Today in history, Dec 2nd!

Some of the great historical events that happened today in history, on December 2nd!

Today in history facts are from various sites including, but not limited too: the History Channel, The New York Times, WHG Historynet.com, HistoryOrb.com, and On This Day blogs from my blogroll.

http://hankeringforhistory.com/2012/12/02/today-in-history-dec-2nd/

1804	Napoleon Bonaparte crowns himself Emperor of France in Notre Dame Cathedral.
1823	President James Monroe proclaims the principles known as the Monroe Doctrine, “that the American continents, by the free and independent condition which they have assumed and maintained, are henceforth not to be considered as subjects for future colonization by European powers.”
1863	General Braxton Bragg turns over command of the Army of Tennessee to General William Hardee at Dalton, Ga.
1864	Major General Grenville M. Dodge is named to replace General William Rosecrans as Commander of the Department of Missouri.
1867	People wait in mile-long lines to hear Charles Dickens give his first reading in New York City.
1907	Spain and France agree to enforce Moroccan measures adopted in 1906.
1909	J.P. Morgan acquires majority holdings in Equitable Life Co. This is the largest concentration of bank power to date.
1914	Austrian troops occupy Belgrade, Serbia.
1918	Armenia proclaims independence from Turkey.
1921	The first successful helium dirigible, C-7, makes a test flight in Portsmouth, Va.
1927	The new Ford Model A is introduced to the American public.
1932	Bolivia accepts Paraguay’s terms for a truce in the Chaco War.
1942	The Allies repel a strong Axis attack in Tunisia, North Africa.
1944	General George S. Patton’s troops enter the Saar Valley and break through the Siegfried line.
1946	The United States and Great Britain merge their German occupation zones.
1954	The Senate voted to condemn Sen. Joseph R. McCarthy, R Wis., for “conduct that tends to bring the Senate into dishonor and disrepute.”
1961	Cuban leader Fidel Castro declared himself a Marxist-Leninist who would lead Cuba to Communism.
1964	Brazil sends Juan Peron back to Spain, foiling his efforts to return to his native land.
1969	The Boeing 747 jumbo jet debuted.
1970	The U.S. Senate votes to give 48,000 acres of New Mexico back to the Taos Indians.
1980	Four American churchwomen were raped, murdered and buried in El Salvador. (Five national guardsmen were later convicted of murder.)
1982	Doctors at the University of Utah Medical Center performed the first implant of a permanent artificial heart in a human. Barney Clark lived 112 days with the device.
1990	Chancellor Helmut Kohl’s center-right coalition easily won the first free all-German elections since 1932.
1990	Composer Aaron Copland died at age 90.
1993	Colombian drug lord Pablo Escobar was shot to death by security forces in Medellin.
2001	Enron filed for Chapter 11 protection in one of the largest corporate bankruptcies in U.S. history.
2010	The House voted to censure Rep. Charles Rangel, D-N.Y., for financial and fundraising misconduct.

Today in history, Nov 12th!

Some of the great historical events that happened today in history, on November 12th!

