Browsing: Military

A Brief History On November 17, 1871, The National Rifle Association (NRA) was first chartered in the state of New York by William Church, the editor of the Army and Navy Journal and General George Wood Wingate.  The first president of the NRA was Union General Ambrose Burnside who had also worked as a gunsmith in Rhode Island. (Hey! this author has been to Rhode Island, have you?) Digging Deeper It is believed that during the Civil War, the Union Army fired about 1,000 rifle shots for every Confederate soldier hit.  Burnside was well aware of the sorry state of marksmanship among his…

A Brief History On November 15, 1942, the Heinkel He 219, often called the “Uhu,” which is German for eagle-owl, made its first flight.  A year later, the first editions became operational.  Designed from the ground up as a night fighter to combat the British night-bombing raids, the He 219 had an innovative design which incorporated air-to-air radar and the first ejection seats installed in an operational aircraft.  It was also the only German plane of World War II with tricycle-type landing gear. Digging Deeper The He 219 suffered what most German aircraft developed during World War II suffered from, that being bureaucratic infighting between various…

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 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…