Aloysius Schmitt
The Rev. Aloysius Schmitt, a Roman Catholic priest and Navy chaplain of the battleship USS Oklahoma, saved 12 of his crewmates on Dec. 7, 1941, during the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor.
Schmitt had been hearing confession when Oklahoma was hit by four torpedoes, according to the Navy.
Torpedoes hit early that morning, and Schmitt was trapped in a compartment with crew members as water rushed in. He could have escaped, but instead hoisted others to safety through a 14-inch porthole.
Schmitt was partway through the porthole when he heard more people in the room behind him. He let go of the ones he had already helped out, who were trying to pull him though, and turned back to save the others.
W.A. Perrett, an electrician’s mate first class on the ship, later penned a letter to the Navy Chaplain Corps, testifying about Schmitt’s heroism.
“He said ‘Boys, I’m having a tough time getting through,’” Perrett’s letter read. “So we all got together and tried to pull him out. But no luck. His next words really took us by surprise and will linger with us for some time — ‘Men, you are endangering your lives and keeping others from getting through.’”
That’s when Schmitt “disappeared back in the ship knowing well he would never come out of there alive.”
The men Schmitt saved swam through the attack to safety on the USS Maryland and saw their ship go down.
“A few minutes later, the Oklahoma turned turtle and with her went a brave and courageous man who gave his life in keeping with the best traditions of the U.S. Navy,” Perrett wrote.
Schmitt, 32 when he died, became the first chaplain killed during World War II. He was among 429 crew members on that ship to die in the attack.
Navy Chief of Chaplains, Rear Adm. Margaret Kibben will present the Silver Star Medal to Schmitt’s family during a ceremony on the campus of Loras College in Dubuque, Iowa.
A memorial to Schmitt in the Loras College chapel in Dubuque Iowa, includes his chalice, prayer book, military medals and more of his personal belongings recovered in the ship’s wreckage. The book is still marked with a page ribbon for Dec. 8 prayers, according to Loras College.
A Story of Christmas Around the Moon
Frank Borman commanded the December 1968 Apollo mission, on which he and his crewmates, Jim Lovell and Bill Anders, were the first people to orbit the moon.
Having viewed the far side of the moon, Borman radioed a message back home: "From the crew of Apollo 8, we close with good night, good luck and merry Christmas, and God bless all of you -- all of you on the good Earth."
Michael Collins
People invariably asked Apollo 11 astronaut Michael Collins, how he felt orbiting behind the far side of the moon, cut off from his home world, while his two crewmates made history landing on the lunar surface for the first time.
"Mr. Collins, weren't you the loneliest man in the whole lonely history of this lonely planet in your lonely orbit behind the lonely moon? Weren't you by yourself terribly lonely?" is how he recently phrased the inevitable question.
For 50 years, his answer rarely varied: "No." It was comfortable in the Apollo 11 command module he piloted, he would say. Out of radio contact periodically, he enjoyed the respite from chatter with Mission Control. There was hot coffee right at hand and music if he wanted. "I had this beautiful little domain," he usually said.
It was their lifeboat. Without Mr. Collins tending the orbiting command module in their absence, his moonwalking crewmates Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin wouldn't have returned home alive.
To be sure, he wasn't without fear. He waited for hours alone in the command module, "sweating like a nervous bride," to hear from his crewmates that the mission was going according to plan, he wrote.
As he waited for Messrs. Armstrong and Aldrin to lift off from the lunar surface, Mr. Collins tape-recorded a note: "My secret terror for the last six months has been leaving them on the moon and returning to Earth alone; now am within minutes of finding out the truth of the matter."
All went well. Mr. Collins piloted them home to a safe landing on July 24, 1969.
Among the awards and ticker-tape parades on their return, Mr. Collins and his crewmates in 1969 received the Presidential Medal of Freedom from President Richard Nixon. Congress in 2011 awarded the three astronauts the Congressional Gold Medal, its highest civilian honor.
Neil Armstrong Lands on the Moon
Apollo 11 (July 16–24, 1969) was the American spaceflight that first landed humans on the Moon. Commander Neil Armstrong and lunar module pilot Buzz Aldrin landed the Apollo Lunar Module Eagle on July 20, 1969, at 20:17 UTC, and Armstrong became the first person to step onto the Moon's surface six hours and 39 minutes later, on July 21 at 02:56 UTC. Aldrin joined him 19 minutes later, and they spent about two and a quarter hours together exploring the site they had named Tranquility Base upon landing. Armstrong and Aldrin collected 47.5 pounds (21.5 kg) of lunar material to bring back to Earth as pilot Michael Collins flew the Command Module Columbia in lunar orbit, and were on the Moon's surface for 21 hours, 36 minutes before lifting off to rejoin Columbia.
Apollo 11 was launched by a Saturn V rocket from Kennedy Space Center on Merritt Island, Florida, on July 16 at 13:32 UTC, and it was the fifth crewed mission of NASA's Apollo program. The Apollo spacecraft had three parts: a command module (CM) with a cabin for the three astronauts, the only part that returned to Earth; a service module (SM), which supported the command module with propulsion, electrical power, oxygen, and water; and a lunar module (LM) that had two stages—a descent stage for landing on the Moon and an ascent stage to place the astronauts back into lunar orbit.
After being sent to the Moon by the Saturn V's third stage, the astronauts separated the spacecraft from it and traveled for three days until they entered lunar orbit. Armstrong and Aldrin then moved into Eagle and landed in the Sea of Tranquility on July 20. The astronauts used Eagle's ascent stage to lift off from the lunar surface and rejoin Collins in the command module. They jettisoned Eagle before they performed the maneuvers that propelled Columbia out of the last of its 30 lunar orbits onto a trajectory back to Earth. They returned to Earth and splashed down in the Pacific Ocean on July 24 after more than eight days in space.
Armstrong's first step onto the lunar surface was broadcast on live TV to a worldwide audience. He described the event as "one small step for man, one giant leap for mankind." Apollo 11 effectively proved U.S. victory in the Space Race to demonstrate spaceflight superiority, by fulfilling a national goal proposed in 1961 by President John F. Kennedy, "before this decade is out, of landing a man on the Moon and returning him safely to the Earth."
Apollo 13
Due to a malfunction in their life-support system during their 1970 mission to the moon, the crew of Apollo 13 was very much in peril and faced nearly insurmountable odds against making it back to Earth alive. A series of technical achievements -- stretching battery power beyond expectations, using the lunar module as a lifeboat, creatively replumbing carbon-dioxide filters to clean the cabin air -- demonstrated the expertise and dedication of everyone involved. Near the end of the mission, the astronaut Fred Haise was running a fever and violently shaking with the chills. His commander, Jim Lovell, offered words of comfort: "Two hours, that's all you have to hang on for. After that, we're floating in the South Pacific, we open the hatch, and it's 80 degrees outside." Mr. Lovell embraced his crewmate: "Moving up behind Haise, the commander wrapped him in a bear hug, to share his body heat. At first the gesture seemed to accomplish nothing, but gradually the trembling subsided." The astronauts involved,
Jim Lovell, Fred Haise, and Jack Swigert
and the people in NASA's Mission Control Center who helped bring the crew home alive exemplified bravery and left the world feeling great joy.
The Cornfield Bomber
The "Cornfield Bomber" is the nickname given to a Convair F-106 Delta Dart, operated by the 71st Fighter-Interceptor Squadron of the United States Air Force. The individual aircraft was manufactured by Convair in 1958 and received the tail number 58-0787. It served with 71st Fighter-Interceptor Squadron based at Malmstrom Air Force Base adjacent to Great Falls, Montana. During a routine training flight conducting aerial combat maneuvers on February 2, 1970, the aircraft entered a flat spin. The pilot, Captain Gary Foust, attempted to recover, deploying the aircraft's drag chute as a last resort; recovery proved to be impossible. Foust fired his ejection seat and escaped the stricken aircraft at an altitude of 15,000 feet (4,600 m).
The reduction in weight and change in center of gravity caused by the removal of the pilot, coupled with the blast force of his seat rocketing out of the plane pushing the nose of the aircraft down, which had been trimmed by Faust for takeoff and idle throttle, caused the aircraft to recover from the spin. One of the other pilots on the mission was reported to have radioed Foust during his descent by parachute that "you'd better get back in it!". From his parachute, Foust watched incredulously as the now-pilotless aircraft descended and skidded to a halt in a farmer's field near Big Sandy, Montana. Foust drifted into the nearby mountains. He was later rescued by local residents using snowmobiles.
Shortly thereafter the local sheriff and local residents arrived at the scene of the crash. The thrust from the still-idling jet engine allowed the aircraft to slowly drift on its belly along a field. The sheriff, having contacted the air base, was informed that he should simply allow the jet to run out of fuel, which occurred an hour and forty-five minutes later without further incident. A recovery crew from McClellan Air Force Base arrived on the scene and began to dismantle the aircraft, removing its wings for transport aboard a railroad flat car. The damage to the aircraft was minimal; indeed, one officer on the recovery crew is reported to have stated that if there were any less damage he would have simply flown the aircraft out of the field. The aircraft, recovered and repaired, was returned to service, and is currently on display at the National Museum of the United States Air Force.
John R. Pardo
Pardo's push was an event over the skies of Vietnam where Captain John R. Pardo and Lieutenant Steve Wayne pushed another damaged F4 across the border to avoid capture. Unwilling to leave his wing man behind Pardo saved the crew with an incredibly selfless act of bravery and ingenuity.
Captain Bob Pardo (with Weapon Systems Officer 1st Lt Steve Wayne) and wingman Captain Earl Aman (with Weapon Systems Officer 1st Lt Robert Houghton) were assigned to the 8th Tactical Fighter Wing, 433rd Tactical Fighter Squadron, at Ubon Royal Thai Air Force Base, Thailand. In March 1967, they were trying to attack a steel mill in North Vietnam just north of Hanoi.
F-4Ds of the 8th Tactical Fighter Wing from Ubon Royal Thai Air Force Base.
On March 10, 1967, the sky was clear for a bombing run, but both F-4 Phantom IIs were hit by anti-aircraft fire. Aman's plane took the worst damage; his fuel tank had been hit, and he quickly lost most of his fuel. Aman and Houghton then determined that they did not have enough fuel to make it to a KC-135 tanker aircraft over Laos.
To avoid having Aman and Houghton bail out over hostile territory, Pardo decided to try pushing the airplane. Pardo first tried pushing the plane using Aman's drag chute compartment but turbulence interfered.
Tailhook of an F-4C Phantom II on display at the Joint Base Elmendorf-Richardson.
Pardo then tried to use Aman's tailhook to push the plane. The Phantom, having been originally designed as a naval aircraft for the U.S. Navy and U.S. Marine Corps, was equipped with a heavy duty tailhook for landings aboard aircraft carriers and for emergency arrestments ashore. Aman lowered his tailhook and Pardo moved behind Aman until the tailhook was against Pardo's windscreen. Aman then shut down both of his J79 jet engines. The push worked, reducing the rate of descent considerably, but the tailhook slipped off the windscreen every 15 to 30 seconds, and each time Pardo had to reposition his plane to do it again. Pardo also struggled with a fire in one of his own engines and eventually had to shut it down. In the remaining 10 minutes of flight time, Pardo used the one last engine to slow the descent of both planes.
With Pardo's plane running out of fuel after pushing Aman's plane almost 88 miles, the planes reached Laotian airspace at an altitude of 6,000 feet (1,800 m). This left them about two minutes of flying time. The pilots and their weapons systems officers ejected, evaded capture, and were picked up by rescue helicopters.
Pardo was initially reprimanded for not saving his own aircraft. However, in 1989, the military re-examined the case and awarded both Pardo and Wayne the Silver Star for the maneuver, two decades after the incident,
A Plane without a Crew that Landed Itself.
On November 23, 1944 a B-17 touched down at an Allied airfield in Belgium. Crews on the airfield were surprised when the bomber’s propellors continued buzzing 20 minutes after the plane had landed. However, the most surprising thing was that the B-17 was completely empty with no sign of a crew.
Markings on the B-17 indicated that it was part of the 91st Bomber Group returning from a raid against German oil refineries. As the ground crews conducted an investigation they found signs of life such as half-eaten chocolate bars and a written log which mentioned that the plane had taken damage from Flak.
The parachutes were still onboard and no indication of gunfire or blood caused by hostile attacks were seen on the plane. There have been theories surrounding the event for decades but never a definitive answer. The odds of a plane landing on an Allied airfield without a crew or sustaining damage are next to impossible yet it happened. The B-17 became known as the “Phantom Fortress.”
James Raley
On January 11, 1944, 21 B-17 bombers ran into a huge problem on their route over Greece. It wasn’t the enemy; it was the weather.
The clouds swallowed up the formation. Visibility was not much beyond the wingtips and it was impossible for the bombers to see each other. In an effort to create space, the trailing squadrons followed procedure and flew off course for two minutes.
Disaster struck. In an impossible sky, two 97th Bomb Group B-17s collided nearly head on with the 301st formation. It was utter chaos.
There’s not a lot of room in the tail gun!
Sgt. James Raley had no way of knowing what had happened. All he knew was that he was falling.
“I knew we were spinning around because flashes of blue, green and brown kept flashing past…. I thought the whole ship was intact by the way it was twisting around and the time it was taking us to get down. I was praying, too. I was telling myself in another few minutes I’ll be dead.” -Sgt. James Raley
But then he landed and he was still alive. In fact, he was in surprisingly great shape for having fallen nearly four miles.
Miraculously, the bomber’s tail that had ripped off the B-17 with Raley inside had just the right lift and weight distribution for it to “float like a leaf” and land relatively softly. A clump of pine trees also helped.
The disastrous accident destroyed eight B-17 and claimed 64 of the airmen. There were 17 survivors from those eight B-17s. Raley was the only one to survive without a parachute.
After the war, Raley visited the families of all his crew members. He would then go on to marry Lorraine Lineberry Sudol, widow of Skippy’s co-pilot, 2nd Lt. Henry J. Sudol.
His story has been documented in his autobiography, “I Fell 4 Miles and Lived: World War II – Missing In Action” which is definitely something worth adding to your reading list. This amazing veteran turned his survival into a meaningful, full life – he retired with the rank of lieutenant colonel and is buried in Arlington National Cemetery after also serving in Korea and Vietnam.
WWII Pilot climbs on Wing during Flight
A New Zealander, James Allan Ward, was flying with his crew back from a raid on Münster, in northeast Germany. The resistance was light; there were few search lights and minimal flak. He was the second pilot, positioned in the astrodome of his Wellington bomber when an enemy interceptor came screaming at them, guns blazing.
An attacking Messerschmitt 110 was shot down by the rear gunner before it could take down the plane, but the damage was done. Red-hot shrapnel tore through the airframe, the starboard engine, and the hydraulic system. A fire suddenly broke out on the starboard wing, fed by a fuel line.
After putting on their chutes in case they had to bail, the crew started desperately fighting the fire. They tore a hole in the fuselage near the fire so they could get at the fire. They threw everything they had at it, including the coffee from their flasks.
