A Brief History On May 23, 1939, the submarine USS Squalus demonstrated the dangers faced by submarine sailors even in peacetime. Squalus was commissioned in March of 1939, with a length of 310 feet and a normal crew of five officers and 54 enlisted men. Digging Deeper With four bow torpedo tubes and four more aft, Squalus was a formidable warrior, boasting a 3-inch gun and four machine guns. After completing a series of test dives, Squalus once again dove on May 23, 1939, and suffered the catastrophic failure of her fresh air intake valve, partly flooding the sub, drowning 26 men…
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A Brief History On May 19, 1959, the North Vietnamese Army formed Group 559 and gave the group the job of establishing a reliable supply route for NVA and Viet Cong forces in South Vietnam. The result became the Ho Chi Minh Trail, a network of roads and footpaths used by the communist North to funnel people and supplies to the South, via Laos and Cambodia. Digging Deeper Called by the American spy group the NSA “one of the great achievements of military engineering of the 20th century,” the Ho Chi Minh trail was a constant target of US bombing…
A Brief History On May 18, 1944, Soviet leader Josef Stalin ordered the deportation of the Tatar population of the Crimea to far away Uzbekistan. Stalin accused the Tatars of collaborating with the German army that had invaded Ukraine and the USSR, and he was ruthless with his “relocation,” moving women and children but also communist party members and members of the Soviet armed forces. Digging Deeper Like other ethnic groups in Ukraine, the Tatars had come from somewhere else originally, in this case a Turkic people that had settled in the peninsula from the 13th to the 17th centuries,…
A Brief History Documentary fans, here is your chance to be among the first in Cleveland, Ohio to see a free, virtual screening of The Blue Angels on Monday, May 20, 2024 at 6:00PM Eastern. Please log on to https://amazonscreenings.com/BLUEANGELShistory for your chance to watch a virtual screening of this film. Please note: you MUST register before 6:00PM ET on Monday, May 20th in order to participate. No new registrations will be accepted after that time. The screener link will deliver from no-reply@amazonscreenings.com at 5:00PM ET on Monday, May 20th. You will have a 36-hour screening window starting at 6:00pm. …
A Brief History On May 17, 1983, the US government was obligated to release information due to a newspaper’s Freedom of Information Act request about the largest Mercury pollution source in history, the Oak Ridge, Tennessee, home of the Oak Ridge National Laboratory and Y-12 National Security Complex, nuclear facilities first constructed during World War II as part of the Manhattan Project. Digging Deeper The site of the second self-sustaining atomic pile reactor in the world, Plutonium was produced there from Uranium to make atom bombs. From 1950 to 1963, 11 million kilos of Mercury were used for isotope separation,…