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Re: On this day in history...

PostPosted: Wed Apr 11, 2018 9:27 am
by Arneb
The Scottish tactics look a lot like what Switzerland was planning for an attack by Uncle Joe.

11 April, 1968 - 50 years ago, Rudi Dutschke, the informal leader of the German radical left student movement, or "the sixty-eighters", as they are informally known until today, was shot in the head by a worker. The attack roused great unrest, the students alleging that the attack had practically been written into reality by the right-wing tabloid press (not at all an absurd claim). The German terrorist movement of the 70s used this attack as one of its founding myths.

Rudi Dutschke survived with severe and lasting injuries to the head and brain, epilepsy being one of the sequelae. He emigrated to Denmark with his wife, Gretchen (an American). He drowned in his bathtub on Christmas Eve, 1982, after a seizure.

Re: On this day in history...

PostPosted: Wed Apr 11, 2018 9:40 am
by Heid the Ba
Arneb wrote:Last flight of a Luftwaffe plane over England (yes, really! Only a reconnaissance flight, but still. April 45!)

That surprises me, I suspect it was a full throttle, don't turn and don't look back run just to say they had done it.

RAF bombers bomb 1139 tons of bombs in the bombing of Plauen (in the corner between Bavaria, Saxonia, and Bohemia), all of 6 days before it was taken by the U.S army.

It was probably done because the ground forces were so close, to interdict any re-enforcements or supplies that the defenders were trying to bring up. There would be a reason for doing it, not necessarily a good reason though.

Re: On this day in history...

PostPosted: Thu Apr 12, 2018 12:37 pm
by Lianachan
April 12th, 1961: Yuri Gagarin becomes the first human to travel into outer space and perform the first manned orbital flight, Vostok 1.

Re: On this day in history...

PostPosted: Thu Apr 12, 2018 1:49 pm
by Heid the Ba
I had forgotten it was Gagarin Day.

Re: On this day in history...

PostPosted: Sat Apr 14, 2018 1:13 pm
by Arneb
Arneb wrote:Rudi Dutschke survived with severe and lasting injuries to the head and brain, epilepsy being one of the sequelae. He emigrated to Denmark with his wife, Gretchen (an American). He drowned in his bathtub on Christmas Eve, 1982, after a seizure.

Actually, it was in 1979. Sorry.

He is in the news a bit because of the anniversary of the assassination and because of '68 in general. I learnt that in 69, he emigrated to the UK, finding a quiet place in Cambridge and being admitted to studying at a college, where he wanted to finish his degree and write a doctoral thesis. He had to leave in '71 because he was deemed a threat to national security. Yes really. A man crippled by being shot in the head by a Nazi sympathizer, twice, who had not been politically active since the shooting, who had needed almost a year to be able to read, write, and speak again, and who got affidavits from practically everyone living arouind him was extradited by the country that had once protected the likes of Marx, Freud, and thousands of people persecuted by Nazi Germany.

Bravo, UK!

Re: On this day in history...

PostPosted: Sun Apr 15, 2018 3:56 pm
by Arneb
15 April, 1945 Potsdam is hit by 1752 tons of bombs. Since unification, more than 130 nonstarters from that night have been defused. They are the kind of ordnance that can take out a house and badly shave a city block, so that kind of action usually means everyone leaves for the day.

When we bought our ground, the building licence was conditonal on a Kampfmittelfreiheitsbescheinigung, and I am not making that word up.

Re: On this day in history...

PostPosted: Sun Apr 15, 2018 4:26 pm
by Heid the Ba
Conflict centre free something something something.

Re: On this day in history...

PostPosted: Sun Apr 15, 2018 6:58 pm
by Arneb
Kampf=Fight
Mittel = Means, Kampfmittel=Ammunition, ordnance...
Freiheit=Freedom, liberty
s= denotes Genitive case
Bescheinigung= Certificate

--> Certificate of Freedom from ordnance, meaning someone qualified looked for unexploded ordnance and didn't find anything or removed it. So no hapless Bob the Builder grinds his dredger into one of His Majesty's King George VI Right Royal 3-ton bomb fuses.

Re: On this day in history...

PostPosted: Mon Apr 16, 2018 9:37 am
by Heid the Ba
Ah mittel not mitte.

Re: On this day in history...

PostPosted: Mon Apr 16, 2018 10:50 am
by Lianachan
16th April, 1746: Battle of Culloden. One of the most disastrous events in the history of the Scottish Highlands, the effects of the aftermath of which are still felt, and highly visible.

Re: On this day in history...

PostPosted: Mon Apr 16, 2018 11:04 am
by Heid the Ba
Clan The Ba' is never mentioned as being on the Jacobite side at Culloden, though I haven't looked into it. As a lowland-ish family we are more likely to have been on the government side.

Re: On this day in history...

