Category: History
Today marks the 46th anniversary of the fall of Saigon, which signified the true end of the Vietnam War. Who could forget that famous picture of people queued up on a Saigon building (mistakenly thought to have been the US Embassy), getting on a UH-1 helicopter leaving Vietnam, as shown in this video:
There were some other great pictures in that video, too. However, the real last helicopter flight out was that of a CH-46 (Callsign “Swift 22”). The video describes the helicopter evacuation operations that were part of Operation Frequent Wind, the largest such operation in history, which commenced on 25 April 1975…………
The non-Communist Vietnamese who escaped the country have long referred to April 1975 as “Black April.” Those who escaped to the US have become some of the most patriotic and anti-Communist of all Americans. Many of them, as well as their progeny, mark Black April on 30 April each year. Here is a typical comment from one person on the 40th anniversary that explains what Black April means:
For Van Truong Le in Boston, this is a painful day, a time he and others who fled Vietnam call “Black April.”
“Because that was when folks from South Vietnam lost our country to the North Communist regime,” he said. “It was the day we lost our country. So we refer to it as Black April 1975. In fact for the last 40 years on April 30, the Vietnamese who have resettled here for the most part commemorate and observe that day as a day to commemorate the loss of Vietnam.”
And that name fits with good reason. Forced reeducation camps and a communization of the economy were in store for those who remained in Vietnam, as part of North Vietnam’s Communist takeover. Here is an excerpt of an account by Quyen Trong, who relates his father’s oral history:
A repost:
Dachau; I’ve been there. Everyone walked around in silence, and when people did speak, it was always in near whispers, even during the liturgies in the memorial chapels that had been built years later.
I don’t know about today, but 30+ years ago, you could walk right into the building where the gas chambers and crematory ovens are, and feel the hair rise up on the back of your neck as you looked into the black insides of those ovens that burned uncounted dead.
Murder. Mass murder. Concentrated, premeditated murder on a scale that makes the ‘mass shootings’ the mewling liberal proggies wail about in their rants for gun control, pale in piddling comparison.
And although you could walk right up to multiple little mass grave plots the size of a postage stamp front yard, marked Graves of Thousands Unknown this was ‘merely’ a concentration camp. Not one of the camps in Poland designed for industrial level mass slaughter.
US troops liberated Dachau concentration camp 77 years ago
77 years ago the U.S. Army liberated Dachau, a concentration camp operated by Nazi Germany during World War II.
On April 29, 1945 the U.S. Army’s 42nd Infantry Division (Rainbow), now a part of the New York Army National Guard, uncovered the concentration camp in the town of Dachau, near Munich Germany. According to a press release by the New York National Guard, the frontline soldiers in the Army unit knew there was a prison camp in the area, but knew few details about the camp’s true nature.
“What the Soldiers discovered next at Dachau left an impression of a lifetime,” the division assistant chaplain (Maj.) Eli Bohnen wrote at the time, according to the release. “Nothing you can put in words would adequately describe what I saw there. The human mind refuses to believe what the eyes see. All the stories of Nazi horrors are underestimated rather than exaggerated.”
The U.S. Army unit uncovered thousands of bodies of men, women and children held in the concentration camp.
“There were over 4,000 bodies, men, women and children in a warehouse in the crematorium,” Lt. Col. Walter Fellenz, commander of the 1st Battalion, 222nd Infantry, said in his report. “There were over 1,000 dead bodies in the barracks within the enclosure.”
“Riflemen, accustomed to witnessing death, had no stomach for rooms stacked almost ceiling high with tangled human bodies adjoining the cremation furnaces, looking like some maniac’s woodpile,” wrote Tech. Sgt. James Creasman, a division public affairs NCO in the 42nd Division World News, May 1, 1945.
“Dachau is no longer a name of terror for hunted men. 32,000 of them have been freed by the 42nd Rainbow Division,” Creasman wrote of the liberation.
The U.S. Holocaust Museum places the estimated number of those freed from the camp at more than 60,000.
On this day in 1960, President Eisenhower signed the law into effect making Wilson’s Creek a national battlefield monument
The Battle for Wilson’s Creek’s recognition
In southern Greene County, there is peace.
