THE ULTIMATE
On this day, May 24th 1930. Amy Johnson gained fame as an aviator for becoming the first woman to fly solo from England to Australia.
She flew from Croydon. England to Darwin in Australia, a trip of 11,000 miles, in her plane Jason. She gained numerous honours for her feat in both Britain and Australia. During the Second World War she served in the Air Transport Auxillary (ATA) where she transported RAF planes across the country the airfields where they would be used to engage the enemy and defend Britain and its allies.
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On this day, May 19th 1909, Nicholas Winton was born.
Nicholas Winton was a British humanitarian known for rescuing 669 Jewish children from Nazi occupied Czechoslovakia just before the outbreak of World War Two. He created an organisation to find homes for the children and the safe passage of the children by train across Europe to Britain. He wrote to other countries, but only Sweden also took in the freed Jewish children. This way the children escaped the Nazis and the Holocaust, in which many of their parents perished. He refused to talk about his actions in Czechoslovakia, now the Czech Republic and Slovakia, for decades until his wife found his scrapbook with details of the children he had helped in the loft. Then in 1988 a BBC programme reunited him with many children, now adults, who he had saved. Nicholas was always modest about his role, saying that others had done the more dangerous work of collecting the children and putting them on the trains to safety. He also regretted the children he couldn't save, only a few on the last train out of Prague station survived the war. He also believed had other countries responded to his letters calling for homes for the children he could hae saved more. In 2003 he was knighted by the Queen for his services to humanity in saving Jewish children from Nazi occupied Czechoslovakia. In 2014 he was awarded the highest honour of the Czech Republic. As VE Day (Victory in Europe) is celebrated, which drew to a close the war against the Nazis across Europe, it should be remembered that it was an international Allied effort - involving citizens from the United States, Britain, France and the Soviet Union (the main part of which was modern day Russia).
What is more, the war effort was even more international than the above list of countries suggests, for at that time Britain was a globe spanning Empire, and British citizens from across its Empire leapt to the defence of what they saw as the 'mother country'. Around 10,000 British citizens came from the Caribbean to fight for Britain against the Nazis, around 5,000 served in the RAF. See the story of 95 year-old veteran, Albert Jarret who travelled from the Caribbean to serve in the RAF, and the campaign to give such contributions greater recognition with a memorial at the National Memorial Arboretum in Staffordshire, on the BBC at: https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/av/uk-england-birmingham-52543809/ve-day-the-experience-of-a-caribbean-ww2-raf-veteran See how 170 trees that survived the Hiroshima Atom Bomb blast, when pretty much everything else in 2km of the blast was destroye, offered hope in the past and today. A wonderful film, by the BBC's 'Witness History', talking to one of the founders of Green Legacy Hiroshima, Tomoko Watanabe, about the detruction of the bombing and how buds on the trees gave the people of Hiroshima hope in the aftermath; how she learned to appreciate the trees and how the seeds of these remarkable survivors being sent around the world offer hope and peace to humanity today. The Green Legacy Hiroshma is at: http://glh.unitar.org/ See the BBC film at: https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/av/stories-52459140/the-trees-that-survived-the-bombing-of-hiroshima Picture; T Grand via Pixabay.
The U.S. Navy is set to name an aircraft carrier after Doris 'Dorie' Miller, the African-American naval hero from the Second World War Pearl Harbor attacks.
Dorie Miller, served in the U.S. Navy during the period of segregation, and could only carry out basic messman duties - laundry, cleaning, and cooking. However, when Japan launched its World War Two raid on the U.S. Navy at anchor in its Pacific Base at Pearl Harbor in Hawaii, Dorie Miller aided wounded sailors of his ship the USS West Virginia, including removing the Captain to saftey. Then he took over an anti-aircraft machine gun, for which he hadn't been trained, and for 15 minutes open fired on the Japanese planes that were destroying the US Pacific fleet. He recalled later that he had seen other sailors training on the gun, and that when he tried to use it, it 'worked just fine'. Dorie continued his attack until the ammunition ran out, believing he had downed at least one of the attackers. The USS West Virginia, eventually sank with the loss of 100 men. Initially, Dorie Miller wasn't mentioned for his actions by name in a roll-call of the day's US heroes, but only as an unnamed black man. A newspaper eventually revealed Dorie Miller's name, and he was eventually awarded the US Navy's 'Navy Cross' by President Franklin Delano Roosevelt, becoming one of the first US national heroes of the Second World War. Sadly, he did not survive the war, being killed when his ship was sunk in the 1943 Batlle of Makin. The official announcement to name the aircraft carrier after Doris 'Dorie' Miller, comes on this year's Martin Luther King jr. Day. See more via: https://www.npr.org/2020/01/19/797756016/u-s-navy-to-name-aircraft-carrier-after-wwii-hero-doris-miller https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-us-canada-51168798 |
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