Browsing: November

A Brief History On November 12, 1944, the Royal Air Force (RAF) used its heavy bomber, the Avro Lancaster, to drop Tall Boy bombs on the last German battleship, the Tirpitz.   This attack was the 26th Allied attempt in a series of attacks over a 4-year period to sink her like her sister ship, the Bismarck.  And with 3 direct hits, over she capsized.  Digging Deeper The Tall Boys were giant 12,000-pound bombs designed by the British weapons designer Barnes Wallis.  They were so big that only Lancasters could lug them to the target.  No U.S. bomber of World War II times was…

A Brief History On November 11, 1911, the Midwest region of the United States experienced one of the weirdest weather days in American history when it was hit by the cold wave “The Great Blue Norther.” Digging Deeper Many cities went through the process of recording their record high temperature for the date only to record their record low for the date later that same day!  Some of those cities and towns even suffered tornadoes and blizzards. Examples of this bizarre temperature fluctuations include: Kansas City, Missouri which had its record high of 76° Fahrenheit (F) in the late morning and a low…

A Brief History On November 10, 1793, the government of revolutionary France celebrated the “Festival of Reason” as it rejected traditional religion (mostly Catholicism in France) and inserted a philosophy known as the “Cult of Reason” as the national “religion.”  Nationwide, real women dressed up in white Roman dress and impersonated “Goddesses of Reason.” Digging Deeper This new government had renounced all forms of deities for a secular, scientific explanation of the universe and all in it.  Despite having Goddesses of Reason dancing around, the framers of this Cult of Reason were also careful to warn against worshipping science, liberty,…

A Brief History On November 9, 1979, the computers that served the North American Aerospace Defense Command (NORAD), the American and Canadian anti-nuclear defense agency, wrongly reported that a massive Soviet nuclear strike was on the way, triggering an alert that nearly caused the U.S. to launch its own massive retaliatory nuclear strike. Digging Deeper Luckily for the citizens of the Northern Hemisphere, and perhaps the entire earth, a frantic manual check of satellite data and early warning radars showed the alarm to be false, and NORAD cancelled the alert, narrowly averting the accidental start of a massive nuclear war. At that point in…

A Brief History On November 8, 1950, early in the Korean War, a U.S. Lockheed F-80 Shooting Star, America’s first operational jet fighter, flown by U.S. Air Force Lieutenant Russell Brown, shot down a Soviet-built MiG-15 piloted by a North Korean pilot, in the first air-to-air combat between jet planes in aviation history. Digging Deeper The F-80 was a reliable and rugged airplane whose service life with the USAF lasted into 1975 and longer elsewhere, however, it was outclassed by the MiG-15.  The Shooting Stars fighting in Korea were effective at shooting down piston-engine communist airplanes (Yak-9, IL-10), but their air-to-air record for shooting down MiGs was 6 for 13 of…