You can’t hear traffic. The wind howls through the trees, birds chirp, and a creek churns through the hills.
But as soon as you hear the name of this creek, your opinion of this place will change. This is Wilson’s Creek and in 1861 peace was far from here.
“The Battle of Wilson’s Creek is the second major battle of the Civil War,” superintendent of Wilson’s Creek National Battlefield Sarah Cunningham said. “It’s also the first major battle west of the Mississippi.”
“It was a five or six-hour bloody battle that took place,” Cunningham said.
A few hours into the fight, General Lyon was killed while positioning his troops. He becomes the first Union general killed in action in the Civil War.
“For years, veterans of this battle would come back to remember,” Cunningham said, “and commemorate the battle that occurred here.”
Those veterans would lay rocks at the spot where their leader, General Lyon died. In 1928, the rocks were replaced with a stone marker made by the University Club of Springfield. But to see it, visitors would have to trespass on the private land.
“Schoolchildren would go to school and they would bring pennies, nickels, anything that they could save,” Cunningham said, “and contribute to the preservation of the Battle of Wilson’s Creek.”
In 1951, the Foundation purchased the 37-acres of land known as Bloody Hill. Over the next few years, the property would grow in size but not in status.
With 16 Civil War sites as National Parks, the government didn’t need another. The Pea Ridge National Military Park in Arkansas was added in 1956. One account mentioned the National Parks thought Pea Ridge was enough to tell the story of the war west of the Mississippi.
“On April 22, 1960, President Eisenhower signs into law the establishment of Wilson’s Creek National Battlefield,” Cunningham said.
Over the decades, a tour road was built around the site as well as a horse riding trail and walking trails. Signs were placed telling stories about this battle and taking you to the points of interest.
In 2021, a $3.5 million renovation was made to the Visitor’s Center and Museum.
The Arts in the Park Music Series is back on Saturday nights in May at Wilson’s Creek. It’s also planning a large event over Memorial Day weekend. And, the National Parks just launched a Wellness Challenge you can do while at Wilson’s Creek. Just visit the Wilson’s Creek National Battlefield website for more information.
“Listen my children and you shall hear, of the midnight ride of Paul Revere…”
With these words an American poet and ardent abolitionist named Henry Wadsworth Longfellow immortalized Paul Revere and Old North Church in American history and myth. Many of us may remember the poem “Paul Revere’s Ride,” but it doesn’t portray the true events of what took place on that fateful night. Longfellow wrote the poem 80 YEARS after Revere’s famous midnight ride when the country was on the brink of Civil War in 1860. He wanted to inspire people to join the Union army by demonstrating that one person could make a difference AND change history in the process. As we shall see, the only one really changing history was Longfellow himself through his creatively altered story. The real events of what took place on April 18, 1775 are far more interesting.
How God Used Roads to Pave the Way for Jesus
Holiday travel is picking back up in cities across America this year. A recent study reported that 70% of us are planning on taking a road trip as part of our holiday celebration. Roads are important to our travel plans, and they were also important to God as he planned the arrival of Jesus. According to the Apostle Paul, God timed the appearance of Jesus perfectly:
But when the fullness of the time came, God sent His Son, born of a woman, born under the Law, so that He might redeem those who were under the Law, that we might receive the adoption as sons and daughters. (Galatians 4:4-5 NASB)
But what did Paul mean when he wrote that Jesus arrived in the “fullness of time”? As a thirty-five-year-old homicide detective and skeptic, I pondered Paul’s words the first time I read his letter to the Galatians. In fact, I began an investigation of history and examined the “fuse” leading up to the explosive appearance of Jesus. I discovered that God used roads to prepare the way.
Advancing on the Roads
Wheels appeared early in history, perhaps as soon as 5000 BC in ancient Sumer (Mesopotamia). From the same region came the first two-wheeled cart (c. 3000 BC), usually pulled by donkeys called “onagers.” Four-wheeled carts came later in history (around 2500 BC) and were used primarily for farming. By 2000 BC spoke-wheeled chariots emerged in southern Siberia and Central Asia.
