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On This Day in History


GhostDancer

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2 hours ago, death tribble said:

The Battle of Hamel took place and resulted in an Allied victory in World War 1

 

Aussies and a few Americans.

 

And I'll say this: If you have to serve under a foreign commander, you might not be able to do better than serving under Sir John Monash.

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  • 3 weeks later...

Can't believe I missed this.

 

Wednesday August 8 was the centenary of what Ludendorff dubbed "der Schwarzer Tag des deutschen Heeres" (the Black Day of the German Army), the first day of the Battle of Amiens, generally held to be the beginning of the Hundred Days' Offensive that ended the First World War.  British III Corps, Australian Corps,  Canadian Corps, and elements of French 1st Army, using the Monash-Currie tactical system including tank support and careful preparations and limited tactical objectives, jumped off pre-dawn and achieved tactical surprise.  South of the Somme, a 24 kilometer gap was opened in the German lines, and the Allies gained on average more than five miles the first day.  Most importantly, the attack broke off after August 12, saving the senseless casualties that characterized most of the Western Front in WW1; however, strategically the offensive continued in a different sector a week later. 

 

No one could tell this at the time, but the Great War had less than three months til its conclusion.

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On 8/10/2018 at 10:19 AM, Cancer said:

 

That can't be right.  I remember seeing Snoopy in Peanuts cartoons when I was single-digit-years old, and I am 62 now, so he has to be over 50.  I would believe that he's 60, though.

 

According to Wikipedia, he was introduced October 4, 1950 (2 days after the strip started), and was named Snoopy in a strip on November 10, 1950. So, 68 this year.

 

Additionally, A Charlie Brown Christmas premiered in 1965, which makes his appearance in that to be 53 years ago in December.

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  • 2 weeks later...

Is Russia carrying out an anniversary re-enactment?

 

I remember reading an anecdote in (IIRC) the old MOVES magazine (so I read this in the mid-to-late 1970s) about a Red Army relatively junior officer at the head of a tank column in western Czechoslovakia in that invasion, not too far from the border with Germany.  Supposedly he came over a ridge, and thought he saw something on the far side of the valley, halted his column ... and was terrified to the core of his being to see tanks bearing the White Star of the United States Army, and that he was about to take the opening shots of World War III.  He checked his maps (and yes, he was several kilometers inside Czechoslovakia), ordered his tanks to take defilade positions, radioed headquarters for orders, and watched.

 

It was several hours before headquarters got back to him, and during that time the American tanks behaved rather oddly, moving around at random and not acting like a coherent unit.  Finally headquarters radioed back to him that everything was OK: it was an East German film crew working on a war movie.

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  • 2 weeks later...

A hundred years ago tonight, Australian forces crossed the Somme and broke the German lines at Battle of Mont Saint-Quentin (a key height anchoring the German defenses in the area, and for which the battle is named) and Peronne.  This was the final segment of the Second Battle of the Somme, and a part of the drum roll of attacks that made up the Hundred Days Offensive which ended the First World War.

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