We never show up before the second inning!
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)
With such great raw material to work from, you’d think it’d be easy to make a great series from it. Apparently it wasn’t. The BBC1 series Rogue Heroes based on the Robert MacIntyre book of the same name is an altogether silly comic-book effort to tell the incredible story of the formation of the elite British Special Air Service during…read more
The silver medal won by German athlete Luz Long in the long jump at the 1936 Munich Olympics fetched $488,435 at auction on October 16, 2022, a record for an Olympic silver medal sold at public auction. In all, 20 bids were made for the medal, which had attracted a significant amount of worldwide media attention. Many other pieces of…read more
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
