Dragnet – Danger Ahead
Dun Da dun dun ~ Walter Schumann's ominous, four-note introduction to the TV show Dragnet was recognized by most Americans in the 1950s to signify "danger ahead." Dragnet was an American television series, based on the radio series of the same name, both created...
Did The U.S. Deploy Bioweapons During the Korean War?
https://youtu.be/Y4ALYK8c5Yg A 1950s report published in Peking by an international commission concluded that the U.S. used bioweapons on North Korea. The report raised doubts about claims that captured Americans were brainwashed into confessing the use of such...
Kefauver Senate Crime Investigation
https://youtu.be/WnnWin0Zq7Q In 1951 the United States Senate Special Committee to Investigate Crime in Interstate Commerce (Chairman -Senator Estes Kefauver) investigated inter-state organized crime. "The Kefauver Committee hearings in the winter of 1951...
Sinchon Massacre
https://youtu.be/znRecjPqO74 This rather, robotic-voiced discussion seems a reasonable review of the facts surrounding this dark page in Korean War history. In October 1950, North Korea (DPRK) claims that, during the retreat of the DPRK's Korean Peoples Army from...
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...
Korean War Atrocities
The Korean War was a brutal affair on all sides. Declassified U.S. National Archive military documents show that U.S. commanders repeatedly ordered their forces to kill Korean refugees on the battlefieldCivilians believed to be enemy collaborators and/or inadequately...
Hill 303 massacre
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FBI Ten Most Wanted List
https://youtu.be/nWgn0lb9q3A In March 1950 the FBI officially released a list of Ten Most Wanted Fugitives designed to increase law enforcement's ability to capture dangerous fugitives. If fugitives were captured, died, had charges dropped or were no longer considered...
The Great Brinks Robbery
The great Brinks robbery In January 1950 eleven men pulled off the greatest robbery up to that time at the Brinks Armed Car depot in Boston Massachusetts. Vanishing after stealing $2.7 million, the masked men left few clues (a chauffeur’s cap and adhesive tape and...
The Tragedy of Billie Holiday
https://youtu.be/tZJoVPFoYPM In January 1949 Police broke into a room in the Mark Twain Hotel in San Francisco and arrested Billie Holiday and her manager John Levy on charges of possession of opium. Her defense attorney Jake Erlich, fingered Levy as an informer and...
Tojo Sentenced to Death
https://youtu.be/2HgdXDkmV60 Hideki Tojo, a general of the Imperial Japanese Army, was Minister for War from 1940 to 1941 and Prime Minister of Japan from October 1941 to July 1944. Tojo was best known for ordering the attack on Pearl Harbor (although planning...
UN Mediator Assassinated
In September 1948 members of the Lehi militant organization (AKA the Stern gang) assassinated the Swedish UN mediator Count Folke Bernadotte in Palestine -- presumably for proposing an Arab administration for Jerusalem. The Lehi (Hebrew for "Fighters for the...
Partition of India
The 1947 partition of India into Hindu and Muslim majorities divided three provinces: Assam, Bengal and the Punjab. The division of >14 million people according to religious beliefs resulted in large-scale violence, with varying estimates...
Man’s Search for Meaning
In 1946 the neuro-psychiatrist Viktor Frankl (1905-1997) chronicled his experience in Nazi concentration camps in his best-selling memoir Man's Search for Meaning. In this book, Frankl described how finding personal meaning allowed him to survive internment in Nazi...
Alcatraz Siege
From 1934-1963, Alcatraz was a high-security federal prison in San Francisco Bay. With a reputation of being escape-proof, it held notorious, high-profile prisoners, particularly those with a history of previous escape attempts. In May 1946, after a failed escape...
Tokyo Trials
The International Military Tribunal for the Far East (IMTFE) conducted the Tokyo War Crimes Trials from May 1946 to November 1948. 28 Imperial Japanese military and government leaders were charged with Class A war crimes - participating in a joint conspiracy to start...
Nuremberg Trials
From 1945-46, judges from Great Britain, France, USSR and USA presided over the Nuremberg trials of 24 prominent Nazis charged with war crimes. Charges included: crimes against peace—defined as participation in the planning and waging of a war of aggression in...
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...
A-Bomb Morality
Albert Einstein and Leó Szilárd The concept of a nuclear chain reaction reportedly came to the physicist Leó Szilárd as an epiphany while waiting to cross a London street in 1933. “...It suddenly occurred to me that if we could find an element which is split by...
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...
Operation August Storm 1945
On August 8, 1945, after refusing to mediate a Japanese surrender with the United States and its allies, the USSR declared war on Japan. On August 9, 1945, Russian troops invaded the Japanese puppet state of Manchukuo in Operation August Storm. On August 14, 1945 a...
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...
German POWS
Unlike the treatment of German POWs in the USA, the Allied treatment of German military prisoners in Europe at the end of the war is quite controversial. With titles like Eisenhower's Death Camps, The Real Holocaust, The Last Dirty Secret of WWII and Eisenhower...
Under the Sand
From 1940-1943, the Danish government pursued a course of cautious cooperation with the occupying forces of Nazi Germany. However, in 1943, with increased turbulence and sabotage by the underground resistance movement, the Germans imposed a state of emergency and...
V-2 to Apollo – Wernher von Braun
https://youtu.be/4wIxsYk9UdI The German rocket scientist Wernher von Braun was a complex character. Fascinated by astronomy since childhood, he studied at the Technische Hochschule Berlin and the Friedrich-Wilhelms-Universität in Berlin, receiving a bachelor's...