Interesting Facts and Stories

I remember watching a documentary on it somewhere, but can't recall where.

Utterly amazing.

Steve
 
Fanny Schoonheyt, born in Rotterdam in 1912, was the only woman among the contingent of dutch volunteers to take up arms in defense of the Spanish Republic. There were other dutch women in Spain during the Civil War, but they generally worked as nurses.

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Fanny was already in Barcelona at the outbreak of the war and participated in those July days of 1936 in the defense against the military coup.
Fanny immediately joined the antifascist milicias and as early as July/August ‘36 left for the Aragón front, where she stayed till November when she was wounded. Fanny Schoonheyt died in 1961, age 49.
 
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During the Dunkirk evacuation on 1940, the smallest boat to take part was the Tamzine.
Tamzine is a light yet strong 15 foot long, clinker-built, wooden fishing and sailing boat built at Margate, Kent in 1937. Now in the Imperial War Museum.
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On the 2nd December 1804, Napoleon Bonaparte crowned himself Emperor of the French at Notre Dame Cathedral in Paris. His coronation was attended by Pope Pius VII, but significantly he did not place the crown on the new Emperor’s head.
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The USS Narkeeta (Harbor Tug No.3), a two-masted steel tug, who served the Navy, here with an experimental "brickwork" camouflage scheme in 1917.
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Black stripes on the white background produced a soft gray effect at moderate distances. Larger black patches were applied to those areas which usually reflected light. Visibility of the ship was reduced when the light was behind the observer.
 
In 1943, during the war, the security measures in all US military installations and ports were very strict.
For example, the authorities of the Port Authority of Baltimore, Maryland, issued an official identification card for Herman The Cat: The best mouse hunter of the US Coast Guard.
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Although Argentina was the first country on the continent of South America to establish a paratrooper force, Peru was the first to see action in the 1941 Ecuador-Peru conflict.
During the Ecuadorian–Peruvian War, the Peruvian army had established a paratrooper unit and used it to great effect by seizing the Ecuadorian port city of Puerto Bolívar, on July 27, 1941.
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Detail: paratroopers over Puerto Bolivar.
 
The USS Oklahoma was struck by several torpedoes during the attack on Dec. 7, 1941 by the Japanese. The ship rolled in its berth and 429 sailors were killed. Two years later, the ship was righted and human remains recovered, although only 35 could be identified.

The remaining 388 unknown casualties were buried in mass graves at the National Memorial Cemetery of the Pacific in Hawaii. Efforts began in 2015 to recover the remains and identify them using DNA analysis.

Six sets of brothers died on the USS Oklahoma, including one set of identical twins: Leo and Rudolph Blitz (both 20).

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One by one, the sailors and Marines of the ill-fated battleship USS Oklahoma are coming home.
 
To the dismay of post-WWII Iceland, currents often carried floating mines to Iceland’s rocky coast, where “tails” of rusted-through chains snagged rocks, causing the mine to pop up and regain tension, rearming itself. Even dead WWII mines with their contact horns gone present a danger in Iceland, as deep currents rolled sunken mines ashore over many decades, with the small bursting charge inside undamaged by sea pressure.

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Above is a British Mk.XVII mine being inspected by an EOD specialist of the Icelandic coast guard in 2016.
 
73 years ago, on Oct 14, 1944, german Field Marshal E. Rommel, suspected of complicity in the July 20th plot against Hitler, is visited at home by two of Hitler's staff and given the choice of public trial or suicide by poison. He chooses suicide and it is announced that he died of wounds.
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The aircraftcarrier USS Forrestal (CV-59) was also informally known in the fleet as the "USS Zippo" and "Forest Fire" or "Firestal" because of a number of highly publicized fires on board, most notably a 1967 incident in which 134 sailors died and an additional 161 were injured.

On the morning of July 29, at around 10:50 that morning, an unguided Zuni rocket accidently fired. It exploded into a few fully armed planes, creating a massive fire. The fire was fueled by a ruptured 400-gallon fuel tank and exploding bombs.

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Was decommissioned in 1993.
 
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