Comments by "Colonel K" (@Paladin1873) on "The History Guy: History Deserves to Be Remembered" channel.

  1. I'm more of a mustard man.
    9
  2. That story almost brought a tear to my eye. She may have started life a Mongolian mongrel, but she became a Thoroughbred Marine.
    9
  3. Grierson's Raid by Union cavalry wasn't as long, but was far more effective. Morgan's Raid was a fool-hearty effort that was doomed to failure. You never operate behind enemy lines without an achievable mission statement, good intelligence, a solid support plan, an effective escape route, and the shortest possible timeline. It appears Morgan lacked all five. In many ways it reminds me of the ill-fated 1876 Northfield, MN raid by the James-Younger Gang. Guile, dash, and surprise will only carry you so far, no matter how fearsome your reputation.
    9
  4.  @TestTestGo  It's both. It forms the route of several languages. I took Latin in high school.
    8
  5. Excellent review. Now for the nitpicking :) Truman may have said "won" but military medals are not won, for it is not a competition wherein only a few are allowed to be recognized. The CMH, like ever other medal, is earned. On a separate note, I remember reading about the Cochise affair as a boy. I realize that western photos from this time period are either scarce or nonexistent, but the images you used appear to show post-civil war soldiers, based upon the weapons and uniforms. I believe the Army of 1861 was equipped with the 1858 Hardee hats (one side of the brim pinned up), forage caps, and kepis. I don't think any flat brimmed slouch hats were in use at the time, though uniform variations during the conflict were so common that the term "uniform" hardly seemed to apply. Nevertheless, the photos certainly provide a feel for the time period.
    8
  6. There are two flyspecks in Georgia about 120 miles apart named "Hopeful" and "Needmore". I always thought they should merge. Then there's Sopchoppy, FL, which is a name derived from the mangling of a the local Muskogean Indian word. Of course, growing up, we thought it might have been named after some sort of Asian cuisine like chop suey, or possibly had something to do with slopping and butchering hogs.
    8
  7. In my early youth I spent my summers in Tampa, FL, where my grandfather, a WWI Navy veteran, was very actively involved in American Legion Post 5 on Bay Street, just off Bayshore Blvd. The Post, which was named after the Tampa, had a beautiful stained glass window inside which contained the names of the crew and a figure of the ship, and was dedicated as a memorial to the men of the USS (USCGC) Tampa. Her sinking represented the greatest single combat loss of active duty US military personnel at sea in WWI and (proportionally) the highest number of causalities of all the services. Ten percent of her crew were native Tampians. When Post 5 relocated to Kennedy Blvd, the stain glass window went with it.
    8
  8. I well remember the Firestone radial tire fiasco of the late 70s. The steel belts on all four of my 500 series tires separated, but when I took the car into a Firestone dealership, they refused to warranty them, claiming my tires weren't part of the recalled lot. I stopped buying Firestones after that. Being a Ford family member, I continued to acquire their vehicles, but they always came factory equipped with Firestone tires. I'd swap them out with Michelins as soon as they wore down sufficiently. When the next round of faulty Firestone tires were recalled because of Explorer rollovers, our local Ford dealership did replace them for free, but they were out of Michelins, so I had to settle for Goodyears (or was it Goodrich, who can keep those two names straight?). That incident was the final straw for Ford, which severed its nearly century long relationship with Firestone. The final indignation for me came when I retired from the Air Force a few years later and tried to rent a U-Haul trailer. Because of the rollover issue, U-Haul refused to rent me anything, despite no longer having Firestone tires on my vehicle.
    8
  9. I've heard the story before, but it still chokes me up.
    8
  10.  @sparky6086  I was fed a lot of baloney when I was at Georgia Tech. The good news is, unlike today, none of it came from my professors.
    8
  11. @FukAzz RS I rather doubt that. The Korean airliner was shot down because Soviet air defense at the time was incredibly paranoid (as was top Soviet leader Andropov) and rather incompetent. Of course, the same might be said of the crew of the USS Vincennes when, in 1988, it mistakenly downed an Iranian airliner, thinking it was an attacking fighter. Then there is the case of the Malaysian airliner that was destroyed by a Russian made missile fired from the pro-Russian separatist side of Ukraine in 2014. And now we have the latest tragedy, the downing of a Ukrainian airliner by jittery missile men in Iran just a few days ago. Ascribing other motives may provide some sense of rationalization, but the cold hard truth is that nobody has cornered the market on the tragic, criminal mishandling of air defense.
