Michael Shannon (“Nocturnal Animals”) is to play assassinated President James A. Garfield with Matthew Macfadyen (“Succession”) as his killer Charles Guiteau in a new series, “Death by Lightning” for Netflix, Deadline was first to report.

Based on historian Candice Millard’s book, “Destiny of The Republic,” the series is set to follow Guiteau, a failed evangelist, insurance salesman, attorney, and one-time admirer of President Garfield whose obsession turned deadly.

After stalking Garfield in the capital for weeks, Guiteau found his opportunity to strike on the morning of July 2, 1881, after a newspaper article tipped off the soon-to-be-assassin of the president’s whereabouts.

Guiteau shot Garfield twice in the back with a .442 Webley, nicknamed the British Bulldog revolver for its large-caliber capacity.

Garfield’s doctors were unable to remove the bullet, which was lodged in the president’s pancreas. On Sept. 19, 1881, 80 days after the shooting, Garfield died of blood poisoning, “

Continuing his stunning run of audaciousness, the imprisoned Guiteau — who had previously castrated himself — placed an advert in the local newspaper stating: “I am looking for a wife and see no objection in mentioning it here. I want an elegant Christian lady of wealth, under 30, belonging to a first-class family. Any such lady can address me with the utmost confidence.”

He told The Herald that he had “shot the president without malice or murderous intent.”

“Death By Lightning” comes from the mind of Mike Makowsky, the “Bad Education” screenwriter, and is directed by Matt Ross (“Captain Fantastic”) with the “Game of Thrones” duo David Benioff and D.B. Weiss producing, according to Deadline.

No word yet as to when this historical drama will be released, but it will surely attract history and “Succession” fans alike.

The B-17 was known for its ability to take extreme punishment and stay airborne. A fact that is driven home in the first episode of “Masters of the Air,” as Maj. Gale “Buck” Cleven, played by Austin Butler, stares in disbelief as light pours in through the flak-riddled holes of his bomber.

After a decade of delays, the highly anticipated third installment to Steven Spielberg and Tom Hanks trilogy of sorts premiered on January 26th on Apple TV+ to much fanfare.

“Masters of the Air” follows the crew of the now famed “Bloody 100th” as they conduct daylight strategic bombing raids over Nazi-occupied Europe — at great personal sacrifice.

After its two-episode premiere, the show will be rolled out weekly until March 15.

Based on the book by Donald L. Miller, the series is loosely narrated by Lt. Harry Crosby (Anthony Boyle), a navigator who ultimately served 22 months with the unit — an impressive feat considering casualty rates in 1943 hovered around 30 percent.

“Of the 40 men from my flying class that went to the 100th Bomb Group, only four of us managed to complete a tour. That gives you an idea of how inadequately trained we were and how unlikely it was that we were going to survive,” pilot John Luckadoo recalled to HistoryNet in 2019.

The first two episodes follow the cocky, hotheaded Maj. John “Bucky” Egan (Callum Turner) and his buttoned-up best friend Cleven as they each go through baptisms of fire over mainland Europe.

“Why didn’t you tell me? You’ve been up… you didn’t tell me it was like that,” Butler’s character Cleven later accuses Egan after an aborted bombing run over the Nazi submarine pen at Bremen.

“You’ve seen it now,” comes Egan’s retort.

Fans of “Band of Brothers” and “The Pacific” will certainly appreciate the similar strengths of “Masters of the Air” as the previous two offerings.

Helmed once again by screenwriter John Orloff, the miniseries manages to encapsulate a broad range of themes: from thrilling missions, their impact, to the banalities of life in between.

Yet it is the small details that historians, military aficionados and veterans alike can appreciate.

After the aborted Bremen bombing run, “Buck” is taken back to see his ball turret gunner who was badly injured. But it wasn’t flak or bullets that caused the damage — it was the elements.

In 1943 the B-17 was unpressurized, and at high altitudes the crew could experience temperatures of -50 to -60 degrees. Even the briefest exposure could cause severe frostbite, which is made clear in the opening episodes.

“The only spot that’s worse [than a tail gunner] is the ball turret, where the gunner is wrapped around his gun like an anchovy or a fetus in a womb too small,” Elmer “Benny” Bendiner, a B-17′s bombardier, wrote in his wartime postscript, “The Fall of Fortresses.”

Locked into their ball turrets over enemy territory for hours on end, gunners “urinated in their clothing, freezing their back, buttocks, and thighs so badly muscles sloughed and bones were exposed,” came Miller’s similar assessment.

While “Masters of the Air” certainly delivers in showcasing the intensity and brutality of war, the series shines with quick, one-liners that show that these men are after all, really just boys.

“You’re a navigator, Crosby,” Capt. John D. Brady scolds Crosby after the young lieutenant almost delivers his B-17 to the coast of France. “You should be able to, I don’t know, find England?”

If the rest of the series is anything like the first two episodes, viewers are in for a spectacular and educational treat, worthy of those who fought and died over the European skies.

“These hours of television are like the Army Air Forces’ missions themselves,” writes NPR. “They’re such intense experiences, it’s nice to have a little time between them to reflect … and to breathe.”

“Truth is incontrovertible,” Winston Churchill wrote in his War Memoirs. “Panic may resent it. Ignorance may deride it. Malice may distort it. But there it is.”

Gov. Ron DeSantis of Florida might have wanted to take a page out of Churchill’s book on truth and accuracy when he announced the end of his presidential campaign. In a post on X, the governor invoked the famed British Prime Minister, quoting:

“‘Success is not final, failure is not fatal: it is the courage to continue that counts.’” — Winston Churchill.

The issue? Churchill never said that.

“We base this on careful research in the canon of fifty million words by and about Churchill, including all of his books, articles, speeches and papers,” the International Churchill Society said in response to a 2013 article in the Atlanta Journal-Constitution which also used the same quote.

“We can find no attribution for either one of these, and you will find that they are broadly attributed to Winston Churchill,” the organization reports. “They are found nowhere in his canon, however.”

Ironically, the wartime PM is among the more oft-quoted and misquoted figures in history, alongside the likes of Thomas Jefferson, Maya Angelou and Mohandas K. Gandhi.

Here are some zingers that Churchill did say:

“Anyone can rat, but it takes a certain amount of ingenuity to re-rat.”

“We are all worms, but I do believe that I am a glow-worm.”

“You do your worst and we will do our best.”

“Just tell me if I’m going the right way.”

Charles Jackson French called the words out to a raft of 15 injured sailors as he tied a rope around his waist and began to swim. He did so for nearly eight hours, swimming his way through shark-infested waters and into U.S. Navy history.

On January 10, Secretary of the Navy Carlos Del Toro announced that the sea service will name a new Arleigh Burke-class destroyer after French in honor of his heroic actions that day during the September 1942 naval battle near Guadalcanal.

French, a Black cook who had previously completed a four-year enlistment in the Navy, reenlisted just days after the Dec. 7, 1941 attack at Pearl Harbor. By Sept. 4, 1942, French found himself aboard the destroyer-turned-transport ship USS Gregory as it returned from delivering a Marine Raider battalion to Savo Island.

As Gregory and her sister ship USS Little patrolled the area between Savo Island and Guadalcanal, “three Japanese destroyers — Yūdachi, Hatsuyuki and Murakumo — came into the Slot undetected to bombard American positions ashore,” according to Naval History and Heritage Command.

Gunfire erupted, with flashes lighting up the night sky in the early morning hours of Sept. 5. From the sky, a patrolling Navy pilot believing the flashes to be coming from Japanese submarines dropped a line of five flares in the water.

Gregory and Little were suddenly illuminated, silhouetting as easy targets for Japanese destroyers.

With the destroyers previously stripped of virtually all their armament to make room for boats, the outgunned Gregory lasted just three minutes before her boilers burst and calls to abandon ship rang out.

