President Truman created a new federal agency to coordinate local, state and federal civil defense strategy after the Soviet Union detonated a powerful atomic bomb in 1949. Since many Japanese people had survived the Hiroshima and Nagasaki bombings, the US government assumed that, with proper training and preparation, the American civilian population could survive a nuclear bomb, too. Fallout shelters were constructed in public buildings and stocked with food and the agency prepared a raft of educational materials for the public, including the nine-minute film, Duck and Cover.
For more than a hundred years, barges transported Allegheny coal from Cumberland, Maryland, down the C & O Canal to the tidewater port in Georgetown. But developments in the railroad after the Civil War curtailed this business and the canal fell into ruin. When government officials in the 1950s proposed paving the canal as a highway, environmental activists led by Supreme Court Justice William O. Douglas intervened, staging well-publicized hikes along the canal. The canal is now a protected national monument and a Georgetown destination for runners, bikers and tourists.
Left: Rick Rescorla at the Battle of Ia Drang, in the Central Highlands of South Vietnam, November 1965. Right: Rescorla as the head of security for Morgan Stanley in the South Tower of the World Trade Center on 9/11. After the first plane struck the North Tower, occupants of the South Tower were advised to stay in their offices, but Rescola ignored the order and led his 2700 employees to safety. [All but six were saved.] He then returned to the building to look for others needing help, but was killed when the South Tower collapsed.
In the depth of the Depression, when many people couldn’t afford food or gasoline, Clyde Barrow and his girlfriend, Bonnie Parker, robbed more than one hundred small stores, rural gas stations and banks. The press published series of campy staged photos of the couple, brandishing cigars and rifles, derived from an undeveloped roll of film found at an abandoned hide-out. These photos created a glamorous, romanticized public image of the young lovers who lived off the land by breaking the law and defied conventional sexual morality. The couple is believed to have killed nine police officers and four civilians in a two-year crime spree centered in Texas, Oklahoma and Louisiana. They were killed in a federal ambush in May 1934.
On August 1, 1943, 178 B-24 Liberator heavy bombers with 1,751 aircrew mounted a low-level daylight raid against Axis oil refineries in Ploiești, Romania. The mission was premised on the element of surprise and the ability of the large force to maintain formation on the long flight from their airbase in Benghazi, Libya. But the Germans had advance notice of the raid and weather and other difficulties caused the bombers to break formation, forcing many pilots to improvise their attack. Only 88 B-24s returned to Benghazi after the operation. Most had battle damage. 310 air crewmen had been killed and 190 had been captured. While initially hailed as a success, the raid crippled Axis oil supply lines for only four months. Left: B-24s over Ploiesti. Right: B-24 waist gunner in action.
Left: Margaretha Zelle, born in the Netherlands in 1876, who became a Paris sensation in 1904 as the exotic dancer “Mata Hari.” Right: Zelle in 1917, upon her arrest as a German war spy who was responsible for the deaths of 50,000 French soldiers. Zelle was convicted of treason and executed by a firing squad in a case now believed to have been fabricated to supply a demoralized French public with a scapegoat for catastrophic losses suffered during a difficult period in WWI.
Before Navalny emerged as the leading opposition politician in Russia, it was Boris Nemtsov, an energetic and charismatic man, who stood as Putin’s main challenger. On the night of February 27, 2015, Nemtsov was shot and killed instantly [right photo] as he walked with his girlfriend across the Bolshoy Moskvorestsky Bridge in the center of Moscow, just yards in front of the Kremlin. The assassination occurred the night before Nemtsov was scheduled to lead a rally in protest of economic conditions in Russia and in opposition to Russian involvement in the war in Ukraine, which had begun just months before. Nemtsov had announced that he had compiled a report detailing the heavy involvement of the Russian army in supporting pro-Russian separatist forces in the disputed Donbass region of eastern Ukraine. The report contradicted the official Russian story on its involvement in Ukraine. On the night following his killing, Nemtsov’s apartment was raided and his Ukraine report and all of his work materials were confiscated.
Left: British Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain arrives at the London airport from Munich, holding Hitler’s signed agreement to commit to peaceful methods of resolving conflict, September 30, 1938. [The meeting at Munich is shown on the right.] The document signified the agreement of Britain and France to allow Hitler to seize part of Czechoslovakia by force. One year later, as Hitler prepared to invade Poland, he told his advisors "[o]ur enemies are men below average, not men of action, not masters. They are little worms. I saw them at Munich.”