These developments certainly aided the ability to move materials and wage war, but their use for “social” transportation was limited to the quality of roads in each region. Most roads were little more than cleared pathways, susceptible to weather and war. Had Jesus been born at this time in history, his message would not have traveled far from the region in which he lived.
But as road technology advanced, so did the opportunity to advance the message of Jesus.
Persians were among the first to build significant roads. Darius the Great refurbished an existing roadway and created the “Royal Road” in 500 BC, connecting regions as far apart as Susa (now the Khuzestan region of Iran) to Sardis (now the Manisa Province in western Turkey). This reduced travel from ninety days on foot to nine days on horseback.
Not Yet the Time
Surprisingly, the powerful Greek Empire contributed little to the advancement of roads, primarily because of Greece’s difficult, mountainous, and rocky terrain, their reliance on sea travel for trade, and their inability to protect travelers with official oversight. Until 400 BC, with some exceptions (like the thoroughfares between major cities and surrounding holy sites), most roads were difficult for wheeled transportation.
Had Jesus arrived at this point in history, his followers would still have faced the limits of transportation within nations in less-than-perfect road conditions. But as before, the Roman Empire provided a solution.
The Roman Solution
As the Roman Empire grew militarily, so did its need for roads. As a result, Roman roads were widespread and usually well paved. Wherever they conquered, the Romans built long, relatively straight roads to make the movement of military equipment easier. This desire to avoid curves necessitated the advanced engineering of bridges, tunnels, and viaducts to traverse mountains and valleys. Roman roads were well built and often populated by the military, making them much safer to travel than their Greek counterparts. Spanning nearly 250,000 miles, these roads became a symbol of Rome’s power, connecting diverse subcultures within the empire.
Construction of probably the most famous of Roman roads, the Appian Way, was started in 312 BC. Called the “Queen of Roads,” it set the standard for the many famous roads Romans would build leading up to the lifetime of Jesus.
The Romans weren’t the only ones contributing to the advance of transportation.
The Roads We Travel
By 130 BC, the Silk Road (also called the Silk Routes) was formally opened for travel by the Han dynasty of China. This ancient network of connected trade routes would be used to facilitate trade between the East and the West for many centuries.
As the Romans built the infrastructure of secondary roads and perfected the engineering of bridges and tunnels by 100 BC, the stage was set for the peacetime expansion of the Roman highway system that occurred as Jesus’s followers began to share his message and ministry.
At this point in history, early in the first century, the Roman Empire had unified and refurbished the road systems of conquered nations, connecting the various systems into a network of roads that spanned the empire from Britain to Syria. This network provided a new opportunity to trade and share ideas, even ideas about Jesus, including his birth, death, and resurrection.
So, this year, as you’re on the road heading toward a Christmas celebration, be sure to celebrate the way God used roads as He delivered Jesus in the “fullness of time” so we might “receive the adoption as sons and daughters.”
Almost forgot.
Happy Assault Weapons Ban Sunset Provision Day, Everyone!
On this day in 2004, the Assault Weapon Ban that had been enacted in 1994 reached its sunset date.
Lest anyone also forget, the NRA had a big hand in getting that 10 year sunset provision added.
Also, this law was one of the major factors in such a massive demoncrap loss in Congress when 8 Senators and 54 Representatives were sent packing.
There are still some institutions that are not given over to indoctrinating our youth with anti-American/anti-Civil Rights claptrap.
The Thirteen-Hundred-And-Eighty-Nine-Year War
During an interview regarding the recent suicide attack on Kabul airport, a former Navy SEAL quipped that no one making military decisions for the United States seems to have read a history book. Lack of knowledge, he implied, is partly why America is suffering a humiliating and unconscionable defeat in Afghanistan.
Here, then, is a short skeletal history of Muslim-Christian relations beginning with Islam’s founding in 622 AD by Muhammad, an Arab military leader intent on unifying the Arab world and conquering the rest. The lessons learned might put us on the right path forward.
