America in Space
https://youtu.be/XcCfcKhXv4w Image credit: NASA In July 1950 the first rocket was launched from Cape Canaveral, Florida. The General Electric Bumper 2 was a two-stage rocket made of a V-2 missile base topped with a WAC Corporal rocket, capable of reaching...
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Bombing North Korea
https://youtu.be/TGY7_WAvkj0 From 1950-53 the United States Air Force (USAF) carried out an extensive bombing campaign against North Korea. It is estimated that conventional bombs, incendiaries and napalm destroyed ~85 percent of the buildings in major...
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MASH
The Mobile Army Surgical Hospital (MASH) was a fully functional hospital unit maintained by the U.S. Army Medical Corps in a combat zone. MASH units, established in August 1945, were deployed during the Korean War and later...
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Early Korean Air War
At the outbreak of the Korean War, the United States Air Force (USAF) had >1000 aircraft in the Pacific region. Immediately mustered against the North Korean invasion were F-80 Shooting Stars, F-82 Twin Mustangs, B-26 Invaders and B-29...
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McMinnville UFO
McMinnvile Oregon UFO - Wikipedia In May 1950 photographs of UFOs taken on a farm near McMinnville, Oregon were published in Life magazine and nationwide newspapers. Although some skeptics believe UFOs are a hoax, many ufologists argue that the photos are...
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U.S. Navy Plane Shot Down
Consolidated Vultee PB4Y-2 Privateer In April 1950, Soviet fighters shot down a US Navy PB4Y-2 Privateer patrol bomber over the Baltic Sea. At the time, Privateers were used by the US Navy for signals intelligence flights off of the coast of the Soviet Union and the...
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B-36 Crash~British Columbia
https://youtu.be/uLnagDIlfZQ In February 1950 a US Air Force B-36 crashed near the coast of northern British Columbia during a simulated nuclear attack on San Francisco. A Mark 4 nuclear bomb, which lacked the plutonium core needed for a nuclear blast, was...
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Nonstop Around-the-World
https://youtu.be/OXf1fSiOYPs Flying out of Fort Worth, Texas, a United States Air Force Boeing B-50 Superfortress named Lucky Lady II made the first non-stop around-the-world flight in February 1949. With in-flight refueling, the 94-hour trip covered 23,452 miles...
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Pearl Harbor
On the morning of December 7, 1941, the surprise military strike by the Imperial Japanese Navy Air Service against the U.S. naval base at Pearl Harbor, Hawaii catapulted a reluctant America into the Second World War. There are not many...
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Spruce Goose
The largest wooden airplane ever constructed, the Spruce Goose was actually made from birch. In the face of staggering losses to German U-boats in 1942, the steel magnate and shipbuilder Henry Kaiser asked Howard Hughes to design and build a massive flying transport....
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Breaking the Sound Barrier
In October 1947, 24 year-old Air Force test pilot Charles E. "Chuck" Yeager flew an experimental Bell X-XS-1 rocket-propelled aircraft out of Edwards Air Force Base (then called Muroc Army Air Field) in California to break the sound barrier at a speed of...
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UFO
In July 1947, an unidentified disc-shaped object, apparently crashed from the air, was found near Roswell, New Mexico. Although there was initial widespread interest in the possibility it was an extra-terrestrial craft, the US military claimed it was merely a...
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Wolves at the Doorstep 1942
Somewhere between the attack on Pearl Harbor, the Bataan death march and the fierce fighting on Guadalcanal, many of us seem to have forgotten one of the most important American theaters in early WWII - The Battle of the Western Atlantic. In 1942, German...
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Blue Angels
The Chief of Naval Operations, Admiral Chester W. Nimitz, ordered the establishment of the Blue Angels flight demonstration team in 1946. The Blue Angels team flew the Grumman F6F Hellcat in 1946, the more powerful Grumman F8F Bearcat (1946 to 1949), the Grumman F9F...
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Japanese Attack on Pearl Harbor
Press this link for more photos published by Alex Q. Arbuckle that are rare and interesting from the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor December 7. 1941.
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Burmese Harp / Grave of the Fireflies
Adapted from the novel by Michio Takeyama, this 1956 film directed by Ichikawa Kon, involves a company of Japanese Imperial Army troops who finally surrender in the last desperate stages of the Burma campaign. When their company commander begins to lead them in songs...
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Nagasaki
President Harry Truman approved but did not specify the dates for use of atomic bombs.The Target Committee identified the targets and determined the best opportunities for attack based on logistics and weather. After the bombing of Hiroshima produced no Japanese...
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Hiroshima
In April-July 1945 Japanese forces inflicted Allied casualties totaling nearly half those suffered in three full years of war in the Pacific. In late July, Japan’s militarist government rejected the Potsdam Declaration demanding unconditional surrender or...
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B-25 Strikes Empire State
A U.S. Army Air Force B-25 Mitchell bomber crashed into the Empire State Building on Saturday July 28, 1945. Fourteen people were killed. Flying from New Bedford, Massachusetts, to LaGuardia Airport in New York City, with two pilots and a passenger aboard, the B-25...
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Dunkirk
After seeing the new movie DUNKIRK directed by Christopher Nolan last night, I wanted to recommend it to you readers. Like the top film critics, I found this film technically flawless and emotionally extremely powerful. The film's soundtrack by Hans Zimmer kept...
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Kamikaze
With the inevitable loss of the war apparent, Imperial Japan dispatched young kamikaze (神風 = divine wind) pilots of the 205th Air Group on suicidal missions against the American ships in the Pacific, especially at Okinawa. Although damage to the American fleet at...
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Yamato Sunk
In April 1945, the Japanese battleship Yamato, the pride of the Imperial Japanese Navy and heaviest battleship in the world, was dispatched from Japan with nine other warships on a suicide mission against Allied forces attacking Okinawa. Before reaching Okinawa, the...
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B-29s Blast Japan
First deployed in 1944, the B-29 was a new generation bomber that carried more bombs, and flew higher, faster and farther than any other WWII bomber. It also introduced remote controlled turrets for defense and pressurized crew compartments that allowed them to forgo...
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Firebombing Tokyo
On March 9, 1945, with the code name “Operation Meetinghouse,” 334 B-29 bombers under the command of Colonel Curtis LeMay, took off from USAAF bases in the Mariana Islands. Shortly after midnight on March 10, the B-29s flew over densely-populated areas of Tokyo at the...
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Dresden Firebombed
From February 13-15 1945, British RAF and American USAAF heavy bombers dropped more than 3,900 tons of high-explosive detonation bombs and incendiary devices on the city of Dresden. The bombing and resulting firestorm destroyed most of the city center and...
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