Mess Attendant 1st Class French was among the very few left uninjured by the ship’s conflagrations. Despite standing at just 5′8 and 195 pounds, French was a strong swimmer and calmly swam around the sinking ship gathering his injured comrades.

Ensign Robert Adrian, who gradually came to after suffering injuries to his legs and blast fragments in his eyes, attempted to persuade French to join them aboard the raft and out of the shark-infested waters, Adrian later recalled.

French refused, responding that he was more afraid of the Japanese than the sharks. Against a strong current, French swam all night — away from enemy gunfire and the Japanese-held shoreline.

In eight hours he managed to rescue all but 11 members of Gregory’s crew, according to Naval History and Heritage Command. At sunrise, French and the raft of sailors were spotted by scout aircraft.

For his actions, French was recommended for the Navy Cross. However, likely due to his race, the cook only received a letter of commendation from Adm. William “Bull” Halsey, the commander of the Southern Pacific Fleet.

In the letter, Halsey mistakenly credited French with swimming continuously for only two hours.

Initially, French’s story was covered widely, particularly in Black newspapers in the U.S. He was dubbed the “Human Tugboat” and was featured in one comic book iteration.

Adrian, meanwhile, appeared on a national radio show to tell French’s story after becoming outraged over the minimal accolades garnered by the sailor’s heroics.

After the war, however, French’s story was largely forgotten. He died in 1956 of alcoholism, a condition historians say was likely brought on due to undiagnosed post-traumatic stress disorder.

In May 2022, Del Toro sought to correct the record and posthumously awarded the Navy and Marine Corps Medal to French. That year the training pool for rescue swimmers at Naval Base San Diego was named after him.

French is now getting some “long-overdue recognition,” Del Toro said on Wednesday during the Surface Navy Association’s 36th National Symposium.

“French gathered 15 shipmates onto a raft and, fearing they would drift to a Japanese-controlled island, towed the raft himself to a different island,” Del Toro continued. “He swam for hours, pulling 15 souls from the jaws of the sea, defying the odds and the sharks with nothing but his own grit and compassion.”

Maj. Mike Sadler, one of the first recruits and the last surviving member of Britain’s Special Air Service (S.A.S.), died on Thursday in Cambridge, England. He was 103.

Dubbed a human GPS by the New York Times, Sadler served in the Long Range Desert Group (LRDG), an elite reconnaissance unit prized by the British for its prowess at deep desert exploration and infiltration of enemy-held wilderness. 

As the key navigator within the LRDG, it was Sadler’s duty to guide the commandos — including the likes of Robert Blair “Paddy” Mayne — as they “crept onto Nazi airfields; attached time bombs to Messerschmitt fighters, Stuka dive bombers, fuel dumps and pilot quarters; then sped away as explosions roared behind,” writes the NYT.

But unlike his daredevilish comrades, Sadler might not have even fired a single shot at the enemy while fighting in the North African desert.

Sadler arrived on the African continent in 1941 as an antitank gunner, but after a chance meeting with LRDG recruits in a Cairo bar while on leave, Sadler quickly joined the budding detachment.

Although, as Sadler puts it, he was never actually asked if he wanted to join the S.A.S., according to the BBC History Magazine.

“All I knew,” Sadler quipped, “was that [S.A.S. commander] David Stirling decided he wanted me — and somehow he got me.”

Sadler became interested in celestial navigation and, within several weeks, learned how to use a theodolite, a tool used by surveyors to measure horizontal and vertical angles, as well as how to read celestial charts to accurately cross hundreds of miles amid the desert’s shifting sands and featureless landscapes.

“I was so tickled by the idea of being able to find where you were by looking at the stars,” Sadler later told the BBC History Magazine.

“Desert navigation, like its equivalent at sea, is largely a matter of mathematics and observation, but the good navigator also relies on art, hunch and instinct,” author Ben Macintyre wrote in “Rogue Heroes”. “Sadler had uncanny, almost unerring ability to know where he was, where he was going, and when he would get there.”

Sadler, however, demurred over that fact, stating that he tried to never let his gut overrule his observations while navigating.

“You have to be confident because it was awfully easy, especially at night, to start feeling you’re going wrong and you should be further to left or right,” he told historian Gavin Mortimer. “It was rather easy to give way to that feeling if you weren’t confident.”

Yet time and time again, Sadler delivered his men to their targets — and got them out again.

“Without him,” the New York Times reports, “the commandos could not have crossed hundreds of miles of desert, found enemy bases on the Mediterranean Coast, destroyed more than 325 aircraft, blown up ammunition and supply dumps, killed hundreds of German and Italian soldiers and pilots, or found their way back to hidden bases.”

The S.A.S. became well-known for their hit-and-run strike attacks — striking deep into Nazi-held territory and then disappearing just as swiftly as they had arrived.

After leaving the desert war in 1943, Sadler was posted to an S.A.S. training center in Scotland before parachuting in France in 1944 after the D-Day invasion to aid in sabotage operations. He retired from the war as a major.

According to the Washington Post, Sadler later joined the British Foreign Office, working in intelligence during the Cold War. He declined to publicly discuss his duties.

Like many of the rogue heroes that surrounded him, Sadler wasn’t initially suited for the strait-laced Army life. Before joining the S.A.S., Sadler voluntarily gave up his sergeant rank rather than apologize over his objection that soldiers keep their boots on in their sleeping bags.

“I wasn’t at all keen on the extreme aspects of militarism, marching up and down,” Sadler later recalled. “Although I did my best to be reasonably smart.”

Among the S.A.S., he had found like-minded people.

“Nowadays the SAS has a fearsome reputation,” Sadler wrote in the foreword of Joshua Levine’s “SAS: The Illustrated History of the SAS”, “but I don’t remember ever wanting to kill anybody.”

In the agony of trench warfare and no man’s land, the sound of a skitter and a wet nose — typically a rat, doubled in size after gorging on the flesh of man — usually spelled trouble. 

But occasionally, the wet nose brushing across both Allied and Central Power soldier’s faces meant that help, or at the very least comfort, was on its way. 

Over 16 million total animals were in service during the Great War, with dogs hauling machine guns and supply carts, serving as messengers and delivering the all-important cigarette cartons to the troops.

However, Mercy Dogs, also referred to as casualty dogs, were specifically trained to aid the wounded and dying on the battlefield. First trained by the Germanic armies in the 19th century, these sanitätshunde, or medical dogs, began to see widespread use as World War I swept across Europe.

Trained to find and distinguish between the dead, wounded and dying, Mercy Dogs were set loose on the battlefield to bring medical supplies to the wounded, “getting as close as possible so the soldier could access the dogs’ saddle bags, which contained first aid supplies and rations. Instead of barking and alerting the enemy, the dogs were trained to bring back something belonging to the soldier,” according to the Red Cross.

The dogs were trained in triage, able to indicate who needed aid the most and who was too far gone to establish any medical care. In the case of the latter, the dog would often stay with the mortally wounded soldier to ensure that, in his final moments, he wasn’t alone.

The idea of Mercy Dogs was first introduced in 1890 by German painter, Jean Bungartz, who founded the Deutschen Verein für Santiätshunde or German Association for Medical Dogs.

Five years later, Britain took notice after Maj. Edwin Richardson observed that English-bred dogs were being shipped to Germany in bulk.

“I took notice of a ‘foreigner’ buying a sheepdog from a shepherd and learned that the man was a German, sent over by his government to purchase large quantities of collie dogs for the German Army,” Richardson recounted.

Seeing a similar need, Richardson and his wife opened the British War Dog School, just prior to the outbreak of war in 1914 — the first of its kind in the nation. While Richardson trained several different breeds, his favorite was Airedales for their intelligence, devotion and coolness under fire.

Trained under realistic battle conditions, one visiting journalist recounted that “Shells from batteries at practice were screaming overhead, and army motor lorries passed to and fro. The dogs are trained to the constant sound of the guns and very soon learn to take no heed of them.”