1859	The first flying-trapeze circus act is performed by Jules Leotard at the Circus Napoleon.
1863	Confederate General James Longstreet arrives at Loudon, Tennessee, to assist the attack on Union General Ambrose Burnside’s troops at Knoxville.
1867	Mount Vesuvius erupts.
1903	The Lebaudy brothers of France set an air-travel distance record of 34 miles in a dirigible.
1920	Judge Kenesaw Mountain Landis was elected baseball’s first commissioner.
1923	Adolf Hitler is arrested for his attempted German coup.
1927	Canada is admitted to the League of Nations.
1928	The ocean liner Vestris sinks off the Virginia cape with 328 aboard, killing 111.
1938	Mexico agrees to compensate the United States for land seizures.
1941	Madame Lillian Evanti and Mary Cardwell Dawson establish the National Negro Opera Company.
1942	The World War II naval Battle of Guadalcanal began.
1944	U.S. fighters wipe out a Japanese convoy near Leyte, consisting of six destroyers, four transports and 8,000 troops.
1944	The German battleship Tirpitz is sunk in a Norwegian fjord.
1948	Former Japanese premier Hideki Tojo and several other World War II Japanese leaders were sentenced to death by a war crimes tribunal.
1951	The U.S. Eighth Army in Korea is ordered to cease offensive operations and begin an active defense.
1954	Ellis Island closed after processing more than 20 million immigrants since opening in New York Harbor in 1892.
1960	The satellite Discoverer XVII is launched into orbit from California’s Vandenberg AFB.
1968	The U.S. Supreme Court voids an Arkansas law banning the teaching of evolution in public schools.
1971	President Richard Nixon announces the withdrawal of about 45,000 U.S. troops from Vietnam by February.
1982	Yuri V. Andropov was elected to succeed the late Leonid I. Brezhnev as general secretary of the Soviet Communist Party’s Central Committee.
1985	Xavier Suarez was elected Miami’s first Cuban-American mayor.
1987	Boris Yeltsin is fired as head of Moscow’s Communist Party for criticizing the slow pace of reform.
1990	Japanese Emperor Akihito formally assumed the Chrysanthemum Throne.
1997	Ramzi Yousef was found guilty of masterminding the 1993 bombing of the World Trade Center.
1999	President Bill Clinton signed a sweeping measure knocking down Depression-era barriers and allowing banks, investment firms and insurance companies to sell each other’s products.
2001	An American Airlines flight crashed near New York’s Kennedy airport, killing 265 people.
2004	A jury convicted Scott Peterson of murdering his pregnant wife, Laci, and dumping her body in San Francisco Bay. (Peterson was later sentenced to death.)
2009	Army psychiatrist Maj. Nidal Malik Hasan was charged with 13 counts of premeditated murder in the Fort Hood, Texas, massacre.
2011	The Arab League voted to suspend Syria over the country’s bloody crackdown on protesters.

Today’s historical facts are from various sites including, but not limited too: the History Channel, The New York Times, WHG Historynet.com, HistoryOrb.com, and On This Day blogs from my blogroll.

http://hankeringforhistory.com/2012/11/12/today-in-history-nov-12th/

Weird Weapons of WW II

There are certainly several weird weapons of WW II, but I think the following video shows some of my favorites. I ran across a video the other day entitled ‘British Secret Wartime Follies.’ The caption underneath the video described the video as: “British science made some dreadful bloopers when they were give free reign to design during WWII.”

There were definitely some interesting inventions…

I have to say, the invention at 2:37, the Hajile (which used retro rockets to land supplies), looks like a primitive version of the process used with the most recent Mars landing. So maybe it wasn’t as crazy as everyone thought.

This led me to searching for other poorly designed, experimental weapons, and I ran across several weapons involving animals. Personally, I thought it was odd that the fate of the world, and the defeat of Axis, relied on animals…but what do I know?

The first one I ran across was when America wanted to attached bombs to bats and let them loose in Japan. The plan was to have the bats hide in crevices of building during the day, normal bat behavior, then BOOM! This apparently was very successful in the testing stages, but was quickly made obsolete by the atomic bomb.

You think that sacrificing bats was cruel? How about dogs?

Yep, puppies were also served up as weapons during WW II. The Soviet Union kept dogs on the brink of starvation and trained them to know that food could always be found under vehicles. By training them this way, when the dogs were released–in front of a group of advancing German tanks–the dogs would immediately look for food under the German tanks, then BOOM! The poor doggy would be sacrificed to stop a tank.

Well, that is what they thought would happen.

Unfortunately for the Soviet Union, this was not usually the case. For the most part, the dogs were scared of the tanks and usually retreated, running straight back to the Soviet lines–bombs still attached.

The last animal WW II weapon I bring before you today is the Pigeon Guided Missile. This isn’t as simple as the other two. They other two relied on basic animal instinct and training. The Pigeon Guided Missile relied on advanced technology and genius birds. Placing a pigeon inside of a missile, the pigeon would peck on levers to steer towards a certain target. The pigeon would be trained to look for certain targets and used the levers to keep the desired image focused in the cross-hair. The National Defense Research Committee was surprisingly pleased with the outcome, but ventured for superior electronics guidance systems and scrapped the Pigeon guided missiles.

http://hankeringforhistory.com/2012/11/02/weird-weapons-of-ww-ii/