By this time, the plane reached the coastline of continental Europe. They had to decide if they were going to try to cross over to England or go down with the plane in Nazi-occupied Holland. They went for home, preferring a dip in the channel to a Nazi prison camp.
That's when Sgt. James Ward realized he might be able to reach the fire and put it out by hand. His crewmates tied him to the airplane as he crawled out through the astrodome and tore holes in the plane's fuselage to use as hand holds as he made his way to the fire on the wing.
He moved four feet onto the wing, avoiding being lifted away by the air current or rotor slipstream and being burned by the flaming gas jet he was trying to put out. He only had one hand free to work with because the other was holding on for dear life.
Ward smothered the fire on the fuel pipe using the canvas cockpit cover. As soon as he finished, the slipstream tore it from his hands. He just couldn't hold on any longer.
With the fire out, there was nothing left to do but try to get back inside. Using the rope that kept him attached to the aircraft he turned around and moved to get back to the astrodome. Exhausted, his mates had to pull him the rest of the way in. The fire flared up a little when they reached England, but died right out.
Prime Minister Winston Churchill personally awarded Sgt. Ward the Victoria Cross a month later.
German Pilot saves his Enemy
The Charlie Brown and Franz Stigler incident occurred on 20 December 1943, when, after a successful bomb run on Bremen, 2nd Lt Charles "Charlie" Brown's B-17 Flying Fortress (named "Ye Olde Pub") was severely damaged by German fighters. Luftwaffe pilot Franz Stigler had the opportunity to shoot down the crippled bomber but did not do so. After an extensive search by Brown, the two pilots met each other 50 years later and developed a friendship that lasted until Stigler's death in March 2008.
Bob Hoover
During World War II, while based in North Africa and southern Europe, Mr. Bob Hoover flew 58 missions as a fighter pilot with the Army Air Forces. On his 59th, on Feb. 9, 1944, he was shot down off the coast of southern France and was plucked from the sea by a German patrol boat.
He spent more than a year in a German prison camp before he and a fellow American climbed the fence and fled into the nearby woods. With the war coming to an end, German civilians were more cooperative, and a farm woman gave Mr. Hoover and his fellow escapee a gun.
“She said it would do us a lot more good than it did her, and she was right,” Mr. Hoover later told the Los Angeles Daily News.
He and his friend came upon a field with hundreds of damaged German warplanes. Mr. Hoover found one that had a full gas tank.
When a German mechanic approached, Mr. Hoover’s friend pulled the gun on him.
“We told him unless he could get us airborne fast, we were going to kill him,” Mr. Hoover recalled years later.
The German plane's engine started, but Mr. Hoover's buddy refused to get aboard, vowing never to fly in another airplane. Instead, he took his chances on foot — and years later was reunited with Mr. Hoover.
The stolen plane had a German cross painted on the side, and Mr. Hoover was fearful of being attacked by Allied forces as he flew along the coast of Germany toward the Netherlands.
He landed in a field and was quickly surrounded by Dutch farmers with pitchforks. Soon afterward, a British army truck rolled up, and Mr. Hoover was taken to safety.
Hailed as a hero, he noted that the prison camps were loosely guarded during the waning days of the war. “People made it sound like a great escape,” he said, “but the guards had deserted us.”
Elgin Staples
In the night and early morning of August 8 and 9, 1942, the life of 19-year-old Navy Signalman 3rd Class Elgin Staples of Akron, Ohio, was saved by someone over 8,000 miles away. Serving aboard the cruiser USS Astoria (CA-34) in support of the landings on Guadalcanal, Staples and his crewmates suddenly found themselves illuminated by spotlight and under attack by a force of Japanese cruisers north of Savo Island. At approximately 0200 hours on the morning of August 9, the Astoria’s No. 1 eight-inch turret was hit and exploded, sweeping Signalman Staples into the air and overboard.
Signalman Staples, dazed and wounded in his legs by shrapnel, kept afloat thanks to an inflatable rubber life belt he had donned shortly before the explosion. More than 200 men were lost aboard the Astoria.
At approximately 0600 hours, Staples along with other survivors were rescued by the destroyer USS Bagley (DD-386) and returned to assist the Astoria, which was heavily damaged but attempting to beach itself in the shallow waters off Guadalcanal. Those efforts failed, as Astoria took on a dangerous list before finally sinking at approximately 1200 hours, putting Staples back into the water, still wearing the same life belt.
Rescued a second time by the transport USS President Jackson (AP-37), Signalman Staples was first evacuated to New Caledonia before being given leave to return home. It was while on board the President Jackson that Staples first closely examined the life belt that had saved him, and was surprised to find that it had been manufactured in his hometown of Akron, Ohio, by the Firestone Tire and Rubber Company. Staples also noticed an unusual set of numbers stamped on the belt.
Returning home to Akron, Signalman Staples thought to bring along the life belt to show his mother, Vera Mueller-Staples. In 2001, he wrote about what transpired next:
After a quietly emotional welcome, I sat with my mother in our kitchen, telling her about my recent ordeal and hearing what had happened at home since I had gone away. My mother informed me that “to do her part,” she had gotten a wartime job at the Firestone plant. Surprised, I jumped up and grabbing my life belt from my duffel bag, put it on the table in front of her.
“Take a look at that, Mom,” I said, “It was made right here in Akron, at your plant.”
She leaned forward and taking the rubber belt in her hands, she read the label. She had just heard the story and knew that in the darkness of that terrible night, it was this one piece of rubber that had saved my life. When she looked up at me, her mouth and her eyes were open wide with surprise. “Son, I’m an inspector at Firestone. This is my inspector number,” she said, her voice hardly above a whisper.
We stared at each other, too stunned to speak. Then I stood up, walked around the table and pulled her up from her chair. We held each other in a tight embrace, saying nothing. My mother was not a demonstrative woman, but the significance of this amazing coincidence overcame her usual reserve. We hugged each other for a long, long time, feeling the bond between us. My mother had put her arms halfway around the world to save me.
Mikhail Petrovich Devyatayev
This week in 1945, Soviet fighter pilot Lt. Mikhail Petrovich Devyatayev made one of military history’s most daring escapes—stealing a Luftwaffe Heinkel 111 bomber and literally flying out of the grasp of his German captors, and taking nine fellow POWs with him.
Devyatayev was a tough trooper who also possessed a flair for shrewdness and daring. A fighter pilot by vocation, he graduated from the Chkalov Military Aviation School of pilots in 1940 and went on to complete 180 combat flights, counting a Junkers Ju-87 and a Focke-Wulf 190 among his kills.
Devyatayev’s luck in the air ran out in the summer of 1944 as he tangled with the Luftwaffe over Ukraine. Then serving as a flight commander in the 104th Guards Fighter Regiment, Devyatayev was piloting an American-built Bell P-39 Airacobra as wingman for his regimental commander when his plane was shot down near Lviv. Injured, Devyatayev landed by parachute on German territory and fell immediately into Nazi hands.
Despite having only seen this demonstration once, Devyatayev decided he was ready to escape as soon as opportunity presented itself. Working together with a group of five other Russian-speaking inmates, he decided to fly to freedom as soon as the predictably punctual German guards went to lunch.
After calling off two attempts due to the lingering presence of guards on the airfield, the daring band of Russians improvised. On their third attempt, they ambushed and stealthily killed a German trooper using a sharpened crowbar and stole his uniform. In an audacious display of theatrics, one POW put the uniform on and pretended to march the prisoners onto the airfield. Germans observing the area from a distance didn’t immediately detect something was amiss.
A Heinkel 111 was ripe for the taking. Devyatayev quickly bypassed the locked cockpit by breaking a small hole in the casing and prying open the door handle.After takeoff, the plane spiraled in the air for some time before the daring pilot gained total control of the aircraft. During this time, with wild audacity rivaling the fictional Star Wars hero Han Solo, Devyatayev evaded enemy fire and escaped being shot down by fighter planes, including a Junkers Ju 88, deployed to take him down.
Despite being targeted by Soviet guns, Devyatayev and his friends managed to make a safe landing in friendly territory and return home. Instead of being welcomed as heroes, the men were subjected to suspicion and interrogation by NKVD agents, who were inclined to disbelieve their story and assumed they had cooperated with the Germans. Despite this Devyatayev was able to provide the Soviet authorities with valuable information about Germany’s secret V-2 weapons program, which worked in his favor.
After living ignominiously as a presumed “traitor” for years, Devyatayev was recognized as a Hero of the Soviet Union in 1957. He later visited the site of the Peenemünde facility and met with Germans who had witnessed his spectacular flight, including Günter Hobohm, the Junkers Ju 88 pilot who had been ordered to shoot him down. Devyatayev passed away in 2002.
His son, Alexander Devyatayev, said his father was “driven by the belief that a human being is capable of doing things which should ordinarily be impossible.”
Robert Smalls
Just before dawn on May 13, 1862, Robert Smalls and a crew composed of fellow slaves, in the absence of the white captain and his two mates, slipped a cotton steamer off the dock, picked up family members at a rendezvous point, then slowly navigated their way through the harbor. Smalls, doubling as the captain, even donning the captain’s wide-brimmed straw hat to help to hide his face, responded with the proper coded signals at two Confederate checkpoints, including at Fort Sumter itself, and other defense positions. Cleared, Smalls sailed into the open seas. Once outside of Confederate waters, he had his crew raise a white flag and surrendered his ship to the blockading Union fleet.
In fewer than four hours, Robert Smalls had done something unimaginable: In the midst of the Civil War, this black male slave had commandeered a heavily armed Confederate ship and delivered its 17 black passengers (nine men, five women and three children) from slavery to freedom.
In the North, Smalls was feted as a hero and personally lobbied the Secretary of War Edwin Stanton to begin enlisting black soldiers. After President Lincoln acted a few months later, Smalls was said to have recruited 5,000 soldiers by himself. In October 1862, he returned to the Planter as pilot as part of Admiral Du Pont’s South Atlantic Blockading Squadron. According to the 1883 Naval Affairs Committee report, Smalls was engaged in approximately 17 military actions, including the April 7, 1863, assault on Fort Sumter and the attack at Folly Island Creek, S.C., two months later, where he assumed command of the Planter when, under “very hot fire,” its white captain became so “demoralized” he hid in the “coal-bunker.” For his valiancy, Smalls was promoted to the rank of captain himself, and from December 1863 on, earned $150 a month, making him one of the highest paid black soldiers of the war. Poetically, when the war ended in April 1865, Smalls was on board the Planter in a ceremony in Charleston Harbor.
Following the war, Smalls continued to push the boundaries of freedom as a first-generation black politician, serving in the South Carolina state assembly and senate, and for five nonconsecutive terms in the U.S. House of Representatives (1874-1886).
P-51 Spares Enemy
On August 24, 1944, 1st Lt. William R. Preddy of the 503rd Fighter Squadron was on his P-51 Mustang nicknamed “Rusty.”
Lt. William’s Mustang was nicknamed Rusty for a particular reason- it’s made of multiple scrapped Mustangs, and his old engine always had problems.
On that day, he received a new engine, a new 1615, and wanted to test its reliability and performance prior to his schedule in the afternoon. He takes off and begins to steep climb at high throttle to break in the engine. But suddenly he was informed over the radio that the base had picked up incoming aircraft.
The time was only 11 in the morning, and quite unusual for a German plane to be attacking at this time. When Lt. William went out to investigate, he saw an incoming plane with a very thick smoke trail and repeating a very wide circle pattern.
As he neared the aircraft, it was very clear that this was the Heinkel He 111 bomber, considered the Luftwaffe’s best in World War II. Due to its limited defensive capabilities, never designed to fly alone. To spot a lone Heinkel in the morning, especially one on fire, was quite odd.
He then approaches the plane from above, noticing the whole tail section was on fire. He informs the ground that it was just a lone Heinkel 111, and was ordered to immediately shoot it.
He knew that one short burst to that tail would already bring down the already weakened plane. After a few tense moments, Lt. William lets go of the trigger. He was unable to bring himself to open fire on a defenseless crew. He knew that disobeying direct orders and refusing to shoot down the enemy would lead to a court martial.
Lt. William approached the cockpit of the pilot, signaling to the pilot to turn away from England. He then sees a young pilot fighting with the controls in sheer panic as the fire spread. With difficulty, the pilot gets the bomber partially turned around towards France.
Both pilots exchanged a salute of respect and William brings his Mustang in front giving them a slipstream of air, helping them in getting as far away as they could from the coast of England.
However, the fire-ridden plane eventually gave in and crashes into the North Sea. William, flies to the crash site, and not knowing if there are any survivors, throws his lifejacket overboard and over the radio, informs control that he had successfully shot the bomber over the North Sea, and returns back to base. His story would only be discovered a year later in his tragic death.
On April 17, 1945, 1st Lt. William would go on in his last mission, after chasing two German me 262 jet fighters. Although he manage to crash land, a shrapnel hit him and was critically wounded. He was taken by a Czech woman who took him 5 km on a horse-drawn cart to a German emergency treatment center. Being an American airman, German doctors refused to take him in.
The woman then took him another 10 kilometers to a nearby hospital where he would die. His personal diary was recovered, and he was buried at his crash site before he was moved to an American cemetery.
A marker in tribute to the fallen pilot, written in Czech, to remember his actions of gallantry and chivalry when he refused to shoot down a defenseless pilot. The marker exists to this day, and Lt. William would go on to receive numerous posthumous awards.
Capture of the Dutch fleet at Den Helder
The capture of the Dutch fleet at Den Helder by the 8th Hussar and the 15th Line Infantry Regiment of the French Revolutionary Army occurred during the night of the 23 January 1795, during the French Revolutionary Wars.
General Pichegru was commanding the autumn 1794 campaign during which the conquest of Netherlands occurred. The French Army entered Amsterdam on the 19 January 1795 to stay there over winter. Well informed, the general found out that a Dutch fleet was anchored at Den Helder, approximately eighty kilometers north from Amsterdam. The ongoing winter was extremely cold, so much so that the rivers and seashores were frozen solid. Brigadier general Jean-Guillaume de Winter was ordered by Pichegru to take the head of a squadron of the 8th Hussar. This Dutchman was fighting along with the French since 1787, and would later command the Dutch fleet in the Battle of Camperdown. He arrived at Den Helder with his troops during the night of the 23 January 1795. The Dutch fleet was there as planned, trapped by ice. Each Hussar had brought on his an infantryman of the 15th Line Infantry Regiment. After a very careful approach to avoid awakening the Dutch sailors, lieutenant-colonel Louis Joseph Lahure launched the assault. The ice did not break up, and the Dutch ship were boarded by the cavalry that managed to get on the decks.
The French Army captured 14 ships of the line and 850 guns. It is the only time in known military history to have seen a fleet captured by a cavalry charge.
