History from Deardoff

  “This is Armed Forces Radio Saigon. The temperature in Saigon is 105 degrees and rising. Here is Frank Snepp “I'm Dreaming of a White Christmas." This was broadcast 12:15 pm local time April 29th 1975 and signaled that Operation Frequent Wind Option 4 was in effect; the beginning of the evacuation of US personnel and at risk South Vietnamese. A group of Japanese journalist asked that the song be sung to them because they were afraid they wouldn’t understand the words, but felt they could recognize the tune. At 0730 April 29th the US Embassy and it’s staff was complete. During the fixed-wing evacuation 50,493 people were evacuated from Tan Son Nhut and the fixed wing aspect of the evacuation conducted by the USAF. Marine pilots accumulated 1,054 flight hours and flew 682 sorties throughout Operation Frequent Wind. The evacuation lasted nine hours and involved over 50 Marine Corps and Air Force helicopters. In the helicopter evacuation a total of 395 Americans and 4,475 Vietna...

 OTD in 1941, Hitler  ordered that the systematic murder of the mentally ill and handicapped be brought to an end because of protests within Germany on August 18, 1941.  In 1939, Dr. Viktor Brack, head of Hitler’s Euthanasia Department, oversaw the creation of the T.4 program, which began as the systematic killing of children deemed “mentally defective.” Children were transported from all over Germany to a Special Psychiatric Youth Department and killed. Later, certain criteria were established for non-Jewish children. They had to be “certified” mentally ill, schizophrenic, or incapable of working for one reason or another. Jewish children already in mental hospitals, whatever the reason or whatever the prognosis, were automatically to be subject to the program. The victims were either injected with lethal substances or were led to “showers” where the children sat as gas flooded the room through water pipes. The program was then expanded to adults. It wasn’t long before p...

  On August 15, 1914, the government of Japan sends an ultimatum to Germany, demanding the removal of all German ships from Japanese and Chinese waters and the surrender of control of Tsingtao—the location of Germany’s largest overseas naval bases, located on China’s Shantung Peninsula—to Japan by noon on August 23. The previous August 6, the day after Britain entered WWI against Germany, the British foreign secretary, Sir Edward Grey, had requested limited naval assistance from the Japanese navy in hunting down armed German merchant ships. Japan gladly agreed, seeing the war as a great opportunity to pursue its own interests in the Far East. As one Japanese statesman, Inoue Karou, put it, the war was “divine aid…for the development of the destiny of Japan.” Thus the Japanese hurried to honor their 1902 alliance agreement with Britain, serving Germany with its ultimatum on August 15. “We consider it highly important and necessary in the present situation to take measures to remove ...

During WWII, six German saboteurs who secretly entered the United States on a mission to attack its civil infrastructure are executed by the United States for spying. Two other saboteurs who disclosed the plot to the FBI and aided U.S. authorities in their manhunt for their collaborators were imprisoned. In 1942, under Nazi leader Adolf Hitler’s orders, the defense branch of the German Military Intelligence Corps initiated a program to infiltrate the United States and destroy industrial plants, bridges, railroads, waterworks, and Jewish-owned department stores. The Nazis hoped that sabotage teams would be able to slip into America at the rate of one or two every six weeks. The first two teams, made up of eight Germans who had all lived in the United States before the war, departed the German submarine base at Lorient, France, in late May. Just before midnight on June 12, in a heavy fog, a German submarine reached the American coast off Amagansett, Long Island, and deployed a team w...

  If we were truly a honest society we would admit that outside of gymnastics, maybe ice skating, and beach volleyball but only when they wear bikinis, no one cares about women’s sports. Including women. The idea that female professional basketball players demand pay equity with males is absurd.  While networks might feel a need to broadcast the games, does anyone watch?

  At six o’clock in the evening on July 23, 1914, nearly one month after the assassination of Franz Ferdinand   and his wife by a young Serbian nationalist in Sarajevo, Bosnia, the ambassador of the Austro-Hungarian Empire to Serbia, delivered an ultimatum to the Serbian foreign ministry. Acting with the full support of its allies in Berlin, Austria-Hungary had determined in the aftermath of Franz Ferdinand’s assassination to pursue a hard-line policy towards Serbia. Their plan, developed in coordination with the German foreign office, was to force a military conflict that would, Vienna hoped, end quickly and decisively with a crushing Austrian victory before the rest of Europe—namely, Serbia’s powerful ally, Russia—had time to react. On receipt of the ultimatum, Serbia at once appealed to Russia, whose council of ministers met on July 24 to determine a course of action. Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Sazonov voiced his belief that Germany was using the crisis over the archdu...