SSG Harold George Bennett: A Heroic Legacy of Valor and Sacrifice Harold George Bennett, born on August 1, 1921, in Washington, D.C., was a remarkable soldier who left an enduring mark on World War II. Enlisting in the United States Army in 1942, Bennett was assigned to the renowned 30th Infantry Division, known as the "Old Hickory" division. This division played a significant role in the European theater, and Bennett would prove himself as an exceptional soldier during his service. One of the defining moments of Bennett's military career came during the Battle of Mortain in August 1944. In a harrowing situation, his unit found themselves surrounded by German forces.  Despite the overwhelming odds, Bennett's courage and leadership shone through. With unwavering determination, he single-handedly eliminated an enemy machine gun position, allowing his fellow soldiers to break free from the encirclement. For his extraordinary bravery, Bennett was awarded the Distinguished

Clyde Lee Choate of West Frankfort, Illinois, a Staff Sergeant in the U.S. Army, was awarded the Medal of Honor for his extraordinary actions on October 25, 1944, near Bruyères, France. Choate enlisted in the Army as a private and served 31 months overseas in the European Theatre. By October 25, 1944, he was serving as a staff sergeant in Company C, 601st Tank Destroyer Battalion. On October 25, near Bruyères in eastern France, his tank destroyer was hit and set on fire in an attack by German forces.  He ordered his crew to abandon the destroyer and reach safety but then returned through hostile fire to ensure no one was trapped inside. Seeing a German tank overrunning American infantry soldiers, he single-handedly attacked and destroyed the tank. He was awarded the Medal of Honor for his actions on October 25, 1944. Choate was honorably discharged from the Army in 1946. In 1946, he was elected to the Illinois House of Representatives.  After three decades in the legislature, he retire

Imagine if we inflicted corporal punishment on criminals today? 😳 During the medieval period, whipping was a regular form of punishment utilized for minor criminal offenses. Public whippings in town squares served as a deterrent against petty crimes as locals were reminded of the consequences of unlawful acts.  Corporal punishment referred to physical forms of discipline administered to the body. It was a common method employed not only on children but adults as well. Whippings and floggings were frequently used to punish people across all age groups for various infractions.    Some of the minor crimes against adults that were disciplined through corporal punishment included theft, public drunkenness, and disorderly conduct. More serious offenses such as assault or burglary could result in stockading or time in the town jail in addition to physical beating.   While children may be the group most associated with corporal punishment today, it was widely practiced on the entire populatio

 On March 25, 1931, nine unemployed young black men, the Scottsboro Boys were falsely accused of raping two white women on board a train near Scottsboro, Alabama in 1931. Convicted and facing execution, the case sparked international demonstrations and succeeded in both highlighting the racism of the American legal system and in overturning the conviction.        The Soviet Union and Communist Part of USA played an important part fighting for the boys freedom and making their story known everywhere.  There were "Free Scottsboro Boys" protests all over the world. "The Scottsboro Boys", as they became known, were defended by many in the North and attacked by many in the South.  The case is now widely considered a miscarriage of justice, highlighted by the use of all-white juries.      William L. Patterson who went to Russia many times in those days was one of the attorneys representing this case. Oliver Golden, George Tynes and others who went to work in the Soviet Un

I liked to shoot women pushing prams": Secret Nazi tapes shocking Germany Horrific new transcripts reveal ordinary soldiers and airmen bragging about their role in the Hiler's atrocities Game:  A Luftwaffe boss reveals shooting children was a sport (Image: Getty) IT wasn’t their fault, has been the lame excuse. Ordinary German soldiers had nothing to do with the atrocities committed by Hitler and his hardcore Nazi henchmen. But now a disturbing – and at times ­horrifyingly graphic – new book has laid to rest the myth that only the likes of the SS and Gestapo were responsible for war crimes and acts of rape, murder and genocide. And the German people have been forced into ­reassessing their past. Soldaten: On Fighting, Killing and Dying: The Secret Second World War Tapes of German POWs, which is published in English for the first time next week, contains shocking transcripts of ordinary soldiers, sailors and airmen condemning themselves from their own mouths. We are printing so