God's Miracle at Dunkirk
The Dunkirk evacuation, codenamed Operation Dynamo and also known as the Miracle of Dunkirk, or just Dunkirk, was the evacuation of more than 338,000 Allied soldiers during the Second World War from the beaches and harbour of Dunkirk, in the north of France, between 26 May and 4 June 1940. The operation commenced after large numbers of Belgian, British, and French troops were cut off and surrounded by German troops during the six-week Battle of France. In a speech to the House of Commons, British Prime Minister Winston Churchill called this "a colossal military disaster", saying "the whole root and core and brain of the British Army" had been stranded at Dunkirk and seemed about to perish or be captured.
During the darkest hours of World War II, King George VI called for a national day of prayer and churches across Great Britain were filled with people.
In his "We shall fight on the beaches" speech on 4 June, he hailed their rescue as a "miracle of deliverance".
Operation Cowboy
It was April 28, 1945. The war in Europe was just days away from ending when one of the strangest episodes of the entire conflict played out along the German-Czechoslovakian border. More than 350 American GIs had just fought their way through enemy lines to reach the town of Hostau. The settlement, which was still in the hands of a detachment of Wehrmacht soldiers, was home to some remarkably valuable treasure: several hundred prized Lipizzaner horses. The famous and extremely rare animals, which had been seized by the Third Reich as part of a bizarre wartime livestock breeding program, were now in the path of the advancing Red Army where they faced almost certain destruction. Fearing for the horses’ lives, the German officer in charge of the stud farm sent word to the Americans that he and his men would surrender en masse if the U.S. Army promised to get the beasts out of harm’s way. A cavalry unit in Patton’s Third Army leapt at the chance to save the legendary Lipizzaners. The mission, which was dubbed Operation Cowboy, would see U.S. troops, along with a motley collection of liberated Allied POWs, a bona fide Cossack aristocrat and a platoon of turn-coat German soldiers race the clock to drive a herd of priceless horses to safety, all the while fighting off attacks by a legion of crack troops from the Waffen-SS bent on their destruction.
St. Bernadette Soubirous
St. Bernadette Soubirous is the renowned visionary of Lourdes. She was born into a poor family in Lourdes, France, in 1844 and was baptized with the name Mary Bernard.
Our Lady first appeared to the 14-year-old Bernadette on Feb. 11, 1858, in a cave on the banks of the Gave River near Lourdes. The visions continued for a period of several weeks. Two weeks after the first appearance of Our Lady, a spring emerged from the cave, and the waters were found to miraculously heal the sick and the lame. One month later, on March 25, the woman whom Bernadette had been seeing told her that her name was "the Immaculate Conception", and that a chapel should be built on the site of the apparitions.
Civil authorities tried to frighten Bernadette into retracting her accounts, but she remained faithful to her visions. They also tried to shut down the spring and delay the construction of the chapel, but Empress Eugenie of France intervened when her child was cured with the water from the spring, and the church was built.
In 1866, Bernadette entered the Sisters of Notre Dame in Nevers. She was diagnosed with a painful, incurable illness soon afterward and died in 1879 at the age of 35. Pope Pius XI canonized her in 1933.
Our Lady of Fatima
During World War I, Pope Benedict XV made repeated but forlorn pleas for peace, and finally in May 1917, made a direct appeal to the Blessed Mother to intercede for peace in the world. Just over a week later, Our Lady began to appear at Fatima, Portugal to three shepherd children: Lucia dos Santos, age 10, and her cousins, Francisco and Jacinta Marto, ages 9 and 7. Fatima is a small village about 70 miles north of Lisbon.
The Angel of Peace
The Fatima apparitions actually began in the spring of the previous year, 1916, when the Angel of Peace appeared to the children three times to prepare them for their meetings with the Queen of Heaven.
As they were looking after their sheep one day in the spring, a dazzlingly beautiful young man, seemingly made of light, appeared and told them, “Do not be afraid. I am the Angel of Peace.” He invited them to pray with him (the Pardon Prayer) and said the Hearts of Jesus and Mary were attentive to their prayers.
The angel appeared to the children again in the summer. He encouraged them to pray and make sacrifices as a way of drawing down peace on their country. He also revealed that he was the Guardian Angel of Portugal.
The angel came a third time in the autumn. He appeared before them holding a chalice in his hands. A Host was suspended above it, from which drops of blood were falling into the chalice. The angel left the chalice suspended in the air and prostrated himself before it in prayer. He taught them a prayer of Eucharistic reparation (the Angel Prayer). He then gave the Host to Lucia and the chalice to Francisco and Jacinta, saying: “Take and drink the Body and Blood of Jesus Christ, horribly outraged by ungrateful men. Make reparation for their crimes and console your God.”
The angel fell prostrate to the ground and repeated the prayer three times and disappeared. The children remained in prayer for a long time.
Then, on the 13th day of the month of Our Lady, May 1917, an apparition of ‘a woman all in white, more brilliant than the sun’ presented itself to the three children saying “Please don’t be afraid of me, I’m not going to harm you.” Lucia asked her where she came from and she responded, “I come from Heaven.” The woman wore a white mantle edged with gold and held a rosary in her hand. The woman asked them to pray and devote themselves to the Holy Trinity and to “say the Rosary every day, to bring peace to the world and an end to the war.”
She also revealed that the children would suffer, especially from the unbelief of their friends and families, and that the two younger children, Francisco and Jacinta would be taken to Heaven very soon but Lucia would live longer in order to spread her message and devotion to the Immaculate Heart.
In the last apparition the woman revealed her name in response to Lucia’s question: “I am the Lady of the Rosary.”
That same day, 70,000 people had turned out to witness the apparition, following a promise by the woman that she would show the people that the apparitions were true. They saw the sun make three circles and move around the sky in an incredible zigzag movement in a manner which left no doubt in their minds about the veracity of the apparitions. By 1930 the Bishop had approved of the apparitions and they have been approved by the Church as authentic.
Juan Diego
Juan Diego was born in 1474 with the name "Cuauhtlatoatzin" ("the talking eagle") in Cuautlitlán, today part of Mexico City, Mexico. He was a gifted member of the Chichimeca people, one of the more culturally advanced groups living in the Anáhuac Valley.
When he was 50 years old he was baptized by a Franciscan priest, Fr Peter da Gand, one of the first Franciscan missionaries. On 9 December 1531, when Juan Diego was on his way to morning Mass, the Blessed Mother appeared to him on Tepeyac Hill, the outskirts of what is now Mexico City. She asked him to go to the Bishop and to request in her name that a shrine be built at Tepeyac, where she promised to pour out her grace upon those who invoked her. The Bishop, who did not believe Juan Diego, asked for a sign to prove that the apparition was true. On 12 December, Juan Diego returned to Tepeyac. Here, the Blessed Mother told him to climb the hill and to pick the flowers that he would find in bloom. He obeyed, and although it was winter time, he found roses flowering. He gathered the flowers and took them to Our Lady who carefully placed them in his mantle and told him to take them to the Bishop as "proof". When he opened his mantle, the flowers fell on the ground and there remained impressed, in place of the flowers, an image of the Blessed Mother, the apparition at Tepeyac.
With the Bishop's permission, Juan Diego lived the rest of his life as a hermit in a small hut near the chapel where the miraculous image was placed for veneration. Here he cared for the church and the first pilgrims who came to pray to the Mother of Jesus.
Much deeper than the "exterior grace" of having been "chosen" as Our Lady's "messenger", Juan Diego received the grace of interior enlightenment and from that moment, he began a life dedicated to prayer and the practice of virtue and boundless love of God and neighbour. He died in 1548 and was buried in the first chapel dedicated to the Virgin of Guadalupe. He was beatified on 6 May 1990 by Pope John Paul II in the Basilica of Santa Maria di Guadalupe, Mexico City.
The miraculous image, which is preserved in the Basilica of Our Lady of Guadalupe, shows a woman with native features and dress. She is supported by an angel whose wings are reminiscent of one of the major gods of the traditional religion of that area. The moon is beneath her feet and her blue mantle is covered with gold stars. The black girdle about her waist signifies that she is pregnant. Thus, the image graphically depicts the fact that Christ is to be "born" again among the peoples of the New World, and is a message as relevant to the "New World" today as it was during the lifetime of Juan Diego.
Wiley Post
In 1931, American aviator Wiley Post flew around the world with navigator Harold Gatty in 8 days, 15 hours, and 51 minutes, breaking the previous record of 21 days. They published an account of their trip in Around the World in Eight Days. Two years later, Post became the first person to fly around the world alone, a feat he completed in just 7 days and 19 hours.
Post's friend Will Rogers visited him often at the airport in Burbank, California while Pacific Airmotive Ltd. was modifying the aircraft, and asked Post to fly him through Alaska in search of new material for his newspaper column. When the floats Post had ordered did not arrive at Seattle in time, he used a set that was designed for a larger type, making the already nose-heavy hybrid aircraft still more nose-heavy. However, according to the research of Bryan Sterling, the floats were the correct type for the aircraft.
After making a test flight in July, Post and Rogers left Lake Washington, near Seattle in early August and made several stops in Alaska. While Post piloted the aircraft, Rogers wrote his columns on his typewriter. Before they left Fairbanks they signed and mailed a yacht club burgee belonging to South Coast Corinthian Yacht Club. The signed Burgee is on display at South Coast Corinthian Yacht Club in Marina del Rey, California. On August 15, 1935, they left Fairbanks, Alaska for Point Barrow. They were a few miles from Point Barrow when they became uncertain of their position in bad weather and landed in a lagoon to ask directions. On takeoff, the engine failed at low altitude, and the aircraft, uncontrollably nose-heavy at low speed, plunged into the lagoon, shearing off the right wing, and ended up inverted in the shallow water of the lagoon. Both men died instantly.
Sir Malcolm Campbell
Cornelia Fort
Cornelia Clark Fort was a United States aviator who became famous for being part of two aviation-related events. The first occurred while conducting a civilian training flight at Pearl Harbor on December 7, 1941, when she was the first United States pilot to encounter the Japanese air fleet during the Attack on Pearl Harbor. Early in the morning on December 7, 1941, a 22-year-old civilian flight instructor named Cornelia Fort happened to be airborne over Honolulu, giving a lesson to a student who was at the controls of an Interstate Cadet, a tiny single-engine trainer. As they turned and headed back toward the city airfield, the glint of a plane in the distance caught her eye. It seemed to be heading right at them, and fast. She grabbed the stick and climbed furiously, passing so close to the plane that the little Cadet’s windows shook.
Looking down, she saw a Japanese fighter. Off to the west, she “saw something detach itself from a plane and come glistening down,” she later recalled. “My heart turned over convulsively when the bomb exploded in the middle of the Harbor.” Fort and her student landed at the airport and ran to the terminal as a warplane strafed the runway. “Flight interrupted by Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor,” she later noted in her logbook. She and her student narrowly escaped a mid-air collision with the Japanese aircraft and a strafing attack after making an emergency landing.
The following year, Fort became the second member of what was to become the Women Airforce Service Pilots or WASP. Fort was working as a WASP ferry pilot on 21 March 1943 when she became the first female pilot in American history to die on active duty. She was involved in a mid-air collision and crashed ten miles south of Merkel, Texas in Mulberry Canyon, Texas.
Harriet Quimby
In 1911, Harriet Quimby earned the first pilot's license issued to a woman in the United States. Less than a year later, Quimby became the first woman to fly across the English Channel. She continued piloting aircrafts until her tragic death in 1912, when she was tossed from her airplane after it unexpectedly pitched forward. Despite the importance of her flight over the English Channel, the feat barely made the newspapers at the time because it was eclipsed by the sinking of the RMS Titanic on April 15 (the day before) which consumed the interest of the public and filled newspapers
Beryl Markham
Beryl Markham challenged the conventions of her day: she was a bush pilot in 1920s Africa, the first licensed female horse trainer in Kenya, and the first person to fly solo, nonstop, across the Atlantic from Britain to North America in 1936. And she was a writer. Ernest Hemingway was taken with her work, writing to Maxwell Perkins: "She has written so well, and marvelously well, that I was completely ashamed of myself as a writer. I felt that I was simply a carpenter with words, picking up whatever was furnished on the job and nailing them together and sometimes making an okay pig pen. But [she] can write rings around all of us who consider ourselves as writers." Markham gave direct advice for leaving behind the safety of the past to push into the unknown: "Never turn back and never believe that an hour you remember is a better hour because it is dead. Passed years seem safe ones, vanquished ones, while the future lives in a cloud, formidable from a distance. The cloud clears as you enter it. I have learned this, but like everyone, I learned it late."
Vera Brittain
In 1916, Vera Brittain was 22 years old. Her fiance, Roland Leighton, had been killed on the western front the previous Christmas. Her beloved brother, Edward, had been seriously injured in the battle of the Somme. One of her two closest male friends, Geoffrey Thurlow, had been wounded at Ypres. The other, Victor Richardson, was fighting in the trenches in France.
Brittain herself had been working as a Voluntary Aid Detachment nurse tending to wounded servicemen for more than a year. She was physically exhausted, stricken with grief and in a near-constant state of heightened nervous apprehension. Yet amid the chaos and trauma of war, the seed of an idea was planted in her mind. "If the war spares me," Brittain wrote to her brother in a letter that year, "it will be my one aim to immortalise in a book the story of us four."
In the end the war did spare Vera Brittain, but her fiance, her brother and her two dearest male friends were all dead by the time the armistice was signed in November 1918. The idea for a book, however, survived. It would later become Testament of Youth, one of the most famous memoirs of the 20th century.
After writing that letter to her brother, Brittain took the best part of 17 years to complete the manuscript. First she made several attempts at fictionalising her wartime experiences without much success. It was only when she decided to write as herself that her authorial voice seemed to flow and the events she had endured were given a poignant immediacy to which readers could relate. In Testament of Youth, the words seemed to pour out of her, a potent mixture of rage and loss, underpinned by lively intelligence and fervent pacifist beliefs.
When it was finally published in August 1933, the book was an instant hit. At the close of publication day, its first print-run of 3,000 had sold out. The Sunday Times called it "a book which stands alone among books written by women about the war". Rebecca West wrote that it was "a vivid testimony". Virginia Woolf noted in her diaries that she felt compelled to stay up all night to finish the memoir. When it was later published in America, the New York Times reviewer wrote that Brittain's autobiographical account was "honest… revealing… heartbreakingly beautiful".
Ernest Shackleton
Ernest Shackleton was born in Kilkea, Ireland, in 1874. His family moved to England when he was 10; six years later, he joined the merchant navy. This set him apart from the rigid British establishment, as exemplified by the Royal Geographical Society, whose walrus-whiskered denizens preferred fellows from the Royal Navy.
Shackleton took part in several expeditions. First, on the Discovery expedition of 1901-04, from which Robert Falcon Scott sent Shackleton home early, on a relief ship, after a 93-day, 960-mile Antarctic march. Scott had deemed the Irishman unfit and later called him an invalid.
Next, Shackleton took on his first role as leader, on the 1907-09 Nimrod expedition. This time he came within 97 nautical miles of the South Pole, but, with food supplies dwindling and his crew's lives at stake, he was forced to turn back. Upon his return, Shackleton was knighted by Edward VII, and "his face appeared in almost every newspaper."
