chatarra
All posts tagged "history"
Esto tenéis que leerlo.
1945 Letter from Kurt Vonnegut to his family from a repatriation camp, in which he informs them of his capture and survival
During the plague in the Middle Ages, some doctors wore a primitive form of biohazard suit called “plague suits”. The mask included red glass eyepieces, which were thought to make the wearer impervious to evil. The beak of the mask was often filled with strongly aromatic herbs and spices to overpower the miasmas or “bad air” which was also thought to carry the plague.
(via theangryprojectionist< studentloansforbeermoney< dontcookbilly< shorterexcerpts< skysignal)
El avión segador. Esto es una de las cosas más MACARRAS que he visto en mucho tiempo. Lástima que lo que tiene de macarra lo tenga de inútil. Aun así me hubiera encantado presenciar alguna de sus misiones. Ahora los militares sólo decapitan infectados usando aspas de helicóptero. ¡Menudencias!
The Soviet ‘Fire Hedgehog’
What looks to be an anti-infantry experiment - 88 downward-firing machine guns in the bomb bay of a Tupolev Tu-2, giving a firing rate of about 1,300 rounds per second.
Believed to be flown and tested in 1944, and abandoned due to the problems associated with in-flight reloading of the guns.
Otto Dix es, bueno, Dios.
(via obsidianobelisk)
“A Lewis gunner at action stations on the engine gantry of a North Sea type airship. Note the complete lack of any type of guardrail or safety line” (circa 1918)
An account on the development of the "biohazard" symbol
“The only parameters that I set down for them to noodle through were, it had to be unique and something that would be striking enough that it would be remembered.”
I had always wondered how did this extremely badass symbol come to be. And the blame has to be put in the package design people of Dow Chemicals, circa 1966. It’s a cool backstory, specially the end.
Ojalá alguno de los profesores de esas asignaturas que amargaron mis años de estudiante las hubiera impartido con la décima parte de mano izquierda y encanto que tiene Xplanes contando historias de aviación. Esta sobre escuadrones femeninos de bombarderos rusos tampoco tiene precio. Hasta existe un cómic de Garth Ennis!
Night Witches
On June 22 1941, Germany commenced Operation Barbarossa - the invasion of the Soviet Union. The resulting conflict is known by many names - The Eastern Front, the Russo-German War, the Axis-Soviet War to name a few - but scholars/historians tend to agree that it was the largest, bloodiest and most ferocious theatre of war in human history.
Marina Raskova, a famous aviatrix before the war, used her personal influence with Joseph Stalin to secure permission to form three all-female combat units. The most famous was the 588th Night Bomber Regiment. They flew obsolete Polikarpov Po-2 biplanes (believed to be the second most produced aircraft in history), and flew night-time harassment bombing missions against enemy encampments. The Po-2 aircraft could only carry a couple of bombs each, so missions were mainly psychological in impact - the aircraft would cut their engines and glide over the targets, release their bombs, and hopefully vanish into the night (there are stories of enemy troops hearing singing as the silent aircraft passed overhead)
The German forces called them “Nachthexen” - Night Witches
The missions were endless and highly dangerous. The Witches would regularly fly in groups - each aircraft taking it in turn to act as a decoy against searchlights and flak. Losses to enemy nightfighters also took their toll. Many refused to wear parachutes, opting for a revolver instead..
By the end of the war, the Soviet women bomber pilots had earned 23 Hero of the Soviet Union medals and dozens of Orders of the Red Banner, flew more than 24,000 sorties and dropped 23,000 tons of bombs. Most surviving pilots had racked up nearly 1,000 missions each.
(art above from the excellent but brutal “BATTLEFIELDS: Night Witches”, a 3-part comic mini-series by Garth Ennis and Russ Braun, released last year)
¿Por qué lee CiRC un blog sobre aviación? Pues por estas cosas, hombre. Por estas cosas.
The “Ye Olde Pub”
On December 20th 1943, 2nd Lieutenant Charles “Charlie” Brown, of the 379th Bomb group, flew the B-17 Flying Fortress “Ye Olde Pub” on a bombing run against the Focke-Wulf aircraft plant at Bremen, Germany.
The squadron encountered heavy flak on approach to the target. Brown had to feather two of his engines, and his aircraft began to trail behind the rest of the bomber formation. He watched his flight leader plummet to the ground ahead of him.
Suddenly, eight fighters attacked from the front, joined by another seven from the rear. The crippled B-17 managed to down one (possibly two aircraft) before starting to spiral to the ground. Brown recalls:
”I either spiraled or spun and came out of the spin just above the ground. My only conscience memory was of dodging trees but I had nightmares for years and years about dodging buildings and then trees. I think the Germans thought that we had spun in and crashed”The B-17 recovered, but Brown and four of his crew were injured, and one of his gunners was dead. They had no compass and no oxygen. Then they were engaged by a lone Messerschmitt Bf-109, piloted by Franz Stigler. Stigler approached the bomber from the rear, then noticed that the tail gunner was incapacitated, bleeding profusely.
“I saw his gunner lying in the back profusely bleeding….. so, I couldn’t shoot.”
As he flew by the cockpit, he gestured for Brown to land the aircraft - he refused. He tried to get Brown to turn to Sweden - only 30 minutes away - he also refused.
He continued to escort the B-17 towards England, eventually saluting Brown and heading back to base. He told his superiors that the plane had gone down over the sea.
“I tried to get him to land in Germany and he didn’t react at all. So, I figured, well, turn him to Sweden, because his airplane was so shot up; I never saw anything flying so shot up…the most badly damaged aircraft I ever saw, still flying.”
“I didn’t have the heart to finish off those brave men,” Stigler later said. “I flew beside them for a long time. They were trying desperately to get home and I was going to let them do it. I could not have shot at them. It would have been the same as shooting at a man in a parachute.”
Stigler and Brown eventually found each other in 1989, and became firm friends. They both passed away last year.
Hoy se cumplen 64 años de Hiroshima y la pregunta que subyace sigue siendo: ¿la invención de la bomba atómica ha hecho de la civilización humana algo más inestable, o menos?
“The optimist thinks this is the best of all possible worlds and the pessimist knows it.”
“Albert Tissandier (left), Gaston Tissandier (right), and an unidentified man in the basket of their airship demonstrating an electric navigational system featuring a propeller. Wood engraving between 1880 and 1900”
(from the Library of Congress Tissandier Collection)
- ¿Cuál es la tierra de España?
- La tierra de España es la mayor parte de la Península ibérica, colocada providencialmente por Dios en el centro del mundo.
- ¿Por qué decís que la lengua castellana será la lengua de la civilización del futuro?- La lengua castellana será la lengua de la civilización del futuro porque el inglés y el francés, que con ella pudieran compartir esta función, son lenguas tan gastadas, que van camino de una disolución completa.
-¿Se habla en España otras lenguas más que la lengua castellana?- puede decirse que en España se habla sólo la lengua castellana, pues aparte de ésta tan sólo se habla el vascuence, que, como lengua única, sólo se emplea en algunos caseríos vascos y quedó reducido a funciones de dialecto por su pobreza linguística y filológica.
visto aquí
Michelangelo’s First Painting”
“Every supernova starts as a modest spark. Even Michelangelo began his career with less than Sistine-worthy work. What, exactly, was he doing? According to the 16th-century art-stargazer Giorgio Vasari, the master’s virgin effort was a smallish, slightly customized painted copy of a German print.”
Miguel Ángel, como todos, también fue jebi con 13.