Muhammad died in 632 and, soon thereafter, his followers began Muslim military advances into the Christian Levant. In your mind’s eye, if you can picture the Mediterranean Sea on your left, the landmass to its right – Syria, Iraq, Israel, Jordan, Lebanon, Palestine, and part of Turkey—is known as the Levant, which means the place where the sun rises. A great trading center in ancient and medieval times, conquering the Levant was the Muslims’ first great conquest over the Christian Greeks at the Battle of Yarmuk, in 636, only four years after Muhammad’s death. Jerusalem surrendered in 638.
Islam pushed on vigorously after this battle, sweeping over North Africa, uniting Arab countries, and setting its sights on conquering Constantinople, the Greek capital. Today, Constantinople is known as Istanbul and is part of Turkey. In 717, however, at what is known as the Siege of Constantinople, 80,000 Muslim troops and 1,880 galleys laid siege to the city. Possessing the equivalent of napalm, a fire that is very difficult to put out, the Greeks set fire to the galleys and after a year of siege and attack without success, Muslim forces retreated.
This Christian victory is thought to have slowed Muslim conquest of Europe but Islam penetrated Europe by crossing the Gibraltar Strait into Spain. Not content, in 732, Muslim forces moved north into what is now France. At this time France, western Germany, Switzerland, Belgium, and the Netherlands were part of the Frankish Empire, led by Charles Martel, or Charles the Hammer, and his victory over the Muslim attack at the Battle of Tours, in France, is credited with reversing Islam’s spread in Europe. Christianity, not fully established in Western Europe at this time, began to unify Western Civilization around the Roman Catholic Church.
So, here is one of the great moments of history. Were it not for Charles Martel, Europe would have been swept up in the advance of Islam instead of the advance of Christianity. One of the differences is Christianity’s mental openness to science and intellectual inquiry – hence the rise of the great universities of Europe and Europe’s eventual influence on America.
The story does not end here. The struggle continued back and forth for another 1,289 years. Muslim Turks defeated the Christian Greeks at the Battle of Manzikert in 1071. The Greeks had re-conquered the Levant in the 1100s but lost again at the Battle of Hattin in 1187. Back and forth it went. Muslim victories – then Christian victories – finally ending at the Siege of Acre in 1291 when the last of the Crusader influence was dispelled from the Holy Lands and the Hospitallers moved to Cyprus and Rhodes, where they held out until 1523.
Islam had conquered Spain. Islam had conquered the Holy Lands. Islam had conquered the Levant.
Islam laid siege to the Greek capital, Constantinople, which surrendered in 1453. That surrender marks the end of the Roman Empire and a victory for the Muslim Ottomans.
Painstakingly, Western Civilization began to fight back. Spain was re-conquered at the Battle of Navas de Tolosa in 1212.
[if I may interject, this isn’t correct. While the battle was a major turning point, the final battle of the Reconquista was in 1492 .ed]
A fleet of the Holy League, mostly from Spain and Venice, fought the last rowing naval battle at Lepanto, in 1571, routing the Muslims. Finally, in 1683, the Muslim Ottoman Empire and the Habsburg Holy Roman Empire fought it out literally at the gates of Vienna. The Ottoman defeat there meant that Islam ceased to be a menace to the West, especially with the Ottoman Empire’s and caliphate’s final dissolution on March 23, 1924, after World War I.
America was colonized by Christian Europe, specifically Protestant Christian Europe, beginning in 1607 at Jamestown, Virginia, and Plymouth, Massachusetts in 1620. Americans take for granted the intense battle for humanity’s mind that this history represents. The notion of natural individual rights through a Creator; the notion of the development of the person (male or female); the notion of personal Liberty; the notion of people as a reflection of the divine—the undergirding of our way of life is the result of being on the Western side of this war.
We are now at the Battle of Afghanistan, 2021. Because our military and political leaders have not read a history book, they deem it a 20-year war, but they are wrong. It is a thirteen-hundred-and-eighty-nine-year war that we will lose because we do not know we are in it.
The Navy SEAL was right. Our political and military leaders make decisions without a clue. We had a stable and neutralized position in Afghanistan, with very few troops, that served as a check on Islamic Jihad and the rise of an Islamic caliphate and harsh Sharia Law.