Then came the Imperial Trans-Antarctic Expedition, the first attempt at a land crossing of the continent, a march of some 1,800 miles. The team set sail on the Endurance in 1914 as World War I broke out; when the 40-year-old Shackleton offered his ship and crew to the War Office, First Lord of the Admiralty Winston Churchill replied with a one-word cable: "Proceed."
As the Endurance approached Antarctica, ice closed in around its hull, trapping and then crushing the ship. To seek help, Shackleton embarked on a mission that involved an 800-mile voyage across the uncharted Southern Ocean in a lifeboat caulked with seal blood. It was referred to as "a masterclass in disaster management." The scene when the blubber-blackened Shackleton reaches a South Georgia whaling station and says quietly to its manager, "My name is Shackleton," rivals anything Hollywood could confect. Between expeditions, he jumped from one failed business venture to the next, stood unsuccessfully for Parliament and lectured around the world. President Taft hosted him in the White House in 1910. He gave generously to charitable causes despite mounting debts because, he "wanted to be loved." Shackleton died of heart failure in 1922, at the age of 47, more than 1,000 miles off the tip of South America in South Georgia. At the time he was aboard the Quest, its decks lashed with provisions for one last haul.
Lewis & Clark Expedition
Thomas Jefferson dispatched Meriwether Lewis and William Clark in 1804 to find a water route across North America and explore the uncharted West. Their famous story of two years of travel and discovery often glosses over the fact that without the help of friendly Native tribes and their interpreter, Sacajawea, the expedition would have starved to death or become hopelessly lost in the Rocky Mountains. Despite the help they received during their expedition, they were robbed, injured and nearly starved many times.
When the Lewis and Clark Expedition crossed into what would become Washington state in October 1805, the two explorers thought the worst of their transcontinental navigation was behind them. Then they encountered the Columbia River. The rapids were treacherous. Fierce winds raged in the 4,000-foot-deep, 80-mile-long Columbia Gorge. Mosquitoes swarmed in the flatwaters and marshes. And there were fleas from the native dogs. As he approached the ocean, William Clark wrote that, far from pacific, the waters were "tempestuous and horrible."
The mouth of the Columbia River, which lies roughly 700 miles north of San Francisco on the Oregon-Washington coast, is one of the most perilous waterways in the world. As it winds its way south from British Columbia, Canada, the 1,200-mile river flows through four mountain ranges and acts as the confluence of several major rivers -- the Snake, Yakima, Willamette -- and hundreds of smaller tributaries. It drains more water into the Pacific than any other river in the Americas; during the snowmelt season, it discharges freshwater at an estimated rate of 1.2 million cubic feet per second.
Miracle on the Hudson
On January 15, 2009, a potential disaster turned into a heroic display of skill and composure when Captain Chesley Burnett Sullenberger III safely landed the plane he was piloting on New York City’s Hudson River after a bird strike caused its engines to fail. David Paterson, governor of New York at the time, dubbed the incident the “miracle on the Hudson.” Sullenberger, a former fighter pilot with decades of flying experience, received a slew of honors for his actions, including an invitation to Barack Obama’s presidential inauguration and resolutions of praise from the U.S. Congress.
Father Willie Doyle
He was so brave during the battles of The First World War that he ran countless times into “no man’s land” to drag fellow soldiers to safety. He was so devout that he would get up and pray throughout the night every Thursday and would swim and pray in the early morning hours in an icy lake. Nevertheless, others saw him as “such a jovial character” that they wanted to hang out with him because of his wonderful practical jokes.
His name was Father Willie Doyle, and he was an Irish Catholic Jesuit, who enlisted as a Chaplain in the British Army in 1915 because he wanted to be on the battlefield when soldiers most needed a priest.
Although Father Willie was referred by many as a “man’s man,” the priest had a great impact on everyone he met. For example, while in England, Father Willie passed two prostitutes on the street. He said, ‘Ladies, go home. Don’t offend Jesus,” and walked on. The women knew he was the “mission priest,” but that was the last he thought of them.
Years later, Father Willie was called into his superior’s office in Ireland and asked to go to England to speak with someone who had been arrested and who was about to be executed. When he arrived, he discovered it was one of these women. He had made such an impression on her that, in her final hours, she asked to see him. Before her execution, he baptized her and said Mass for her.
However, his life changed drastically after the outbreak of the First World War. The 42-year-old priest felt led to join the British Army, 16th Irish Division, as a Catholic Chaplain. Amidst the carnage, Father Willie’s story really comes to life.
“All denominations loved him,” Miller said. “They knew no matter what happened, even if they were out in no man’s land and left for dead, Father Willie would come for them. He didn’t just come once. He came multiple times a day. He would drag that soldier back if injured or, if they weren’t going to make it, he would lie down beside them and give them the last rites.”
Miller said all the soldiers wanted to be in Father Willie’s dugout because it appeared to them that no one who fought near him was killed. However, that changed in August 1917. Father Willie went out on the battlefield to rescue two men, and was caught in a mortar attack.
The Four Chaplains
On January 23, 1943, the USAT Dorchester left New York harbor bound for Greenland carrying 902 officers, servicemen and civilian workers. The Dorchester was escorted by three Coast Guard cutters. On February 2, one of the cutters detected the presence of a submarine but failed to find the submarine’s position. The C.O. of the Dorchester ordered the men to sleep in their clothing, with life jackets close at hand. They were only 150 miles from Greenland and daylight would bring air cover from the American base.
Down in the old converted cruise ship’s stifling hold, four U.S. Army chaplains circulated among the frightened young men, some lying wide-eyed in their bunks, others nervously playing cards or shooting dice.Those chaplains were Lt. George L. Fox, Methodist; Lt. Alexander D. Goode, Jewish; Lt. John P. Washington, Catholic; and Lt. Clark V. Poling, Reformed. Chatting with the troops, the chaplains eased tensions, calmed fears and passed out soda crackers to alleviate seasickness.
Early in the morning of February 3 the chaplains were still up just before 1:00 when the torpedo struck. The missile exploded in the boiler room, destroying the electric supply and releasing suffocating clouds of steam and ammonia gas.The tremendous explosion threw soldiers from bunks and the lights went out as the stricken ship listed to starboard, sinking fast.
Those not trapped below rushed topside. Amid the shriek of escaping steam and frantic blasts of the ship's whistle, dazed men stumbled about the dark, crowded decks. Some gripped the rails, too struck with horror to head toward the lifeboats.
The four chaplains quickly moved among the bewildered men, calming them, directing them to life rafts, urging them to escape the doomed ship. Many had forgotten their life jackets. The chaplains located a supply in a deck locker and passed them out. When the bin was empty they pulled off their own and made others put them on.
Only two of the 14 lifeboats were successfully used in abandoning ship. Soldiers leaped into the icy sea. They clutched the gunwales of the two overloaded lifeboats, clung to doughnut-like rafts or floated alone. Some men were insulated by the thick fuel oil that coated them and floated in lifejackets for eight hours.
The four chaplains remained on the ship's slanted aft deck, standing together, arms linked, heads bowed in prayer, as the Dorchester slipped beneath the waves. Their sacrifice would be remembered as one of the most touching stories of the Second World War, and their legacy continues to this day.
Fr. Charles J Watters
Chaplain (Major) Charles J. Watters, like other Army Chaplains during the Vietnam War, provided spiritual guidance to men in combat and improved morale. Watters, a Catholic priest, spent 16 months with the 2nd Battalion, 503rd Infantry, 173rd Airborne Brigade. He delivered masses, listened to confessions, and offered counsel.
Watters willingly faced the hardships of war with his fellow Paratroopers. In February of 1967, he parachuted with the 2nd Battalion, 503rd Infantry during Operation JUNCTION CITY, and in May of 1967, he was awarded the Bronze Star for Valor after administering last rites to a fatally wounded man while under heavy enemy fire.
During the Battle of Dak To in November of 1967, Chaplain Watters willingly exposed himself to enemy fire while helping to evacuate wounded Soldiers from the battlefield. While performing last rites on a dying Soldier, he was killed by a bomb mistakenly dropped by an American bomber. A Paratrooper summarized 2nd Battalion’s feelings toward Chaplain Watters: “From beginning to end, he was our Chaplain.” Watters was posthumously awarded the Congressional Medal of Honor for his actions during the Battle of Dak To.
Father Emil Kapaun
Emil Kapaun was a Catholic priest and U.S. Army Chaplain born in the small Czech farming community of Pilsen, Kansas on April 20, 1916. Growing up he was much like any other hardworking farm boy, but was especially mindful of God and others. Four years after his ordination as a priest of the Diocese of Wichita, he entered the Chaplain Corps to serve the troops in World War II and was sent to the Burma-India theater. After the war he went back to parish life, but re-entered the Chaplain Corps in 1948, serving first at Ft. Bliss, Texas. At the beginning of 1950 he was assigned to the 1st Cavalry Division in Japan.
In July of 1950 Chaplain Kapaun and the 8th Cavalry Regiment of the Army’s 1st Cavalry Division were among the first troops sent to help defend nearby South Korea after its invasion by the North. Chaplain Kapaun quickly gained a reputation for bravery by ministering to soldiers in the thick of battle, often having to be reminded to keep his head down from oncoming bullets.
Eventually pushing its way into North Korea, the 8th Cav was ambushed by a large Chinese Army that had secretly entered the war. Here, at the Battle of Unsan on November 2, Kapaun once again braved the battlefield to rescue men or give them Last Rites. He showed his dedication to his "boys" by choosing to remain with a number of wounded men rather than escape. Captured by the enemy, this group was forced to march over 60 miles to a prison camp along the Chinese border in the bitter cold. Along the way, Father Kapaun carried his wounded comrades and encouraged them to do likewise. For his actions at the Battle of Unsan, Kapaun was awarded the military’s highest award, the Medal of Honor, in 2013.
n his seven months in the prison camp, Father Kapaun spent himself in heroic service to his fellow prisoners without regard for race, color, or creed, giving them help and hope when they needed it most. Ignoring his own ill health, he nursed the sick and wounded, stole food for the hungry, picked lice off of men, washed dirty and soiled clothing, and encouraged men through prayer and humor to keep fighting for life. Falling sick, the Chinese moved Father Kapaun to a so-called hospital, where, denied medical assistance, his death soon followed on May 23, 1951.
Two years later the surviving Prisoners of War were released, and with them came a beautiful crucifix carved in the camp by a Jewish POW who was inspired by tales of Father Kapaun's deeds. The Prisoners testified to Father Kapaun's role in their survival and began to tell the world about their heroic and saintly chaplain.
Father Damien
Father Damien or Saint Damien of Molokai, SS.CC. or Saint Damien De Veuster (Dutch: Pater Damiaan or Heilige Damiaan van Molokai; 3 January 1840 – 15 April 1889), born Jozef De Veuster, was a Roman Catholic priest from Belgium and member of the Congregation of the Sacred Hearts of Jesus and Mary,a missionary religious institute. He was recognized for his ministry, which he led from 1873 until his death in 1889, in the Kingdom of Hawaiʻi for people with leprosy (Hansen's disease), who lived in government-mandated medical quarantine in a settlement on the Kalaupapa Peninsula of Moloka.ʻ
During this time, he taught the Catholic faith to the people of Hawaii. Father Damien also cared for the patients himself and established leadership within the community to build houses, schools, roads, hospitals, and churches. He dressed residents' ulcers, built a reservoir, made coffins, dug graves, shared pipes, and ate poi by hand with them, providing both medical and emotional support.
After eleven years caring for the physical, spiritual, and emotional needs of those in the leper colony, Father Damien contracted leprosy. He continued with his work despite the infection but finally succumbed to the disease on 15 April 1889.
Father Joe
Joseph Timothy O'Callahan (May 14, 1905 – March 18, 1964) was a Jesuit priest and, during World War II, a United States Navy chaplain.
While in active service, O'Callahan reported aboard USS Franklin on March 2, 1945. 17 days later, the ship was severely damaged at dawn by two bombs from a lone Japanese aircraft. The hangar deck immediately became an inferno of exploding gas tanks and ammunition. Although wounded by one of the explosions after the attack, Chaplain O'Callahan moved about the exposed and slanting flight deck, administering the last rites to the dying, comforting the wounded, and leading officers and crewmen into the flames to carry hot bombs and shells to the edge of the deck for jettisoning. He personally recruited a damage control party and led it into one of the main ammunition magazines to wet it down and prevent its exploding. For this action he received the Navy Cross, which he publicly refused (the only man to do so in World War II). At the time, it was speculated that O'Callahan was offered the Navy Cross in lieu of the Medal of Honor since his heroic actions on USS Franklin highlighted perceived lapses in leadership by the ship's commanding officer, Captain Leslie E. Gehres, which reflected poorly on the Navy. President Harry Truman intervened after the resulting public outcry and the Medal of Honor was awarded to O'Callahan on January 23, 1946. He was the first Naval Chaplain so decorated.
Maximilian Kolbe
Maximilian Kolbe (born Rajmund Kolbe; Polish: Maksymilian Maria Kolbe [maksɨˌmʲilʲan ˌmarʲja ˈkɔlbɛ]; 8 January 1894 – 14 August 1941), venerated as Saint Maximilian Kolbe, was a Polish Catholic priest and Conventual Franciscan friar who volunteered to die in place of a stranger in the German death camp of Auschwitz, located in German-occupied Poland during World War II. He had been active in promoting the veneration of the Immaculate Virgin Mary, founding and supervising the monastery of Niepokalanów near Warsaw, operating an amateur-radio station (SP3RN), and founding or running several other organizations and publications.
Kolbe's life was strongly influenced in 1906, when he was 12, by a vision of the Virgin Mary. He later described this incident:
That night I asked the Mother of God what was to become of me. Then she came to me holding two crowns, one white, the other red. She asked me if I was willing to accept either of these crowns. The white one meant that I should persevere in purity and the red that I should become a martyr. I said that I would accept them both.
On August 9, 1945, an atomic bomb was dropped on Nagasaki, the city known as the Japanese capital of Catholicism since nearly two-thirds of Japan’s Catholics lived there. Nagasaki was devastated. The Franciscan Convent built by St. Maximilian Kolbe, however, remained standing.
The Polish saint, martyred in the concentration camp at Auschwitz, had decided to build the convent in a location that many thought was poorly chosen because it was not near the center of the city. Despite this criticism, Maximilian insisted on a plot of land located behind a mountain.
It was that mountain, in fact, that protected the convent when the atomic bomb destroyed the city, killing nearly 70,000 people.
In the midst of such horrible death and destruction, God—apparently at least in part due to Mary’s intercession—protected those missionaries, but surely not only for their own sake. They lived so they could minister to the injured, sick, and dying from the attack. They lived so they could be witnesses to the world of the horrors of war and specifically of nuclear weapons, witnesses to God’s power and mercy, and witnesses to the importance and power of prayer.
