Matt Fratus is a staff writer for Coffee or Die and contributes regularly to 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
In the early 1900s, Hiram Percy Maxim was a New York-born inventor with a passion for pioneering automobiles. He patented a gas-powered bicycle and helped design an early automobile, built in Hartford, Connecticut. But he heard his real calling in ...
Phyllis “Pippa” Latour Doyle celebrated her 100th birthday Thursday, but for the majority of her life, the reluctant hero kept a secret from everyone. Not even her children were aware of her experiences in World War II until her son read about them ...
“Goooooood morning, Vietnam!” Adrian Cronauer boomed out his signature drawn-out greeting. “It’s just a smidgen past five after six, and here we go with another day’s version of the Dawn Buster show from the Armed Forces Radio.” Cronauer was the ...
When night fell, Francis “Peggy” Pegahmagabow left his trench, moving past the barbed wire and into No Man’s Land. On any given night, he’d sneak by the wounded and the dying soldiers from the European front as they lay crying for help from inside ...
He wasn’t like the rest of the aspiring Marines who arrived at Parris Island in 1942. Paul Douglas had some miles on him. At 50, Douglas wore glasses, was wrinkled in the face, and had gray hair. He was more than twice as old as nearly all his fellow ...
Every Marine knows the date: Nov. 10, 1775. It was the day the US Marine Corps (then called the Continental Marines) was born. The Second Continental Congress ordered that “two Battalions of Marines be raised” for service at sea and on shore. Marine ...
“Did they get off?” asked Signalman 1st Class Douglas Munro. He had just been struck in the neck by a Japanese bullet at the helm of a landing craft off Guadalcanal, desperately trying to evacuate 500 ambushed Marines. His best friend, Signalman 1st ...
A team of deep diving explorers last week located the final resting place of one of World War II's most famous lost ships, the USS Johnston, a Fletcher-class destroyer (DD-557) led by one of the Navy's most legendary fighting commanders. A team of ...
On Easter Sunday, April 2, 1972, Capt. John Ripley surveyed the Dong Ha bridge over the Cua Viet River in South Vietnam’s Quang Tri province. The 32-year-old former enlisted Marine was on his second tour. He had survived a previous engagement five ...
Oliver J. “Porky” Bickar rolled out of bed on April Fools’ Day, 1974, looked out his window to a white-topped mountain outside Sitka, Alaska, and told his wife, Patty, “I have to do it today.” She replied with age-old words of wisdom: “Don’t make an ...
On the morning of Dec. 21, 2012, Pennsylvania State Trooper Timothy Strohmeyer was pursuing a man who had just murdered three people. With Strohmeyer and other police closing in, Jeffrey Lee Michael rammed his Ford F-250 truck into another trooper’s ...
Some 70 years after his own government turned its back on his vital work to defeat Nazi Germany, the Bank of England announced this month that an image of Alan Turing will appear on the new 50-pound note in commemoration of his legacy. Turing's ...
Wearing an enemy uniform and crawling alone through dark tunnels under a Vietnamese mountain, K’Sao Krajan fought alongside soldiers of the 5th Special Forces Group. His actions were as fierce and heroic as those of any among that unit. With the ...
As soon as he saw the blood, James Pizzutelli got ready to move. He didn’t know it yet, but the athletic trainer for the NHL’s Buffalo Sabres had just witnessed one of the most gruesome sports injuries ever captured on a live broadcast (GRAPHIC video ...
Chief Gunner's Mate Frank William Crilley recognized the urgency unfolding 265 feet below the surface. Responding to a lost submarine in April 1915, a fellow Navy diver was operating at extreme depths when his life line and air hose became tangled in ...
As members of England's First Aid Nursing Yeomanry, or FANYs, during World War II, Odette Sansom, Violette Szabó, and Noor Inayat Khan might have worked in hospitals, driven ambulances, sent coded radio signals, fixed trucks, or even, as one FANY did ...
On the night of Sept. 26, 1971, Emperor Hirohito landed at Elmendorf Air Force Base in Anchorage, Alaska. It was late — 10 p.m. — when the 70-year-old emerged from his plane with Empress Nagako by his side. The couple gingerly walked down the steps ...
The year 1932 was interesting for military decorations. Army Chief of Staff Gen. Douglas MacArthur successfully revived Gen. George Washington’s Badge for Military Merit of 1782, which became known as the Purple Heart, a medal given to those wounded ...
William J. “Wild Bill” Donovan is most revered for his role as the director of the Office of Strategic Services (OSS) — the premier paramilitary and intelligence unit that emerged during World War II and served as the precursor to the CIA. Before he ...
The course of 10 rigorous weeks at the Second Class Diving School saw about 44 out of 100 candidates graduate each year. The school, held at the time at the Naval Amphibious Base in Little Creek, Virginia, prepared deep sea divers for underwater ...
Hedy Lamarr was an Austrian-born actress whose dark-haired beauty inspired the cartoon characters of Snow White and Catwoman. Starring in roles alongside Clark Gable, Spencer Tracy, and Jimmy Stewart, she had fame, fortune, and glamour. She was also ...
Mrs. Jaffe, as she was known to her third grade students at Ambrose Elementary School in Winchester, Massachusetts, mailed a special package to the Kennedy Space Center in Cape Canaveral, Florida. Inside was a small paper cutout of a bear, detailed ...
In 2018, Chadwick Boseman and Lupita Nyong’o starred in the popular Marvel superhero movie Black Panther. The film introduced viewers to an elite all-female guard known as the Dora Milaje. Sworn to protect the King of Wakanda in the fictional kingdom ...
A green Bedford Commer van with the name Four Square Laundry painted on its side pulled into the Twinbrook estate neighborhood on the outskirts of Belfast. Sarah Jane Warke opened the passenger door, stepped out, and approached the front entrance of ...
We’ve all seen the iconic photograph: the young woman wearing shorts, a checkered shirt, and a French beret and holding an MP-40 submachine gun, looking down the side of a building, while two French Resistance fighters flank her. The look of ...
At the turn of the 20th century, women in the medical field were only allowed to treat other women or children. When the war broke out across Europe in 1914, Louisa Garrett Anderson, the daughter of Dr. Elizabeth Garrett Anderson, Britain’s first ...
In 1979, there wasn’t a single woman working a fire season as a smokejumper in the United States. Since their beginnings in 1939, the smokejumpers were exclusively an all-male unit, famously known as the wildland firefighters who parachuted from ...
The Gestapo didn’t know who she was. The Nazi secret police who were notorious for capturing Allied spies only knew of her legend — a beautiful and mysterious woman who would slip away from capture each time they closed in. The Gestapo referred to ...
The blond bombshell was a megastar by 1937. Made famous by the movie The Blue Angel in 1930, Marlene Dietrich was Germany’s most revered actress, singer, and performer. She was independent and expressive, both in her openness in her bisexuality and ...
Six weeks after more than a million American, British, and Canadian troops invaded Normandy, France, on June 6, 1944, Lt. Gen. Omar Bradley launched Operation Cobra. The mission was to break out from the stalemate where the Allies were wedged in a ...
