Comments by "Sar Jim" (@sarjim4381) on "The History Guy: History Deserves to Be Remembered" channel.

  1. Grenada, the island nation in the south Caribbean, produces the finest natural vanilla in the world. There are several vanilla plantation you can tour and sample various types of vanilla while on your tour. Don't miss it if you get to Grenada, also know as the Spice Island, since it also produces several types of high quality spices like saffron,
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  2. What? Al Capone? He never served in the Navy. He spent the war at his home at Palm Island, Florida, suffering from late stage syphilis. He was one of first patients treated with penicillin to stop the damage for the syphilis, but the disease was too far advanced for the new antibiotic to help. He lingered on as a barely conscious invalid until his death in 1947. I don't know who this supposed son was but his "research" was entirely false.
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  3. The San Francisco harbor area has probably the most preserved forts and shore batteries, including a couple that were repurposed as Nike missile launch sites in the 50's. The are administered by the Golden Gate National Recreation Area (GGNRA). They provide a map of all the fortifications and short history of each. The last time I was there, about twenty sites still existed, the most of any area I know about. It will take you about two days to visit all of them, or a day to see the best preserved fortifications.
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  4. Black Hand gangs operated in almost every city with a large Italian immigrant population. Anthony "Tony" Milano got his start with the Black Hand in Cleveland from the start of the twentieth century onward. He hand his brother Frank were also active in the largest Mafia gang, the Mayfield Road Mob". Tony profited from prohibition, the numbers, racket, and gambling. He was also an accomplished counterfeiter and spent time in the federal pen for that pursuit in 1911. It is said Tony was never got into in drug dealing or prostitution, two things he promised his mother on her deathbed the gang wouldn't be involved in. He eventually had business interests in Las Vegas when gambling was legalized in Nevada. He had money in some of the first casinos in Vegas, including the Desert Inn and the Hacienda, and he used his experience racketeering unions in Cleveland to make sure casino unions in Vegas were "compliant". Unlike many of his contemporaries, Tony died in a hospital bed at age 89 in Cleveland in 1978, and he died from natural causes rather than the standard lead poisoning.
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  5. I worked with CAP crews a lot in missing and overdue aircraft cases. CAP pilots are reasonably well known, but the most CAP members are "ground pounders". Members are trained in and practice conducting ground searches for those missing planes, and they also assisted in missing person cases. It was usually unsung cold or hot, muddy or dusty, and always exhausting work. They were a great bunch to work with.
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  6. While the Texas City disaster was both terrible and historically interesting, the materials, means of ignition, and industrial surroundings of the SS Grandcamp were much different than the issues we see with SS Richard Montgomery. There is no chance of repeat of Texas City in London.
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  7. Isn't coffee also a fruit? I'd guess the total value of coffee sales far exceeds that of bananas.
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  8. There's some understandable confusion here. I grew up in Cleveland, so I'm familiar with most of the sites. One communications site was located not far from my home in Garfield Heights. It controlled the actual missile site in Independence. It was the only site that was that far separated from each other, mainly because the missile site didn't have enough room for the complete base and communications facility. The original missile was the Nike Ajax. These were relatively small and were not capable of carrying a nuclear warhead. The Nike Hercules was much larger and carried a nuclear warhead to increase kill probability. The first ones were deployed in the Chicago area in 1958, and it took until 1963 to convert most of the Nike Ajax sites to the Nike Hercules. There were eight Nike sites in the Cleveland area, but only three were ever converted Nike Hercules missiles before the program began shutting down, most in the late 60's to early 70's. The decreasing likelihood of bomber attacks and increasing probability of ICBM attack made the Nike missiles obsolete. Most US Nike sites were closed by 1975, but sites in Alaska and Florida lasted until 1979. The Florida and Alaska sites lasted longer because there was still a possibility of bomber attacks there from the Soviet Union or Cuba. The effective periods of these missiles and their sites was less than ten years on average, not much of a return for the hundreds of millions of dollars spent on them. [Edited for typos]
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  9. There was indeed a Nike site at Ft. Sheridan. The radar and control base was on the west side of Forest Way Drive two blocks north of Tower Road. The missile site itself was located near the lagoons adjoining the Edens Expressway. Both of the sites are part of the forest reserve.
