Author: Larry Holzwarth

The French were among the innovators militarizing the air as early as 1794, when a lighter than air observation balloon tracked the movements of Austrian troops before and during the Battle of Fleurus. France was an early customer of the Wright Brothers, and soon began developing and building its own aircraft, with innovations kept secret…

If the truth be told, the smartest criminal of all-time likely doesn’t appear on this list. That’s because the smartest criminals’ crimes go undetected. Or at best, the criminal is never identified as the perpetrator of a crime, which remains unsolved, baffling the police and other authorities. There have been many possessed of superior mental…

There are ships that are kept hidden from the public that pays for them, usually because they are of an experimental nature. Other ships are presented to the public as existing for a purpose far different from the role they actually play. And some ships simply operate in environments where their mission and work are…

Warfare has always provided the impetus for advancing more efficient methods of killing one’s fellow man. History shows nearly every extended period of warfare found new weapons proposed and developed, which often failed because existing technology incapable of supporting the design. For example, the earliest land mines, filled with gunpowder, often failed because the moisture…

Since 1942 or thereabouts, the quip, “The United States and Great Britain are two countries separated by a common language,” has been attributed to George Bernard Shaw, though it does not appear in any of his known writings. Another, from Oscar Wilde’s The Canterville Ghost, claims, “We have really everything in common with America nowadays,…

During the 2012 presidential election less than 56% of eligible Americans cast votes. Two years later the mid-term elections saw only 36% participation by voters. The lack of participation of so many eligible voters has led to a growing movement in the United States to make voting in national, state, and local elections mandatory, a…

The chief advantage of the submarine in warfare is stealth. Their ability to approach a target and strike without detection was originally considered unfair by professional naval officers. Naval officers considered them ungentlemanly up to and during the First World War. Since then their operations have become ever more stealthy, and they can operate in all the world’s…

Soldiers have been decorated by their grateful leaders throughout history, though not always through the awarding of medals. Decorations for heroism or distinguished services appeared in armies of the ancients, including among the Greeks and Romans. Roman commanders wore laurels signifying victory over their enemies, while rank and file soldiers could receive a stiffened neck…

When Apollo 13 lifted off from the John F. Kennedy Space Center on April 11, 1970 on America’s planned third visit to the surface of the moon, the general public greeted the event with a collective yawn. After just two manned visits to the moon the reaction by many to continuing lunar exploration was “been…

Some jobs leap to mind as dangerous, including police officer, firefighter, or in current times, front-line healthcare worker. They certainly all present their dangers to those who practice such professions. But none of them qualified for this list, comprised from statistics collected from 2019 and 2018. Some of them are surprising, while others have long…

Childhood is a time of wondrous belief. Children are taught that those who behave well will be rewarded with a visit from a “right jolly old elf” on Christmas Eve. A miraculous bunny visits on Easter, leaving baskets of goodies and hidden eggs, though the relationship between rabbits and eggs remains mysterious. Why a fairy…

Spanish flu, the deadliest pandemic of the 20th century, struck the world in a series of waves, and left between 50 and 100 million people dead in its wake. It may have appeared in the trenches of World War I in Europe as early as 1916, according to some researchers. It first appeared in the…

North Americans tend to generalize when considering the native tribes that once populated the continent. An idea that they all lived in small villages, in tents of animal skins or small wooden lean-tos predominates. It is an image presented by Hollywood, television, and the western novels of Louis L’Amour and Zane Grey. The image is…

The chief advantage of the submarine in warfare is stealth. Their ability to approach a target and strike without detection was originally considered unfair by professional naval officers. Naval officers considered them ungentlemanly up to and during the First World War. Since then their operations have become ever more stealthy, and they can operate in…

Warships first developed as a means of delivering armies to areas of combat. Over the centuries they developed weapons to fight each other, with arrows, flames, rams, and through boarding the enemy. Eventually cannons replaced arrows and catapults, but rams remained a feature on some ships well into the 19th century. CSS Virginia was one…

The year 1816 was the first since the onset of the French Revolutionary Wars in which the western world was at peace. In Europe, the nightmare of the Napoleonic Wars began to fade. In North America, Washington DC began the process of rebuilding after being burned by the British Army during the War of 1812.…

The history of the American Civil War is fraught with myth. Some developed over time, as myths do, and some are deliberate alterations of truth. The Civil War was the most traumatic event in American history, in many ways a continuation of the Revolution. It determined whether the promises of the Declaration of Independence and…

When a major corporation makes a major mistake it leads, of course, to major embarrassment, as well as the loss of significant amounts of money in all too many cases. And for some it leads to the loss of jobs. But for the rest of us, the result is usually a source of amusement. Heads…

The American diet has been diverse from the beginning, as would be expected since diverse peoples settled the country. All of them brought traditional foods to the table, so to speak, foods considered strange today. For example, the English brought their love of pies to America, but many of the types of pies they enjoyed…

Americans have never accepted defeat easily. Not in sports, not in politics, not in warfare. Defeats in battle have only been sustained, in the American psyche, when the enemy has resorted to treachery, or the soldiers defending a given position were overcome by overwhelming odds, despite heroic and inspiring resistance. The Pearl Harbor debacle is…

When Adolf Hitler’s Nazi Germany declared war on the United States, his hatred for America was visceral. So when his chief of military intelligence, Admiral Wilhelm Canaris of the Abwehr, proposed a means of striking in America’s heartland, crippling its industry and terrorizing its people, he approved immediately. The plan was to recruit German men,…

Harriet Tubman is well known in the United States as an escaped slave and abolitionist, and as someone who led other escaping slaves to their freedom along the Underground Railroad. But much of what is known about her is untrue. Her exploits have been exaggerated over the years for political purposes. Some of the exaggerations…

The Hatfield and the McCoy feud during the second half of the 19th century is so well known, at least by name, that is has become a phrase used to describe mutual hostility among parties in all walks of life. Arguably it is the most famous feud of American history. There are many others, though,…

To some Napoleon Bonaparte was one of the greatest military geniuses of all time. He used the French Army (and those of allies) to spread the French revolutionary ideals of liberty, equality, and fraternity across Europe. His vision was of a united Europe, under the hegemony of France. To others he was a bloodthirsty tyrant,…