Matt Fratus is a staff writer for Coffee or Die and Free Range American. He prides himself on uncovering the most fascinating tales of history by sharing them through any means of engaging storytelling. He writes for his micro-blog @LateNightHistory
The call rang out in the firehouse of Rescue Company 1 reporting a jumper at the Ritz-Carlton hotel. Ed Loder, a 41-year-old firefighter with 20 years on the job, threw on his gear and pulled himself into the driver’s seat of their fire engine. The ...
The birthday candles, the birthday cakes, and the celebrations of life would have to wait because Vivian “Millie” Bailey was fulfilling a bucket-list item she had always wanted to experience. The World War II veteran celebrated her 102nd birthday by ...
The Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum in Boston, Massachusetts, was the victim of the single largest property theft in the world. Two art thieves dressed in police uniforms arrived near the side entrance and pushed the buzzer, informing the guard ...
The “Gray Ghost” was tenacious, scrappy, and violent. He wore a double-breasted gray wool shell jacket and a gray slouch hat. There was a confident aura about him despite conventional correlations between physical stature and capability. He stood ...
“That’s Johnny’s work,” said a Scotland Yard detective after inspecting an open and empty safe. “Johnny’s back.” The year was 1951, and their wanted man was among the most well-known safecrackers in the criminal underworld. The meticulous and ...
Holding a candle with a flame, commanding officer Oliver Woodward whispered in the darkness to a group of men of the 1st Australian Tunneling Company, informing the engineers he was now in charge. The soldiers, some only teenagers when they joined ...
Cpl. Tibor “Ted” Rubin had already seen the violence fellow human beings were capable of prior to his service with the US Army during the Korean War. He didn’t have a normal American upbringing — in fact, he was born in Hungary and deported to ...
Among the daunting tasks that a new chef must perfect is flipping a pan or skillet filled with breakfast ingredients, a stir-fry, or another recipe that involves mixed foods. “When you flip anything, you really just have to have the courage of ...
A US Fish and Wildlife Service officer looks back over her left shoulder to watch a Super Scooper aircraft swoop in low and skim across Skilak Lake. The Swan Lake Fire began in June 2019 and raged for months, burning more than 162,000 acres of land ...
Nazi Germany had occupied Poland for less than a year before the regime rolled through Denmark. The only planes seen in the clouds were those of the Luftwaffe, and the sympathetic Danish government offered zero resistance to the invasion. Soon after ...
On Oct. 12, 2000, a small picket boat filled with hidden explosives approached the side of the USS Cole while she was refueling in Yemen's Aden harbor and exploded. The blast by suicide bombers caused a gaping 40-foot hole in the destroyer’s hull in ...
Communities in war-stricken countries are frequent victims of hidden land mines that were never recovered. A Tanzanian-based nonprofit known as Apopo has trained its animals to detect land mines since the early 1990s, and added tuberculosis in 2002. ...
“For years and years and years people just thought truck driving was driving a truck,” said Sammy Seay, a US Army veteran who helped build the Ace of Spades gun truck. “Well normally it is. Not in Vietnam.” On Sept. 2, 1967, 37 cargo trucks from ...
Parachuting from a perfectly good airplane is a valuable infiltration method for airborne paratroopers and special operations forces. During the Global War on Terrorism, US troops completed several combat and training airborne operations. Hurling ...
“The War Garden of 1918 must become the Victory Garden of 1919,” reads a pamphlet filled with cartoon illustrations that was published by the National War Garden Commission. While the men exchanged their farm tools for a rifle, a civilian ...
When it comes to drone warfare, the Nazis were early innovators. In World War II, the Germans had an arsenal of technological weapons systems that were used against the Allies, but one of their most surprising ideas was the Goliath Tracked Mine, ...
“What the hell’s the Navy doing here?” asked an airman at Tri Duby airfield. Three weeks prior to the arrival of an American B-17 on the dirt runway in Slovakia, partisans of the Slovak National Uprising had battled against their Nazi-aligned ...
Col. Ralph Parr retired from the US Air Force in 1976 with 10 Distinguished Flying Cross medals and 41 air medals — each an indication of bravery from flying in 641 combat missions during three wars. The double ace who downed 10 enemy aircraft in ...
The book and movie Black Hawk Down provided the outside world a glimpse into what occurred during the 17-hour firefight in Mogadishu, Somalia, on Oct. 3, 1993. Army Rangers and operators from the US Army’s Special Operations Command — commonly known ...
Master Sgt. Scott Fales wasn’t a junior Air Force Pararescueman (PJ) when he deployed to Somalia as a member of Task Force Ranger. He had 16 years of military service, 13 of those years as a PJ, and numerous combat search and rescue (CSAR) operations ...
On the north side of the 6200 block of Hollywood Boulevard is Mark Harmon’s star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame. Thomas Mark Harmon is most popularly known as leading man Jethro Gibbs in the hit CBS TV show NCIS. He shares his first name with his ...
The Last Samurai hit the box office in 2003 and grabbed the attention of both movie critics and historians. The film was nominated for four Oscars by the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences. Its story follows Capt. Nathan Algren, an American ...
When a US service member is killed in the line of duty, whether in combat or in training, there is a support system in place to assist the families with their needs. These family members adopt the term “Gold Star” to acknowledge that their son, ...
Teenagers in Bełchatów, Poland, an industrial city home to the largest coal-fueled power plant in Europe, normally worried about getting good grades in school, making friends, and chasing girls. The typical upbringing for a Polish Jew became anything ...
Eight whalers and 265 men were stranded in the Arctic ice fields near Point Barrow, Alaska. From the top of the world the ship’s captain feared the worst. His crew was in danger of starvation, as they didn’t have enough food to endure the winter. In ...
The men who served in the US Army’s 65th Infantry Regiment have something to be proud of. Known as the Puerto Rican Regiment prior to World War II, the last all-Hispanic unit in military history has overcome decades of severe racial prejudices and ...
The Philippines was the ideal destination for nurses seeking adventure in a tropical paradise. The warm weather, palm trees, and clear blue ocean departed from the usual setting found on military bases, hospitals, or aid stations back home. It was a ...
The soldiers of the 1st Battalion of the Australian Imperial Force (AIF) had overtaken a section of the Turkish trench system by nightfall. The assault at Lone Pine on Aug. 6, 1915, was a diversion to distract the enemy’s attention away from the ...
The Department of Defense announced Wednesday that 23-year-old Staff Sgt. Ronald J. Ouellette died Monday from injuries suffered in a single all-terrain-vehicle (ATV) non-combat related accident. The crash occurred on the flight line at Ali Al ...
The CIA had its eye on Tibet. The Buddhist nation of vast plateaus and mountain ranges in Central Asia was completely isolated from the rest of society. A diplomatic relationship with the small country surrounded by China on three of its sides was of ...