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  10. Sorry, Beak, I think I screwed this up. The launch site was indeed on the grounds of Fort Sheridan, just southwest of the cemetery. You can see the concrete pad that still remains in a Google maps view at https://virtualglobetrotting.com/map/c-98l-nike-missile-site/view/google/. I don't know how this matches up to your soapbox derby hill since most of the post has been obliterated
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  11. Halsey was totally responsible for the loss of so many men and ships to Cobra. He knew that the storm was getting bigger and more intense. It could be seen on ship's radar up to 150 miles away, so it didn't just sneak up on them. Halsey was intent on getting his ships refueled to resume air operations. If he had called off the refuelling and ordered his ships to sail on a 90 degree path across the approaching storm. his should could ave escaped with very little damage or loss of life, It was only the intervention of Admiral Nimitz that saved Halsey from being court martialed. Almost unbelievably, Halsey sailed the Third Fleet right into Typhoon Connie in June, 1945, even though he had the command ship USS Ancon as part of his fleet. She had the most advanced radars of any ship off Okinawa, and her radar was able ot see Connie a75 miles away. If he had liaison officer aboard her, the flett could have turned away from the storm in time. Instead, Ancon had to send a coded radio message that took five hours to decode, and the storm was on top of them by then. Luckily, it wasn't as bad a Cobra, so no ships were lost (although many were damaged) and only six men were lost. Once again, Nimitz stepped in to save Halsey from sanction and reassignment, and he kept command of the fleet until December, 1945. Halsey had turned from the best admiral we could have in 1942 into a disaster by 1945.
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  12. It was the air to south of the cold front that was warm and humid. It would be easy to show that if you used a real weather map, easily available from the NWS page on this flood, rather than hand gestures and brow wrinkling.
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  13. Gee, Sally, I'm sure sorry I upset you.
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  14.  @tarnishedknight730  Well, those stations live and die by ratings, and your ratings won't improve if your weather person says "Things won't be that bad". :-) It is especially bad down here on the Gulf Coast when we get hurricanes. With the breathlessness of some of these men and women I'm surprised they don't require on-air oxygen. There's usually one local station that has a competent meteorologist. I'd pay attention to him or her and the local NWS. That should give you the best combination of forecasting and gut feels. It was really quite amazing watching our hurricanes make landfall this year within 25 miles of the predicted location and within 10 mph of the predicted intensity, all the while predicting the formation of the hurricanes seven to ten days out. It's the kind of thing we could only dream of as recently as ten years ago. Predicting continental storms in winter regarding how much snow will fall where, how windy it will be, and how cold it will get is orders of magnitude harder than hurricanes. The scientists are getting there, but predicting big winter storms with the accuracy of hurricane forecasts is still another ten years away.
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  15.  @JoseRamirez-yi5if  I had heard they aquired rebuilt engines for three F-5s but hadn't heard they were actually back flying. They will only be useful for parade flying, but that's an important thing for Mexico.
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  16. That ship would be the SS Illinois. A USS ship would have been one owned by the US Navy.
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  17. Well, what the robber barons did may not have been totally legal, but it was a heck of lot more interesting than spending time trying to figure out SEC filings about the latest robber barons.
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  18. Mujangga  Hitler felt an affinity to the Japanese from his youth. They were not a threat to his expansion plans and were a valuable source of supply for things like rubber and chromium. He knew that war between Japan and Britain would tie down lots of RN ships and British army soldiers in the far east. In a sense, the Japanese became "honorary Aryans".
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  19. The Japanese didn't have to "work their way up" from anything. They were allies the same way the Russians were when it came to carving up Poland. They happened to be in a different part of the world so they weren't a threat...yet. As Hitler said on learning of Pearl Harbor “We can’t lose the war at all. We now have an ally which has never been conquered in 3,000 years.” That's why the two were allies. Japan kept Russian forces tied up in eastern Russia while Hitler invaded western Russia. Hitler was content until such time as he was strong enough to take on the "yellow peril", as he called the Japanese in "Mein Kampf".
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  20. That Japanese surrendered to the Russians before Barbarossa? They didn't fight Russia during the war? The USSR declared war on Japan on August 9, 1945, with the war lasting until September 2. They lost at least 21,000 killed during the short campaign before the surrender. This is a channel on history that deserves to be remembered, not history you've made up.
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  21. Look, Mujangga, you wrote the Japanese had surrendered before Barbarossa. That started on June 22, 1940. Your statement was clearly wrong. The war didn't end with the surrender of Germany. Thus, the Japanese fought the Russians during the war. What does the fall of Nazi Germany have to do with it?