Once on the Western Front, these dogs “not only had to survive but to perform critical duties in ghastly conditions which saw the natural world obliterated daily — grass was virtually nonexistent, trees were blown to pieces or harvested into oblivion for wood, the air was rife with poisonous gases in addition to the sounds and shell fragments of explosions, water was contaminated with heavy metals, decomposing bodies were omnipresent and the earth’s surface tended to be wildernesses of bomb craters or oceans of mud,” writes MHQ editor, Zita Ballinger Fletcher.

Under these conditions, the animals silently toiled, utilizing their noses and devotion to ultimately save roughly thousands of lives, according to the Red Cross.

One British surgeon noted, “They sometimes lead us to bodies we think have no life in them, but when we bring them back to the doctors…always find a spark. It is purely a matter of their instinct, [which is] far more effective than man’s reasoning powers.”

In 1915, British soldier Oliver Hyde published a long-forgotten work entitled “The Work of the Red Cross Dog on the Battlefield.”

In it, he captures the small but mighty group of heroes:

“To the forlorn and despairing wounded soldier, the coming of the Red Cross dog is that of a messenger of hope.

“Here at last is help, here is first aid. [The soldier] knows that medical assistance cannot be far away, and will be summoned by every means in the dog’s power.

“As part of the great Red Cross army of mercy, he is beyond price.”

Tragically, albeit unsurprisingly, a large number of Mercy Dogs died during the war. By the time the Armistice was signed on Nov. 18, 1918, some 7,000 Mercy Dogs had been killed in service to their respective countries.

“The ‘Tondelayo’ was being knocked about the sky … climbing, diving and making corkscrew patterns in a crazy choreography designed to unsettle the fighters, who were pressing in from all sides,” according to an account by Elmer “Benny” Bendiner, the B-17′s bombardier, in his wartime postscript, “The Fall of Fortresses.”

It was July 30, 1943, and the primary targets of the 379th Bomb Group were the Nazi aero engine shops located in the central German town of Kassel.

Of course, B-17 bombing missions were no picnic. Aeronautical advancements at the time allowed a B-17 to fly at altitudes of approximately 35,000 feet for up to 2,800 miles, all while carrying a hefty bomb payload supplemented by 10 .50-caliber machine guns.

The bomber, however, flew at a speed of just 150 mph, which left crews immensely vulnerable when flying through swarms of the 400 mph-capable Messerschmitt and Focke-Wulf-190s. What’s more, it would not be until the routine implementation of the P-51 Mustang in 1944 Europe that B-17s would be regularly accompanied by fighter escorts.

In 1943, as casualty rates hovered around 30 percent, surviving the mandatory 25 missions as a crewman of a B-17 often came down to luck. The Kassel raid was no exception.

The Tondelayo and its crew weathered near constant attacks from Luftwaffe fighters, with Messerschmitt and Focke-Wulf-190s hedge-hopping from station to station to refuel along the bombers’ flight path — easy actions with nary an Allied fighter in sight.

From the skies, German fighters spit the Tondelayo with 20 mm explosive shells. From below, anti-aircraft flak peppered the flying coffin.

“I was undeniably alive in battle. … This was not the war of boredom and vermin we had read about in the tales of our fathers’ agony. This was a frenzy in which I heaved and sweated but could not stop because, shamefully, my guts loved what my head hated,” Bendiner noted about the constant proximity to death. “I exulted in that parade of Fortresses forming for battle. I confess this as an act of treason against the intellect, because I have seen dead men washed out of their turrets with a hose. But if one wants an intellectual view of war, one must ask someone who has not seen it.”

Throughout the war, B-17 crews became used to the all too frequent scene of adjacent bombers being hit and hurtling towards the earth. For the men of the Tondelayo, July 30 seemed like it would yield much of the same. But on that particular raid, the Tondelayo was afforded remarkable luck in the form of Czech prisoner of war sabotage. After losing both of the bomber’s waist gunners, Tondelayo crew members, upon successfully returning to England, discovered 11 unexploded 20 mm shells housed in the bomber’s gas tank. Such placement of explosives would normally spell out certain death for all on board, except for a “highly personal miracle,” Bendiner recalled.

In looking at the shells’ construction, the armorers found no explosives. Instead, the munitions were “clean as a whistle and as harmless,” Bendiner wrote. One shell, however, wasn’t quite empty.

Inside the casing was “a carefully rolled piece of paper” written in Czech, he noted.

“This is all we can do for you now,” the message read.

Ultimately, the Tondelayo’s luck would run out. She now sits somewhere on the bottom of the English Channel, a relic of sacrifice and sabotage.

Bendiner, meanwhile, retired from the service with a Distinguished Flying Cross, the Air Medal with three oak leaf clusters, and a Purple Heart. He authored numerous books after the war and worked as a journalist for Esquire.

Elmer Bendiner died in September 2001.

At the 11th hour on Monday, a federal judge in Alexandria, Va. issued a temporary restraining order to halt workers’ efforts — which had begun several hours prior — in removing the controversial Confederate memorial in Arlington National Cemetery.

The memorial remains one of the nation’s most prominent monuments to the Confederacy on public land and has been criticized “for its sanitized depiction of slavery,” writes The New York Times.

The removal, which was set to be completed by the end of the week, comes at the tail end of efforts across the United States for the past several years to remove symbols, flags and monuments honoring slaveholders and Confederate leaders.

According to NPR, a group called Defend Arlington, which is affiliated with a group called Save Southern Heritage Florida, brought their suit before U.S. District Judge Rossie Alston Jr. on Sunday.

The group is suing the Department of Defense, arguing that the “The removal will desecrate, damage, and likely destroy the Memorial longstanding at ANC as a grave marker and impede the Memorial’s eligibility for listing on the National Register of Historic Places.”

They were granted the injunction by accusing the Pentagon of rushing its decision and circumventing federal law by not issuing an environmental impact statement. A hearing on the matter is scheduled for 10 a.m. on Wednesday.

Fourteen years after Congress authorized Confederate remains to be reinterred at Arlington in 1900, the statue was dedicated by President Woodrow Wilson and funded by the United Daughters of the Confederacy — an organization that helped to largely forge the Lost Cause ideology.

According to Karen L. Cox, a professor of history at the University of North Carolina at Charlotte, the statues around the United States didn’t appear in great numbers for more than 30 years after the war. Founded in 1894, “an early objective of the UDC was the erection of monuments as tangible signs of pride and appreciation,” Cox writes. 

As such, during the early 20th century, more than 700 monuments were erected across the South before World War II.

The 1914 Arlington unveiling, however, served as a watershed moment for the UDC. By allowing the burial of Confederate soldiers in Arlington and “accepting the monument to honor them, the federal government had fulfilled the Daughters’ conditions for reconciliation,” Cox posits.

The bronze and granite memorial stands in what is now known as section 16, towering over the remains of the Confederate soldiers buried there.

Last week more than 40 Republican members of Congress signed a letter demanding that Defense Secretary Lloyd J. Austin III halt the removal, the NYT reported. They argued that the memorial did not commemorate the Lost Cause ideology but rather the “reconciliation and national unity” between North and South.

Others, however, find the 32-foot pedestal more controversial. The 32-foot pedestal, designed by Confederate soldier Moses Ezekiel, features a bronzed statue of a beautiful woman that represents the South, standing over a frieze of figures that include two African Americans: “an enslaved woman depicted as a “Mammy,” holding the infant child of a white officer, and an enslaved man following his owner to war,” the cemetery website reads.

Virginia governor, Glenn Youngkin, has been steadfast in his opposition to the removal but had secured a plan for the Virginia Military Institute — where Ezekiel was once a cadet — to take ownership of the statue and place it at the Virginia Museum of the Civil War at New Market Battlefield State Historical Park, writes The Washington Post.

The debate over “heritage, not hate” continues to play out on the national stage, yet, as David W. Blight, professor of American history at Yale University, tells HistoryNet, “History and memory are not the same thing. History is based on reasoned research. Memory is born of groups and forged in myriad ways; passed down generation to generation, it tends to be more emotional and sacred.