We do not need to be there to nation-build—something that anyone who knows history knows cannot be successful. We are there because Islam decided to attack the West once again in 2001. We are there to save Western Civilization. We cannot allow a humiliating defeat.
Name of biblical judge found inscribed on 3,100-year-old jug found in Israel
Archaeologists have uncovered a small jug with a rare five-letter inscription, linking the 3,100-year-old ceramic artifact to a biblical judge mentioned in the Book of Judges.
The jug and ancient inscription — the first to feature the name ‘Jerubbaal’ — were found at a dig site in the Shahariya Forest, among Israel’s Judean Foothills, archeologists reported the discovery Monday in the Jerusalem Journal of Archaeology.
“The name of the Judge Gideon ben Yoash was Jerubbaal, but we cannot tell whether he owned the vessel on which the inscription is written in ink,” archaeologists said in a press release.
The inscribed jug, bearing the name Jerubbaal, was recovered from a subsurface storage pit lined with stones. Researchers suspect the small jug likely held a precious liquid, such as oil, perfume or medicine.
Though the jug features only five inscribed letters, close analysis suggests the original inscription was longer.
In the Book of Judges, Jerubbaal is first mentioned as a leading opponent of idolatry.
He’s also credited with leading a successful battle against the Midianites.
“According to the Bible, Gideon organized a small army of 300 soldiers and attacked the Midianites by night near Ma’ayan Harod,” said Yossef Garfinkel and Sa’ar Ganor, lead archaeologists on the project and professors at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem.
“In view of the geographical distance between the Shephelah and the Jezreel Valley, this inscription may refer to another Jerubbaal and not the Gideon of biblical tradition, although the possibility cannot be ruled out that the jug belonged to the judge Gideon,” Garfinkel and Ganor said.
“In any event, the name Jerubbaal was evidently in common usage at the time of the biblical Judges,” they said.
Because the jug and its inscription date to roughly 1,100 B.C., the time of biblical judges, archaeologists suggest the discovery offers proof of the historical accuracy of the Bible.
“As we know, there is considerable debate as to whether biblical tradition reflects reality and whether it is faithful to historical memories from the days of the Judges and the days of David,” according to Garfinkel and Ganor.
“The name Jerubbaal only appears in the Bible in the period of the Judges, yet now it has also been discovered in an archaeological context, in a stratum dating from this period,” Garfinkel and Ganor said.
“In a similar manner, the name Ishbaal, which is only mentioned in the Bible during the monarchy of King David, has been found in strata dated to that period at the site of Khirbat Qeiyafa,” the archaeologists said.
Identical names being mentioned in the Bible, which have been found in other previously recovered inscriptions, they said, ” shows that memories were preserved and passed down through the generations.”
Yes, Gun Control Did Help Facilitate The Holocaust
The Holocaust is one of the most horrible events in human history. It became the benchmark by which we compare atrocities, and for good reason. Millions of Jews slaughtered. Millions more put through some of the worst abuses a person can visit upon another. It was awful in so many ways.
However, we on the gun right side have pointed out over and over again that if the Jews had been able to have guns, the Holocaust may never have happened.
Unsurprisingly, some people disagree.
But the freshman congresswoman is hardly the only figure in the nation to have manipulated the Holocaust. The National Rifle Association, or at least its modern leaders led by its now embattled CEO, Wayne LaPierre, have long searched for “proof” that gun control is nothing more than a slippery slope to genocide. And in recent years, the NRA has manipulated the Holocaust to claim they finally found it, funding research that has allegedly discovered a new link between gun control and the Holocaust that generations of scholars have yet to find.
In 2013, the Anti-Defamation League said “Nazi Analogies Have No Place In Gun Control Debate” after a half dozen commentators including Sean Hannity and Judge Andrew Napolitano of Fox News out of the blue all raised the matter of gun control and the Holocaust.
“If the Jews in the Warsaw ghetto had had the firepower and the ammunition that the Nazis did, some of Poland might have stayed free and more persons would have survived the Holocaust,” claimed Napolitano.
