On July 25, 1945, President Truman authorized the U.S. military to deploy atomic weapons against Japan. On August 6, at 8:15 a.m. local time, the city of Hiroshima was destroyed by the first atomic bomb used in warfare. Three days later, on August 9, a second atomic attack was launched. The intended target was Kokura, situated in the northeast corner of Fukuoka Prefecture on the southern island of Kyushu. Because the skies at Kokura were heavily clouded, however, forces were directed toward a second target, Nagasaki. At 11:02 a.m. local time, the B-29 bomber known as “Bock’s Car,” accompanied by a weather observation plane, released a plutonium bomb that exploded approximately 500 meters above the Urakami basin in the northwestern part of the city. The explosive force of the Nagasaki bomb represented the equivalent of about 21 kilotons of conventional exposive TNT. At the hypocenter – the ground point immediately beneath the explosion – the temperature is believed to have reached between 3,000 and 4,000 degrees centigrade. Almost every buidling and structure within 1.1 kilometers of the hypocenter was totally destroyed. Although exact figures are unknown, an estimated 70,000 people, from a population of 270,000, are believed to have died within the first four months. The majority of those who died at Nagasaki died on the day of the bombing. Six days later, on August 15, 1945, Emperor Hirohito publicly announced Japan’s surrender to the Allied forces.

Culled from: Nagasaki Journey: The Photographs of Yosuke Yamahata August 10, 1945

Photographs of the Nagasaki carnage are available at Fogonazos (thanks to Amos Quito for the link).

Aaron Bracey was a freed slave who set out for California during the Gold Rush. Bracey quickly earned a reputation as a man you didn’t want to cross. In 1856, he killed a Chinese man he claimed had burglarized his cabin on his small ranch near Auburn. On February 18, 1856, Bracey was engaged in a property dispute with his neighbor James Murphy, an Irish emigrant. No one really knows jus what was said or what occurred during the quarrel, but whatever happened made Bracey fly into a rage, grab a pickax, and strike Murphy in the back of the head. Bracey immediately got a doctor and turned himself over to authorities, explaining to the police that the pickax had accidentally slipped out of his hands. Murphy told the authorities on his deathbed that Bracey had struck him from behind.

Slavery was still legal in America, and many of the miners in the hills were from the Deep South. Murphy was a popular man, and his friends started lingering around the jail calling for Judge Lynch. Sheriff King and Deputy John Boggs deputized a posse to guard the jail. Fifty more citizens of Auburn were asked to be ready to come to the sheriff’s aid if they heard the courhouse bells ringing. At about 2:30 in the morning of February 19, Deputy Boggs spotted a mob approaching the jail. Boggs yelled out to the sheriff and the posse but by the time they stepped outside of the jail, they were surrounded and disarmed by the mob. One officer managed to ring the courthouse bell, but none of the citizen guards came to the rescue.

The mob overpowered the sheriff and took the key to the jail. Aaron Bracey was dragged from his cell and forced to march up the street, as the mob beat him over his head with pick handles and clubs. Father Quinn, a Catholic priest, pleaded with the vigilantes to release the man and let the courts try him, but the frenzied throng was in no mood to listen to a man of the cloth. A handful of vigilantes picked up the priest and threw him over a fence.

Somewhere outside of Auburn, the exact place lost to history, the mob threw a rope over a branch of a pine tree and jerked Bracey into the air. The noose slipped over the terrified man’s face as he dangled in the cold night air. The mob lowered Bracey, readjusted the noose and pulled him back up into the air, where he slowly strangled to death, as a crowd of 200 stood by and watched.

Culled from: California Justice: Shootouts, Lynchings and Assassinations in the Golden State by David Kulczyk

I think you can see just how worthless a Chinese man’s life was considered in Gold Rush California if a black man (whose life was obviously little-valued as well) could kill one and not be punished for it. Sick times, on so many levels.

Oh, and I must add a note that California Justice: Shootouts, Lynchings and Assassinations in the Golden State is available on Kindle and it’s a great, fun read. Oh, and the author is a great guy too!

The White Death: Tragedy and Heroism in an Avalanche Zone

I actually got this book by accident. I meant to order The White Death: A History of Tuberculosis by Thomas Dormandy. Unsurprisingly, I put this book aside and ignored it for a few years to punish it for not being the book I wanted to read. Finally, running out of unread material, I rescued it from oblivion and took it with me as my in-flight read last month. And, apart from a couple of chapters that absolutely DARE you to skip them, it was a pretty interesting read.

The story centers on a group of mountaineering friends who, like all young men, think they’re invincible. In December 1969, they attempt to do something that had never been done before: climb Mt. Cleveland in Montana’s Glacier National Park in wintertime. Well, the reason it had never been done before is because the geography of Mt. Cleveland makes it an ideal avalanche zone. And I think you can probably guess from the title what happens.

The biography of each climber and the story of that fateful final climb is stretched out over the course of the book, intermingled with some interesting historical accounts of avalanche death and some less-than-interesting detailed analysis of various types of snow and what makes certain types more conducive to avalanches than others. Although I guess some of that stuff was kinda interesting: whenever we get snow that doesn’t stick together at all, I know to call it “sugar snow” and I know that a layer of sugar snow that is later covered over by additional snowfall is called “depth hoar” and is the ultimate avalanche-inducing nightmare for anyone journeying through the mountains. However, the author does go a bit too far in discussing the technical details of snow. I admit one chapter was nearly skipped in its entirety.