“Heritage” can make us want to own a past, a story, a place against all other possible narratives or interpretations. A person using a symbol in public or in official ways must understand how the public views their actions. There is always going to be more memory than there is history, but those of us who are devoted to the craft of history have a deep responsibility to push back against memory even as we genuinely respect its power.”

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On June 6, 1944, over 160,000 Allied troops were sent to cross the English Channel onto the beaches of Normandy, France — the D-Day invasion that marked the assault on Western Europe. Yet the operation, dubbed Operation Overlord, almost ended in disaster before it even began. That it succeeded was thanks to one Irishwoman, Maureen Sweeney, who passed away at the age of 100 this past week.

Her story begins at a post office in Blacksod Bay, County Mayo, on Ireland’s west coast, which doubled as a weather station. Sweeney and her husband were tasked with taking hourly barometer readings night and day in the lead-up to the Allied invasion of Normandy, according to the BBC.

Despite Ireland’s official neutrality during World War II, information gathered by the Irish Meteorological Service was covertly shared with the Allies.

At 1 a.m. on June 3, 1944, the 21-year-old noticed a drop in barometric pressure over the Atlantic — a sure sign of a gathering storm. Since the outbreak of World War II, Sweeney and her husband had been reporting the weather to the Irish Met Service in Dublin every hour, every day, every year.

Like normal, her report was sent to the Irish Met Service in Dublin but this time, unbeknownst to Sweeney, on to the Supreme Allied Commander, Dwight D. Eisenhower.

The report set about a series of agonizing decisions for Eisenhower and the Allied staff.

Only a small window — nine days in May and June — was suitable for the invasion. Eisenhower had originally set the date for the invasion to be June 5th.

According to the U.S. Department of Defense, “The days needed to be long for maximum air power usage; a near-full moon was needed to help guide ships and airborne troops; and the tides had to be strong enough to expose beach obstacles at low tide and float supply-filled landing vehicles far onto the beach during high tide. H-Hour was also crucial in that it relied on those tides to be rising at that time. There also had to be an hour of daylight just beforehand for bombardment accuracy.”

Sweeney’s intel proved correct and a storm broke over the English Channel on June 5th. However, further postponement would have meant a two-week delay. Group Captain James Stagg, Eisenhower’s chief meteorologist, predicted a temporary break in the weather. Eisenhower made the decision to go on June 6th just before dawn 24 hours prior.

The ensuing action — the largest amphibious operation in human history — was the first of many in the fight to liberate Western Europe from Hitler’s grasp. 

Yet it was thanks to Sweeney and her 1 a.m. report that the largest amphibious operation in human history was postponed, undoubtedly saving countless lives in the process.

Sweeney ultimately ran the very same post office where she made that fateful report until her retirement in the 2000s.

In 2021, Sweeney was awarded a special U.S. House of Representatives honor for her wartime contributions, with her son, Vincent Sweeney, stating that his mother “was proud of the dispatch’s influence, but primarily ‘happy that she got it right.’” 

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For four years Honore Hermene wandered across the battle-scarred landscapes of the Western Front, surviving by scavenging through the wastelands of Europe’s no man’s lands and the kindness of Allied soldiers.

On Christmas Day 1918, motivated by the gurgling in his gut, the young Hermene sniffed out the decadent Christmas lunch of the Australian Flying Corps 4 Squadron, hosted in the airmen’s mess at Bickendorf Air Base in Germany.

Cold, hungry and alone, the boy invited himself to share in the Australians’ feast. Although introducing himself as Honore, according to the Australian War Memorial, the aviators “couldn’t pronounce it, so he became known to them as Henri, and was nicknamed ‘Little Digger’ or ‘Digger.’”

“He is one of those little kids who is a true casualty of war,” Australian War Memorial Historian Dr. Meleah Hampton stated.

 His father, most likely a soldier, was killed in the early weeks of the war in 1914, and his mother — and possibly a sister — were killed shortly after that when a German shell struck his house.

“From what we can work out,” Hampton continued, “he had been going from unit to unit, spending a little bit of time with them, getting food and whatever, before moving on to the next one, and that’s what he was doing when he wandered into to the Australian Flying Corps mess on Christmas Day 1918. We don’t know when he was born, and we’re not even sure what town he really came from, or what his surname really was, or anything.”

After his years of rambling, Henri found a home among the Aussies. He was quickly “adopted” by the unit, becoming something of a mascot for the squadron — catching rats, sneaking into planes and enjoying the general camaraderie at the base.

While his age was never determined, Australian doctors estimated that the young “Digger” was roughly nine years old by the war’s end. The men chose his birthday as Christmas Day — one that Henri would use for the rest of his life.

Husband and father Timothy Tovell, an air mechanic with the squadron, became the boy’s unofficial guardian. With the armistice signed on Nov. 11, 1918, the squadron got word that the military drawdown was taking place and that they would soon be sent home.

Tovell wrote to his wife, Gertie, requesting that they open their home to the young boy.

“Tovell determined that he was going to bring the boy home to Australia, and that created quite a stir,” Hampton relayed. “The French and the English authorities didn’t want him to go. They wanted him to go and live in an orphanage, so the Australians decided to smuggle him home with them on a troopship. They carried him on board in a kit bag, and then hid him in a bag of bread, or a bag of oats, until it was too late to turn back.”

He became the beloved son of Timothy and Gertie. However, just as Henri’s life began in tragedy, so too did it end with it.

In May 1928, Henri was killed in a motorcycle accident while traveling in Melbourne.

Despite not being a member of the R.A.A.F., the “Little Digger” was buried with full military honors.

“Tim Tovell was a steady and strong person for Henri to cleave to,” wrote Hampton. “He really needed that, and I think Tovell was happy to be the person that he needed.“

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As Soviet ICBM tests and the launch of Sputnik in the 1950s added intensity to the Cold War, the United States turned its attention to the ice sheets of Greenland for an edge.

Meant to be a “city under the ice,” Camp Century was designed to be a series of “twenty-one horizontal tunnels spidering through the snow,” according to the University of Vermont. Designers boasted that, once complete, it would be three times the size of Denmark — replete with a movie theater, hot showers, a chapel, a library, chemistry labs, and, most importantly, a portable nuclear reactor.

Destined to house nearly 200 residents, the top-secret missile base in northwestern Greenland, far north of the Arctic Circle, was publicly touted as a “remote research community” under the auspices of the Army Polar Research and Development Center.

In reality, it was “a top-secret plan to convert part of the Arctic into a launchpad for nuclear missiles,” according to the Washington Post.

Dubbed “Project Iceworm,” the city nestled under layer after layer of ice was to be positioned less than 3,000 miles from Moscow. During the Cold War, the frigid location offered the U.S. Army a more covert and convenient cover for its medium-range ballistic missiles, or MRBMs.

The project was to take advantage of the strategic location of Greenland — midway between the two superpowers — so as to avoid using long-range Minuteman intercontinental ballistic missiles, or ICBMs, located stateside, professor Nikolaj Petersen of Denmark’s Aarhus University wrote in a 2007 article for the Scandinavian Journal of History.

In 1958, the U.S. received tacit approval from Denmark — which has maintained control of the world’s largest island since the 1814 Treaty of Kiel — after being approached with the plans for Iceworm by U.S. ambassador Val Petersen.
According to Petersen’s account, Danish Prime Minister H. C. Hansen replied, “You did not submit any concrete plan as to such possible storing, nor did you ask questions as to the attitude of the Danish Government to this item. I do no[t] think that your remarks give rise to any comments from my side.”

The U.S. deemed this a green light, with construction slated to begin in June 1959. Despite temperatures as low as -70°F, winds as high as 125 miles per hour and an annual snowfall of more than four feet, the audacious project was completed the following October, according to the Atomic Heritage Foundation.