Father Michael Quealy
The Reverend Michael Quealy, was the first military chaplain killed in action in Vietnam. On the morning of Nov. 8, 1966, he jumped into a medical evacuation helicopter with a unit that was not his own, according to a contemporary article from The Associated Press. When an officer tried to stop him, he reportedly said, “My place is with them.” Hours later, he was dead.
A press release from the information office of the First Infantry Division states that “he had seen battle in Operation El Paso, Operation Shenandoah, and, finally, in Operation Attleboro. For him, the battle of November 8, 1966, differed only in the way it ended.”
On that day, reports generally agree that Father Quealy ran to the most besieged part of the battlefield and began assisting with medical evacuations. By one sergeant’s report, “at least five of those guys owed their lives to him.” Father Quealy was hit with machine gun fire and died in the field. He was posthumously awarded a Purple Heart.
Padre Pio
In the midst of World War II, Italy was invaded by Nazi Germany and Allied forces made many attempts to liberate the country. According to various accounts, intelligence reported a cache of German munitions near San Giovanni Rotondo, the town in which stood the monastery of St. Padre Pio.
However, at the beginning of the war Padre Pio reassured the people that no bomb would touch their small city. True to his word, Padre Pio reportedly went out of his way to make this happen.
None of the Allied planes sent to bomb the San Giovanni Rotondo area were able to complete their missions successfully. There were often mysterious malfunctions, causing the bombs to drop harmlessly in the fields, or mechanical failures which caused the planes to veer off course.”
Most remarkable of all were the stories of a “flying monk.”
An American pilot was just about to bomb the city when, “Suddenly, the pilot saw in front of his plane the image of a monk in the sky, gesturing with his arms and hands for the plane to turn back. The shocked pilot did just that, and jettisoned his bombs elsewhere. When he returned to the base and told his story, his commanding officer decided it was best to put this pilot in a hospital under observation for mission-fatigue.”
The pilot couldn’t get the image from his mind and after the war he made inquiries to find this monk. He eventually made the journey to San Giovanni Rotondo and recognized the “flying monk” as St. Padre Pio.
While the accounts might appear to be fictitious tales, what is true is that San Giovanni Rotondo was spared during World War II and multiple pilots reported seeing a “flying monk” in the sky over the spot where they were ordered to unload bombs.
Padre Pio was united to God so intimately that he could be in two places at once, extending himself to another location because of his deep relationship with God, who exists outside of space and time. Padre Pio certainly did not do any of these amazing feats from his own power, but through the infinite power of God.
As Jesus said to his apostles, “With men this is impossible, but with God all things are possible” (Matthew 19:26).
Rev. Thomas Conway
On July 30, 1945, the heavy cruiser USS Indianapolis, scarred from an earlier kamikaze attack that killed nine sailors, was headed to the Philippines after stopping at the island of Tinian to deliver parts for the atomic bomb, “Little Boy,” later to be dropped on Hiroshima. The Rev. Thomas Conway, Waterbury native and heroic chaplain, was among the crew of 1,196.
At 12:15 a.m., a Japanese submarine loosed two Long Lance torpedoes into the ship’s starboard side. The Indianapolis sank in 12 minutes, dropping 18,000 feet to the bottom of the Philippine Sea.
Into the oil-slicked sea went about 880 men, Conway among them. Only 316 would survive the ordeal of shark attacks, dehydration and madness that finally ended with rescue on Aug. 2.
Braithwaite said the sea at night is often serene and beautiful, but he could not imagine the Indianapolis sailors’ terror in that dark hour. Conway, he said, became a beacon of hope for his shipmates.
The citation for the Navy Cross reads:
“Completely disregarding his own well-being, Chaplain Conway continually swam between the clusters of adrift sailors — many of whom were severely injured, delirious and dying — to provide them encouragement and comfort, pray with and for them and administer them sacraments. After three days of tireless exertion to aid his shipmates, he finally succumbed to exhaustion and his body was committed to the deep.
“His efforts were credited as a major reason 67 of the shipmates in his group were ultimately rescued,” the citation says.
The Rev. Vincent Capodanno,
Father Vincent Capodanno participated in seven combat operations.
Father Capodanno, also known as “the grunt padre,” was shot 27 times in the back, neck and head on the battlefield in Que Son Valley.
He was with the 3rd Battalion, 5th Marine Regiment, during Operation Swift, a search-and-destroy mission.
He received the Medal of Honor for his valor in the Marine Corps during some of the most harrowing battles of the Vietnam War.
He lost his life at age 38, on September 4, 1967, while administering last rites to a dying Marine. Although he was wearing a collar and was already injured — his hand was nearly severed and his face wounded — he continued on his mission to console and administer last rites.
Joseph L. George
On the morning of Dec. 7, George, a second class petty officer at the time, was reading the Sunday newspaper when general quarters sounded on Vestal. He went outside to see what was happening and saw a Japanese plane go down. Torpedoes passed under Vestal and hit battleship USS Arizona (BB-39), according to the Navy.
George helped another sailor remove the awning covers off Vestal’s guns and then helped fight fires onboard. As sailors jumped off the heavily damaged Arizona, moored next to Vestal, George secured a line to Vestal and through it overboard to help Arizona’s sailors escape, according to an oral history George recorded with the University of North Texas in 1978.
When it became apparent Arizona was doomed, George assisted with getting Vestal underway and away from the burning and fast-sinking battleship. Arizona lost 1,177 crewmembers during the attack. Vestal lost seven. George’s actions saved the lives of several sailor from Arizona, according to the Navy. George survived the war, retiring after 20 years in the Navy in 1955.
Father Thomas Byles on Titanic
Father Thomas Byles, originally from Staffordshire, was ordained as a priest in 1902 and came to the Catholic Parish of Ongar and Doddinghurst three years later.
When Father Byles was invited to officiate at his brother's wedding in New York, parishioners helped pay for his trip on the liner.
Father Byles had said Mass for second-class passengers on the morning of the disaster.
In it he talked about the "spiritual lifeboats that take us to God".
Following the iceberg strike on 14 April, eyewitness accounts told how Father Byles refused several offers to board a lifeboat.
Instead, he remained on board to help others to lifeboats, take confessions, offer absolution and pray with those still on board as the ship went down.
His body was never recovered.
USS Marblehead
The U.S.S. Marblehead was a Omaha class light-cruiser during World War Two. The Marblehead was in Borneo at the time of the Pearl Harbor attack, and joined other ships of the Royal Netherlands and Royal Australian Navies in patrol duty and as escorts to merchant ships.
Nearly sunk by Japanese land-based bombers during the Battle of Makassar Strait on Feb. 4, 1942, the American light-cruiser USS Marblehead remained afloat only because of the determination and professionalism of her crew.
Though grievously damaged – a nine-foot hole in her hull, 34 compartments flooded, steering inoperable, electrical power reduced, speed nearly halved – over the next 89 days Marblehead would sail more than 20,000 miles to the U.S. east coast for repairs. Remarkably, the vessel was back in action before the end of the year.
Ironically, had the enemy bombs missed the Marblehead, she almost certainly would have shared the fate of the American cruiser USS Houston, the Dutch cruisers De Ruyter and Java, the British cruiser HMS Exeter, and the Australian cruiser HMAS Perth. All were sunk in the doomed Allied attempt to defend the the Dutch East Indies from Japanese invasion during the first three months of 1942.
But the Marblehead survived, and her crew of more than 450 men avoided death or years of brutal captivity as prisoners of war.
Poon Lim's Raft
Poon Lim was born in China in 1918. He grew up in a fishing village and learned to swim at a young age. When he was just ten years old, his family moved to Malaysia, where he continued to work in the fishing industry.
In 1942, at 30, Poon Lim was drafted into the Chinese Merchant Marine to work as a steward on the SS Benlomond, a British ship transporting supplies from Southeast Asia to Australia.
The SS Ben Lomond was generally slow and sluggish, had scant weapons, and was now cruising alone away from any other friendly ships.
On November 23, 1942, the Ben Lomond was torpedoed by a German U-boat. Most of the crew members on board were caught off guard and perished along with the ship.
Poon Lim was the only survivor of 55.
Poon Lim was able to grab a life jacket as the ship sank and dived into the water. He swam for around two hours before coming across and boarding an 8 by 8-foot wooden raft.
Fortune and fate had very different plans in store for him
as he found himself stranded in the middle of the Atlantic Ocean.
Against all odds, Poon Lim survived 133 days at sea before being rescued by Brazilian fishermen.
Jan Baalsrud
In March 1943, a team of four expatriate Norwegian commandoes, including Jan Baalsrud, sailed from England to Nazi-occupied Norway to organize and supply the Norwegian resistance. Betrayed shortly after landing, the team was ambushed by the Nazis, leaving Baalsrud as the lone survivor. The book We Die Alone recounts Baalsrud’s incredible escape and his iron will to survive. Poorly clothed, with one foot entirely bare, and part of his big toe shot off, Baalsrud was relentlessly pursued by the Nazis. Surviving an avalanche, and suffering from frostbite and snow blindness, Baalsrud fought his way over the Norwegian mountains and tundra to a small arctic village. He was crippled and near death when he stumbled into the village of Mandal. The locals were willing to save him, and help him escape back home to Sweden.
The Longest Peaceful War
The Three Hundred and Thirty Five Years' War ) was an alleged state of war between the Netherlands and the Isles of Scilly (located off the southwest coast of Great Britain), and its existence is disputed. It is said to have been extended by the lack of a peace treaty for 335 years without a single shot being fired, which would make it one of the world's longest wars, and a bloodless war. Despite the uncertain validity of the declaration of war, and thus uncertainty about whether or not a state of war ever actually existed, peace was finally declared in 1986, bringing an end to any hypothetical war that may have been legally considered to exist.
Louis Le Prince
The name Louis Le Prince is rarely mentioned when talking about the history of film. But on October 14th, 1888, French inventor Le Prince, shot what is believed to be the first film ever made, or at least the oldest one still in existence.Then there's the matter of the unscrupulous Edison, whom Le Prince considered, and then decided against, partnering with. After Le Prince's disappearance, the patent attorney who had worked with him was spotted by Lizzie in the company of Edison.
In the end, the coincidence of Le Prince vanishing not long before Edison went public with his movie technology seems to have been just that -- a coincidence. Edison's invention may have borne some of the hallmarks of Le Prince's design, and Edison greatly benefited from having Le Prince out of the picture. But no concrete evidence was ever found linking Edison to Le Prince's disappearance; meanwhile, there's ample circumstantial evidence pointing to a family financial matter that may have led Le Prince's brother to commit fratricide.
What's undeniable is that Le Prince not only made moving pictures a reality but had the foresight to recognize the medium's importance. Louis wanted life -- history -- captured on his 'ribbons,' to be replayed, rewound, re-experienced at will. He may have gotten a raw deal during his life, but the next time you turn on Netflix, remember the Frenchman who dreamt it all up.
Grace Horsley Darling
On September 7, 1838, Grace Horsley Darling spotted the wrecked SS Forfarshire from an upstairs window of the Longstone Lighthouse that her father kept on the Farne Islands. The ship had foundered on rocks during a storm and broken in half. The weather was too rough for a lifeboat, so Darling and her father rescued survivors in a rowboat. She and her father William determined that the weather was too rough for the lifeboat to put out from Seahouses (then North Sunderland), so they took a rowing boat (a 21 ft, 4-man Northumberland coble) across to the survivors, taking a long route that kept to the lee side of the islands, a distance of nearly a mile. Grace kept the coble steady in the water while her father helped four men and the lone surviving woman, Mrs. Dawson, into the boat. Although she survived the sinking, Mrs Dawson had lost her two young children during the night. William and three of the rescued men then rowed the boat back to the lighthouse. Grace then remained at the lighthouse while William and three of the rescued crew members rowed back and recovered four more survivors.
The Forfarshire had been carrying 62 people. The vessel broke in two almost immediately upon hitting the rocks. Those rescued by Grace and her father were from the bow section of the vessel which had been held by the rocks for some time before sinking. All that remained at daybreak was the portside paddlebox casing. Nine other passengers and crew had managed to float off a lifeboat from the stern section before it too sank, and were picked up in the night by a passing Montrose sloop and brought into South Shields that same night.
Darling was celebrated as a national hero and became the subject of legends and even a poem by William Wordsworth
ENIAC
Early in 1946, the U.S. Army was ready to make a big announcement: Scientists had created the "world's first general-purpose, programmable, all-electronic computer . . . at least a thousand times faster than any other computer on Earth," the Electronic Numerical Integrator and Computer, or ENIAC.
Its development -- how it was built, troubleshot, programmed, checked again -- involved years of careful work by mathematicians, physicists and engineers. And its eventual ability to perform faster calculations than anyone had ever dreamt of -- "5,000 additions in a second and 500 multiplications in the same second, not to mention lightning-fast divisions and square roots" -- owed a surprising debt to a cohort of young women who started the war punching numbers into mechanical calculators to figure out ballistic artillery trajectories.
Their story was all but lost. until a puzzling photograph that showed enormous metal machines tethered by cables and adorned with switches and plugs, the famous ENIAC.
The cast of characters could have come from one of those diverse rosters beloved of war movies: Kay McNulty, the Donegal-born math major whose first language was Irish; her quiet classmate Fran Bilas, one of the smartest girls at Chestnut Hill; the lively and imaginative Betty Snyder, who foreshadowed her problem-solving ability by fact-checking lipstick-sales statistics; Marlyn Wescoff, discouraged from looking for teaching jobs because of anti-Semitism; Ruth Lichterman, who turned down a job at Jewish summer camp to take the computing job; and Jean Jennings of Missouri, who could hoe corn as well as her brothers and was so good at math that her professors thought of her when the Army job notice came around.
By summer 1942, the Army was "looking for women math majors" for specialized jobs that would previously have been men's. In Philadelphia, they were hiring Computers -- the human sort -- to calculate all sorts of variables that affect trajectory, from wind direction and humidity to shell weight. Kay and Fran joined early, and the others came later, working long hours to identify and synthesize pertinent information. (For example, calculations for the North African desert take into account that the ground is softer than in France, so recoil changes, and the air is drier and less dense.)The women in the ballistics project combined intelligence with diligence and imagination and were already familiar with the problems ENIAC would have to solve. So the project leaders brought the six women into Project X -- partway. They didn't have clearances even to enter the ENIAC room, so they were given plans to study, diagrams showing what went where and did what. The ENIAC 6 divided up the homework and taught each other what they figured out. If they had questions, they buttonholed their male colleagues in the hall.
There was a lot to learn. ENIAC resembled a series of metal cabinets; at times there were more than 40. On their faces were switches, toggles, plugs for the wires that resembled "ganglia of heavy black cables." The function tables alone had "two square faces full of dials: [each with] twenty-six rows of twenty-eight switches, for 728 switches per side and 1,456 switches per unit."