Still, this is a very good read for anyone interested in mountain tragedy. (And who isn’t?) Not as good as “Into Thin Air,” the masterpiece of this genre, but pretty interesting nonetheless. (4/5)

During World War I, as the Austrians and Italians fought it out in the Tyrol Mountains, soldiers discovered the effectiveness of launching explosives onto the slopes above each other, bringing down avalanches that killed far more effectively than their weapons. Colin Fraser has estimated the loss of life from avalanches in the war to have been between 40,000 and 80,000. In one account of the Tyrolean campain, entitled Kampf über die Gletschern, (“Battle over the Glaciers”), and reported by Fraser, a soldier breathlessly exclaimed that “the White Death” had claimed countless victims in the mountains. “The snowy torrents are like the deep sea; they seldom return their victims alive. The bravest of the brave are covered by the heavy winding sheet of the avalanche. It is no glorious death at the hands of the enemy; I have seen the corpses. It is a pitiful way to die, a comfortless suffocation in an evil element.”

Culled from: The White Death

Which begs the question: what way to die during war is NOT a pitiful way to die?

In 218 B.C., the Carthaginian general Hannibal left southern Spain with some 90,000 soldiers, 12,000 horsemen, and three dozen elephants, crossed France, and climbed into the Alps on his way to attack Rome during the Second Punic War. In the mountains, the elephants were placed at the front of the column; the belligerent Celts and Gauls who lived in the mountains reportedly “beheld these beasts with superstitious awe.” After defeating its foes in a number of terrible skirmishes, Hannibal’s army reached a pass on October 26; to cheer his depleted, exhausted troops, Hannibal exclaimed that they had “climbed the ramparts of Italy, nay, of Rome. What lies still for us to accomplish is not difficult.” The trouble was that the Alps on the way down toward Italy proved far steeper than on the way up from France. Worse, November storms had covered the glaciers with snow, concealing deadly crevasses and loading the steeper slopes with heavy blankets of snow. Although they encountered no enemies during their descent, thousands of soldiers and horses were lost to avalanches. By the time the army reached the plains on the eastern slope of the mountains, some 18,000 men, 2,000 horses, and several elephants were lost, as many as half of them to cold and avalanches.

Culled from: The White Death: Tragedy and Heroism in an Avalanche Zone

Hidden Mother: Tintypes and Cabinets

Thanks to Katchaya for the link.

Varig Flight 820 was a scheduled airline service from Galeão Airport, Rio de Janeiro, Brazil to Orly Airport, Paris, France. On 11 July 1973, the Boeing 707 made an emergency landing in a field in the Orly commune due to smoke in the cabin. The fire, smoke, and crash at the final part of the landing resulted in 123 deaths, with 12 survivors (11 crew, 1 passenger).

Flight 820′s problems began when a fire started in a rear lavatory. Crew members tried to contain the fire and smoke, but were unable to find the source of the problem. Prior to the forced landing, many of the passengers had already died of smoke inhalation.

The aircraft landed at a field 5km short of the runway, in a full-flap and gear down configuration. Only one passenger survived, while the major part of the crew left the plane by the emergency exit at the top of the cockpit. The captain of this flight, Gilberto Araujo da Silva, disappeared 30 January 1979 while flying Varig Cargo Boeing 707 PP-VLU over the Pacific Ocean.

As a possible cause of the fire was that the lavatory waste bin contents caught fire after a still lit cigarette was thrown into it, the FAA issued AD 74-08-09 requiring “installation of placards prohibiting smoking in the lavatory and disposal of cigarettes in the lavatory waste receptacles; establishment of a procedure to announce to airplane occupants that smoking is prohibited in the lavatories; installation of ashtrays at certain locations; and repetitive inspections to ensure that lavatory waste receptacle doors operate correctly”.

Culled from: Wikipedia

Excerpt from the Badger State Banner newspaper, January 23, 1890:

John Kuhni, charged with the murder of William Christian in the town of Primrose, December 12, 1888… pleaded guilty and was immediately sentenced to life imprisonment… [His] crime was the most atrocious ever committed in Dane County… About December 23, 1888, 2 boys while fishing found a sack in the water. They opened it and found… portions of a human body. It was found that Christian had been killed, his body cut in small pieces, part of the remains burned, part placed in a sack and thrown in a creek, and others packed in a valise and carried away by the murderer… In his confession… Kuhni says that he killed Christian because he ridiculed his religion and laughed at him for reading the Bible.

Culled from: My favorite book, Wisconsin Death Trip by Michael Lesy

Timing played an important role in the death of English King George V (1865-1936). The announcement of his impending demise was recorded in the famous bulletin, ‘The life of the King is moving peacefully to its close,’ written on the back of a menu by his doctor, Lord Dawson. In 1968 it was revealed by Dawson’s biographer, Francis Watson, that the doctor had taken it upon himself to accelerate death with a lethal mixture of morphine and cocaine injected into the king’s jugular vein. Dawson had resorted to euthanasia not for the comfort of the king – since he was already comatose – but so as not further to exhaust the assembled onlookers. A second reason was also given: Dawson wished the announcement of George’s death to appear in the morning papers; laggardliness on the king’s part ran the risk of the news appearing less ‘appropriately’ in the ‘evening journals’.

Culled from: Death: A History Of Man’s Obsessions and Fears by Robert Wilkins

A 39-year-old woman was struck and killed by her own SUV in a central Miami-Dade parking garage. Arlene M. Allen, of Miramar, began to pull out of a parking space at Burger King’s corporate headquarters, 5505 Blue lagoon Dr., at about 6:20 p.m. on Thursday, September 8, 2011. While backing out, she hit a vehicle next to hers. Allen stopped and got out of her BMW SUV to check the damage, but the woman left her SUV in reverse with the driver’s door open. The SUV struck her. It continued to roll and hit two more vehicles before it stopped. The woman died in the parking lot.

Culled from: The Miami Herald
Generously submitted by: Mike Marano