“The missile force is hidden and elusive,” a 1960 planning document noted. “It is deployed into an extensive cut‐and‐cover tunnel network in which men and missiles are protected from weather and, to a degree, from enemy attack. The deployment is invulnerable to all but massive attacks and even then most of the force can be launched. Concealment and variability of the deployment pattern are exploited to prevent the enemy from targeting the critical elements of the force.”

The audacious $2.71 billion plan didn’t account for one thing, however: Mother Nature.

It became increasingly clear, in short order, that building an atomic city under shifting ice sheets was tenuous at best. The project was scrapped entirely by 1967, and the massive underground structure collapsed shortly after.

Despite this rather large military gaffe, the project wasn’t entirely a waste. During the building of Camp Century, U.S. glacier scientist Chester Langway drilled “a 4,560-foot-deep vertical core down through the ice,” according to an account in the University of Vermont Today. “Each section of ice that came up was packaged and stored, frozen. When the drill finally hit dirt, the scientists worked it down for twelve more feet through mud and rock. Then they stopped.”

For decades, this layer of ice and rock from Greenland’s core remained untouched, stored in cookie jars at the bottom of a freezer in Denmark.Then in 2017, it was rediscovered by Jørgen Peder Steffensen, a professor and curator of the ice core repository at the University of Copenhagen, and glaciologist Dorthe Dahl-Jensen, who were going through the university’s extensive collections of ice cores in preparation for a move to a new freezer.
“Some were oddly labeled ‘Camp Century sub-ice,’” Steffensen told UVM Today. “I never thought about what was in those two boxes.

“Well, when you see a lot of cookie jars, you think: who the hell put this in here?” he continued. “No, I didn’t know what to make of it. But once we got it out, we picked it up to see these dirty lumps, and I said: what is this now? And all of a sudden it dawned on us: Oh s–t, this is the sediment underneath it. The ‘sub-ice’ is because it’s below the ice. Whoa.”

In October 2019 the overlooked bits of dirt finally had their time in the sun as more than 30 scientists from around the world gathered in Vermont to study what the silty ice and frozen sediment might tell us.

The convention discovered that the sediment contained “fossilized leaf and twig fragments, proving that plants had once grown under one of the coldest regions on earth,” according to the Washington Post story.

While the U.S. didn’t get to act out its Bond villain lair fantasies, it did, at the very least, further scientific understandings of the world around us — and below us.

After more than 80 years and many different lives away, the reverberations of the heartbreaking melody, “Futile Regrets” was heard inside a concert hall in London.

The song, reports the Washington Post, is part of a collection of more than 210 pieces of music found in the archives at Auschwitz, never played, until now.

In 2015, British composer and conductor Leo Geyer stumbled upon the historic ephemera while on a trip to the Nazi death camp after he was commissioned to create a piece honoring historian and Holocaust expert Martin Gilbert.

“I had a conversation with one of the archivists, and he said in a somewhat offhand way that there were some [musical] manuscripts in the archive,” Geyer explained to the Washington Post. “I nearly fell over at the time when he mentioned it because I couldn’t believe that such a thing could exist and that it had been overlooked all this time.”

From its opening in 1940 to the camp’s liberation in 1945, over 1.1 million men, women and children were systematically murdered at Auschwitz. More than 11 million were killed in the Holocaust — six million of whom were Jews.

During these five years music provided comfort — but also became a beat to its seemingly never ending horrors.

The Nazis used the arts “as part of the murder machine,” Norman Lebrecht, a British music journalist, told the German media outlet DW.

“Our task consisted of playing every morning and every evening at the gate of the camp so that the outgoing and incoming work commandos would march neatly in step to the marches we played,” Anita Lasker-Wallfisch, an Auschwitz survivor who played the cello at the camp, relayed to CNN.

“We also had to be available at all times to play to individual SS staff who would come into our block and wanted to hear some music after sending thousands of people to their death,” she continued.

Despite being intertwined with such hell, music was also a way for Jewish prisoners to express their pain and terror.

It was “a chink of daylight in the darkness,” Geyer stated to the Washington Post.

“Jews being held in concentration camps were unable to document what was happening to them by conventional means. Writing down or photographing this would have been impossible, so they turned to a long cultural tradition of telling their stories through songs and music,” historian Shirli Gilbert said in a news release. “ … Away from the eye of the SS officers, Jews secretly created their own music as a means to cope, survive and document.”

However, the task of bringing the camp music back to life was a tall order for Geyer. Many of the sheets of music were partially destroyed, burned along the edges or tragically, never completed.

Further complicating matters, writes the Post, was the fact that the orchestras often used a “hodgepodge of random instruments that were available,” Geyer said, including some that are not traditionally used in orchestras like accordions, saxophones and mandolins.

Geyer took it on as his mission to stitch together a proper coda to honor the victims of Auschwitz — a feat that would take more than seven years, extensive research, interviews with survivors and six visits to Auschwitz.  

On Monday, Geyer’s work came to fruition as violin strings played the sorrowful sounds of a now completed “Futile Regrets” and three other pieces found at Auschwitz.

“I’m not Jewish, Romani, Polish, Russian or disabled, or descended from any person from Auschwitz,” Geyer told the Post. “But I do stand by those who are persecuted for no reason other than who they are. And I hope to live in a world where no evil could rise again.”

As Nazis infamously looted art, jewelry and other valuables from the many cities and towns of Europe during the Second World War, Adolf Hitler’s protégé Julius Streicher had other, more debased collectibles on his mind: pornography.

Born on Feb. 12, 1885, in the Bavarian town of Fleinhausen, Streicher was once considered a rising star on the radical right. The school teacher-turned-soldier fought in the First World War and in 1919 helped launch the Nuremberg wing of the Deutschsozialistische Partei — or, German Socialist Party — which “espoused right-wing ultra-nationalist, anti-Catholic and antisemitic principles,” according to the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum. 

Three years later, Streicher persuaded his followers to merge with the National Socialist German Workers’ Party — the Nazi party under Hitler’s command.

Considered among the “old guard” in the party, it was Streicher’s oratory skills, much like the Nazi leader, that drew the attention of his comrades.

In 1923, Streicher’s passion for propaganda coalesced with his lecherous mind when he launched Der Stürmer, a virulent anti-Semitic newspaper that featured crude, graphic anti-Jewish cartoons, photographs and articles. 

Week after week, month after month, for nearly 22 years, Streicher tied together accusations of blood libel with pornography, which has come to be considered the very nadir of Nazi anti-Semitic propaganda.

“These grotesque, often pornographic cartoons of Jewish stereotypes,” which were drawn by Philipp Rupprecht, “accompanied the propaganda Streicher disseminated, saturating the consciousness of Germans during the Third Reich and contribut[ed] to the capacity of many Germans to accept the Nazi program,” according to Michael D. Bulmash, whose family collection of Holocaust-related propaganda is accessible via Kenyon College.

In a July 1946 article titled “Portrait of a Pervert,” author Herbert Eisen detailed the lascivious mind of Streicher.

“Its pages abounded with tales of rape by non-Aryans — often negroes — of fair German virgins, described with all the details of smut and bawdry which a lecherous mind can invent,” Eisen wrote in the Australian magazine The Pertinent.

“The [Nazi] excesses which have now — too late — become notorious, even among the most indifferent, and which have their origination in sexual aberrations skillfully enhanced and implanted over two decades, must be regarded as Streicher’s main contribution to the cause of Nazism,” Eisen continued.

These lurid sexual assault stories Streicher propagated were largely consumed by the young men of Germany, and, with Streicher’s prominent place within the Nazi party, Der Stürmer’s graphic cartoons and pictures became the most accessible pornography of its time.

But Streicher didn’t just produce fanciful, smutty and violent content. He also consumed it. Vast amounts, in fact.  

Streicher even went as far during World War II as ordering the local Nuremberg police and troops to seize all the pornography they discovered for “research” purposes, according to the popular podcast Behind the Bastards.  

