Throwback Thursday - Share an Interesting Historical Event \ stacker news ~history

Throwback Thursday - Share an Interesting Historical Event

1860 sats \ 5 comments \ @sn 4 Jan history

It's time for a history lesson.

Let's hear some historical events that you think other stackers should know about. Any topic counts.

Feel free to share events that happened in your home country, things you experienced personally, or simply share some lessons you learned from watching historical events unfold from afar.

Send your best 👇

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1176 sats \ 1 reply \ @ek 4 Jan

This scene from The Pacific:

Marines on the shore thought the US navy is winning against the Japanese and cheered on the battle. They didn't realize the US navy is "getting their ass handed to them" until the morning:

Rear Admiral Samuel J. Cox, director of the Naval History and Heritage Command, considers this battle and the Battle of Tassafaronga to be two of the worst defeats in U.S. naval history, with only the attack on Pearl Harbor being worse.

-- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Battle_of_Savo_Island

According to my research, this scene is depicting the Battle of Savo Island which took place on 8-9 August 1942. The ship that exploded in this scene was the HMAS Canberra from Australia.

-- HMAS Canberra (center left) protects three Allied transport ships, source

In the darkness of the early hours of the morning of 9 August 1942 the RAN heavy cruiser HMAS Canberra was severely damaged off Guadalcanal (Solomon Islands) in a surprise attack by a powerful Japanese naval force in an action that became known as the Battle of Savo Island. Canberra was hit 24 times in less than two minutes and 84 of her crew were killed including Captain Frank Getting. Following an order to abandon ship the Canberra was sunk the next day by a torpedo from a US destroyer.

-- https://www.awm.gov.au/articles/encyclopedia/ww2_navy/savo

63 sats \ 0 replies \ @ek 4 Jan

Btw, getting hit 24 times in less than two minutes means that on average, they got hit every 5 second.

752 sats \ 0 replies \ @0xbitcoiner 4 Jan

The name of the greatest and most important sailor for astronauts is Fernão de Magalhães. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ferdinand_Magellan

1216 sats \ 0 replies \ @Signal312 4 Jan

The Greatest War Crime Never Told

There were death camps run by the American and French military, for German prisoners of war, in 1945. Huge numbers (around a million) of German soldiers died in them, from engineered starvation and exposure.

Here's a senior historian, in the forward to the book Other Losses: An Investigation into the Mass Deaths of German Prisoners at the Hands of the French and Americans after World War II

“Starting in April 1945, the United States Army and the French Army casually annihilated about one million [German] men, most of them in American camps … Eisenhower’s hatred, passed through the lens of a compliant military bureaucracy, produced the horror of death camps unequalled by anything in American military history.

I first came across this almost completely unknown historical event in a small town in Austria. On the outskirts of town was a memorial to the tens of thousands of prisoners of war who died there, penned up in a field, with almost no food or clothing.

21 sats \ 0 replies \ @mango 4 Jan

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