When the women were finally called into the ENIAC sanctum in November 1945, to help with a hush-hush job for Los Alamos, they were awestruck, slightly daunted and delighted. As the women watched, the visiting scientists inserted prepared cards into slots on the faces of the machines, Accumulator 2, Program Line Input A-0 to Switch 5, set to add to Alpha, was read out, and the crew flipped switches and wired cables, programming the computer directly. It was thrilling and dramatic,
Big Bang Theory
Did you know that the Big Bank Theory is credited to a Catholic Priest.
Georges Henri Joseph Édouard Lemaître; (17 July 1894 – 20 June 1966) was a Belgian Catholic priest, mathematician, astronomer, and professor of physics at the Catholic University of Louvain. He was the first to theorize that the recession of nearby galaxies can be explained by an expanding universe, which was observationally confirmed soon afterwards by Edwin Hubble. He first derived "Hubble's law", now called the Hubble–Lemaître law by the IAU, and published the first estimation of the Hubble constant in 1927, two years before Hubble's article. Lemaître also proposed the "Big Bang theory" of the origin of the universe, calling it the "hypothesis of the primeval atom", and later calling it "the beginning of the world"
Pierre Gassendi (1592)
As a priest and a professor, Gassendi lectured on theology in his native southeastern France. However, as a philosopher, scientist, and astronomer, he was compelled to try to reconcile his scientific beliefs with the teachings of the church. Dissatisfied with the teachings of Aristotle, he came to espouse empiricism and atomism, the belief that tiny, indestructible particles form the basic building blocks of the entire universe. In 1621, he was the first person to give the Aurora Borealis a name. In 1631, he became the first person to observe the transit of a planet across the Sun, viewing the transit of Mercury that Kepler had predicted.
Jane Austin
Jane Austen's enchanting novels about love and marriage are unrivaled in Western literature. It is an irony that the author herself never married. Was she ever in love?
Rudyard Kipling certainly thought so. In his poem "Jane's Marriage," the dashing but financially shaky Captain Wentworth of Austen's "Persuasion" stands in for the love of Jane's life. Some scholars say Austen's beloved was a young Irishman named Tom Lefroy. Austen's relatives destroyed most of her letters, so the matter has primarily been one of speculation.
In December 1795 Jane, who had just turned 20, met Tom Lefroy, a few weeks her junior, when he visited relatives in Hampshire. A cheeky flirtation soon overtook them, so much so that Austen claimed they broke the bonds of 18th-century propriety. Austen considered her "Irish friend" "good-looking" and "very gentlemanlike," picturing him in the role of Henry Fielding's cocky and comic hero, Tom Jones. Jane expected an offer of marriage. But this was not to be. Shortly thereafter Lefroy returned to London, a development possibly orchestrated by relatives who wished to shield him from a financially imprudent match. Whatever feelings there might have been, in 1799 Tom Lefroy married Mary Paul.
Shakespeare's dictum "The course of true love never did run smooth" is the theme of Austen's novel "Emma" (1815). Full of obstacles and mishaps, blindness and blunders, "Emma" is Austen's most playful work, teeming with messages hidden in word games such as acrostics, anagrams and charades, or cleverly secreted in the text via deliberate errors and incongruities.
In Chapter 9 of "Emma," Austen underscores one particular charade, or literary riddle, by calling it a "motto to the chapter" and "prologue to the play." It consists of two four-line stanzas and a couplet, introduced by the salutation "To Miss -- ." The stanzas contain at least two answers to the riddle and two related acrostics, which have received scholarly attention. The salutation, however, has been ignored, and so has the couplet: "Thy ready wit the word will soon supply,/ May its approval beam in that soft eye!"
Impatient with her protegee Harriet Smith's "wrong" guesses to the charade, Emma snatches the paper and commands that she listen. "For Miss -- , read Miss Smith," Emma proclaims. But Emma gets two things wrong: She carelessly alters the charade's salutation from "To Miss" to "For Miss," and she mistakes her friend Harriet as the charade's intended recipient. Harriet then reads the actual words of the salutation correctly: "To Miss -- ," she says. "Dear me, how clever! Could it really be meant for me?"
"Such sweet lines! . . . these two last," Harriet observes.
"Leave out the two last lines," Emma advises, "and there is no reason why you should not write it into your book."
"Oh! But those two lines are -- "
" -- The best of all," Emma says, finishing Harriet's sentence. Emma continues: "Granted; -- for private enjoyment; and for private enjoyment keep them. They are not at all the less written you know, because you divide them. The couplet does not cease to be, nor does its meaning change. But take it away, and all appropriation ceases."
Although separating the couplet doesn't change its meaning, it does change the "appropriation." The last two lines are too private for public consumption because they indicate for whom the charade is truly meant and to whom the novel is actually dedicated. Hidden in these lines is a message of love from the author herself.
In Austen's poem, if we look for acrostics (letters at the beginning), mesostitchs (letters in the middle) and telestichs (letters at the end) in the couplet, we get TOYMEE.
Now, follow Emma's command to leave off the "last two" -- not the whole two lines but the last letter in each of these two lines, thus omitting "y" and "e" and taking "l" and "y" as the telestich letters. Now we have TOLMEY.
Recall the error in the salutation made by Emma (but deliberately made by Austen), where "For Miss -- " should have been "To Miss -- ." Add the extraneous letters ("for") to the others we have gathered: TOLMEYFOR.
Finally, anagram these letters. What do you have? Austen's "Irish friend," Tom Lefroy.
The secret she hid in "Emma" is stunning and heartbreaking. Jane Austen fell in love with Tom Lefroy over Christmas 1795, and she loved him from then on, forever, even when all hope was gone.
In Kipling's poem, on entering paradise, Jane was met by three archangels who offered her the command of any of heaven's gifts. "Jane said: 'Love.'" At once the seraphim set forth, for a time their search in vain, "whispering round the Nebulae 'Who loved Jane?'" Then there "in a private limbo where none had thought to look, sat a Hampshire gentleman reading of a book." The book "was called Persuasion" and in its pages told the story of their timeless love, more precious than caskets of gold.
Paul Lindholm & USS CREVALLE
About 30 minutes before sunset on 11 May 1944, USS CREVALLE (SS-291) surfaced off Negros Island in the Philippines. Her mission: to bring supplies to guerillas fighting the Japanese and pick up refugees. CREVALLE’s commanding officer, Frank Walker, remembers, “My orders stated that we would bring out twenty five passengers and no baggage,” and that the refugees would be delivered to the sub on a canoe. The second canoe, carrying sixteen more refugees, was a total surprise. “He [Colonel Abcede, the guerilla commander] said the he had done this in hopes to persuade us to carry more than the twenty-five. …Many of the second group…were women, children, and also included four American and Filipino soldiers who had survived the Bataan Death March, had made their escape and desperately needed medical treatment.” Walker could not turn them away—CREVALLE took everyone aboard. Among the refugees was American missionary Paul Lindholm and his wife and four children. Lindholm made sure his family was safe aboard the boat and then, in Walker’s words, “returned ashore at the last minute to continue his ministry among the guerillas—much to the astonishment of his wife who expected him to accompany them to safety.” The entire family would survive to be reunited at war’s end.
With forty-one extra people aboard, CREVALLE was crowded. The chiefs gave their quarters over to the women so they could have some privacy, but mealtimes proved to be the bigger headache. “We fed them in the crew’s mess, which required trooping them through the control room,” Walker said. “This fascinated some of the children, who took to straggling and playing with the switches, on the interior electrical control panel. The Chief of the Watch solved this by putting up a sign that read, ‘Any children found in the control room without their mothers will be shot.’ The mothers read this to their kids, who seemed to take it as a matter of course. Considering that some of them could not remember a time when they were not fugitives and in the middle of the war, this is entirely understandable.”
The trip to Darwin, Australia, where the refugees would disembark, was anything but calm. A particularly vicious depth-charging sent the boat down to 580 feet, far below her 412-foot test depth; water flooded into a forward area where the female refugees had been told to stay. Nancy Real explained why they were able to keep their cool: “…I noticed four…torpedomen, standing in water almost over their heads up by the torpedo tubes. They seemed so unconcerned as I watched them, that I decided until they looked worried, why should I be worried?”
Mercy shown during the Civil War
As wave after wave of blue-coated Yankees fell before Rebel rifles, then lay dying on this frozen battlefield, a 19-year-old's killer instinct deserted him.
"All night and all day I have heard these poor people crying for water, and I can't stand it no longer," Sgt. Richard Rowland Kirkland said to Confederate Gen. Joseph B. Kershaw on Dec. 14, 1862. "I came to ask permission to go and give them water."
With his commanding officer's consent, Sgt. Kirkland risked his life to offer wounded Union soldiers water and blankets as both armies watched, guns silent, for nearly 11/2 hours.
D Day Medic Hero
Heavy machine-gun fire greeted a nauseous and bloody Waverly B. Woodson, Jr. as he disembarked onto Omaha Beach the morning of June 6, 1944. A German shell had just blasted apart his landing craft, killing the man next to him and peppering him with so much shrapnel that he initially believed he, too, was dying.
Woodson, a medic with the lone African-American combat unit to fight on D-Day, nonetheless managed to set up a medical aid station and for the next 30 hours occupied himself treating others and saving many lives on the beach. He also saved four men from drowning, reportedly pulling them from the waves and administering CPR after their guide rope broke on the way ashore.
An October Day at Walter Reed
It's an October afternoon on the grounds of the nation's most renowned military hospital. A bitter presidential campaign is in its stretch run. In his room at Walter Reed, a grievously ill man much more accustomed to life in the Oval Office looks out the window, to be greeted by a surprise.
Dwight D. Eisenhower glances at the lawn and is startled by the sight of hundreds of people looking up toward him. October 14, 1968 -- is his 78th birthday. His wife, Mamie, stands behind his wheelchair; she, his doctors and nurses have carefully planned this.
The conductor of the U.S. Army Band and Chorus raises his baton. The crisply uniformed musicians and vocalists, on signal, commence with a program of Eisenhower's favorite songs. He has been a patient here for months, having suffered his seventh heart attack. He is more than 24 years removed from the D-Day invasion, seven years from his last day of work in the White House. He brings a handkerchief to his face and dabs his eyes.
Somewhere else in America, two men -- Richard Nixon and Hubert Humphrey -- are courting voters. Here on the grounds of Walter Reed Army Hospital people hear the music, and word passes among them about why it is being performed. Soldiers home from Vietnam for treatment, their family members, medical personnel, hospital support staff, all hurry to where the band is playing and look up toward the side of the brick building.
Here is what they see in that window, pulled to the up-and-open position in its wooden frame: the 34th president of the United States, with eyeglasses he will sometimes remove, wearing a robe over a pair of pajamas. They sing a greeting to him, using the honorific he prefers postpresidency: "Happy birthday to you, happy birthday to you, happy birthday, General Eisenhower. . ." With the first two fingers of his right hand he flashes them the V-for-victory sign.
The selection of music has been made with care; his wife knows each song will please him. There is "The Yellow Rose of Texas," commemorating the state where, in small-town Denison, he was born. There is "Army Blue," traditionally played and sung at West Point graduation ceremonies. There is "The Army Goes Rolling Along." At the sound of that one, he salutes.
Someone hands him a miniature flag, bearing five stars to signify his rank. He briefly waves it in time with a tune. The crowd beneath the window grows. A song he loves from "The Sound of Music" is played: "Climb every mountain, ford every stream. . ."
What a life he has led. Within six months, it will have ended. For now, in what will turn out to be his last appearance in public and the final birthday he will ever celebrate, the crowd on the lawn continues to gather, wanting to show their love, respect and gratitude. They look at the man in the window, and he looks back, and the band plays on.
A Mutiny that led to the Election of Thomas Jefferson
One mutiny, aboard HMS Hermione in 1797, occurred off western Puerto Rico on the night of Sept. 21. The crew of the Hermione had had enough, they decided to answer violence with violence, and judicial terror with treason. In a crescendo of maritime radicalism, the ill-fated ship suffered the most violent revolt in the chronicles of the Royal Navy. In addition to the captain, the inexperienced and sadistic Hugh Pigot, nine officers were murdered with cutlasses, axes and tomahawks before being launched overboard.
With a majority of the crew, upward of a hundred or more, eluding capture, the Hermione revolt stands as one of the most consequential and successful mutinies in naval history. An indeterminate number fled to the United States, of whom one, Thomas Nash, was extradited to the British with the unthinking approval of President John Adams. Such was the outrage among Americans, already incensed by the impressment of the country's seamen, that this fresh act of British "tyranny" helped Thomas Jefferson win the tumultuous election of 1800. Nash's subsequent execution also led directly to America's adoption of political asylum for European fugitives.
The man who prevented WWIII Vasily Arkhipov
On 27 October 1962, during the Cuban Missile Crisis, a group of 11 United States Navy destroyers and the aircraft carrier USS Randolph located the diesel-powered, nuclear-armed Foxtrot-class submarine B-59 near Cuba. Despite being in international waters, the United States Navy started dropping signaling depth charges, explosives intended to force the submarine to come to the surface for identification. There had been no contact from Moscow for a number of days and, although the submarine's crew had earlier been picking up U.S. civilian radio broadcasts, once B-59 began attempting to hide from its U.S. Navy pursuers, it was too deep to monitor any radio traffic. Those on board did not know whether war had broken out or not. The captain of the submarine, Valentin Grigorievitch Savitsky, decided that a war might already have started and wanted to launch a nuclear torpedo.
Unlike the other submarines in the flotilla, three officers on board B-59 had to agree unanimously to authorize a nuclear launch: Captain Savitsky, the political officer Ivan Semonovich Maslennikov, and the flotilla commodore (and executive officer of B-59) Arkhipov. Typically, Soviet submarines armed with the "Special Weapon" required the captain only to get authorization from the political officer to launch a nuclear torpedo, but due to Arkhipov's position as commodore, B-59's captain also was required to gain Arkhipov's approval. An argument broke out, with only Arkhipov against the launch.
Even though Arkhipov was second-in-command of the submarine B-59, he was in fact commodore of the entire submarine flotilla, including B-4, B-36 and B-130. According to author Edward Wilson, the reputation Arkhipov had gained from his courageous conduct in the previous year's K-19 incident also helped him prevail. Arkhipov eventually persuaded Savitsky to surface and await orders from Moscow. This effectively averted the general nuclear war which probably would have ensued if the nuclear weapon had been fired. The submarine's batteries had run very low and the air-conditioning had failed, causing extreme heat and high levels of carbon dioxide inside the submarine. They were forced to surface amid the American pursuers and return to the Soviet Union as a result
Stanislav Petrov
On 26 September 1983, just three weeks after the Soviet military had shot down Korean Air Lines Flight 007, Lieutenant Colonel Petrov was the duty officer at the command center for the Oko nuclear early-warning system when the system reported that five missiles had been launched from the United States. Petrov judged the reports to be a false alarm, and his decision is credited with having prevented an erroneous retaliatory nuclear attack on the United States and its NATO allies that could have resulted in large-scale nuclear war.