Upon the Allied victory in May 1945, Streicher was arrested as “Jew-Baiter Number One” near his home in Nuremberg by Maj. Henry Plitt of the 101st Airborne Division. As American paratroopers tore through the Nazi’s home, they stumbled upon what might have been the largest stockpile of pornography in the world at the time. 

Streicher was later convicted during a trial at the Nuremberg International Military Tribunal on the charge of crimes against humanity, with the court deeming the Nazi culpable for murder and extermination within the pages of Der Stürmer. Yet his putrid newspaper wasn’t the only topic of conversation during the trial. 

According to Joseph Maier and Sender Jaari, who worked as researchers for the prosecution during the Nuremberg Trials, “Streicher was without a doubt the dirtiest man in Nuremberg. His collection of pornographic literature was the largest we have ever seen.” 

Julius Streicher was executed by hanging in October 1946. What became of his erotic collection, however, remains somewhat of a mystery.

Archivists, do your thing.

Baseball and bombers. That’s how Historic England describes their latest archival unveiling. 

Over 3,600 photographs have been digitized for public consumption — displaying airfields, military bases, towns and the English countryside during the war years of 1943-1944.

Taken by U.S. Army Air Forces photographic reconnaissance units stationed across England, the thousands of images show a nation at war but offers glimpses of relative tranquility afforded to the island nation.

Damage to the main stand of Manchester United’s famed stadium, Old Trafford, can be seen in the 1943 pictures — which, according to The Guardian, “was hit in a bombing raid in March 1941. Old Trafford was not used again for football until 1949.”

Other “photographs show incidental details, including Second World War anti-invasion defences. Traces of earlier times can also be seen, from prehistoric archaeological features to the remains of First World War camps,” according to Historic England.

From capturing remnants of the 1940-1941 Blitz to “capturing fascinating incidental detail, like American troops playing baseball,” the archive is well worth going down a rabbit hole of exploration for aviation and World War II aficionados alike.

The sailors of the USS Pennsylvania football team were suited up. Although partially cloudy, the temperatures hovered around a balmy 71 degrees Fahrenheit, promising decent weather for what was dubbed the “Super Bowl” of the Navy.

Their opponents from the USS Arizona donned similar protective gear, reading for a scrimmage before the 1:00 p.m. fleet championship, when the first Japanese bomb struck the USS Oklahoma in Battleship Row, Oahu, Hawaii.

The date was December 7, 1941, and unbeknownst to the Americans on the ground and at sea, they were at war.

Among those men suited up to face off with the crew of the USS Arizona was Michael “Mickey” Ganitch, the USS Pennsylvania’s quartermaster.

But as the first Japanese planes swept over Pearl Harbor, Ganitch’s focus turned from the gridiron to the skies. The sailor scrambled up to his battle station — the crow’s nest of the USS Pennsylvania — pads and all.

“I had all my padding on. They couldn’t hurt me there! I was well protected with all my padding on except my helmet and spikes,” Ganitch recalled in an interview with the American Veterans Center.

“From his vantage point above the super-dreadnought battleship and dressed in full football pads, Ganitch served as a lookout, spotting Japanese bombers and Zeros in what might have been the most American moment of the Pearl Harbor attacks,” writes Mac Caltrider for Coffee or Die Magazine.

As fate would have it, the USS Pennsylvania — the flagship of the fleet — was experiencing propeller issues and had gone into dry dock the day before the infamous attack.

Because of this, the 31,400-ton battleships largely went unnoticed in the first few moments of the assault, and in the 10-minute lull between the first and second wave, Ganitch and his fellow sailors ditched their football gear and don their uniforms.

I wasn’t well protected during that second attack,” Ganitch quipped.

From his high vantage point, Ganitch watched as a Japanese Nakajima B5N torpedo bomber dropped a 500-pound bomb onto the ship’s deck, missing him by a mere 45 feet, according to Caltrider.

The ship did not remain unscathed, however, with the bomb piercing two decks below before exploding. Fifteen men were killed and 14 were listed as missing in action.

“If it had exploded on contact, I wouldn’t be here talking to you,” Ganitch told the American Veterans Center.

Despite the first attack, the USS Pennsylvania fought throughout the day, with its crew aiding in the anti-aircraft fight, providing damage control to other crews and ships, and fighting fires in the dry docks.

Due to its relatively light damage, the Pennsylvania was one of the first battleships out patrolling the Pacific and holds the distinction of serving at Attu, Kiska, the assault on the Gilbert Islands, Kwajalein and Eniwetok, Saipan, Tinian, Guam, Leyte Gulf, Lingayen Gulf, and Okinawa.

Seriously damaged by a Japanese aerial torpedo off Okinawa on Aug. 12, 1945, the USS Pennsylvania was the last major Navy ship to be hit during World War II — holding the distinction of being one of the first and last American ships hit during the war.

According to his 2022 obituary, Ganitch remained on the “Pennsy” through it all, up to and including witnessing the ship serve for target duty during the July 1946 Bikini atomic bomb testing.

Ganitch went on to outlive the USS Pennsylvania, serving about the USS Mt. Katmai during the Korean War before retiring from the Navy on Oct. 10, 1963.

No football pads were in sight.

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Vincent Speranza, the American paratrooper who became known as the soldier who doled out beer to his wounded comrades during the Battle of the Bulge, died Wednesday at the age of 98, the 18th Airborne Corps announced on Twitter.

The New York native was drafted out of high school in 1943 to Company H, 501st Parachutist Infantry Regiment, 101st Airborne Division, and slotted in as an incredibly green replacement in November 1944 as the unit regrouped following the failure of Operation Market Garden earlier that fall.

Within weeks, Speranza found himself among 600,000 GIs engaged in the bitter, nearly six-week campaign against approximately 500,000 Nazis.

On the second day of the fierce fighting, Company H found itself surrounded, its supplies waning rapidly.

“The Germans had slipped around and they had surrounded the town and we had no place to put the wounded,” Speranza told the 101st Airborne Museum in Bastogne in 2012.

The men found a bombed-out church and used it as a makeshift field hospital. Amid the chaos and carnage, Speranza heard his friend Joe Willis — who was wounded with shrapnel in both legs — begging for water.

His own canteen empty, Speranza checked a devastated tavern close by and found, to his delight, a working beer tap. Filling his helmet, which also served as his foxhole toilet, Speranza returned to the field hospital and gave Willis and other wounded soldiers the cold brew.

“I was like an old cow you know, feeding everybody with the beer,” Speranza cheekily recounted.

The helmet soon ran dry, so Speranza made another run but soon found his exit blocked by the regimental surgeon.

“What the hell are you doing, soldier?” groused the major.

”Giving aid and comfort to the wounded,” came Speranza’s insolent reply.

“He goes, ‘You stupid bastard, don’t you know I have chest cases and stomach cases in there? You give them beer you’ll kill them.’”

Speranza quickly placed the helmet back on his head, the vestiges of beer leaking down his cheeks as he ran back to his foxhole. Speranza went on to survive Bastogne and the war, but upon returning home the former paratrooper largely attempted avoiding the memories of his service, becoming a history teacher and a father in the years that followed.

Unbeknownst to him, however, the private’s act of kindness on December 17, 1944, became the stuff of legend in the town of Bastogne. Brasserie Lamborelle, a brewery in Bastogne, even created Airborne Beer that was served in helmet-shaped ceramic bowls to commemorate the paratrooper’s beer-carrying mission, Speranza’s VA biography said.

Incredibly, Speranza did not become aware of his fame until 2009, when he returned to the once-besieged town for the first time since the war.

“After being a machine gunner at the Battle of the Bulge, winning a Purple Heart and a Bronze Star and (spending) two decades as a public school teacher, Airborne Beer is what I’m famous for,” Speranza told Stars and Stripes.

In subsequent years, Speranza traveled across the U.S. and Europe, recounting his wartime stories to soldiers and veterans alike — even going viral in 2016 for his rendition of “Blood on the Risers” at the Frederick Army Air Field in Oklahoma.

