Here are a couple of quotes from Gay's book Sole Survivor on some points here:

First is related to leaving A&M.

"There are many reasons I didn't want to go back to college for my junior year. Money was one. I knew it was draining my folks just to keep me there, and with Hitler running wild in Europe it was obvious the U.S. would have to bail things out again. Somehow, what I was doing at school just didn't seem to be what I would want to do if I had to fight in a war. So I decided to go home and talk things over - this did not seem to be something to discuss on the telephone"

Here are a few sections where he talks about Midway.

"I cannot tell you the sequence in which the planes went down. Everything was happening at once, but I was consciously seeing it all. At least one plane blew up, and each would hit the water and seem to disappear."

"Waldron was shot down very early. His plane burst into flames, and I saw him stand up to get out of the fire. He put his right leg outside the cockpit, and then hit the water and disappeared. His radioman, Dobbs, didn't have a chance. Good old Dobbs. When we had been leaving Pearl Harbor, Dobbs had orders back to the States to teach radio. But he had chosen to delay that assignment and stay with us."

"Much to early, it seemed, Bob Huntington said, "They got me!" "Are you hurt bad?" I asked. I looked back and Bob was slumped down almost out of sight. "Can you move?" I asked. He said no more."

"The cable, or mechanical release, came out of the instrument panel on the left side, designed to be pulled with the left hand. But those damn Zeros had messed up my program. My left hand did not work. Anyway, it was awkward, and I almost lost control of the plane trying to pull out that cable by the roots. I can't honestly say I got rid of that torpedo. It felt like it. I had never done it before so I couldn't be sure, and it the plane pitching like a bronco, I had to be content with trying my best"

"God, but that ship looked big! I remember thinking, "Why in the hell doesn't the Hornet look that big when I'm trying to land on her?"

Lots more in about watching the carriers get hit and surviving in the water. Good book and worth having with the connection to A&M.

Murder Hornet said:

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Cen-Tex said:

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LMCane said:

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The Confederate Rebel Yell sounded like a pack of hungry hyenas

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Liked the Don Troiani artwork in the clip

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Any truth that our Whooping is based on the rebel yell?

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Maybe. Seeing as how the first umpteen-years would have had sons and grandsons of Confederate veterans attending the college.

JABQ04 said:

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Maybe. Seeing as how the first umpteen-years would have had sons and grandsons of Confederate veterans attending the college.

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Faculty was likely 90% Confederate veterans as well

Mind blowing personal history fact - my brother in law is about my age, 60.

His grandfather was part of General Pershing's expedition into Mexico chasing after Pancho Villa and was too old to be shipped out for WWI. Also, his uncle died in the Spanish Flu pandemic in 1918.

Having a dad and granddad each having sons in their 70's does odd things to time perspectives.

Hogties said:

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Mind blowing personal history fact - my brother in law is about my age, 60.

His grandfather was part of General Pershing's expedition into Mexico chasing after Pancho Villa and was too old to be shipped out for WWI. Also, his uncle died in the Spanish Flu pandemic in 1918.

Having a dad and granddad each having sons in their 70's does odd things to time perspectives.

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Mind blowing personal fact:

- I'm not even 60 and had an uncle (not great uncle) that fought in the Spanish American war.

- My wife's grandfather was Pershing's personal driver when he was on the border. Member of an Iowa unit sent to assist. Pershing sent him an engraved artillery spent shell casing at the end of WWI that he had made into an ash tray. Pershing said it was one of the last shells fired. It's in the possession of my BIL. We have about 50 old pictures of the Iowa boys during their deployment there….none of which have ever been published.

- I had an uncle (not great uncle) that died in an Army Air Corp crash in 1928 in San Antonio.

My great great grandfather served with Pershing going into Mexico after Pancho Villa and also with him in the Philippines in WWI. This is the only known picture of him. Also the program for the Christmas meal in 1914 from the Philippines.

My grandfather told me he was Pershing's personal interpreter. He was apparently also a cook as the program says. I would like to find a way to corroborate that story and learn his history of service. My grandfather always spoke very fondly of him.

One story is that when he joined the army, he only spoke German and had a very thick accent. They could not understand him well and misspelled his last name. When he died, his wife tried to make sure his name was spelled con his tombstone. It still got messed up, so the family just changed the name to the more common Groesbeck instead of Groesbach. He is buried ant Ft. Sam in San Antonio very near the flag pole at the main entrance.

There has been someone from every generation since in the family serve in some capacity. All the way down to my nephew who is a senior in Parson's at aTm. I intend to get the pieces of this picture framed and give to him.

Following the Allied defeats at the Battles of the Java Sea and Sunda Strait in late February 1942, all Allied ships were ordered to withdraw to Australia. Abraham Crijnssen was meant to sail with three other warships, but found herself proceeding alone.