    8
  12.  PatchesRips  Michener is not speaking about the causes for which they fought; he is speaking about the sacrifices they willingly made and the fact that eventually time will forget them. In this he spoke the truth. Fewer and fewer people are interested in the history of the Civil War or even WWII. There are those who have long condemned the South for supporting slavery, and many today who now condemn America for dropping two Atom bombs on Japan. I suspect the woke generation will eventually condemn MLK because he opposed homosexuality. Judging the past, then erasing the parts you don't like, is a fool's errand that will only lead to greater mischief in the future. It is the reason for the saying that those who do not study and learn from past mistakes are condemned to repeat it.
    8
  13. The whole time you were describing these events I was thinking that it reminded me of Eddie Albert. I didn't know his last name was actually Heimberger. I remember seeing an old TV show (it might ave been "This is Your Life") where a former sailor was introduced and he described how Eddie Albert dove in and rescued him after he fell overboard. It might have been during the Tarawa invasion.
    8
  14. Almost parallels the story of the USS Indianapolis.
    8
  15. They shall not grow old, as we that are left grow old: Age shall not weary them, nor the years condemn. At the going down of the sun and in the morning, We will remember them. (Laurence Binyon 1869 - 1943)
    7
  16.  @glennriviere7807  Those who do not learn from history are doomed to repeat it.
    7
  17. It may be a small consolation, but at least he was able to keep warm until then. 🤨
    7
  18. My Air War College paper centered around American involvement in small scale actions and began with a description of the long forgotten Polar Bear Expedition. It is an early example of mission creep, or as others have said, "When you're up to your neck in alligators, it's hard to remember that your original objective was to drain the swamp". Somalia comes to mind.
    7
  19. I think today the Brits would call him a real nutter.
    7
  20. The distinction between pirates and privateers is reminiscent of that between ninja and samurai.
    7
  21. "They will live a long time, these men of the South Pacific. They had an American quality. They, like their victories, will be remembered as long as our generation lives. After that, like the men of the Confederacy, they will become strangers. Longer and longer shadows will obscure them, until their Guadalcanal sounds distant on the ear, like Shiloh and Valley Forge." - James Michener, Tales of the South Pacific
    7
  22. Bruce, the mission of protection personnel is to block attackers and their avenues of attack where possible, quickly remove their charges from the scene to a more secure location when it is not, and stop the attack, in that order. It is not to shoot people, even those who deserve it, unless absolutely necessary. Remember, there are far more innocent people standing around than bad guys, and you don't want to injure or kill them by mistake. To say that Secret Service agents are willing to take a bullet for the President is not an exaggeration.
    6
  23. I normally watch The History Guy at 2x speed (challenging though it is), but this one I had to play at normal speed. The Captain was a major influence on a lot of us who grew up with The Lone Ranger, Sky King, and Lassie. In our house it was practically sacrilegious to skip the Wizard of Oz at Halloween time or Captain Kangaroo helping to MC the Thanksgiving Day parades. I truly pity those who missed the golden age of television. I doubt the internet will have anything equivalent. For those who have never heard Captain Kangaroo's theme song, here is a link. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tSW-LJJHH3U
    6
  24. Wow, a Fleet. My Dad used to fly one in the late 1950s with the local Civil Air Patrol. Somewhere I have a color photo of it in flight.
    6
  25. The Irish are always at their best when fighting.
    6
  26.  @danielseelye6005  Isn't that usually the reason for the fighting?
    6
  27.  @aliceshaw8265  Why do you feel the instant need to engage in an ad hominem attack on me? I said nothing about the LDS church nor did I imply anything about my faith or anyone else's faith. As for the sources of my information, they came from a friend of mine who is a practicing Mormon and from an old television series that recreated supposedly true western adventures. This is why I posed my remarks as both a question and a lore rather than as statements of fact. If you know the truth, please provide some useful details. If you don't know, please do not engage in character assassination of a person you know absolutely nothing about. It does you no credit.
    6
  28. Sounds like a rather pointless life.
    6
  29.  @k8zhd  We didn't get a color set until 1970 and I remember the time spent fiddling with the controls. Did you ever have to walk around with the rabbit ears in your hand, searching for a sweet spot?
    6
  30. This is the first time I have heard of this tragedy.
    6
  31. Quite true, but at least one movie made during the war did not change the names of the principal characters, and that was "Thirty Seconds Over Tokyo". It remains an astonishingly honest film, full of depth, love, fear, bravery, and sacrifice. I still feel the pathos that movie evokes when I reflect on the horrific sacrifices paid by 250,000 Chinese civilians in the aftermath of the raid. Many decades later I watched a film of one of the Doolittle Raiders, who had returned to China to thank the people for their efforts. As he spoke and recounted the price in lives to his audience, he lost his composure and cried. Who woundn't be moved by such a scene.
