Christy Mathewson and Ty Cobb were among several Hall-of-Famers who served in the Gas & Flame Division of the US Chemical Warfare Service near the end of World War I. The division was charged with advancing across no-man’s land under cover of an artillery barrage, spraying liquid flames from tanks strapped to their backs and tossing gas-filled bombs into enemy trenches. During a botched training drill, eight men died from breathing poisonous gas and eight more were injured, including Mathewson, who struggled with tuberculosis for the next seven years until his death in 1925. [left: Matty and Cobb in uniform, 1918; right: Cobb and Matty in 1911].
JFK went to great lengths to strenthen ties with Pakistan. Soon after taking office, he hosted Pakistan’s military dictator, President Mohammad Ayub Khan, in an elaborate state dinner at Mount Vernon; and it was at this dinner that Mrs. Kennedy and Ayub Khan learned of their shared love of horses. Mrs. Kennedy later visited Pakistan, where Ayub Khan gave her a beautiful horse [photo left]. When Ayub Khan visited the US again, Mrs. Kennedy took him to the Virginia farm where the horse was stabled and they went riding.
These photos show US Marines on Saipan, where they fought entrenched Japanese forces during June and July 1944. Saipan had a large Japanese civilian population. Many were killed during the battle and others committed suicide rather than submit to vicorious Allied forces. On the right, a Marine medic tends to a Japanese child.
Left: Francis Gary Powers’ downed U-2 aerial surveillance plane, on display in the Central Museum of the Armed Forces in Moscow [Mikko Tapio Vartianen photo]. The shoot-down occurred in May 1960. Right: The Glienicke Bridge, shown here during the Cold War, which formed the border between East and West Berlin [Undogmatisch Berlin photo]. Powers was freed from a Soviet prison in a Feb. 1962 exchange on the bridge which returned an imprisoned KGB spy to the USSR.
The first meeting among FDR, Stalin and Churchill during the 1943 Tehran Conference took place in the elaborate British Embassy. There, in the Victorian Drawing Room, the ‘Big Three’ toasted Churchill during a formal dinner on Nov. 30, his 69th birthday, which was topped off with a large birthday cake ablaze with candles. Reports say the dinner was quite a boozy affair. But why not? Stalin also had a reason to celebrate: FDR and Churchill had finally committed to launch Operation Overlord, the invasion of France, in 1944, which would relieve some of the pressure of the war in the east.
In 1944, illustrator Floyd Davis painted this delightful image of the bar at the Hôtel Scribe in Paris, which had become a favorite haunt for journalists after the Allies liberated the city in August 1944. New Yorker reporter Janet Flanner and CBS newscaster William Shirer are among those shown here, seated at a center table with a smiling Ernest Hemingway. Photographer Robert Capa, helmeted and unshaven, whose D-Day photos riveted the nation, is at the top right. Right: the hotel today.
About Gene Krantz and those white vests… In the early days of the space program, there were 3 mission control teams — red, white and blue — and Gene Kranz [now 90] led the white team. Because he liked 3-piece suits, Krant’z wife, Marta, a seamstress, sewed a new white vest for every mission. The vest he wore for the Apollo 13 mission [“Houston, we have a problem”] is now on display at the Smithsonian.
American literary giant Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, shown here in 1868 — author of “Paul Revere’s Ride” and “Evangeline,” Bowdoin classmate and lifelong friend of Nathaniel Hawthorne, Harvard professor — lived for fifty years in the colonial Cambridge, Massachusetts, home which George Washington had used as his Revolutionary War headquarters (1775–76). The Longfellow family donated the house and its contents to the National Park Service in 1972 and it is now operated as a museum.
A Ukrainian soldier sits in a dugout near the front line.