The minesweeper evaded the Japanese for eight days disguised as an island. The crew covered the decks in cut trees and painted exposed surfaces to look like rocks. They moved only at night and anchored closed to shore by day, eventually escaping to Australia.

Abraham Crijnssen was the last vessel to successfully escape Java, and the only ship of her class in the region to survive.

Piper Daniel Laidlaw enlisted in the British army at 39
Years old in 1914 and was 40 years old in September of 1915 at the Battle of Loos, where he earned the Victoria Cross. While under a German artillery barrage of high explosive and gas, the men of the Kings Own Scottish Borderers began to waiver. Laidlaws Lieutenant said "Pipe them together, Laidlaw, pipe them together for gods sake". Laidlaw mounted the parapet of the trench under fire, paved back and forth playing "Bluebonnets over The Border" and led the assault on the German lines before being wounded assaulting the second German Line. He was one of only two pipers to be awarded the VC during the war.




Still from the silent film "The Guns of Loos" in 1929 where Laidlaw played himself…..being himself for the camera.

JABQ04 said:

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Piper Daniel Laidlaw enlisted in the British army at 39
Years old in 1914 and was 40 years old in September of 1915 at the Battle of Loos, where he earned the Victoria Cross. While under a German artillery barrage of high explosive and gas, the men of the Kings Own Scottish Borderers began to waiver. Laidlaws Lieutenant said "Pipe them together, Laidlaw, pipe them together for gods sake". Laidlaw mounted the parapet of the trench under fire, paved back and forth playing "Bluebonnets over The Border" and led the assault on the German lines before being wounded assaulting the second German Line. He was one of only two pipers to be awarded the VC during the war.

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Men like him were who I ever hoped to be in my uniformed service. No matter how frigthening the situation, I always remembered those who performed in the worse. It worked.

The U2 was one of the first projects out of Area 51. While its first military mission was in July of 1956 over the USSR, it was actually used in its first deployment/non-test flight to search for the wreckage of a C-54 that crashed on Mt Charleston with 14 crew on board who were ferrying to area 51 for work via plane.

also, about 6 miles north of area 51, in line-of-sight to the base is Groom Mine. This was owned by a family going back to the founding of area 51, when they actually hosted US military personnel who were scouting for a potential base site on groom lake. The family fought a long battle with the US government, finally losing due it to eminent domain in 2015. They didn't always live on the claim, but when members of the family were at the mine, area 51 would have to cancel missions. In the 1970s and 1980s, armed personnel arrived when the Sheahan family came onto their property, sometimes locking them into their own buildings. Some of the Sheahan family were issued with security clearances after 1984 so they would have less impact on base operations when they visited the mine.

also, during the height of the cuban missle crisis, as if things weren't on a knife's edge enough already, both the USSR and the US continued to conduct nuclear tests, several of them in space (checkmate was 91 miles elevation)

As John Wilkes Booth entered the box at Ford's Theater where President Abraham Lincoln was watching the play Our American Cousin on the evening of April 14, 1865, there were two people who would be murdered by shooting and two murderers. Of course, one was seconds away as Booth shot Lincoln. But the other murder was 18 years in the future.

Major Basil Rathbone and his fiance, Clara Harris, the daughter of senator Ira Harris, were the other couple in the box with the Lincolns at Ford's Theater. After Booth shot Lincoln, Rathbone grappled briefly with Booth and was stabbed in the arm by the assassin before leaping to the stage.

Rathbone and Harris delayed their marriage as a result of the tragedy but were finally married in 1867. The marriage resulted in three children. But supposedly Rathbone never got over the evening and hated the attention the event caused. Especially grueling for him was the gossip that he should have done more to prevent the assassination.

Chester Arthur appointed Rathbone as a minister to Hanover, Germany during his presidency. In Germany, Rathbone drank heavily and had numerous affairs. He began to have hallucinations and declined into mental illness, having paranoid delusions that his wife would divorce him and take the children. Two days before Christmas, 1883 he attacked his children and shot his wife. A servant intervened and stopped him but then Rathbone stabbed himself six times in the chest. As on April 14, 1865, the shooting victim died but the stabbing victim survived. Rathbone lived out his years in a well appointed room in a German insane asylum dying there in 1911.

LMCane said:

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a minesweeper with that many large guns?

looks more like the German warships hiding in Norwegian Fjords for most of the war.

this is the Koln which looks much more like that picture you posted than some Dutch minesweeper



https://www.reddit.com/r/WarshipPorn/comments/11v5sut/during_july_1942_the_kriegsmarine_light_cruiser/

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The original photo is the Abraham Crijnssen


The Koln had two stacks that are not in that photo. It also had tthree triple 15cm gunned turrets, one fore and two aft. The original photo does not show those turrets. Obviously a lot larger.

