Browsing: May 11

A Brief History On May 11, 2011, former NBA and current European league basketball player Robert Traylor died of an apparent heart attack at his home in Puerto Rico. He was only 34 years old and had played in a professional basketball game only a couple of weeks prior to his untimely death.  Sadly, the history of basketball is filled with similar sad stories, and today we take a look at some of these athletes that died too young. (By the way, the loss of Kobe Bryant in January of 2020 in a helicopter crash at the age of 41…

A Brief History On May 11, 1945, the man that would become the famous actor and philanthropist, Paul Newman, was assigned to the USS Bunker Hill CV-17, an Essex class aircraft carrier off the coast of Okinawa when not one, but two Japanese suicide (Kamikaze) aircraft slammed into the ship, killing nearly 350 men and injuring another 300, with another 43 missing. Newman, a crew member on carrier aircraft torpedo bombers survived the devastating attack when the pilot of his plane was ill, and the crew had to wait for his recovery to report to the ship. He went on…

A Brief History On May 11, 1891, while paying a State visit to Lake Biwa, Otsu, Japan, heir to the throne of the Russian Empire Tsesarevich Nicholas Alexandrovich (the future Czar Nicholas II, Emperor of Russia) was attacked with a sword by one of the Japanese policemen escorting him, wounding the Tsesarevich. Digging Deeper Lucky for Nicholas his cousin, Prince George of Greece and Denmark (seriously, Greece and Denmark?  How did that happen?) was on the spot with his cane, with which he blocked the second sword strike, saving the life of Nicholas.  The first strike had landed on Nicholas’s…

A Brief History On May 11, 1862, Confederate sailors sunk their own ship, the CSS Virginia, in the James River outside of Norfolk, Virginia to avoid capture by Union troops.  Ships have been intentionally sunk by their own crews for a variety of reasons, usually to avoid capture by the enemy, sometimes after battle damage and sometimes while the ships were perfectly sound. At times, even whole fleets were scuttled.  German U-boats would be scuttled when forced to the surface and unable to continue the fight to avoid capture of sensitive encoding equipment, let alone the boats themselves, a common…

A Brief History On May 11, 1862, the CSA ironclad, CSS Virginia, was scuttled in the James River to avoid capture by Union forces. The Virginia had formerly been the USS Merrimac and had fought the USS Monitor in the first battle of ironclad armored ships.  Over its long and illustrious history, the US Navy has lost a variety of vessels, and here we list some of the most famous of those losses. Digging Deeper 10. Bonhomme Richard, 1779. Starting life as a French merchant ship named Duc de Duras built in 1765, she was given to the fledgling US Navy to fight the…