Browsing: Military

A Brief History On May 22, 1176, The Hashshashin (Assassins) made an attempt on the life of Saladin, the First Sultan of Egypt and Syria. The attempt failed, and Saladin, a Kurd and a Sunni Muslim, continued his reign until his death in 1193 of fever at the age of 56. Kurdish by ethnicity, Saladin was the founder of the Ayyubid dynasty and ruled what is now Egypt, Syria and Yemen along with the West coast of the Saudi Arabian Peninsula and Upper Mesopotamia (parts of Northern Iraq, Northeast Syria and Southern Turkey). Saladin is probably the best known person…

A Brief History On May 20, 1645, the forces of Prince Dodo (we do not make this stuff up!) of the Qing Dynasty conquered the city of Yangzhou, China, from the forces of the Southern Ming of the Hongguang Emperor. The Qing army commenced perhaps the greatest single incident atrocity/massacre in all of History by killing 800,000 people over the next 10 days. (See below for another candidate for worst massacre in History.) Digging Deeper China had long been fought over by rival warlords calling themselves “Emperor” and the carnage involved in these Chinese wars are among the deadliest in…

A Brief History On May 18, 1974, India’s Operation Smiling Buddha resulted in the successful detonation of a nuclear weapon, becoming the sixth nation to explode a nuclear device. Prior to India, only the 5 permanent members of the UN Security Council (US, Soviet Union/Russia, United Kingdom, France and China) had developed nuclear weapons, at least officially. Digging Deeper India officially claimed a yield of about 13 kilotons, similar in size to the bomb the US dropped on Hiroshima, Japan in 1945. Outside scientists estimated the explosion as less powerful, perhaps as little as 2 kilotons. Canada, which had supplied…

A Brief History On May 17, 1943, the British RAF conducted their famous “Dambusters” raid on dams on Germany’s rivers, a story we told in our article “May 17, 1943: 10 Most Daring, Dashing, Devastating Bombing Raids (WWII)”. Today we will discuss 10 Bombing raids of significance (historic or famous) that did not occur during World War II. Digging Deeper 1. Balloon Bombs, Venice, 1849. The first known use of aerial bombing, Austrians used unmanned balloons to carry bombs over Venice on July 15, 1849, which had revolted against Austrian rule and declared the Republic of San Marcos. The Austrians…

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…