This past March, the 98-year-old veteran skydived as part of a ceremony commemorating WWII paratroopers.

“Jumping is the most fantastic thing in the world,” he told Staten Island Live. “The last jump I made was in 1945, and when I reached about age 80, I started training for another jump. I said, ‘I’m going to be gone soon, and I gotta just do it one more time.’”

Since the 1920s, Japanese naval planners had envisioned a scenario for war with the United States that would require “attrition operations,” writes historian Ian Toll in “The Conquering Tide.”

By 1942, in response to the American amphibious landings in the eastern Solomon Islands on August 7, Japanese Admiral Gunichi Mikawa intended on a surprise nighttime raid into Savo Sound to destroy the vulnerable American transports and cargo ships screening the Allied landing force.

In the night and early morning of August 8 and 9, the Japanese column slipped into the channel between Savo and Guadalcanal undetected. By 1:31 a.m., Mikawa had signaled “Every ship attack.”

Among those battered awake by 5- and 8-inch shells was 19-year-old Navy Signalman 3rd Class Elgin Staples of Akron, Ohio, aboard the New Orleans-class cruiser the USS Astoria.

“Peppered along her length by 25mm machine-gun fire…One heavy projective struck the barbette of turret No. 1, knocking the weapon out of action and killing all personnel in the area. Another slammed home in the No. 1 fireroom, and a third stuck a kerosene tank on the starboard side amidships, spilling blazing fuel across the well deck,” writes Toll.

Swept into the air and out to sea from the concussive blasts, Staples found himself dazed, wounded by shrapnel to his legs, but alive — thanks to his M1926 inflatable rubber life belt strapped around his waist.

“I began treading water, trying to stay calm as I felt things brushing against my legs, knowing that if a shark attacked me, any moment could be my last,” he later wrote. “And the sharks weren’t the only danger: The powerful current threatened to sweep me out to sea.”

Rescued nearly four hours later by the destroyer USS Bagley (DD-386), Staples and other survivors were tasked to return and try to salvage the heavily damaged, burning Astoria, which was now attempting to beach itself off the shallow waters of Guadalcanal.

“Those efforts failed, as Astoria took on a dangerous list before finally sinking at approximately 1200 hours, putting Staples back into the water, still wearing the same life belt,” according to the National WWII Museum.

More than 200 men were lost aboard the Astoria, with Allied dead totaling 1,023 and 709 wounded during the Battle of Savo Island. The attack, according to the Naval History and Heritage Command “has come to be identified as the worst defeat in a single fleet action suffered by the United States Navy.”

Picked up by the USS President Jackson the following day and evacuated to New Caledonia, it was only then that Staples felt safe enough to remove his lucky life belt.

To his surprise, he discovered that the belt that had saved him from drowning twice before had been manufactured by the Firestone Tire and Rubber Company in his hometown of Akron, Ohio.

But soon, the connection ran even deeper.

Returning home on leave shortly after the battle, Staples reunited with his mother, Vera Mueller-Staples. In a 2001 recounting, Staples wrote about what occurred next:

After a quietly emotional welcome, I sat with my mother in our kitchen, telling her about my recent ordeal and hearing what had happened at home since I had gone away. My mother informed me that “to do her part,” she had gotten a wartime job at the Firestone plant. Surprised, I jumped up and grabbing my life belt from my duffel bag, put it on the table in front of her.

“Take a look at that, Mom,” I said, “It was made right here in Akron, at your plant.”

She leaned forward and taking the rubber belt in her hands, she read the label. She had just heard the story and knew that in the darkness of that terrible night, it was this one piece of rubber that had saved my life. When she looked up at me, her mouth and her eyes were open wide with surprise. “Son, I’m an inspector at Firestone. This is my inspector number,” she said, her voice hardly above a whisper .

We stared at each other, too stunned to speak. Then I stood up, walked around the table and pulled her up from her chair. We held each other in a tight embrace, saying nothing. My mother was not a demonstrative woman, but the significance of this amazing coincidence overcame her usual reserve. We hugged each other for a long, long time, feeling the bond between us. My mother had put her arms halfway around the world to save me.  

Staples returned to active duty shortly after, alive, thanks — in large part — to his mother.

“Now you’ve never met him,” comes the voice of Ralph Edwards, host of the wildly popular 1950s television show, “This Is Your Life.” You “have never seen him but he’s here tonight to clasp your hand in friendship.”

And with that, a large, square figure stepped out from behind a screen to shake the hand of what appears to be a deeply reticent Kiyoshi Tanimoto.

Tanimoto, a Methodist minister, was 36 years old when he became a survivor of Hiroshima. As to the shadowy figure who stepped out from behind the screen? Capt. Robert Lewis, co-pilot and aircraft commander of the Enola Gay — the B-29 bomber that unleashed the first atomic bomb, Little Boy, on the city of Hiroshima on Aug. 6, 1945.

At the time, Tanimoto was visiting the United States to coordinate care for 25 women who had been badly disfigured by the dropping of the atomic bomb in Hiroshima.

Dubbed the Hiroshima Maidens, the women were going to Mount Sinai Hospital in New York City for reconstructive surgery in May of 1955, and Tanimoto believed that he was in the studio to be interviewed about these women and their suffering, according to Electric Literature.

“This Is Your Life” — whose original premise was to surprise unsuspecting celebrities with friends and family who had supported them throughout their life and career — changed its tone with Tanimoto.

Asking Tanimoto to relive the morning of the bombing, the show begins to play an air raid siren, flashing between Tanimoto’s startled face and newsreel clips of the attack.

“The time has come, that split second of eternity which comes in one way or another to every man in his lifetime,” Edwards says to Tanimoto. “What did you do when you heard that bomb?”

“Well, I didn’t hear any sounds, but I saw strange flash running through the air,” replied the minister.

Throughout much of the rest of the interview,Tanimoto says very little, with Edwards guiding his guest into each new topic ranging from greeting the minister’s former U.S. church congregation to cringe-worthy questions such as “where were you on December 7, 1941?”

“It’s not only that Edwards mostly refuses to let his subject speak,” writes Electric Literature. “It’s that he continually takes the liberty of describing Tanimoto’s feelings and memories to Tanimoto, often speaking over him to do so… He embodies an America that will bomb your home, kill your neighbors, surprise you with an interview on a deeply personal, traumatic experience and then — rather than allow you to tell your own story — tell you what happened and how you felt about it.”

Around the 16-minute mark of the show, Lewis makes his appearance.

“Captain Lewis, come in here close,” Edwards beseeches the airman.

Lewis and Tanimoto remain awkwardly as far apart on screen as possible.

A visibly nervous Lewis begins to haltingly give an account of his experience on the morning of Aug. 6, 1945, to a stone-faced Tanimoto before relaying, head in hand, that he wrote in his logbook after the infamous flight, “My God, what have we done?”

In a This American Life story about “This is Your Life,” Allison Silverman reports that “Lewis is the one you’re most worried about watching this bizarre blind date. Ralph Edwards is pleased. Tanimoto is respectful, but Captain Lewis looks like he’s breaking down. People say he went to a bar before the show and came back drunk.”

The men shake hands once again and Lewis swiftly leaves stage left.

The bizarre interaction caused many, including Jack Gould at The New York Times, to accuse the show of exploiting the raw and private emotions of victims. Time magazine called Ralph Edwards a “spiritual prosecutor” to his guests.

Lewis, it appears, remained haunted by his actions.

During the show, Lewis pledged a contribution to Tanimoto’s Hiroshima Maiden’s fund “on behalf of the entire crew that participated in that mission, my company, and my lovely family.” 

Lewis’ crewman, Paul Tibbets, insisted until he died iin 2007 that he had no regrets about dropping the bomb.

In 1971, Lewis sold his famous log where he declared “Just how many Japs did we kill?… My God, what have we done?” and used the money from the sale to buy marble for his new hobby: sculpture.

