General Anton Dostler is tied to a stake before his execution by a firing squad in a stockade in Aversa , Italy , on December 1, 1945. The General, Commander of the 75th Army Corps, was sentenced to death by an United States Military Commission in Rome for having ordered the shooting of 15 unarmed American prisoners of war, in La Spezia, Italy, on March 26, 1944. (AP Photo)
- Gaunt and emaciated, but happy at their release from Japanese captivity, two Allied prisoners pack their meager belongings, after being freed near Yokohama, Japan, on September 11, 1945, by men of an American mercy squadron of the U.S. Navy. (AP Photo)
- Aerial view of Hiroshima, Japan, one year after the atomic bomb blast shows some small amount of reconstruction amid much ruin on July 20, 1946. The slow pace of rebuilding is attributed to a shortage of building equipment and materials. (AP Photo/Charles P. Gorry)
- A Japanese man amid the scorched wreckage and rubble that was once his home in Yokohama, Japan . ( NARA )
- Red Army photographer Yevgeny Khaldei (center) in Berlin with Soviet forces, near the Brandenburg Gate in May of 1945.
- A P-47 Thunderbolt of the U.S. Army 12th Air Force flies low over the crumbled ruins of what once was Hitler's retreat at Berchtesgaden, Germany, on May 26, 1945. Small and large bomb craters dot the grounds around the wreckage. (AP Photo)
- Hermann Goering, once the leader of the formidable Luftwaffe and second in command of the German Reich under Hitler, appears in a mugshot on file with the Central Registry of War Criminals and Security Suspects in Paris, France, on November 5, 1945. Goering surrendered to U.S. soldiers in Bavaria , on May 9, 1945, and was eventually taken to Nuremburg to face trial for War Crimes. He was sentenced to death by hanging, but committed suicide by cyanide ingestion the night before he was due to be hanged. (AP Photo)
- Many of Germany 's captured new and experimental aircraft were displayed in an exhibition as part of London 's Thanksgiving week on September 14, 1945. Among the aircraft are a number of jet and rocket propelled planes. Here, a side view of the Heinkel He-162 "Volksjaeger", propelled by a turbo-jet unit mounted above the fuselage, in Hyde park, in London . (AP Photo)