It’s as if they were all laying the groundwork for the book, “Gun Control in The Third Reich: Disarming the Jews and ‘Enemies of the State,’” published later that year by the Independent Institute, a small think-tank in Oakland. Research for this book was partly funded by the NRA. Its author, Stephen P. Halbrook, is the nation’s best-known pro-gun lawyer. Several years before, during the watershed gun rights case Heller vs. District of Columbia that established that the Second Amendment protects an individual right to keep arms, Halbrook filed a successful amicus brief on behalf of 250 members of the House of Representatives, 55 senators, and the president of the Senate, then-Vice President Dick Cheney.
Halbrook’s thesis about gun control and the Holocaust is novel at best. Most Holocaust scholars, like Alan E. Steinweis, director of holocaust studies at the University of Vermont, say that the idea that gun control was a factor in the Holocaust is “simply a nonissue.” But Halbrook claims that prior gun control laws during the Weimer Republic, or Germany’s democratic years before Hitler took power, were used to seize firearms from Jews, enough to have helped enable the Holocaust.
Never mind the weak evidence, the NRA’s house organ crowed about the book’s supposed breakthrough.
The problem with this line of “reasoning” is that they’re demanding pro-gun voices provide proof for something that wasn’t allowed to happen.
Did the Weimar Republic ban guns? Yes.
Were the Jews in Nazi Germany armed? No.
As such, were they able to offer armed resistance when herded into concentration camps? Also, no.
No one is saying that the Weimar Republic actively sought to empower those that followed them to commit genocide against the Jewish people. No one is claiming that things proceeded along a set plan all built around the idea of exterminating not just the Jews but also homosexuals and gypsies.
To make that claim, you’d need a great deal of evidence and that evidence likely doesn’t exist.
However, there’s ample reason to suggest that the Nazis could capitalize on the existing laws and take advantage of a disarmed population. In fact, no one disputes the fact they were disarmed and while some claim the Holocaust didn’t happen, I don’t really care about their opinions on much of anything.
Now, let’s also be clear that we can’t be certain that an armed population would have prevented the Holocaust. Even in the modern United States where guns outnumber people, a lot of folks are unarmed by choice. That would likely have been true right up until the Nazis decided to put the Jews in concentration camps. How many would have been able to fight back?
Frankly, we’ll never know.
While it’s a year old, it’s still a good article.
May Day Is a Communist Holiday
One suspects that Nobel Prize–winning economist Paul Krugman doesn’t see any irony in launching his new capitalistic subscription-based website with a tweet noting the celebration of May Day, a nefarious and un-American tradition.
In 1901, May Day (the one for “workers,” not the Catholic one) became a mandate by the Second International Socialist Congress that proletariat groups “energetically” celebrate the advent of the eight-hour work day.” Leon Trotsky was one of May Day’s greatest champions. In his 35th anniversary speech for the holiday, this contemptible despot, whose only problem with Stalin’s genocide of the Ukrainian populace was that it wasn’t sufficiently “militarized,” stressed that it was a holiday to commend “red militarism.”
Indeed, May Day was inspired by the 1886 Haymarket incident in Chicago, in which an anarchist and terrorist threw dynamite at policemen (the police had killed a protester the day before), sparking a riot. By the end of the day, seven police and four more protesters had been killed.
It was an ugly incident. But while American workers would one day benefit from capitalism in ways that would have been unimaginable to the 19th-century Chicago striker, the ideological progeny of the May Day organizers would go on to kill tens of millions of people and ask millions more to work a lot more than eight hours a day in the Siberian Gulag.
Washington’s Farewell Address to the People of the United States
First published on September 19th, 1796, in the Philadelphia Daily American Advertiser Continue reading “”
The Long, Hot Summer of 1967: A Forgotten Season of Riots and Urban Unrest Across America
The Book of Ecclesiastes says that there is nothing new under the sun. And while many have spoken of the “unprecedented” nature of the rioting in the early summer of 2020, it is actually quite precedented.
The Long, Hot Summer of 1967 was the peak of urban unrest and rioting in the United States in the lead up to the 1968 election. While there are certainly a number of key differences, there are also a number of striking parallels that make the topic worthy of discussion and examination.