His piece — a mushroom cloud with streams of blood flowing down the side — was later given to Dr. Glenn Van Warrebey, an American psychiatrist who treated Lewis, seemingly for post-traumatic stress disorder.

Tanimoto’s daughter, Koko Kondo later recalled to Silverman that her father had fond memories of his appearance on the show despite the ambush on live tv.

“He wasn’t horrified by meeting Captain Lewis, the co-pilot of the Enola Gay. In fact, the two of them started writing each other after the show,” Kondo told Silverman. “Captain Lewis changed her whole attitude about the old enemy. Seeing him tear up on stage at the El Capitan, she stopped hating American soldiers.”

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The Army promises to make you “Be All You Can Be.” The Air Force “Aims High.” The Navy is “Always Courageous.”

But can any of the other branches promise to make you a king? The Marines Corps can.

In a stranger than fiction, yet historically true turn of events, one stocky, blonde haired, blue-eyed Marine from a small coal mining town in Pennsylvania went from Warrant Officer to king of the island of La Gonave, Haiti.

Sgt. Faustin Wirkus’ ascent from a poor “breaker boy” — separating coal from slate — to king, is the stuff of Marine Corps legend.

“I had to go to work in the collieries,” Wirkus later wrote. “There was no escaping the sequence of that rule… but there was a different idea in my mind… In the little time I had been in school, it had become foggily known to me that somewhere out beyond the dust, the rattling collieries, and the grimy shacks of Dupont [Pennsylvania], was a world full of thrill and the glory of being alive.”

For Wikus, the path to that thrill and glory lay in becoming a U.S. Marine, and by age 18 the teen ran away from home to become one of “The Few.”

In 1915 he was among the first outfits of “Leathernecks” sent to Haiti to restore order, according to his New York Times obituary.

It was during his first tour that he fell in love with the island, returning for duty on and off for several years before, in 1920, Wirkus made a fortuitous friendship while serving at the tiny outpost of Anse à Gallet.

According to a 1931 Time article, Wirkus witnessed a tax collector arrest a Haitian woman for “voodoo offenses.”

The woman, according to the magazine, claimed that she was Queen Ti Memenne of La Gonave. Although initially transferred to Port-au-Prince to stand trial, the queen was eventually freed due to Wirkus’ pleas for leniency.

Five years later, the Haitian-obsessed Wirkus once again applied for duty on the island. His superiors, according to the Marine, “thought of La Gonave as the butt-end of the world,” yet acquiesced to his request.

Made resident commander of La Gonave, Wirkus returned to the island in April 1925. “During his tenure, he saved the Haitian government thousands of dollars by exposing graft in tax collection and ensured the island farmers were given fair tax assessments. He also oversaw the construction of the first airfield and directed the first census,” according to the USMC.

His practical reforms quickly endeared him to the 12,000 inhabitants of La Gonave, but that endearment went one step further. According to local superstition, “a previous ruler of the island had borne that name {King Faustin I] and, according to legend had vanished in 1848 with the promise that his descendant of the same name would return to take his throne,” wrote The New York Times.

By candlelight on the evening of July 18, 1926, Queen Ti Memenne crowned the gunnery sergeant Faustin II, the “White King of La Gonave.” Carried from the houmfort, or voodoo temple, a blood sacrifice was made via a rooster (The New York Times contradicts this and claims it was a goat), as the crowd shouted “The King! Long live King Faustin!” to the more than slightly confused Marine.

“They made me a sort of king in a ceremony I thought was just a celebration of some kind. I learned later they thought I was the reincarnation of a former king of the island who had taken the name of Faustin I when he came into power. The coincidence was just good luck for me,” the flabbergasted Marine recalled.

Wirkus reigned for an incredible three years while still serving in the USMC, before being recalled to Port-au-Prince after Haitian officials expressed “jealousy” over Wirkus’ successes.

By 1931, King Faustin II was no more, with Wirkus leaving the service and returning stateside. In 1939, he re-enlisted with the Marines, serving first as a recruiter in New York before being transferred to the Navy Pre-Flight School in North Carolina.

The Marine and one-time king died in October 1945, leaving behind a wife and a young son — also by the name of Faustin.

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Lt. Col. William Henry Rankin was falling. Or, at least, he was trying to fall.

A U.S. Marine pilot, Rankin was a veteran of both World War II and the Korean War. Yet it was on July 26, 1959, that he came closest to death.

During a flight from Naval Air Station South Weymouth, Massachusetts, to Marine Corps Air Station Beaufort, South Carolina, Rankin climbed to 47,000 feet at a speed of 624 miles per hour over Norfolk, Virginia, when his F-8 Crusader jet engine suddenly stalled and a fire warning light illuminated.

“Unable to get the engine restarted, having lost all power, and having difficulty keeping his jet from going into a complete nosedive, he opted for ejecting, despite the extreme altitude and his lack of a pressure suit,” according to Business Insider.

Ejecting into air that was approximately -65 F, Rankin experienced instant discomfort. The rapid decompression caused his abdomen to swell and his eyes, nose, mouth and ears to bleed.

“I felt as though I were a chunk of beef being tossed into a cavernous deep freeze,” Rankin recalled in his book “The Man Who Rode the Thunder” — available for a cool $799.29 on Amazon.

“The pain of ‘explosive’ decompression was unbearable,” he continued. “I could feel my abdomen distending, stretching, stretching, stretching, until I thought it would burst. My eyes felt as though they were being ripped from their sockets, my head as if it were splitting into several parts, my ears bursting inside, and throughout my entire body there were severe cramps.”

To make matters worse, the Marine aviator had exited his jet atop a gigantic thunderstorm — a cumulonimbus tower that, according to the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign, can be responsible for “large thunderstorms whose updrafts and downdrafts are so closely in balance that such a storm can have a lifetime of several hours.”

After free falling for several minutes through hail the size of baseballs that threaten to beat him into unconsciousness, Rankin became aware of another issue — his parachute’s auto-deployment system, which was supposed to deploy at 10,000 feet, seemingly malfunctioned.

“I had never known such savage pain. I was convinced I would not survive; no human could,” Rankin wrote.

Eventually the auto-deploy did kick in, but Rankin wasn’t exactly at 10,000 feet yet.

“The barometric switch that deploys the parachute automatically had been fooled by the violent weather conditions in the storm, triggering it early,” according to Business Insider.

Several cataclysmic events took place as a result.

With the parachute opening above 10,000 feet, the prolonging of Rankin’s descent meant there was a real possibility that he could die from asphyxiation or hypothermia.

It also meant that he was perilously trapped in the storm system’s up and down draft, buffeting the aviator thousands of feet into the sky before once again dragging him back down.

“At one point I got seasick and heaved,” Rankin recalled in his memoir.

To add to Rankin’s misery, the air around him, so saturated with water, threatened to drown him in the sky.

For nearly 40 minutes this cycle continued, with flashes of thunder and lightning striking around him from every direction.

“I didn’t hear the thunder, I felt it,” Rankin put it simply.

Mercifully, the fierceness of the storm began to abate, with the pilot able to at last escape the storm’s drafts.

The air then became noticeably warmer and the rain that threatened to once drown him relented to a soothing summer shower.

Miraculously, Rankin was alive, his parachute intact, and he began to glide towards the forests of the North Carolina backcountry.

“As he prepared to land, the storm couldn’t resist one final poke, and the wind kicked up, flinging him into a stand of trees,” wrote Anders Clark in Disciples of Flight. “His parachute became tangled up in the branches, and Rankin’s momentum carried him headfirst into the trunk of a tree.”

Once freed from the tree’s grasp, Rankin dragged himself to a nearby road, where a motorist eventually picked him up and drove him to a payphone to call for an ambulance.

Rankin spent several weeks in a hospital recovering from frostbite, severe decompression and numerous other ailments. But despite his 40-minute ordeal in the sky, he suffered no long-term physical damage and returned to active duty shortly thereafter.

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