This date in history

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Originally Posted by JIMBUNA

1944 4,000 shells detonate in RAF arms depot at Fauld, near Stoke-on-Trent, Staffordshire; village of Hanbury destroyed, at least 70 people killed.

R.A.F. PHOTO OF POST-BLAST CRATER

There had been staff shortages, a management position had remained empty for a year, and 189 inexperienced Italian POWs were working in the mines at the time of the accident. In 1974, it was announced that the cause of the explosion was probably a site worker removing a detonator from a live bomb using a brass chisel rather than a wooden batten. The RAF Fauld explosion was one of the largest non-nuclear explosions in history and the largest to occur on UK soil.

THE BOMB STORE AS PAINTED BY WAR ARTIST DAVID BOMBERG
<In February 1942, however, he was invited to paint an underground bomb store at RAF Fauld in Tutbury near Burton-on-Trent, Staffordshire. Sited in a disused gypsum mine, it was one of the largest stores of munitions in Britain with a capacity to hold up to 20,000 tons of high explosives. 'I was a bit fearful,' his wife Lilian later remembered, 'when I learned David not only got lost among the bombs, but I knew how curiously he climbed, slithered and slid among and over the piles to get the angle and form of interest' .... Bomberg spent two weeks at RAF Fauld making numerous oil studies and drawings of the bomb store. He completed the paintings once he returned to London, submitting four drawings with one large and two small paintings to the WAAC. Although the bomb store series is now regarded as a high point in Bomberg's career, the WAAC considered the works too innovative and accepted just three drawings. The committee did not commission Bomberg again, and declined his offer to work on a large mural painting of the same subject.
Lilian Bomberg's concerns about the safety of the mine were proved disastrously prophetic when, on 27 November 1944, RAF Fauld accidentally blew up. The detonation of a single bomb ignited 3500 tons of high explosives, the largest explosion ever recorded on British soil. Sixty-eight people were killed and tremors were felt as far away as Southern Europe. https://www.wikiart.org/en/david-bomberg/bomb-store-1942

[Jimbuna]

1775 Second Continental Congress formally establishes US Navy.

1918 Kaiser Wilhelm II of Prussia & Germany abdicates.

1934 Winston Churchill tells British Prime Minister Stanley Baldwin not to under estimate German air power.

1943 Franklin D. Roosevelt, Winston Churchill and Joseph Stalin meet at the Tehran Conference in Iran to map out strategy.

1944 400 Rotterdammers attack coal warehouse. In reprisal 40 Dutch men are executed by Nazis.

1946 Dutch Nazi Anton Mussert sentenced to death.

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1887 US receives rights to Pearl Harbor, on Oahu, Hawaii.

1917 A Supreme Allied War Council meets at Versailles to define war aims.

1941 Passenger ship Lurline sends radio signal of sighting Japanese war fleet.

1943 US aircraft carrier Hornet launched.

1951 First underground atomic explosion at Frenchman Flat in Nevada.

[Jimbuna]

1487 The first German Beer Purity Law (Reinheitsgebot), is promulgated in Munich by Albert IV, Duke of Bavaria stating beer should be brewed from only three ingredients – water, malt and hops.

1941 Japanese Emperor Hirohito consults with admirals Shimada and Nagano.

1942 U-boats sink and damage 142 allied ships this month (877,774 tons)

1942 German supply vessel Uckermark (formerly called the Altmark) explodes and sinks off Yokohama.

1944 Biggest and last British battleship HMS Vanguard launched.

1953 French parachutists under Colonel De Castries attacks Dien Bien Phu.

1982 US submarine Thomas Edison collides with US Navy destroyer in South China Sea.

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1887 Sherlock Holmes first appears in print in "Study in Scarlet" by Arthur Conan Doyle.

1915 The US requests that Germany withdraw its military and naval attaches from the Embassy in Washington.

1939 SS-Fuhrer Himmler begins deportation of Polish Jews.

1941 Japanese Emperor Hirohito signs declaration of war.

1943 At the end of the Tehran Conference, the Big Three (Stalin, Churchill and Roosevelt) agree that the invasion of Normandy should take place in May 1944.

