Tag Archives: guillermo tabernilla

Fighting Basques: Antonio Guezuraga Besanguiz. From the Beaches of Algeria in 1942 to Apollo 11

This native of Busturia was NASA’s chief engineer and participated in the mission that took Armstrong and Aldrin to the moon. This article originally appeared in its Spanish form in El Diario. How is it possible that a boy from a small town in Bizkaia, with just a few hundred inhabitants, managed to become one […]

Fighting Basques: “This is my war too!” Cecilia Corcuera and Carmen Arabia in the United States Army

This article originally appeared in its Spanish form in El Diario. In “Spaniards against Hitler. At the service of the United States Army,” we presented the results of a preliminary analysis on the weight of Spanish emigration in the United States Army (USA) in World War II (WWII). In that work, we identified 1,194 men and two […]

Fighting Basques: Six Basques at Pearl Harbor, The Day of Infamy

This article originally appeared in its Spanish form in El Diario. War was inevitable. The United States – despite its “neutrality” and even without considering the huge supply of raw materials and war machinery it would send to the United Kingdom in the near future – was the only country capable of standing in the way […]

Fighting Basques: The Two Burials of the Sailor Peter Paul Parisena Mendionde

Pierre “Peter” Paul Parisena Mendionde was born on March 3, 1925 in the French town of Bordeaux, to parents from Nafarroa Beherea. His father, Jean “John” Santiago Parisena Maya, a veteran of the French Army during the Great War, was born in Banka in 1902, while his mother Catherine Mendionde Antchagno was born in Urepele in […]

Fighting Basques: Objective Burma: Julio Eiguren, the Basque Spy Who Did Not Exist

This article originally appeared in Spanish at El Diario. You can find all of the English versions of the Fighting Basques series here. The invasion of Burma (now Myanmar) – in the hands of the British Empire since 1886 – by the Empire of the Rising Sun at the end of December 1941 was another […]

Fighting Basques: A Love Story. The Ybarrola Family in the United States

This article originally appeared in Spanish at El Diario. You can find all of the English versions of the Fighting Basques series here. From the small Baltic province of present-day Estonia, located in northern Europe, the Kivimägi/Kewe family came to Tarhan — in the western part of the Crimean Peninsula bathed by the Black Sea. […]

Fighting Basques: Colonel María Rementeria Llona and the Women at War Together With the US

This article originally appeared in Spanish at El Diario. You can find all of the English versions of the Fighting Basques series here. The struggle of women for equal participation in American society – from the right to vote, achieved in 1920, and women advancing in equality with men in terms rights and responsibilities derived […]

Fighting Basques: Basques on the Forgotten Front of America — The Aleutian Islands of Alaska, 1942-1943

This article originally appeared in Spanish at El Diario. You can find all of the English versions of the Fighting Basques series here. Even more than the devastating attacks by German U-boats against the Allied merchant navy on the Atlantic coast, in the Gulf of Mexico, or in the Caribbean, or the failed espionage attempts […]

Fighting Basques: A Passion for flying — The Etcharts of Montana in World War II

This article originally appeared in Spanish at El Diario. You can find all of the English versions of the Fighting Basques series here. Like many young people of his generation, and like in many cases following in the footsteps of his parents or close relatives, Jean Etchart Chabagno, a young man from Nafarroa Beherea born […]

Fighting Basques: The Laxalts, a Basque Family Serving the United States, 1941-1945

This article originally appeared in Spanish at El Diario. At 36 years old, the Zuberoan Jean Pierre Laxalt Etchart found himself in Ardentes, in central France — about 650 kilometers from his hometown of Aloze — immersed in the Great War of 1914 that would devastate part of the country. The difference from his peers […]