A Brief History On April 16, 2007, a mentally ill college student conducted a planned slaughter of classmates and faculty members before finally taking his own life. With good reason, the man would be ranked among “The Most Evil People in History”. Digging Deeper Seung-Hui Cho, age 23, a senior at Virginia Tech, was a South Korean who had emigrated to the US and was in the country legally. His middle school and high school years marked him as having mental problems, but privacy laws prevented the state or the university from being aware of his problems. Cho’s problems continued…
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A Brief History On April 16, 1945, a Soviet submarine sunk a transport ship filled with civilians and wounded soldiers, one of the great tragedies in a war filled with great tragedies. Digging Deeper The Soviet submarine L-3, while on a mission of laying mines around German held ports in the Baltic Sea, spotted a large easy target. MV Goya, a freighter stolen from Norway by the Germans and converted to a transport ship for people, was about 475 feet long, 57 feet wide, and displaced about 5230 tons, an average sized ship of its day, about the size of…
A Brief History April 15 is the day your income tax return must be filed by each year in the United States. Whether or not you look forward to that day or dread it depends on whether or not you expect to pay the government or get a refund. Some days are like that, good or bad. Here are five of those days. Digging Deeper 5. April 15, Tax Day. Eagerly Await: Knowing you are going to get a nice big tax refund from the government makes tax time a happy time for you. Kind of a back door savings…
A Brief History Earlier, we posted an article about the greatest bomber in history, but you may be wondering what else rounds out the top ten… Digging Deeper 10. Consolidated B-24 Liberator With 18,400 built, it remains to this day the most prolific American warplane ever produced. Slightly faster than the B-17 and capable of carrying more bombs farther, the B-17’s superior ruggedness keeps this airplane from scoring higher. The Liberator was operational with the Indian Air Force until 1968! 9. Gotha G.V-G. X The German Gotha was the premier bomber of World War I with a range of over…
A Brief History On April 15, 1952, a milestone in aviation history was crossed when the Boeing B-52 Stratofortress made its first flight, a flight directly headed to First Place in the pantheon of bomber aircraft. Digging Deeper There is no typographical error in the date, it really was 68 years ago (as 2020). The pilots flying the B-52 for the US Air Force were not even born then! (Neither was the author.) When the B-52 first flew, it was the heaviest airplane in the world and could not be caught by fighter planes of the day. Designed to carry…