Where the penultimate chapter is where we stop!
11/11/2018
Updated on 12/31/2018
This being the 100th anniversary of the armistice that ended major fighting in WWI, SilverMedals.net presents some “second” facts about the Great War.
Russia declared war on Austria-Hungary on July 29, a day after Austria-Hungary declared war on Russian ally Serbia.
Germany 7,142,558 (Russia had the most with 9,150,000)
Russian infantry in 1916.
Cambrai (November, 20 1917)
France 6,160,800
Aerial view of trench systems. Notice the craters all around them, created by artillery shell impacts.
7,020,000
Small arms fire (guns, machine guns, grenades)
René Fonck (France) 75 kills (Manfred von Richthofen “Red Baron” 80)
It was in this second battle where poison gas was first used — Germany used it against British Commonwealth soldiers.
René Fonck, the greatest Allied “Flying Ace” during the Great War. He was second only to the “Red Baron”.
George Lawrence Price (Canada)
The United Kingdom on December 8, 2020 became the first nation to begin widespread distribution of a working Covid-19 vaccine. At the University Hospital in Coventry, in what hopes to be the beginning of the end for the pandemic that effectively shut down the world for most of 2020, 90-year-old Margaret Keenan became the first person in the world outside…read more
It didn’t have as compelling a birth as the first Special Air Service regiment. It didn’t have its great founder driving point in a souped-up jeep during attacks on German air bases. It didn’t have the romance of the desert as its initial stomping grounds. About the only thing it seemed to have going for it was the reputation of…read more
Several cities in the U.S. had a dark smoggy cloud come over them last week as the American Lung Association (ALA) released its annual State of the Air report. The sobering and slightly depressing report uses data on particulate matter — otherwise known as “soot” — and ground-level ozone — otherwise known as “smog” — that was collected between 2015…read more
When it comes to polar exploration, history is the mother of all excursion. To close out 2018, Louis Rudd became the second person to complete a solo crossing of the continent of Antarctica. In what seems a repeat of the Shackleton/Amundsen race to the pole (that was a race to the pole and not a traversal of the continent), the…read more
After the fifth installment of the James Bond movie series You Only Live Twice hit the theaters, Harry Saltzman and Albert R. “Cubby” Broccoli, the producers of the lucrative franchise, had a problem. Their Bond didn’t want to be Bond anymore. Indeed after spying, killing, and sexing his way through five James Bond movies, Scottish actor Sean Connery was ready to…read more
