A Brief History On May 19, 1643, French Bourbon forces beat Spanish forces allied with the Habsburgs at the battle of Rocroi during the 30 Years War. This French victory for practical purposes ended Spain’s time as a land power. As the name implies, the war went on for a long time, just as several other notable wars have. Some of them were actually a series of wars with brief lulls between major campaigns, and some of the longest “wars” were long lived only on paper, with no formal peace signed for many years after the fighting stopped. The Korean…
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A Brief History On May 19, 1802, Napoleon Bonaparte founded the Legion of Honor, the highest award France can bestow upon their heroes. Many countries have a famous and prestigious award and even international organizations have created such symbols to recognize particularly noteworthy behavior. Here are a list of ten of the most prestigious of these awards. 10. Pour le Merite (Blue Max) Imperial Germany/Prussia. How does a country issue its highest award with a name in a foreign language? Germans receiving the award did not seem to mind, as The Blue Max was literally something to die for, as…
A Brief History Named by President Obama as his nominee for Secretary of the Army in November 2015, Eric Fanning, a 47 year old graduate of Dartmouth and a Defense Department employee, was confirmed for the job by the US Senate on May 17, 2016, making him the first openly gay Secretary of a US Military branch. Digging Deeper A sexual identity activist, Fanning supports a policy of allowing transgender persons to serve in the Armed Forces and to prohibit any sort of discrimination based on a person’s sexuality or sexual identity. The US Military had only dropped its controversial…
A Brief History On May 17, 1943, RAF Squadron 617, later known as The Dambusters, embarked on Operation Chastise, a plan to bomb and destroy two dams to flood the Ruhr Valley in Germany. They were successful, largely because of the wacky weapon they used, a barrel like bomb that was rotated on a carriage under the bomber and then dropped to skip across the water to the dam, and then roll down the face of the dam to blow up right against the structure. Many times in wartime nations will stretch the limits of the imaginations of their inventors…
A Brief History On May 17, 1943, the famous 617 Squadron of the RAF conducted a raid against dams on the Eder, Mohne, and Rohr rivers in Germany, using brilliantly designed special “bouncing bombs.” An incredible achievement in ingenuity and bravery, the 19 Lancaster bombers destroyed 2 dams and damaged a third, but lost 8 aircraft in the process, a measure of just how daring this raid really was. Here we list 10 of the most spectacular bombing raids of all time (but specifically of World War II), some famous and some infamous. Digging Deeper 10. Dresden Firebombing, February 13-15,…