The long-term impact of the urban unrest of the summer of 2020 is unclear, but the long-term impact of the Long, Hot Summer of 1967 and related urban rioting was a victory for Richard Nixon in 1968, and a landslide re-election in 1972. One must resist the temptation to make mechanistic comparisons between the two, and we will refrain from doing so here. But the reader is encouraged to look for connections between these events and more recent ones. Continue reading “”
SpaceX spacecraft docks with International Space Station on historic NASA mission
SpaceX’s Dragon Endeavour spacecraft crewed by NASA astronauts Doug Hurley and Bob Behnken has docked with the International Space Station on its historic Demo-2 mission.
The spacecraft launched atop a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket from Kennedy Space Center Saturday. The mission is the first time that astronauts have launched from American soil since the final Space Shuttle flight in 2011.
The mission is also the first time a private company, rather than a national government, has sent astronauts into orbit………..
On Saturday evening Hurley announced that the spacecraft, previously known as capsule 206, has been renamed Endeavour, continuing the tradition of astronauts naming their capsules.
“We would like to welcome you aboard capsule Endeavour,” he said. “We chose Endeavour for a few reasons – one, because of the incredible Endeavour NASA, SpaceX and the United States has been on since the end of the shuttle program in 2011. The other reason we named it Endeavour is little more personal – Bob and I, we both had our first flight on Shuttle Endeavour and it just meant to much to us to carry on that name.”
6 May
1937
Today, February 27, 1917, Congress Heights District of Columbia
John Moses Browning, with executives of Colt’s Patent Firearms, demonstrated his working model of the ‘Automatic Rifle‘ to U.S. government leaders and high ranking military officers.
And off we went to the races.
The production version, the Model 1918 was manufactured in sufficient quantity to outfit the U.S. army’s 79th Division for World War 1 combat use in September of that year.
February 26, 1993.
The First Attack on the World Trade Center.
This is the often forgotten first, and nearly successful, truck bombing of 1 WTC North Tower (Which incidentally was the tower that our friend Lt. Peter Martin of NYFD’s Rescue 2 died in). None of the U.S. government’s indictments against former al-Qaeda leader Osama bin Laden suggested that he had any connection with this bombing, but his organization used the lessons learned from this failure to seek out knowledge provided by structural engineers to figure out that crashing nearly fully fueled commercial jet airliners into each tower would work.
At 12:18 p.m., a terrorist bomb explodes in a parking garage of the World Trade Center in New York City, leaving a crater 60 feet wide and causing the collapse of several steel-reinforced concrete floors in the vicinity of the blast.
Although the terrorist bomb failed to critically damage the main structure of the skyscrapers, six people were killed and more than 1,000 were injured. The World Trade Center itself suffered more than $500 million in damage. After the attack, authorities evacuated 50,000 people from the buildings, hundreds of whom were suffering from smoke inhalation. The evacuation lasted the whole afternoon.
City authorities and the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) undertook a massive manhunt for suspects, and within days several radical Islamic fundamentalists were arrested. In March 1994, Mohammed Salameh, Ahmad Ajaj, Nidal Ayyad, and Mahmoud Abouhalima were convicted by a federal jury for their role in the bombing, and each was sentenced to life in prison. Salameh, a Palestinian, was arrested when he went to retrieve the $400 deposit he had left for the Ryder rental van used in the attack. Ajaj and Ayyad, who both played a role in the construction of the bomb, were arrested soon after. Abouhalima, who helped buy and mix the explosives, fled to Saudi Arabia but was caught in Egypt two weeks later.
The mastermind of the attack–Ramzi Ahmed Yousef–remained at large until February 1995, when he was arrested in Pakistan. He had previously been in the Philippines, and in a computer he left there were found terrorist plans that included a plot to kill Pope John Paul II and a plan to bomb 15 American airliners in 48 hours. On the flight back to the United States, Yousef reportedly admitted to a Secret Service agent that he had directed the Trade Center attack from the beginning and even claimed to have set the fuse that exploded the 1,200-pound bomb. His only regret, the agent quoted Yousef saying, was that the 110-story tower did not collapse into its twin as planned–a catastrophe that would have caused thousands of deaths.