Browsing: February

A Brief History On February 28, 1893, the United States Navy made an enormous step toward eventually ruling the seas by launching its first ever battleship commensurate with those of other great naval powers.  Though the USS Indiana BB-1 was launched on this date, she would not be commissioned until 2 years later. Digging Deeper Designed for coastal defense, the Indiana was not intended to throw her weight around the world as her decks were not designed to take heavy seas in the open ocean.  About 351 feet long and with a beam of 69 feet, she did not have the size or proportions of…

A Brief History In February 2014, the headlines were of censorship, the enemy of free people.   Digging Deeper In Australia, censors had banned the Swedish film Children’s Island because it contains scenes of naked children.  Far from pornographic, the film was first released back in 1980 and had won the most prestigious Swedish movie awards and was even submitted for consideration at the Academy Awards.  The threat of 10 years imprisonment for anyone showing or selling the film sparked animated debate in Australia. On the Internet, Muslims applied enough pressure to have the YouTube video of Katy Perry’s song “Dark Horse” edited to remove…

A Brief History On February 26, 1935, the militant German nationalist leader Adolf Hitler defied the terms of the Treaty of Versailles and ordered the reestablishment of the German Air Force, known as the Luftwaffe. Digging Deeper Hitler and his Nazi buddies had plotted this for some time, disguising pilot training as lessons to fly gliders, something allowed by the treaty.  As German industry developed war planes, the ruse that these planes were civilian craft was used as a cover story. German pilots got their first taste of combat flying in the Condor Legion of “volunteers” during the Spanish Civil…

A Brief History On February 25, 1336, the 4,000 defenders of the medieval Lithuanian fortress of Pilénai thought they had no other choice but to make the horrible decision to kill themselves and their families after torching and destroying everything they had of value to deny their Teutonic besiegers the spoils of victory and the opportunity to kill or enslave them. Digging Deeper The number of women and children sacrificed is unknown, but even just the number of defenders, recorded at 4,000, is more than enough to rank as history’s largest mass suicide, eclipsing the 900+ dead at Masada in 37-31 B.C. and the 900+…

A Brief History On February 24, 1942, less than 3 months after the surprise attack on Pearl Harbor, the city of Los Angeles seemed to be under attack from a mysterious flying object.  Digging Deeper Later claimed by the government to have been a false alarm, something had to have caused numerous air raid alerts to go off and give anti-aircraft gunners something to shoot at.  Shoot they did, and a furious firefight ensued with .50 caliber machine guns and 3-inch artillery shells, about 1,400 rounds of which exploded over the city,  showering it with metal fragments. General Marshall later speculated that unknown persons…