The result of Petrov’s decision for humanity was that life as we know it went on unabated. The result of Petrov’s decision on his military career was quite different. His decision had brought to light problems in the Soviet early warning system and embarrassed his superiors. He was denied promotions, reassigned and took early retirement. The story was not even known outside the secretive world of the Soviet military until the late 1990s.
In May of 2007, while in the United States for the filming of a documentary, Mr. Petrov spent two days at Minuteman Missile National Historic Site, remarking that “he would never have imagined being able to visit one of the enemy’s securest sites.”
Discovery of Antartica
There is a place on Earth that remains untouched by war, slavery or riots. Its inhabitants coexist in peace, and all nationalities are welcomed. No, it's not Neverland or Shangri-La -- it's Antarctica, home to the South Pole, roughly 20 million penguins and a transient population of about 4,000 scientists and support staff.
Antarctica's existence was only confirmed 200 years ago. Following some initial sightings by British and Russian explorers in January 1821, Captain John Davis, a British-born American sealer and explorer, landed on the Antarctic Peninsula on Feb. 7, 1821. Davis was struck by its immense size, writing in his logbook, "I think this Southern Land to be a Continent." It is, in fact, the fifth-largest of Earth's seven continents.
People had long speculated that there had to be something down at the bottom of the globe -- in cartographers' terms, a Terra Australis Incognita ("unknown southern land"). The ancient Greeks referred to the putative landmass as "Ant-Arktos," because it was on the opposite side of the globe from the constellation of Arktos, the Bear, which appears in the north. But the closest anyone came to penetrating the freezing wastes of the Antarctic Circle was Captain James Cook, the British explorer, who looked for a southern continent from 1772-75. He got within 80 miles of the coast, but the harshness of the region convinced Cook that "no man will ever venture further than I have done."
Davis proved him wrong half a century later, but explorers were unable to make further progress until the heroic age of Antarctic exploration in the early 20th century. In 1911, the British explorer Robert F. Scott led a research expedition to the South Pole, only to be beaten by the Norwegian Roald Amundsen, who misled his backers about his true intentions and jettisoned scientific research for the sake of getting there quickly.
Extraordinarily bad luck led to the deaths of Scott and his teammates on their return journey. In 1915, Ernest Shackleton led a British expedition that aimed to make the first crossing of Antarctica by land, but his ship Endurance was trapped in the polar ice. The crew's 18-month odyssey to return to civilization became the stuff of legend.
Georgia Inmates save Warden
On July 29, 2020 three Georgia inmates (Terry Loveless, Walter Whitehead and Mitchell Smallshelped) saved a prison guard’s life (Deputy Warren Hobbs) when he suffered a heart attack inside the lockup.
The three detainees at the Gwinnett County Jail leapt into action when they saw Deputy Warren Hobbs acting strangely and then falling to the prison’s concrete floor and cracking his head, according to police and reports Tuesday.
Locked in their cells, the prisoners did the only thing they could think of — raise a ruckus.
“Kinda was like laying back in his chair and just started (making noises),” inmate Mitchell Smalls told Fox News. “I started hollering and screaming and banging on the door to try to alert everybody to wake up.”
Propeller Plane Shoots Down Jet Plane
On 10 September 1952, a MiG-15 made the mistake of getting into a turning contest with a Corsair piloted by Captain Jesse G. Folmar, with Folmar shooting the MiG down with his four 20 millimeter cannon.The MiG's wingmen quickly had their revenge, shooting down Folmar, though he bailed out and was swiftly rescued with little injury.
A Propeller SeaFury Plane takes out a Jet
At the height of the Korean War, Lieutenant Peter “Hoagy” Carmichael was aboard the cockpit of the Hawker Sea Fury a propeller-driven plane that felt almost archaic to the Soviet MiG-15s.
In a tight dogfight, Carmichael and other Sea Fury pilots went head-to-head with the MiGs. Carmichael was able to bring down one of the jets, making the Sea Fury one of those rare propeller jets to down a jet engine in air combat.
Conscientious Objector
Desmond Thomas Doss (February 7, 1919 – March 23, 2006)[1] was a United States Army corporal who served as a combat medic with an infantry company in World War II.
Doss refused to kill an enemy soldier or carry a weapon into combat because of his personal beliefs as a Seventh-day Adventist. He consequently became a medic assigned to the 2nd Platoon, Company B, 1st Battalion, 307th Infantry, 77th Infantry Division.
While serving with his platoon in 1944 on Guam and the Philippines, he was awarded two Bronze Star Medals with a "V" device, for exceptional valor in aiding wounded soldiers under fire. During the Battle of Okinawa, he saved the lives of 50–100 wounded infantrymen atop the area known by the 96th Division as the Maeda Escarpment or Hacksaw Ridge. Doss was wounded four times in Okinawa,and was evacuated on May 21, 1945, aboard the USS Mercy.Doss suffered a left arm fracture from a sniper's bullet and at one point had seventeen pieces of shrapnel embedded in his body. He was awarded the Medal of Honor for his actions in Okinawa.His life has been the subject of books, the documentary The Conscientious Objector, and the 2016 film Hacksaw Ridge.
Nuclear Weapon that did not Explode
On Feb. 5, 1958, a B-47 bomber dropped a 7,000-pound nuclear bomb into the waters off Tybee Island, Ga., after it collided with another Air Force jet.
Fifty years later, the bomb -- which has unknown quantities of radioactive material -- has never been found.
The bomb found its hidden resting place when the B-47 pilot, Air Force Col. Howard Richardson, dropped it into the water after an F-86 fighter jet accidentally collided with him during a training mission. The fighter jet's pilot, Lt. Clarence Stewart, didn't see Richardson's plane on his radar; Stewart descended directly onto Richardson's aircraft. The impact ripped the left wing off the F-86 and heavily damaged the fuel tanks of the B-47.
Richardson, carrying a two-man crew, was afraid the bomb would break loose from his damaged plane when he landed, so he ditched the bomb in the water before landing the plane at Hunter Air Force Base outside Savannah. Stewart ejected and eventually landed safely in a swamp.
No one was hurt and the bomb did not explode!
Elvis Presley
Early in his career, Elvis Presley donated toys to a Marine drive for children and gave $1,050 to Humes High School so that all 1,400 students could go to the annual E.H. Crump Memorial Football Game for the Blind. In 1959, he donated blood at the Wartturm Barracks in Friedberg for the German Red Cross.
Never one to forget his roots, Elvis performed in his hometown, Tupelo, in 1956 and 1957 to raise money for a youth center and park. Following a devastating tornado in McComb, Mississippi in January 1975, Elvis performed a benefit concert for the city in May of the same year. At the show, Elvis presented a check for more than $100,000 to Mississippi Governor Bill Waller.
In 1961, he performed a concert to build the USS Arizona Memorial at Pearl Harbor and raised more than $65,000. And 12 years later, Elvis donated the proceeds from his 1973 “Aloha from Hawaii” satellite-concert to the Kui Lee cancer fund.
He loved Memphis and wanted the best for the city. On Dec. 1, 1967, he pledged $10,500 to the Memphis Jewish Community Center Building Fund and paid a $2,500 installment on that date. On Dec. 12, 1966, he donated checks totaling $105,000 to various Memphis charities. September 29, 1967 was declared “Elvis Presley Day” by Memphis Mayor William Ingram and Tennessee Governor Buford Ellington in recognition of the King’s many charitable contributions. A massive wooden plaque was given to Elvis by the City of Memphis in recognition for his contributions to more than 50 local charities. That plaque, along with numerous checks he wrote to charities, are on display at Graceland.
Elvis was known to give plenty of gifts – there are countless stories of surprising friends, family and even total strangers with brand new cars – but he also helped his friends pay their medical bills (and often sent personal get-well notes, too).
In 1974, he contributed to a fund for singer-songwriter Ivory Joe Hunter, who was hospitalized with cancer, and he helped pay for Jackie Wilson’s hospital bills following Wilson’s stroke in 1975.
Sara Josepha Hale
A traditionalist bent on creating traditions, Sara Josepha Hale argued in editorials for the establishment of Thanksgiving on the last Thursday in November, not only "throughout all New England" but "in our sister states." George Washington, she knew, had proclaimed in 1789 a public day of thanksgiving in honor of the founding of the nation and "for the peaceable and rational manner in which we have been enabled to establish constitutions of government for our safety and happiness." John Adams had followed suit, though Jefferson considered such proclamations of fasting and prayer to be an "intermeddling" of government with religious institutions.
Thanksgiving had been celebrated intermittently since, by proclamation of this president or that governor, but Hale thought it should be "a grand spectacle of moral power and human happiness, observed, on the same day, throughout all the states and territories," and petitioned governors as well as presidents Taylor, Fillmore, Pierce and Buchanan. No dice. But when she approached Secretary of State William Seward in 1863, he forwarded her suggestion to President Lincoln, who issued the first national proclamation right away. Still, the Civil War was far from over and there was no unanimity, not even for a moment, and not the next month when Lincoln delivered his poignant elegy at Gettysburg.
By the 1890s, Thanksgiving was established as a holiday enjoyed by all Americans. In 1918, during the Spanish flu epidemic, quarantines interfered with Thanksgiving celebrations, but in 1920, Gimbel Brothers department store in Philadelphia orchestrated the first Thanksgiving parade. By the 1930s, Thanksgiving had become entangled with football and the Christmas season. Though Lincoln had established the national observance, an American president would still have proclaim Thanksgiving's date each year, in practice the last Thursday in November. In 1939 Franklin Roosevelt tried to move Thanksgiving to earlier in the month -- it would otherwise have fallen on the 30th, considerably shortening the shopping season and hurting retailers. But the move upset football schedules and school calendars, and the uproar motivated Congress to codify Thanksgiving, establishing the holiday on the fourth Thursday of November.
William Bradford & William Shakespeare
Macy's Thanksgiving Day Parade
The Macy's Thanksgiving Day Parade is an annual parade in New York City. The world's largest parade, it is presented by the U.S.-based department store chain Macy's. The parade started in 1924, tying it for the second-oldest Thanksgiving parade in the United States with America's Thanksgiving Parade in Detroit (with both parades being four years younger than Philadelphia's Thanksgiving Day Parade). The three-hour parade is held in Manhattan, ending outside Macy's Herald Square, and takes place from 9:00 a.m. to 12:00 p.m. Eastern Standard Time on Thanksgiving Day, and has been televised nationally on NBC since 1953. Employees at Macy's department stores have the option of marching in the parade. In 1924, store employees marched to Macy's Herald Square, the flagship store on 34th Street, dressed in vibrant costumes. There were floats, professional bands and live animals borrowed from the Central Park Zoo. At the end of that first parade, Santa Claus was welcomed into Herald Square. At this first parade, Santa was enthroned on the Macy's balcony at the 34th Street store entrance, where he was then crowned "King of the Kiddies". With an audience of over 250,000 people, the parade was such a success that Macy's declared it would become an annual event, despite media reports only barely covering the first parade.
The Macy's parade was enough of a success to push Ragamuffin Day, the typical children's Thanksgiving Day activity from 1870 into the 1920s, into obscurity. Ragamuffin Day featured children going around and performing a primitive version of trick-or-treating, a practice that by the 1920s had come to annoy most adults. The public backlash against such begging in the 1930s (at a time when most Americans were themselves struggling in the midst of the Great Depression) led to promotion of alternatives, including Macy's parade. While ragamuffin parades that competed with Macy's would continue into the 1930s, the competition from Macy's would overwhelm the practice, and the last ragamuffin parade in New York City would take place in 1956.
Anthony "Tony" Frederick Sarg loved to work with marionettes from an early age. After moving to London to start his own marionette business, Sarg moved to New York City to perform with his puppets on the street. Macy's heard about Sarg's talents and asked him to design a window display of a parade for the store.
Through the 1930s, the Parade continued to grow, with crowds of over one million people lining the parade route in 1933. The first Mickey Mouse balloon entered the parade in 1934. The annual festivities were broadcast on local radio stations in New York City from 1932 to 1941, and resumed in 1945, running through 1951.
The parade was suspended from 1942 to 1944 as a result of World War II, because rubber and helium were needed for the war effort. The parade resumed in 1945, and became known nationwide shortly afterward, having been prominently featured in the 1947 film Miracle on 34th Street, which included footage of the 1946 festivities. The event was first broadcast on network television in 1948. From 1984 to 2019, the balloons were made by Raven Industries of Sioux Falls, South Dakota, through its Raven Aerostar division.
Christmas Truce WW!
The Christmas Truce occurred on and around Christmas Day 1914, when the sounds of rifles firing and shells exploding faded in a number of places along the Western Front during World War I in favor of holiday celebrations. During the unofficial ceasefire, soldiers on both sides of the conflict emerged from the trenches and shared gestures of goodwill.
Did you know? On December 7, 1914, Pope Benedict XV suggested a temporary hiatus of the war for the celebration of Christmas. The warring countries refused to create any official cease-fire, but on Christmas the soldiers in the trenches declared their own unofficial truce.
The Christmas Tree
The Christmas tree has evolved from centuries-old traditions. Ancient Egyptians, Romans, Chinese and other cultures used evergreens to mark the winter solstice, celebrate the end of the harvest year and symbolize the spirit of renewal. Druids used holly and mistletoe as symbols of eternal life.
The Christian tradition of the Christmas tree dates to about 724 in Germany, according to Franciscan Father Barry Brunsman, author of “The Christmas Tree: Its Spiritual Meaning.”
Father Brunsman recounts that a tribe was about to sacrifice a youth to a god who lived within a huge oak tree. A Christian named Boniface (later declared St. Boniface) stopped the killing, saved the youth and cut down the tree. He placed a fir tree, triangular to symbolize the Holy Trinity, on the stump of the oak. Eventually, the fir tree became part of the German Christmas tradition, then spread to other parts of the world.
Other authors tell of Martin Luther, who in 1510 was inspired by the stars shimmering through the trees as he walked through the woods one wintry night. He cut down a small tree, took it home and decorated it with candles for his children.
One of the first documented reports of Christmas trees in America was in 1747 among the German Moravian immigrants in Bethlehem, Pa. In 1825, the Saturday Evening Post noted the decorated trees in Philadelphia, and in 1842, candles, popcorn, nuts and homemade paper ornaments were used to decorate Christmans trees in Williamsburg, Va.
In 1851, a New York farmer, Mark Carr, cut a load of evergreens from the Catskills, hauled them to Manhatten and set up the first street corner Christmas tree lot in Greenwich Village. Franklin Pierce put the first tree in the White House in the 1850s, and every president embraced the practice except for Theodore Roosevelt, the noted conservationist, who objected to cutting down perfectly good trees from the forest.
Today, 98 percent of all Christmas trees are grown on plantations rather than cut from the wild, and every tree that is cut down is replaced.
Items commonly associated with the Christmas tree also have a long history.
It is St. Francis of Assisi who is credited with creating the first Nativity Scene. He had developed a special devotion to the feast of Christmas after his trip to the Holy Land and Bethlehem. In 1223, he asked his Brothers to arrange a manger scene, complete with hay, an ox and an ass, in a local cave on a wood-grown cliff in Greccio. On Christmas eve, they carried lighted candles to the cave and Mass was said with the manger as the altar.