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  22. Brasilia went through the same thing as Washington. It too was carved from a wilderness to be the capital city of Brazil. Except for the Federal buildings, nothing was there, and no diplomats wanted to be stationed there. Because of its altitude of over 3,400 feet it has a somewhat more pleasant climate than some sections of Brazil, although it can get quite chilly in winter. It has now grown to a fairly wealthy city of over three million.
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  23. And they say crime is bad today...
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  24.  @peterk8909  Thanks, Peter, and, and Tiny Tim said on that Christmas Eve of 1843, "God bless us, every one". :-)
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  25. It still irritates me that they changed Greenwich Mean Time (GMT), a useful term that was 300 years old, was changed in 1967 to "Coordinated Universal Time". Instead of the acronym now being "CUT", it became "UTC" to keep the French happy.
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  26. Hey! I saw a History Guy in that last photo!
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  27.  @briangarrow448  Indeed, it would have been a losing bet. The US wished it could have intervened to stop Chile from seizing the rich nitrate territories in Peru, but our weakness only led to a failed peace conference aboard the USS Lackawanna. That effort failed because the US had no forces strong enough to threaten any of the warring nations, and we were in no position to get into a fight if the Royal Navy decided to intervene. That was about as close as a US naval vessel got to the War of the Pacific
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  28. Kind of like reading "news" on Buzzfeed today.
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  29.  @TheHistoryGuyChannel  And here I thought I had seen all your videos by now. I should have known better. :-) I've been a coin collector most of my life, and I don't know how that one slipped by me. Thanks.
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  30. The Robin was actually a good plane to use for his flight. It was a strong craft, with steel tube construction for the fuselage and a wooden wing made primarily from California redwood. It had a roomy three person cabin, ideal for all those extra fuel tanks. The wingspan was almost double the average single engine plane, giving more lift and increasing the range. Curtiss built a long range version that was supposedly Corrigan's inspiration on how to modify his Robin. Corrigan assembled his own engine from two castoff Wright Whirlwind engines that gave him almost double the horsepower of the standard engine. It's hardly surprising that federal CAA inspectors were more than a little skeptical about giving him permission for a transatlantic flight.
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  31.  @Erin-Thor  California raised the minimum legal drinking age to 21 at the end of prohibition in 1933. Since then, it has never been legal to drink at age 18 in California. The evidence is overwhelming that when the MLDA was raised to 21 in those states that allowed younger drinking that both alcohol related traffic death and overall consumption of alcohol declined. See https://one.nhtsa.gov/people/injury/research/feweryoungdrivers/iv__what_caused.htm for details.
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  32.  @pmvaldez1  Did you actually read the study in my link from the National Highway Safety Administration about drinking age? No, of course you didn't, which would be appropriate for a guy with a screen name of buttwhisker. I'll play along though. Give me a link to your study showing those statistics are false. Just calling it false without evidence isn't an argument.
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  33.  @Full_Otto_Bismarck  That's true, but it has nothing to do with the drinking age and drunk driving deaths. You are erroneously attempting to make a reasonable argument into an absurd one by taking the argument to the extremes.
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  34.  @pmvaldez1  Well, Harry, that's your story. Others have different stories with some foundation in fact. I'm done with you now.
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  35.  @RTmadnesstoo  No, I didn't. My point was to use a state that actually increased the drinking age for 18 to 21 if you're going to make up a complete lie.
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  36.  @Full_Otto_Bismarck  LOL. Nice try, but I assure you I'm not the only that thinks lowering drinking ages is a bad idea. And your liberty ends right at my front bumper when you're 18 and driving drunk.
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  37.  @Full_Otto_Bismarck  Well, you can read the stats at the link I posted. If that doesn't change your opinion about 18 year olds being legal to drink, so be it. Even libertarians need some laws to limit behavior.
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  38. What an ispiring story. I kind of teared up at the end, History Guy. I have a feeling you did too..
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  39.  @johnshepardson7459  No, it's hyperplasia, an excess of human growth hormone that caused his amazing growth. It's good to look things up before you decide to correct someone. [Edited for typos, as usual]
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  40.  @johnshepardson7459  "pituitary hyperplasia can lead to precocious puberty, acromegaly, and giantism in children. https://www.pituitaryworldnews.org/pituitary-hyperplasia/ I studied it in college. You don't need to have a disease to know what it is. You, on the other hand, claim to have it and don't know what it's called. Gets the old noggin joggin.....
