A Brief History On June 17, 1940, the British passenger liner converted to wartime duty, the RMS Lancastria, was sunk off the coast of France by German Junkers Ju 88 bombers as she headed to England with military and civilian evacuees from mainland Europe. The death toll was massive, with 3,000 to 7,000 dead. Incredibly, 2,477 people survived the sinking, one of the largest number of survivors from any shipwreck ever. Digging Deeper Stories of ships sinking usually focus on the number of lives lost, but seldom are the number of survivors celebrated. Some instances of huge numbers of people…
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A Brief History On June 13, 2018, Volkswagen was fined a whopping billion Euros by the EU in conjunction with an emissions tricking scheme hatched by VW to beat clean air requirements in Europe and the US. Digging Deeper The VW scandal, using special computer programs to falsify emissions testing of their turbocharged direct injection (TDI) diesel engines, is not unique among car companies’ efforts to bamboozle governments and consumers. Further investigation showed that other car companies had also cheated on diesel engine emissions, including Jeep, Hyundai, Citroen, Fiat, Renault, and Fiat. Another extreme scandal, this time of a deadly…
A Brief History On June 9, 1928, Australian Charles E. K. Smith completed the first flight across the Pacific Ocean, an enormous aviation first that is often overlooked. Digging Deeper Smith went to the USA, starting with buying his airplane there from a famed polar explorer. The Fokker F.VII was a monoplane boasting three engines, capable of carrying up to 10 people for 750 miles at a top speed of 130 mph. Named the Southern Cross, the Fokker was modified to carry extra fuel to make the flight from California to Hawaii and beyond. The next stop was Fiji after…
A Brief History On June 4, 1989, an estimated tens of thousands Chinese military troops opened fire on perhaps a million Chinese protestors at Tiananmen Square in Beijing, the capital of China. While numbers of troops, protestors, and casualties are only estimates, because historically, governments cannot be counted on to provide accurate accounts of embarrassing events, as many as 10,000 or more of the peaceful protestors may have died in the massacre. Digging Deeper Not only were hundreds or thousands of people shot, but many others were also trampled in the rush to avoid the gunfire or crushed under the…
A Brief History On June 3, 1980, the long history of the Statue of Liberty was threatened by a bomb that exploded at the base of the statue, although luckily no one was killed and damage was minimal. Digging Deeper The alleged culprits in the 1980 bomb attack were Croatian nationalists that wanted to be separated from Yugoslavia to form their own country. Directing their anger against the US during the Cold War seems a strange way to demand freedom from communism! Completed in 1886 as a gift to the US from France, the actual name of the statue is…