The Story Of Marcy Borders, The ‘Dust Lady’ Of 9/11 On September 11, 2001, Marcy Borders escaped her office in the World Trade Center just before the Twin Towers collapsed. Soon after, she was photographed covered in ash from head to toe and became known as the "Dust Lady." After the 9/11 terrorist attacks destroyed New York City’s Twin Towers, countless heart-wrenching photos from the tragedy began to emerge. Among them was the iconic photo of the “Dust Lady,” a woman named Marcy Borders who was dressed in professional attire — and covered in concrete dust from head to toe. Underneath the layer of soot, her expression clearly conveys the shock of what she’d just survived. But although she lived through 9/11, Marcy Borders would later endure a decade-long struggle with trauma before she succumbed to cancer in 2015. This is the haunting story of the “Dust Lady.” How Marcy Borders Survived The Terror Attacks At The World Trade Center At 8:46 a.m. on Sept. 11, 2001, Marcy Border

John McGrath - a rapist. John McGrath, an Aboriginal, was charged at the Central Criminal Court in Sydney on Tuesday the 10th of August 1875 "with having on the 16th of May last, at Warragubra, in the colony of New South Wales, Australia, committed a rape upon one Sarah Murfin." The crime was committed at night, at Warragubra, three miles from Bega, when Mrs. Murfin was home alone. Her husband and daughter, John and Martha, were at church at Bega.  John and Martha returned to the house before John McGrath had left the neighbourhood. He was arrested soon after by Constable Preston, and charged with rape.  He was tried before Mr. Justice Hargrave at the Central Criminal Court.  The jury retired for half an hour before returning their guilty verdict.  McGrath was then sentenced to death.  It was reported that “the Executive has given his case the most careful consideration, but found nothing in the circumstances connected with the crime which would at all justify a commutation”.

NO GUN RI MASSACRE The first month of the Korean War was chaotic and full of military failures for the South Korean army and its allied U.S. Army. The invasion came as a complete surprise and the North Korean army quickly captured Seoul and rolled southward with little opposition.  American forces had been quickly deployed from Japan where the soldiers were enjoying a cushy life. WWII had been over for five years and American GI’s were ill-prepared for a new war. They were poorly trained, poorly equipped, and poorly led. It is no surprise their performance was substandard.  The first month was one of continuous retreats, some of them of the panicky variety. “Bugging out” became slang for those precipitous withdrawals. As American and ROK units retreated, so did thousands of civilians who did not want to live under communism. The sneaky North Koreans sometimes put soldiers disguised as civilians in the midst of the refugees.  It only took a couple of Incidents of being shot at from behi

British (Scottish) soldiers from the Seaforth Highlanders with a dog in a trench at La Gorgue near Loos, August 5, 1915. Today 109 years ago, on October 13, 1914, the Battle of Armentières began on the Western Front, as part of the "Race to the Sea."  . In September 1914 the First Battle of the Aisne was fought in which neither the Allies nor the Germans had broken through, resulting in a trench stalemate. .  Both sides then began maneuvering north towards the North Sea in an attempt to turn the northern flank of each other, known as the "Race to the Sea". .  The British took up positions in French and Belgian Flanders between Béthune and Ypres, north of the French Army's line. The British 2nd Army Corps was positioned on the La Bassée Canal, while further north the 3rd Army Corps was positioned near Méteren. .  On October 12, the Germans captured the city of Lille and broke through the French lines south of La Bassée, prompting the British 2nd and 3rd Army Corp

British sailor Willie Vicarage, wounded during the Battle of Jutland, prior to his surgery, 1916. Today 108 years ago, on October 13, 1915, British poet and Captain Charles Sorley was killed in action during the Battle of Loos. Sorley is best remembered for his poem "When You See Millions of the Mouthless Dead". . Charles Hamilton Sorley was born on May 19, 1895 in Aberdeen, Scotland as the son of a philosopher. Sorley was described as a precocious and academically gifted child, and in college he began writing and publishing poetry. .  In January 1914, his poetry got him a scholarship at Oxford University, but he decided to study abroad in Germany instead, where he spent some 6 months. When the war broke out, Sorley was interned in a prison for a night, but was released and ordered back to Britain the following morning. .  Once back in Britain, Sorley immediately enlisted into the British Army, joining the Suffolk Regiment as a 2nd Lieutenant. After going through training, So