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  41.  @BrianSmith-yn2zg  Go read some books and you won't have as many haters.
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  42.  @donsharpe5786  As long as your opponent doesn't know the real situation, it's not an empty threat. That's why gas stations get held up every day by crooks with realistic looking fake guns.
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  43.  @donsharpe5786  They had inside information on construction details. The Soviets hadn't been able to penetrate the US military, especially the Army Air Force. They could only guess about how many bombs we already had and how fast we could build more. The information from Kremlin records after the Soviet Union went away was Stalin was convinced the US would have at least ten bombs by the end of 1946 and cold build at least 20 a year by 1948. That's one of the reasons for the high speed development of a Russian bomb. Truman, to his credit, refused to share any information with the Russians, even as the State Department communists were urging him to do so.
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  44.  @BuzzLOLOL  Define "a lot". Who said it needed to be "stabilized for a while"?
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  45.  @BuzzLOLOL  "Normal people"...that's the best you could come up with? There were way more people in Croatia that not only sided with Hitler, they went and fought on the Nazi side. How come none of your "normal people" wanted to stabilize Croatia?
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  46.  @BuzzLOLOL  Croatia declared independence in 1991. The USSR never set foot in Croatia. The Partisans killing about 100,000 Croatian Ustase while the Chetniks, Germans, and Italians killed another 50,000. The Yugoslav communists killed another 10,000 Croats after WWII and "stabilized" the country by brutal dictatorship and terror. Once independence was declared, Catholic/Serb violence broke out anew, only ending after a military victory by Croatia and the expulsion of at least 200,000 by 1995. Your beloved USSR was long gone by then. The Nazis and Hitler weren't Catholic or Christian or even religious. Hitler himself was violently anti-Catholic, and only used the German Protestant church when it suited his political goals. Saying Hitler was "Catholic Christian Religious Terrorist" only got one thing right.
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  47. The training film "Ditch and Live" was made because so many crews forced down over water were dying only after three or four days on a raft. Realizing this, the Army Air Force had their film unit produce a training film starring Arthur Kennedy as Captain Scott H Reynolds. After a previous ditching where he was the sole survivor when the rest of his crew died at sea, he decided to train his new crew mercilessly in ditching procedures and survival techniques. As bad luck would have it, Captain Reynolds and his crew were forced down at sea and were able to put their training to good use. There was one scene where the men were rolled out of bed at 3:00 in the moring to practice on a derelict B-17 so the men would be used to having to ditch in the dark. Several of the men, while getting dressed to head out to the plane, remarked that they'd live longer than Reynolds if they ditched just so they could throw him in the dunk tank when they got back to base. This was an obvious play on what Rickenbacker's crew said about him. He later found out about what the men had said. In reality, it was more like they wanted to live so they could kill him. The producers, not being sure of Rickenbacker's reaction, showed him the script with the more sanitized version of what the crew had said. He approved it without comment. Many of the survival procedures were adapted from Rickenbacker's harrowing experience, and he contributes=d to the script. It became mandatory viewing for bomber crews, and the amount of time men lived at sea more than doubled for crews that had seen the film. Rickenbacker's experiences helped many more men than just the crew he went down with.
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  48. The Cleveland Clinic Disaster of 1929 killed 123 people. It was a direct result if the flammability of nitrocellulose x-ray film and the toxic gasses given off by combustion.
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  49.  @phil4826  Yes, it was even more amazing in 1945. It obviously didn't have anywhere near the range compared to being six feet above water but, by manually focusing the SJ radar screen and increasing the output power, it could search about 15 degrees for about two miles at six feet below the surface. Once a target had been spotted with the periscope radar, the separate SJ was able to track it as long as the target was within that two mile range. Obviously a pretty handy thing compared to having to constantly raising the periscope and expose your position. Since the SJ was centimetric radar, the frequency was far above any kind of detector the Japanese had until about a month before the end of the war. Because of that, our subs had no fear of being detected by the radar emissions. The Japanese had the technical ability to develop more advanced radar and sonar. The constant infighting with the army over who would develop what kind of technology plus the IJNs seeming inability to understand why such technology was necessary doomed the Japanese fleet. [Edited for my usual typos and grammatical errors]
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  50.  @Mondo762  Excellent exposition of what butt hurt looks like. Now maybe you can tell me which of my "projections" have all been dead wrong. I kind of doubt you'd get too far in an engineering meeting by telling everyone they are all dead wrong and a bunch of bullshitters without at least one example.
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