Doolittle Raid 80th Anniversary

Today is the 80th anniversary of the Doolittle Raid on Tokyo. I read Thirty Seconds Over Tokyo as a kid, and also saw the movie with Spencer Tracy, Van Johnson,  and Robert Mitchum.

Battle of Okinawa - started 77 years ago today

On April 1, 1945, the Battle of Okinawa began. You can read this great historical article by the National WWII Museum (New Orleans).

National Vietnam War Veterans Day 2022

Thank you to all the veterans of the Vietnam War.

National Medal of Honor Day - 25 March 2022

Let's honor the courage U.S. servicemen and servicewomen displayed in the face of danger to themselves and others.

Read the fascinating history of the Medal of Honor here. There have been 3,511 recipients. There is a new Medal of Honor Museum opening late 2024 in Arlington, TX. Groundbreaking was fittingly on 25 March 2022.

Here are the three different medals awarded by service. 

Weird fact about Hitler's SA brownshirts

I'm reading volume 1 of John Toland's outstanding books on Adolf Hitler. My copies were published in 1976 and are First Editions. The first volume covers the evil man's childhood (born 1889) through October 1938, right after the Munich deception regarding Czechoslovakia. Volume 2 goes from there to the end of the war.

I'm at the point when 1926 is closing out. Hitler is out of Landsberg Prison, which was like a vacation for him to write his unbelievable Mein Kampf. He has decided the Nazi party would no longer use illegal tactics to gain power and his speeches reflect "saving" Germany.

We are all familiar with the Nazis' Brownshirts, led first by Ernst Röhm, and their violent street attacks.

The actual shirts they became known for came about due to . . . simply price. These were shirts intended for German troops in East Africa, but there was a surplus, so they were on sale at wholesale prices! So the Nazis bought them cheap.

No special or superior reason for the brown shirts. Just got a great price on them.

Fiction becomes reality?

In my second book, Behind German Lines, the main story line is about the Nazis building and deploying an Electromagnetic Pulse (EMP) weapon. The effects were devastating on equipment and humans. Whether an EMP would actually harm humans was my fiction of the story; we all know electric equipment is ruined by one.

Fast forward to the present. The U.S. Intelligence community says the "Havana Syndrome" you may have heard about could be the result of an EMP. A frightening prospect in the real world.

Science fiction writers often predict the future. I sure wasn't expecting to do that with a WWII novel.

2022 International Holocaust Remembrance Day

Today is International Holocaust Remembrance Day. Please take a moment to remember the victims, and the survivors.