The Billingtons - a family of hangmen. James Billington was born at Preston in Lancashire in 1847 and had a life long fascination with hanging. As an eleven year old boy he had built a model gallows and practiced hanging dummies on it. He had unsuccessfully applied to succeed William Marwood but only managed to secure the Yorkshire hangman's position, where he was used rather than James Berry.   James ran a barber shop in Farnworth near Bolton in Lancashire when not engaged in executions.  In the period he was on the Home Office List, 1884-1901, he carried out 151 hangings in total, executing 141 men and five women in England and Wales, plus two men in Ireland and three men in Scotland. James' first execution was at Armley Gaol in Leeds on the 26th of August 1884, when he hanged Joseph Laycock, a Sheffield hawker, for the murder of his wife and four children.  Laycock was to have said just before being hanged, "You will not hurt me?" to which James Billington replied,

The Bengal famine of 1943 was a famine in the Bengal province of British India (now Bangladesh and eastern India) during World War II.  An estimated 2.1–3 million,[A] out of a population of 60.3 million, died of starvation, malaria, and other diseases aggravated by malnutrition, population displacement, unsanitary conditions and lack of health care. Millions were impoverished as the crisis overwhelmed large segments of the economy and catastrophically disrupted the social fabric.  Eventually, families disintegrated; men sold their small farms and left home to look for work or to join the British Indian Army, and women and children became homeless migrants, often travelling to Calcutta or other large cities in search of organised relief.  Historians usually characterise the famine as anthropogenic (man-made),[9] asserting that wartime colonial policies created and then exacerbated the crisis. A minority view exists, however, that holds that the famine was the result of natural causes.

THE UNKNOWN PRISONERS In 2016, archaeologists found over 80 shackled skeletons in a mass grave dug in a corner of a necropolis which was unearthed during the construction of a library and national opera house between Athens and the port of Piraeus.  The burial site dates back to between the 8th and 5th century BCE, and, unlike the downtown Kerameikos cemetery where the majority of the occupants were either nobles or rich, it contains the regular people, like children resting in clay pots, soldiers still wearing parts of their armor, adults buried in stone coffins or burned and interred in an urn. Most showed the signs of a hard and short life, except for the eighty shackled men who were all young and fit.   Who were they? Since most had their wrist tied in iron shackles, and they were all buried at the same time, the assumption is that they were the victims of a mass execution, though their orderly burial and health status suggests they were more than slaves or common criminals, possib

Execution by cannon in Shiraz, Iran, circa 1890s. The prisoner is generally tied to a gun with the upper part of the small of his back resting against the muzzle. When the gun is fired, his head is seen to go straight up into the air some forty or fifty feet; the arms fly off right and left, high up in the air, and fall at, perhaps, a hundred yards distance; the legs drop to the ground beneath the muzzle of the gun; and the body is literally blown away altogether. "Blown from a gun" was a punishment often used by colonial powers against locals who believed their body parts must be together to enter the afterlife.  It was reserved as a special punishment when just death wasn't enough. Local feral dogs would usually eat the pieces of the dead that could be found. Related Top 15 most evil men in history  2. Adolf Hitler Hitler was Chancellor of Germany from 1933 to his death in 1945, becoming Germany’s Fuhrer. Before he gained power, he wanted to be an artist, but he failed.

Serbian soldier resting in a trench next to his father who visited him on the frontlines near Belgrade, 1915. Today 108 years ago, on October 9, 1915, the Serbian capital of Belgrade was captured by German and Austro-Hungarian forces during the "Triple Invasion" of 1915.  .  Belgrade was shortly occupied by the Austro-Hungarians on December 2, 1914, before the Serbs recaptured the city on December 15, 1914, during the Battle of Kolubara. .  Belgrade was captured for good by the Central Powers on October 9, 1915, as a joint German, Austro-Hungarian and Bulgarian offensive forced the Serbian Army to retreat through Montenegro and Albania. .  To accompany this photograph I'll recite the lyrics of Sabaton's song "Last Dying Breath":    ⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀ "War begun, the Kaiser has come Day or night, the shells keep falling, Overrun, but never outdone, Street to street, denying defeat. .  The British notably used Soldiers of the Serbian Army  Keep your heads held