    6
  32. I know the designer, John Garand, did pronounce his name Gerund, but every WWII or Korean era GI pronounced it Gah-rand. As for Marsh Williams, he was brilliant, but almost always cantankerous in the extreme. Now tell the story of the AR15/M16 and the actual role Gene Stoner had in its development. Few people know he did not create the rifle; he developed its predecessor, the AR10. The role of scaling it down went to Jim Sullivan, now largely forgotten.
    6
  33. Maxwell Smart must have been a descendant of Wood.
    6
  34. Keep up the good work. Many of the stories you report are ones that I have some sketchy knowledge of, but often I lack the details. Some of the stories are completely new to me. All of them are interesting.
    6
  35.  @nokiot9  About 22 pounds loaded with a bipod. Many soldiers and Marines removed the bipod to save weight. The WWII version of the BAR had two settings - slow and fast. On the slow setting you could get off single shots, but since it fired from an open bolt, there was a delay before it slammed home and fired. This made accurate aiming difficult unless you used the bipod or some sort of rest to stabilize it.
    6
  36.  @evensgrey  Another noteworthy member of this fraternity is Colonel Joseph W. Kittinger II. Although a pilot, rather than research physician, he performed the very first extreme altitude experiments by riding balloons to altitudes eventually exceeding 100,000 ft and descending by free-fall at over 600 MPH before opening his parachute. This called for titanium cajones.
    6
  37. My daughters read all of Laura Ingalls's books. Now they are being band by the new enlightenment.
    6
  38. I started each Saturday morning with old Popeye and Bugs Bunny cartoons and ended sometime after lunch with the animated Lone Ranger and Jonny Quest.
    5
  39. It wasn't just GM that was building crappy cars in the late 1970s. When I graduated from college I acquired a brand new Ford Granada Sport. At 13,000 miles the transmission went out for the first time. The paint started to peel, the vinyl half-top rotted, and then there were those awful Firestone 500 tires and their chronic belt separations. Maybe I dodged a bullet by not owning a Citation, but I still got zinged. I do not miss that era at all.
    5
  40. When I was a teenager my Dad told me a story of Doctor Bell which is perhaps apocryphal. Supposedly while serving as an assistant to Bell, Doyle witnessed a memorable example of the doctor's keen abilities as an instructor. Bell was demonstrating to a class of medical students how to detect the presence of sugar diabetes by dipping one's finger into a vat of urine and tasting it for sweetness. He then had each student come forward and duplicate his example. Once the entire class was again seated he informed them that the real purpose of his demonstration was to emphasize the importance of the power of observation. "Had you but paid closer attention to my actions, you would have noticed that I dipped my middle finger into the vat, but tasted my index finger." What student was likely to forget that lesson?
    5
  41. Minor correction; the Doolittle Raid was 18 Apr 1942.
    5
  42.  @mindeloman  Grandpa had an Ambassador DPL with front seats that fully reclined. It was perfect for dating.
    5
  43. I remember the incident, but I did not recall so many people being shot. Just what was the princess's husband, Mark Phillips, doing during the escapade beside being scared? I would have expected more from a British Army officer.
    5
  44. "Corn whiskey, corn whiskey I like you pretty well, You've killed all my kin folk and sent them to Hell, You've sent all my kin folk on rotgut and rye, And I guess you'll send me when I'm ready to die" "Corn Whiskey" The Limeliters, 1962 (from their album "Our Men in San Francisco", 1963)
    5
  45. You're deth-spicable! 🙂
    5
  46. A lot of onion farmers got skinned.
    5
  47. I wonder what Charles Russell thought of Remington's art.
    5
  48.  @MrJest2  My parents got cable around 1965. Suddenly we went from one and a half stations to seven, if you counted the weather channel. It consisted of a clock, barometer, thermometer, and wind gauge mounted on an oscillating table to allow the stationary camera to effectively pan back and forth.
    5
  49.  @TheHistoryGuyChannel  Complete BS is a more accurate description. The movie made Johnson the hero and portrayed some of his pursuers as either villains or incompetent clowns. The portrayal of the Canandian flying ace was particularity insulting.
    5
  50. He deserves his own separate video, as do many of the now forgotten Filipino and American guerilla fighters.
    5