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Originally Posted by Jimbuna

1887 Sherlock Holmes first appears in print in "Study in Scarlet" by Arthur Conan Doyle.

"Huzza! The game's afoot! Watson! Fetch your Webley!"... I've occasionally humorously uttered that in the course of 40+ years of armed employment-and everyone knew what I was talking about; probably due in part to Basil Rathbone/Nigel Bruces' fabulous portrayal of the sleuth.

[Jimbuna]

1941 US Naval Intelligence ceases bugging Japanese consul.

1941 Japanese Marshal Admiral Yamamoto sends his fleet to Pearl Harbour.

1943 First RSHA (Reichssicherheitshauptamt - Nazi Reich Security Head Office) transport out of Vienna reaches Birkenau camp.

1990 First time 12 people in space at the same time.

[Jimbuna]

1943 Battle of Monte Cassino, Italy begins.

1944 Britain's Home Guard ('Dad's Army') is officially stood down at a special farewell parade in Hyde Park, London.

1989 Soviet President Mikhail Gorbachev and US President George H. W. Bush, declare the Cold War over.

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1908 The world's ten leading maritime nations attend a Naval Conference in London; they agree on rules for blockade, convoys, and seizure of contraband.

1915 Henry Ford's peace ship, Oscar II, sails for Europe 'to get the boys out of the trenches by Christmas'

1918 US President Woodrow Wilson sails for Versailles Peace Conference in France.

1945 Senate approves US participation in United Nations.

1948 SS Kiangya hits mine in Whangpoo River, China, sinks killing 2,750.

1952 Killer fogs begin in London, England; the term "Smog" is coined.

1966 Military Working Dog "Nemo" saves the life of his handler Airman Robert A. Throneburg during the Vietnam War, surviving a gunshot wound to the nose.

1977 Jean-Bédel Bokassa crowns himself Emperor of the Central African Empire in a lavish ceremony costing US$20 million - one third of the nation's budget.

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Originally Posted by Jimbuna

1948 SS Kiangya hits mine in Whangpoo River, China, sinks killing 2,750.

SOME WOULD SAY HUANGPOO RIVER SHE WAS REFLOATED AND RENAMED THE DONGFANG HONG 8 ...AND OPERATED 'TILL 1983!!

[Jimbuna]

1872 Ship the Mary Celeste is discovered mysteriously abandoned by her crew in the Atlantic Ocean.

1941 US aircraft carrier Lexington and 5 heavy cruisers leave Pearl Harbor.

1945 Flight 19 the "Lost Squadron" of 5 torpedo bombers and 14 airmen is lost east of Florida in the supposed Bermuda Triangle.

1958 Subscriber Trunk Dialling (STD) is inaugurated in the UK by Queen Elizabeth II when she speaks to the Lord Provost in a call from Bristol to Edinburgh.

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1933: National prohibition comes to an end as Utah becomes the 36th state to repeal the Eighteenth Amendment.

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1917 French munition ship "Mont Blanc" explodes in Halifax, Canada killing 1,700

1921 Anglo-Irish Treaty signed; Ireland receives dominion status; partition creates Northern Ireland.

1938 French/German non-attack treaty drawn (Ribbentrop-Bonnet Pact)

1941 Dutch & British pilots see Japanese invasion fleet at Singapore.

1957 First US attempt to launch a satellite fails-Vanguard rocket blows up.

1962 US abandons Skybolt ballistic missile programme.

[Jimbuna]

1941 Imperial Japanese Navy with 353 planes attack the US fleet at Pearl Harbor Naval Base, Hawaii, killing 2,403 people.

1941 First Japanese midget submarine (No. 20) attacked by a US ship (USS Ward)

[Aktungbby]

Originally Posted by Jimbuna

1941 Imperial Japanese Navy with 353 planes attack the US fleet at Pearl Harbor Naval Base, Hawaii, killing 2,403 people.

1941 First Japanese midget submarine (No. 20) attacked by a US ship (USS Ward)

...and sunk by a gun crew from Minnesota! http://www.soest.hawaii.edu/HURL/midget.php