In 1898 the French army introduced the world to a fearsome new piece of artillery: the Canon de 75 modèle 1897. French soldiers quickly dubbed it the Soixante-Quinze (“Seventy-Five”) in a nod to its 75mm bore, and in time the gun would become commonly known as the French 75. The Germans who encountered the gun at the First Battle
During World War II, Major General Ira T. Wyche soldiered in the shadow of such towering figures as Dwight D. Eisenhower, Omar Bradley, and George S. Patton Jr., which may help to explain why no biographer has ever told his life story and why so few histories of the conflict cast him in any kind of central role. Another
One of the occupational hazards of editing a magazine, especially one that covers as much thematic territory as MHQ, is that one thing invariably leads to another, and sometimes the backstories we run across are too fascinating to ignore. That certainly was the case with the vintage coin banks showcased in the feature beginning on page 62. First case
Richard Fleischer, the director of the American sequences of Tora! Tora! Tora!, the 1970 film that is the subject of Wendell Jamieson’s cover story in this issue of MHQ, was a gifted Hollywood veteran whose other credits included The Narrow Margin (1952), 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea (1954), The Vikings (1958), Compulsion (1959), and Dr. Doolittle (1967). “One could
In July 1941, fearing that their city was facing an “unemployment catastrophe,” a group of business, labor, and political leaders from Evansville, Indiana, traveled to Washington, D.C., to ask for an economic lifeline in the form of federal defense contracts. As Roy Morris Jr. tells the story in this issue (“World War II’s Can-Do City,” page 70), the Office
Charles N. Shaffer, Jr., did just about everything right in representing John W. Dean III, the onetime White House counsel whose riveting testimony before a Senate committee in 1973 directly implicated President Richard M. Nixon in the Watergate break-in and coverup, leading to Nixon’s resignation the following year. But Shaffer, who died at age 82 at his home in
Don Adams, whose career as an FBI agent spanned 22 years, never really bought the official line of his own employer: that Lee Harvey Oswald, acting alone, assassinated President John F. Kennedy. Adams, who died on June 14 at age 83 in Akron, Ohio, eventually wrote From an Office Building with a High-Powered Rifle (Trine Day, 2012), in which he
John R. Tunheim, the federal judge in Minnesota who served from 1994 to 1998 as the chairman of the Assassination Records Review Board (ARRB), says in a television program to be aired this month that while the Warren Commission “did a thorough job,” the investigation of President John F. Kennedy’s assassination in 1963 was “somewhat primitive” and riddled with
1. Harry S. Truman’s campaign slogan in 1948 was: a) “I’m Just Wild About Harry b) “Give ‘Em Hell, Harry” c) “Pour It On ‘Em, Harry” d) All of the above Answer: All of the above. The first was derived from a popular song written in 1921 by Noble Sissle and Eubie Blake; the second echoed the spontaneous cries of
Kris Kristofferson’s Coolest Concert Ever
Kris Kristofferson’s career as a singer-songwriter spans nearly 50 years, and his career as an actor nearly that, so it saddened me a little to learn that he’s struggling just a bit with memory loss. “I wish my memory weren’t so bad,” Kristofferson, 77, told Fox News on November 4, following a screening of the indie film “The Motel Life,”
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