The Christmas Wreath
On Christmas Eve, 1843, three ghosts visited Ebenezer Scrooge in the Charles Dickens novella "A Christmas Carol" and changed Christmas forever. Dickens is often credited with "inventing" the modern idea of Christmas because he popularized and reinvigorated such beloved traditions as the turkey feast, singing carols and saying "Merry Christmas."
But one tradition for which he cannot take credit is the ubiquitous Christmas wreath, whose pedigree goes back many centuries, even to pre-Christian times.
Wreaths can be found in almost every ancient culture and were worn or hung for many purposes. In Egypt, participants in the festival of Sokar, a god of the underworld, wore onion wreaths because the vegetable was venerated as a symbol of eternal life. The Greeks awarded laurel wreaths to the winners of competitions because the laurel tree was sacred to Apollo, the god of poetry and athletics. The Romans bestowed them on emperors and victorious generals.
Fixing wreaths and boughs onto doorposts to bring good luck was another widely practiced tradition. As early as the 6th century, Lunar New Year celebrants in central China would decorate their doors with young willow branches, a symbol of immortality and rebirth.
The early Christians did not, as might be assumed, create the Yuletide wreath. That was the pagan Vikings. They celebrated the winter solstice with mistletoe, evergreen wreaths made of holly and ivy, and 12 days of feasting, all of which were subsequently turned into Christian symbols. Holly, for example, has often been equated with the crown of thorns. Perhaps not surprisingly for the people who also introduced the words "knife," "slaughter" and "berserk," one Viking custom involved setting the Yuletide wreath on fire in the hope of attracting the sun's attention.
Across northern Europe, the Norse wreath was eventually absorbed into the Christian calendar as the Advent wreath, symbolizing the four weeks before Christmas. It became part of German culture in 1839, when Johann Hinrich Wichern, a Lutheran pastor in Hamburg, captured the public's imagination with his enormous Advent wreath. Made with a cartwheel and 24 candles, it was intended to help the children at his orphanage count the days to Christmas.
German immigrants to the U.S. brought the Advent wreath with them. Still, while Americans might accept a candlelit wreath inside the house, door wreaths were rare, especially in former Puritan strongholds such as Boston. The whiff of disapproval hung about until 1935, when Colonial Williamsburg appointed Louise B. Fisher, an underemployed and overqualified professor's wife, to be its head of flowers and decorations. Inspired by her love of 15th-century Italian art, Fisher allowed her wreath designs to run riot on the excuse that she was only adding fruits and other whimsies that had been available during the Colonial era.
Thousands of visitors saw her designs and returned home to copy them. Like Wichern, she helped inspire a whole generation to be unapologetically joyous with their wreaths. Thanks in part to her efforts, America's front doors are a thing to behold at this time of year, proving that it's never too late to pour new energy into an old tradition.
Joel Roberts Poinsett
In the winter of 1828, Joel Roberts Poinsett, the U.S. minister to Mexico, was exploring a tropical forest about 100 miles southwest of Mexico City. He was in the habit of sharing unfamiliar species of plants with his far-flung correspondents, hoping the plants might be useful in agriculture or gain him diplomatic favor. Along the slopes of the forest's steep canyons, he came across a bush that the Aztecs called "cuetlaxochitl" (brilliant flower) and that they used for medicinal remedies as well as dyes for clothes and cosmetics. Its display of brilliant red in the winter dry season must have caught his eye. He sent specimens back to Bartram's Garden in Philadelphia, which promptly put them on exhibit. Their popularity spread from Philadelphia to Europe, and today the poinsettia, so evident at this time of year, has become a holiday fixture in American homes and churches.
Poinsett was in Mexico for a reason. He was admired in the U.S. for his expertise in all things to do with Latin America -- politics, science, business. James Madison had appointed him de facto U.S. consul in Argentina and Chile from 1810 to 1815, when both countries were emerging from Spanish rule. Poinsett even took part, on the battlefield, in Chile's war of independence and drafted its constitution.
It was John Quincy Adams who appointed Poinsett as America's first official minister in Mexico. The hope was for friendly relations between fellow republics, but Poinsett soon came to be despised for interfering in local affairs, and the term "poinsettismo" became shorthand for Yankee meddling. Poinsett also promoted and invested in Mexican mines with British and American partners. Sometimes he gilded the gold mines' prospective returns, and he faced lawsuits for such ledger tinkering once he returned to the U.S.
Poinsett won election to the South Carolina state legislature in 1816 (and again in 1830) and was eventually sent to Congress. No less important, he served as president of the South Carolina Board of Public Works, overseeing the planning of the State Road from Charleston, through the capital, Columbia, and then up the Blue Ridge to North Carolina. The 1820 Poinsett Bridge, made of stone with a handsome Gothic arch, still stands in a beautiful spot near the foot of the Blue Ridge, the oldest bridge in South Carolina and probably the entire South. Research suggests that Robert Mills, the Charlestonian who designed the Washington Monument, was most likely its architect.
Poinsett supported President Andrew Jackson and led the anti-Nullification forces in his home state. The Unionist Charleston Courier portrayed him as a "man in a thunderstorm," standing unmoved while more "solid hearts were shivered to atoms by the forked lightnings."
Rewarding Poinsett for his loyalty, Jackson's successor Martin Van Buren promoted him to secretary of war (1837-41),
Thomas Nast, Fred Mizen & Haddon Hubbard
The Santa Claus we all know and love — that big, jolly man in the red suit with a white beard — didn’t always look that way. In fact, many people are surprised to learn that prior to 1931, Santa was depicted as everything from a tall gaunt man to a spooky-looking elf. He has donned a bishop's robe and a Norse huntsman's animal skin. In fact, when Civil War cartoonist Thomas Nast drew Santa Claus for Harper's Weekly in 1862, Santa was a small elflike figure who supported the Union. Nast continued to draw Santa for 30 years, changing the color of his coat from tan to the red he’s known for today. Nast, performed a similar rehabilitation on the Phrygian cap. To give his Santa a far-away but still benign look, he gave him a semi-Phrygian crossed with a camauro, the medieval clergyman's cap. Subsequent artists exaggerated the peak and cocked it back, like a nightcap. Thus the red cap of revolution became the cartoon version of Christmas.
The Coca‑Cola Company began its Christmas advertising in the 1920s with shopping-related ads in magazines like The Saturday Evening Post. The first Santa ads used a strict-looking Claus, in the vein of Thomas Nast.
In 1930, artist Fred Mizen painted a department-store Santa in a crowd drinking a bottle of Coke. The ad featured the world's largest soda fountain, which was located in the department store Famous Barr Co. in St. Louis, Mo. Mizen's painting was used in print ads that Christmas season, appearing in The Saturday Evening Post in December 1930.
In 1931 the company began placing Coca‑Cola ads in popular magazines. Archie Lee, the D'Arcy Advertising Agency executive working with The Coca‑Cola Company, wanted the campaign to show a wholesome Santa who was both realistic and symbolic. So Coca‑Cola commissioned Michigan-born illustrator Haddon Sundblom to develop advertising images using Santa Claus — showing Santa himself, not a man dressed as Santa.
For inspiration, Sundblom turned to Clement Clark Moore's 1822 poem "A Visit From St. Nicholas" (commonly called "'Twas the Night Before Christmas"). Moore's description of St. Nick led to an image of a warm, friendly, pleasantly plump and human Santa. (And even though it's often said that Santa wears a red coat because red is the color of Coca‑Cola, Santa appeared in a red coat before Sundblom painted him.)
Sundblom’s Santa debuted in 1931 in Coke ads in The Saturday Evening Post and appeared regularly in that magazine, as well as in Ladies Home Journal, National Geographic, The New Yorker and others.
From 1931 to 1964, Coca‑Cola advertising showed Santa delivering toys (and playing with them!), pausing to read a letter and enjoy a Coke, visiting with the children who stayed up to greet him, and raiding the refrigerators at a number of homes. The original oil paintings Sundblom created were adapted for Coca‑Cola advertising in magazines and on store displays, billboards, posters, calendars and plush dolls. Many of those items today are popular collectibles.
Sundblom created his final version of Santa Claus in 1964, but for several decades to follow, Coca‑Cola advertising featured images of Santa based on Sundblom’s original works. These paintings are some of the most prized pieces in the art collection in the company’s archives department and have been on exhibit around the world, in famous locales including the Louvre in Paris, the Royal Ontario Museum in Toronto, the Museum of Science and Industry in Chicago, the Isetan Department Store in Tokyo, and the NK Department Store in Stockholm. Many of the original paintings can be seen on display at World of Coca‑Cola in Atlanta, Ga.
In the beginning, Sundblom painted the image of Santa using a live model — his friend Lou Prentiss, a retired salesman. When Prentiss passed away, Sundblom used himself as a model, painting while looking into a mirror. Finally, he began relying on photographs to create the image of St. Nick.
People loved the Coca‑Cola Santa images and paid such close attention to them that when anything changed, they sent letters to The Coca‑Cola Company. One year, Santa's large belt was backwards (perhaps because Sundblom was painting via a mirror). Another year, Santa Claus appeared without a wedding ring, causing fans to write asking what happened to Mrs. Claus.
The children who appear with Santa in Sundblom’s paintings were based on Sundblom's neighbors — two little girls. So he changed one to a boy in his paintings.
The dog in Sundblom’s 1964 Santa Claus painting was actually a gray poodle belonging to the neighborhood florist. But Sundblom wanted the dog to stand out in the holiday scene, so he painted the animal with black fur.
In 1942, Coca‑Cola introduced "Sprite Boy," a character who appeared with Santa Claus in Coca‑Cola advertising throughout the 1940s and 1950s. Sprite Boy, who was also created by Sundblom, got his name due to the fact that he was a sprite, or an elf. (It wasn’t until the 1960s that Coca‑Cola introduced the popular beverage Sprite.)
More than any artist including Norman Rockwell, Sundblom defined the American Dream in pictures, proved by his work for virtually the entire Fortune 500. [Among his still-living legacy is the Quaker Oats man, posed by his friend and colleague, Harold W. McCauley.
Christmas
Drawn from Old English, the word holiday is a combination of "holy" and "day." It is an unwitting acknowledgment that the Christmas Season is, in fact, a transcendent season. As far as season's greetings go, the phrase "Happy Holidays" seems warm and true and perfectly apt.The special nature of this time isn't limited to a single day. Advent (the 22-to-28 days preceding Christmas) and the broader Christmas season (the 40 days following Dec. 25, ending with Epiphany) are also holy days. They're happy ones, too.
In terms of XMas, here, too. The letter "X" is the Greek "Chi" -- the first letter of Christ's name -- and a shorthand that the faithful have used since the days of the Roman Empire. December 26th is celebrated as Boxing Day in the United Kingdom and other countries formerly part of the British Empire. It originated as a holiday to give gifts to the poor, when people would go to the church and donate to the alms "box". Some scholars attribute the tradition to the feast of St Stephen the Deacon (today, December 26th). St Stephen was one of the first deacons selected by the Apostles, who was assigned to caring for the poor of Jerusalem. Stephen was eventually stoned to death, becoming one of the first known martyrs of the early church.
Why is it called Xmas?
The snappy shortening of "Christmas" to "Xmas" might seem like a symptom of a digital era that prizes brevity. Indeed, when space is at a premium, as in headlines, advertising copy and text messages, "Xmas" manages to save some precious characters. But the abbreviated form actually has a history going back many centuries.
Why the "X," though? As I noted in a recent column on the longtime allure of the letter, "X" became part of our alphabet thanks to ancient Romans borrowing the Greek letter chi. And the Greek alphabet is the key to understanding the "Xmas" abbreviation.
Much of early Christian literature, including the New Testament itself, was written in Greek. "Christos," meaning "the anointed one," was spelled starting with the letter chi, which looks like "X," and rho, which looks like "P." Those first two letters, rendered as XP, often appeared symbolically as a kind of monogram for Jesus Christ, known as a Christogram. The "X" on its own representing chi was also commonly used as a religious emblem. (Later on, "X" would be invested with added significance as a symbol of the crucifixion, but in early use, the Christian cross was shaped like a "T" or the Greek letter tau.)
Beginning in medieval times, Christians writing in English sought to mimic the Greek approach by abbreviating "Christian" as "Xpian" -- with the "Xp" visually evoking the old letter combination -- or, eventually as "Xtian," probably as the original association waned with time. And when the name of the holiday commemorating the birth of Jesus came to be called "Christmas," a shortened version of "Christ's mass," it got further shortened with the Greek-style "X."
Spelling varied widely in the early modern era, but the first known "Xmas" variant showed up in a 1551 letter by King Edward VI, where it appeared as "X'temmas" ("Christmas" was also spelled "Christemmas" at the time). And in 1660, when the botanist Robert Sharrock corresponded with his fellow scientist Robert Boyle, he wrote it as "Xtmasse."
The even shorter "Xmas" can be found in the title of an old financial record listing "the revenue in Ireland for one year ended at Xmas 1685." (The tilde over the word was a way for the scribe to indicate that some letters were omitted.) By 1721, the "Xmas" version was common enough to appear in a letter from the English architect John Buxton to his son Robert, off at school: "I hope you will eat at Xmas some roast beef out of the old kitchen."
"Xmas" started taking off more widely in the late 19th century -- especially in advertisements, where the four letters could be printed repeatedly to festoon listings of Christmas gifts sold by retail stores. As the Christmas season became more of an exercise in consumerism, "Xmas" could be perceived as merely a token of that commercialization, especially as the significance of the Greek letter chi has faded from collective memory. In recent years, "Xmas" has occasionally been singled out as disrespectful by those seeking to "keep Christ in Christmas" and to counter the secularization of the holiday.
The old shorthand use of the letter chi for "Christ" lingers in other ways. In Greek, the phrase "Jesus Christ, Son of God, Savior" ("Iesous Christos Theou Yios Soter") was written in acronymic form that also happened to spell the word for fish, "ichthys." That coincidence, helped along by various mentions of fish and fishermen in the Gospels, led to the fish being used as a symbol for Christianity -- as seen on many a car bumper today in the form of the "Jesus fish."
Likewise, "Xmas" partakes in linguistic traditions reaching back to much earlier stages of the Christian faith, even if its compact form makes it remarkably well-suited for celebrating Christmas in the age of electronic communication.
New Years
The New Year's Eve celebration in Times Square started in 1904 when New York Times owner Adolph Ochs organized a party, including fireworks, to commemorate the opening of the newspaper's new headquarters. The first ball drop was three years later, and has taken place every year since except for two years during World War II, when people marked the New Year with a minute of silence followed by the ringing of chimes, according to Alliance. The drop dates to 1907, inspired by a maritime tradition in which ports dropped a "time ball" at noon so navigators could adjust their ships' chronometers. The end of 1995 was the first time that computer controls replaced four guys with ropes pulling the ball down.