PostPosted: Mon Apr 16, 2018 12:00 pm
by Lianachan
Heid the Ba wrote:Clan The Ba' is never mentioned as being on the Jacobite side at Culloden, though I haven't looked into it. As a lowland-ish family we are more likely to have been on the government side.

They sat out the '15, the '19 and the '45 but your chief commanded the Jacobite army in the '89. He died at the Battle of Killiecrankie (1689), but secured a home win so good job fella.

Re: On this day in history...

PostPosted: Mon Apr 16, 2018 1:21 pm
by Heid the Ba
Aye, dieing in your moment of victory sounds like us, I was aware of that one. And a namesake of mine features prominently in the Covenanter/Civil War stramash which helps keep me ungoogleable.

Re: On this day in history...

PostPosted: Mon Apr 16, 2018 2:21 pm
by Arneb
16 April is also considered as the beginning of the Battle of Berlin, the final thrust of the Red Army to occupy Berlin. The Battle started with massive artillery fire along the Oder river; German Wikipedia says that statistically, there was one piece of artillery every five meters along the front.

Another 170.000 dead, again, many of them in the Red army, and 300.00 injured.

Re: On this day in history...

PostPosted: Mon Apr 16, 2018 2:28 pm
by Lianachan
On the other hand, April 16th 1999 saw the birth of my first son - so it's not all death and destruction.

Re: On this day in history...

PostPosted: Mon Apr 16, 2018 2:42 pm
by Arneb
Great counterpoint there, congratulations to the Lianachanito and the proud parents.

Re: On this day in history...

PostPosted: Tue Apr 17, 2018 10:27 am
by Lianachan
April 17th, 1746: Having fled from Culloden overnight, Prince Charles arrives at Invergarry Castle early in the morning and rests there until three in the afternoon. Then, with three companions (O'Sullivan, Allan MacDonald (a priest), and Edward Burke) he rode on by Loch Arkaig to Glenpean, and there spent the night in the house of Donald Cameron. By the end of the day after the battle, he was about 80 miles away.

Re: On this day in history...

PostPosted: Tue Apr 17, 2018 1:00 pm
by Heid the Ba
Lianachan wrote:On the other hand, April 16th 1999 saw the birth of my first son - so it's not all death and destruction.

He shares a birthday with former pope and former flak gunner Benedict XVI. Admit it, you had forgotten he was still alive, hadn't you?

Re: On this day in history...

PostPosted: Tue Apr 17, 2018 1:08 pm
by Lianachan
Heid the Ba wrote:
Lianachan wrote:On the other hand, April 16th 1999 saw the birth of my first son - so it's not all death and destruction.

He shares a birthday with former pope and former flak gunner Benedict XVI. Admit it, you had forgotten he was still alive, hadn't you?

He looked older. Flak gunning then pope-ing must be hard.

Re: On this day in history...

PostPosted: Wed Apr 18, 2018 4:09 pm
by Arneb
He saw both jobs as very hard, but his Flakhelfer time was critical for his intellectual development. These boys were effectively child soldiers who were put to service directly in the line of fire. Many of them were heavily traumatized, and many became adamant defenders of the "Never Again" paradigm of German postwar politics and culture. The country owes a lot to the so-called Flakhelfergeneration who were thrown into the meat grinder in the midst of puberty, saw their school buddies die a meaningless death and just by a hair got out alive. Many of them, and J. Ratzinger among them, became a sort of moral compass in a society that couldn't trust its elders anymore.

He was not my kind of Pope, but he was always vocal in his refusal of military action as a means of politics. I respect him for that.

Re: On this day in history...

PostPosted: Wed Apr 18, 2018 8:53 pm
by Heid the Ba
I had never thought of it that way, that makes a lot of sense.

Re: On this day in history...

PostPosted: Fri Apr 20, 2018 5:49 pm
by Arneb
20 April is Führers Geburtstag, which is kind of sad considering what glorious weather we often have around that date. It also the 49th anniversary of my christening, but that seems very insignificant today.

20 April, 1972 saw the penultimate Moon crewed landing so far, John Young and Charlie Duke, in Apollo 16's Orion LM

Re: On this day in history...

PostPosted: Sat Apr 21, 2018 9:25 am
by Arneb
21 April, 1918 - 100 years ago, Manfred von Richthofen, called the Red Baron, is shot down by British forces near Amiens, France. He was 26 years old. He is Snoopy's perennial adversary when he recreates the great air battles of WWI on his dog-hut.

Re: On this day in history...

PostPosted: Sat Apr 21, 2018 9:31 am
by Heid the Ba
Current thinking is that he flew too low and was shot down by an Australian Lewis gunner rather than another pilot. The angle of the wound suggests he took one up the jacksie rather than from above.

One of the subsequent commanders of his Flying Circus was Hermann Goering, who was a bona fide ace pilot before his descent into drugs and madness.

Re: On this day in history...

PostPosted: Sat Apr 21, 2018 10:23 am
by Arneb
Yeah, you can be an ace and an ass.