Today In History

Unexpected life on moon...

I know, I know, I know, this is 11 days too late already, but it is nevertheless way too important and interesting to wait 354 additional days:

"On 10 July 1943, the American Fifth Army, commanded by General George Patton, landed on the Italian island of Sicily. Pattons forces were joined by the British Eighth Army, led by General Sir Bernard Montgomery. It was the first major attack launched against Hitlers Fortress Europe; an attempt to strike at the soft underbelly of European Nazi hegemony. Over the next thirty-eight days, half a million Allied soldiers, sailors and airmen participated in a bloody battle of attrition against German and Italian troops.

Operation Husky was one of the largest combined operations of the Second World War. Allied forces were immediately disadvantaged by the battles location; their Italian enemies would be fighting on familiar territory. The weather also provided an unforeseen and dangerous adversary. In a disastrous start to the operation, forty mile an hour gales turned the airborne phase of the attack into chaos; American and British paratroopers were scattered arbitrarily over the islands hazardous terrain.

Despite these adverse conditions, the Allies achieved considerable early success on the battlefields of Sicily. As their advance gathered momentum, they secured an Axis withdrawal from the strategically important port of Messina. As Axis forces hurriedly evacuated more than 100,000 troops, the Allied had won undisputed control of the island.

Sicily could now serve as the base for an attack on the rest of southern Europe. The vast operation also provided vital fighting experience for the Allied soldiers who would take part in the June 1944 invasion of France. Eleven months later, the men who gained their stripes amid the tumultuous tides of the Mediterranean would be engaged in ferocious combat on the savage shores of Normandy.

Aerial reconnaissance photographs of the battle have been layered over a three dimensional map to create a CGI model of the island. For over sixty years these photographs have been hidden. For the first time these original high-resolution images allow us to track the battle from the air. Cutting edge technology, archive film, vivid re-enactments and extraordinary interviews provide a unique insight into one of the most dramatic campaigns of the Second World War."
quoted from the description of "The Lost Evidence: Sicily (1/5)",

This completely underestimated operation (codename: Husky) took place almost one year ago, before the famous invasion in Normandy started (D-Day: June 6, 1944)

Another impressive work, Morty. Thanks m8

2346 years ago, the military genius of Alexandre made speak about him by crushing the Persians of Darius at the battle of Issos. According to the encyclopaedic sources which I have (Wikipedia and Encyclopedia Universalis), the rout of the Greek mercenaries in Darius's pay would have pulled the scattering of the Persian army leaded by Darius himself. We can understand that mercenaries, who fight for some cash and for nothing else, can prefer to save their skin but nevertheless, at the beginning of this fight Darius got 70 000 infantrymen among whom the famous 10 000 Immortal, and 50 000 riders besides his 30 000 mercenaries.

In front of what is considered in the time as the most powerful army of the world, Alexandre has 30 000 infantrymen and 6 000 riders, so a ratio of 1 against 4. But it is Alexandre … A a result, Darius loses the fight and runs away by abandoning, besides his royal badges, his mother his wife and his children who will be made prisoners … The losses will be 30 000 men for the Persians against only 450 in the army of Alexandre...




Armies at the beginning


The decisive attack



In France, we have an expression to qualify this kind of rout and the flight which follows: "One hand in front, one hand behind"...

Laïka (from a Russian word meaning "Little barker") was a dog of the Soviet spatial program and the first living being sent into orbit around the Earth. She was launched by the USSR aboard the space vehicle Sputnik 2 on November 3rd, 1957, one month after the launch of the first artificial satellite Sputnik 1. After the success of Sputnik 1, the Soviet leader Nikita Khrouchtchev ordered the launch of a second machine for November 7th in order to celebrate the 40th anniversary of the Russian Revolution. As an emergency, without preliminary study, Sputnik 2 is built in four weeks.

Laïka died approximately 7 hours after the launch, due to the stress and the overheating, probably owed to a failure of the temperature regulation system. The space capsule burned on April 14th, 1958 by coming back into the Earth atmosphere.

In spite of the death of Laïka, the experiment proved that a living being could survive a putting into orbit around the Earth and be affected by the weightlessness, Laïka having died only after this stage.

The dog Laïka appears on the bas-relief of the Space Conquerors Monument in Moscow and a statue, situated near the complex of military research where Laïka was trained , was inaugurated to her memory in Moscow in 2008. Laïka is a theme often represented on the stamps of numerous countries in particular countries of the former Soviet block.



Thank you, Little barker. Rest in peace among the stars.

The Nazi holocaust began a night of broken glass 75 years ago today
Seventy-five years after the "Night of Broken Glass", the beginning of the Nazi persecution of the Jews, five thousand golden cobblestones in Berlin and forty thousand more scattered in hundreds of European cities recall, in the place where they lived, to the victims of terror unleashed by Adolf Hitler. Today, the anniversary of the anti-Semitic pogroms of the night of November 9, 1938, tens of Berliners will symbolically clean these tiles of 10x10 centimeters and square base.