Not sure if this is exactly mind-blowing or not, but this character from my home county (Eastland) sure took the cake for eccentricity and business ventures:

" Donald Grey Pierson (October 11, 1925 March 30, 1996) was an American businessman and civic leader in Eastland, Texas. He founded the British pirate stations Wonderful Radio London, Swinging Radio England and Britain Radio during the 1960s. He also attempted to create free ports on the islands of Tortuga, Haiti and Dominica during the 1970s."

" After opening his second dealership in 1953 for Oldsmobile-Cadillac in Eastland, he went on to establish a number of other automobile dealerships in Texas selling such makes as Volkswagen, Hillman, Renault, Triumph, Jaguar, Porsche, and BMW.
Don Pierson's other business ventures included a department store, a bowling facility, cable television, restaurants, oil investments, home banking, a slot car raceway, and farming and ranching operations. In 1963, he established U.S. Telephonics, the world's first computer telemarketing company and together, with a number of Abilene business leaders, he founded the Abilene National Bank (now Bank One - Abilene) in 1964 and served as the chairman of the board of the bank."

" Although he was a soft-spoken individual, Pierson was also an untiring booster of his adopted hometown of Eastland. In 1957, he reopened the long-closed grass-strip Eastland airport which he renamed "Eastland International Airport." Later, in the 1970s, he became the first person to land a jet aircraft in Eastland.
He attracted world headlines when, as mayor of Eastland in 1964, he convinced his fellow council members to pass a purported ordinance banning all smoking in Eastland, with a mandatory three-year jail penalty for violators. It was intended as a humorous response to the Surgeon General's Commission on Smoking, whose recently issued report on the dangers of smoking had been accompanied by an official photo showing the commissioners' ashtrays overflowing with cigarette butts. The Eastland anti-smoking ordinance proved prophetic, although, at the time, it generated a deluge of hate mail from the outraged citizens of Winston-Salem, North Carolina."

" Soon after, Eastland again found itself in the headlines when, as president of the local Rotary Club, and at the height of the Cold War, Pierson managed to convince the Deputy Soviet Ambassador to the United States, Vladimir Alkimov, to appear as the featured speaker at the club's weekly meeting."

" In a 1984 interview, Pierson said he was captivated by the fact that these two offshore stations were the first and only all-day commercial radio broadcasters serving the UK. "

"After taking some photographs, he returned to Texas determined to create a station bigger and better than either of them.
The result was Radio London, which started transmitting on December 16, 1964, from the MV Galaxy, a former World War II United States Navy US Minesweeper. Radio London stopped transmitting August 14, 1967, when the Marine Broadcasting Offences Act came into effect in the United Kingdom. This law made it a criminal offence for any person to supply music, commentary, advertising, fuel, food, water or any other assistance (except for life-saving purposes) to any ship, offshore structure or aircraft used for broadcasting without a licence."

" In 1967, during the time that Don Pierson was attempting to lease the ship which had been the former homes of Swinging Radio England and Britain Radio, he received a response from the Ambassador for Haiti in Washington, DC. Don Pierson's original plan was to lease or sell the ship to the government of Haiti for it to establish two powerful 50 kW commercial radio stations aimed at American tourists visiting the old buccaneer stronghold of Tortuga island, which is located some 10 miles off the north coast of the main Haitian island of Hispaniola which is also shared by the Dominican Republic.
This offer became a plan to develop the island itself as a freeport and he was asked to assist the government of Haiti to encourage business investment in that poverty-stricken land."

" Pierson's idea of a privately financed, privately managed free enterprise zone became a reality in 1971 when Haitian dictator Franois Duvalier (known as "Papa Doc") and the Haitian government entered into a 99-year contract with Don Pierson's company called Dupont Caribbean Inc. This contract provided for the establishment of Freeport Tortuga."

" Within 18 months Don Pierson succeeded in building the island's first airport, a loading dock for seagoing vessels, a rudimentary water and sewer system, an electricity generating facility, and six miles of paved road. Of equal importance. the project created jobs for some 400 previously unemployed Haitians and resulted in the establishment of a small school to teach various job skills."

" Tragically, the free port project came to abrupt end in 1974 when, after it was announced that Gulf Oil Corporation was contemplating investing more than $300 million to build a resort on the island, the government of Jean-Claude Duvalier (known as "Baby Doc"), summarily expropriated the project, resulting in its collapse.
A similar venture on the island of Dominica which was attempted in the wake of the failed project in Haiti, also met with disaster following governmental turmoil in Dominica."

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Quite a character was Don Pierson.