Browsing: Military

A Brief History On December 18, 1982, arguably the greatest combat pilot in German military history died of a stroke in Rosenheim, Bavaria, West Germany.  Hans-Ulrich Rudel is credited with shooting down only 9 enemy airplanes, and yet eclipses such German legendary aces as Baron Manfred von Richthofen (80 aerial kills, #1 during World War II) and Erich Hartman, history’s all-time leading ace with 353 air to air kills without ever being shot down or forced to land by enemy airplanes (all during World War II).  Rudel performed his aerial heroics flying dive bomber missions.  We used the occasion of…

A Brief History On December 14, 1940, at the University of California at Berkeley, atomic scientists first isolated the element Plutonium, a radioactive element with a designation of Pu-238 on the atomic chart of the elements (also known as the Periodic Chart), Element #94 for those keeping track.  Plutonium is the stuff we make nuclear bombs from and is a highly dangerous substance even without the thermo-nuclear explosions associated with it. Digging Deeper Element #94 was first discovered by Enrico Fermi and his team in 1934 at the University of Rome, and named the element Hesperium, but it turned out…

A Brief History On December 12, 1937, the USS Panay, a gunboat afloat on the Yangtze River near the city of Nanking (now called Nanjing) was attacked by Japanese military aircraft and sunk, with the loss of three American lives.  The United States and Japan were not at war and the incident was claimed by the Japanese to be due to mistaken identity of the American ship, despite clear American flags painted on the decks.  The Panay was not the first, nor the last, American vessel to be attacked by forces of another country not at war with the United…

A Brief History On December 10, 1936, King Edward VIII of the United Kingdom (Britain, et al), signed the Instrument of Abdication, basically his resignation letter.  King George VI followed him onto the throne and life went on for all involved, especially for Edward who allegedly never really wanted to be King and was free to marry “the woman I love” now that he was not constrained by Royal obligations.  Today we list some national leaders that resigned, either in defeat, in protest, or in disgrace.  As hard as it must be to quit a top tier corporate job (such…

A Brief History On December 7, 1941, a date that US President Franklin Roosevelt said “would live in infamy,” the Japanese navy attacked the naval and air bases on Oahu, Hawaii, most notably at Pearl Harbor, in a surprise attack (or sneak attack in the vernacular of the time) that devastated the American Pacific Fleet.  While the Pearl Harbor raid captures most of our historical attention, the Empire of Japan was up to plenty of other shenanigans on that same day (also December 8, 1941 for those areas West of the International Date Line), kicking off a wider war intended…