12th October 1945. Private First Class Desmond T. Doss of Lynchburg, Virginia, is presented the Medal of Honor for outstanding bravery as a combat medic, the first conscientious objector in American history to receive the nation’s highest military award. When called on by his country to fight in World War II, Doss, a dedicated pacifist, registered as a conscientious objector. Eventually sent to the Pacific theater of war as a medical corpsman, Doss voluntarily put his life in the utmost peril during the bloody Battle for Okinawa, saving dozens of lives well beyond the call of duty. During World War II, over 70,000 men were designated conscientious objectors, mostly men whose religious beliefs made them opposed to war. Some refused to serve, but 25,000 joined the US armed forces in noncombat roles such as medics and chaplains. Desmond T. Doss of Lynchburg, Virginia, was one of those men, though he personally shunned the title of conscientious objector. Doss, born in 1919, was raised wit

On This Day in 1944, the city of Warsaw rose against its German occupiers. The uprising was led by the Polish Home Army, the underground resistance force aligned with the Polish government-in-exile. The city's civilian population fought alongside the Home Army against the well-armed German military.  For Polish Jew Stanisław Aronson (pictured here as a child), the uprising was particularly meaningful. He had survived the deadly deportations from the Warsaw ghetto and then been accepted into an elite sabotage unit of the Polish Home Army. He fought in the 1944 uprising. A particularly moving moment for Stanisław came when the Home Army captured the Umschlagplatz.  The Umschlagplatz was the roundup location from which Jews in the Warsaw ghetto had previously been deported to concentration camps and killing centers in 1942–43. More than a year before the uprising, Stanisław’s parents had been rounded up at this very location and sent to their deaths.  “We marched out of the Umschlagpl

FRANÇOIS (fron-SWA) GASTON  opened the 1st SLAUGHTER HOUSE (abattoir in french) in VINCENNES INDIANA in 1823. After many years of butchery & slaughter he decided to try human flesh and discovered it to taste very similar to animal flesh.   He became a gluttonous cannibal and started to secretly sell human flesh to his customers.   He killed and ate his own WIFE.   His brother Pascal Gaston joined him in his cannibalism and hosted horrific dinner parties at their family home here @ 321 N. 2nd street (where you now stand).   His maid Miss Mari tried to hide their evil deeds by cleaning up the bloody messes they left behind. This drove her insane and caused her to become blind.  His oldest son Henri Gaston became obsessed with torturing the victims that would later become meat.   His oldest daughter Anna Gaston married a werewolf that was drawn to the evil of the Gaston family home.   For many years François and his family secretly tortured, killed and consumed the people of VINCENNE

The Horrifying And Lethal Experiments Of Unit 731, The Laboratory Of Death In World War Two, Japan created a top secret project named Unit 731 which sought to learn more about human physiology. Officially called the Epidemic Prevention and Water Purification Department of the Kwantung Army, Unit 731's methods were completely unethical - and that's putting it lightly. Brutal human experimentations were conducted in Unit 731 that resemble things straight out of a horror movie. It shocks the mind to think that these experiments really happened, but indeed they did. Japan committed war crimes throughout WWII that are cruel and horrifying. They used grisly torture methods on countless victims that ranged from bamboo torture to cannibalism. However, the worst methods occurred in Unit 731. Located in Manchuria, most of the test subjects for Unit 731 were Chinese. By the end of the war, as surrender became imminent, the Japanese involved with Unit 731 attempted to destroy all evidence

Cannibalism- We like to think that this type of thing can't happen in our society, that cannibalism is something that uncivilized tribes and macabre serial killers partake in. But history has proven again and again that when humans are starving and survival instincts kick in, people will do and eat anything.  In 1921-1922 there was a great famine in Russia. It began in 1917, at the end of WW1. A Russian civil war started between the Bolshevik Red Army and the White Army. The country was in a state of turmoil; there was no food at all, 25 million people were starving to death.  It's said that they began by eating their pets; when they were hungry enough, they turned on their own families. Mothers ate their own babies; children left alone for a second on the street were kidnapped, slaughtered, and eaten. Its said that the starvation was so terrible that these people told themselves they had done a good thing- the Christian thing. They'd put an end to their victim's suffer