Good Morning & God Bless To Every One !
Today is May 27, the 147th day of 2014 and there are 218 days left this year where it is another Blessed Day in the pleasure of our service for our Lord here at:
For God’s Glory Alone Ministries !!!
In Self Reflection today, I note -…- Sixty some years ago I knew everything; now I know nothing, proving that education is a progressive discovery of my own ignorance!!!
So, What Happened Today In 1941?
President Franklin D. Roosevelt proclaims an unlimited national emergency
Prior to the United States entry into World War II, President Franklin D. Roosevelt announces a state of unlimited national emergency in response to Nazi Germany’s threats of world domination on this day in 1941. In a speech on this day, he repeated his famous remark from a speech he made in 1933 during the Great Depression … “the only thing we have to fear is fear itself.”
In a radio address delivered from the White House, FDR tried to rally isolationists to his philosophy that aid to Europe was purely in America’s self-interest. In March 1941, he had successfully pushed through the Lend-Lease Bill, which gave military aid to any country vital to the defense of the United States. Roosevelt recounted for his audience how German submarines were boldly attacking British shipping and threatening American shipping in the Atlantic and how Londoners endured nightly raids of German bombers. He painted an almost apocalyptic vision of a Nazi-controlled Western Hemisphere where American workers would be enslaved by Germany, godless Nazis would outlaw freedom of worship and America’s children would wander off, goose-stepping in search of new gods.
Roosevelt also took pains to define what he meant by America being attacked. He insisted that an attack on the United States can begin with the domination of any base which menaces our security, for instance Canada, Brazil or Trinidad, and not just when bombs actually drop in the streets of New York or San Francisco or New Orleans or Chicago. He appeared to be urging Americans to consider actively engaging in the war in Europe stating it would be suicide to wait until they are in our front yard.
FDR then laid out his administration’s policy with regard to the current war in Europe. Without committing troops, he promised the protection of shipping in the Atlantic, continued humanitarian and military aid to Britain, the establishment of a civilian defense and warned of saboteurs and fifth columnists (communist infiltrators) who threatened democracy in America and abroad. He also condemned war profiteering and urged organized labor to resist disruptive strikes in war-production industries.
Finally, FDR warned Germany that the U.S. was prepared to go to war in case of attack and pledged to strengthen America’s defense to the extreme limit of our national power and authority.
Just over seven months later, the United States entered World War II after Japan’s attack on Pearl Harbor on December 7, 1941.
Other Memorable Or Interesting Events Occurring On May 27 In History:
1564 – John Calvin, one of the dominant figures of the Protestant Reformation, dies in Geneva;
1668 – Three colonists are expelled from Massachusetts for being Baptists;
1703 – After winning access to the Baltic Sea through his victories in the Great Northern War, Czar Peter I founds the city of St. Petersburg as the new Russian capital. The reign of Peter, who became sole czar in 1696, was characterized by a series of sweeping military, political, economic, and cultural reforms based on Western European models. Peter the Great, as he became known, led his country into major conflicts with Persia, the Ottoman Empire, and Sweden. Russian victories in these wars greatly expanded Peter’s empire, and the defeat of Sweden won Russia direct access to the Baltic Sea, a lifelong obsession of the Russian leader. In 1721, Peter abandoned the traditional Russian title of czar in favor of the European-influenced title of emperor. Four years later, he died and was succeeded by his wife, Catherine;
1813 – Former President Thomas Jefferson writes former President John Adams to let him know that their mutual friend, Dr. Benjamin Rush, has died. Rush’s passing caused Jefferson to meditate upon the departure of the Revolutionary generation. He wrote, We too must go; and that ere long. I believe we are under half a dozen at present; I mean the signers of the Declaration. Although Jefferson and Adams were bitter political enemies by the time of the presidential election of 1800, in which Jefferson narrowly defeated Adams, the two leading intellectuals and politicians of Virginia and Massachusetts had been allies and confidants during the heady, revolutionary days of the late 1770s. Following 12 years of bitter silence caused by their disagreement over the role of the new federal government, the two old friends managed to reestablish the discourse of their younger years spent in Philadelphia, where they both served in the Continental Congress, and Paris, where they served together as ambassadors to France;
1831 – Jedediah Smith, one of the nation’s most important trapper-explorers, is killed by Commanche Indians on the Santa Fe Trail. Smith’s role in opening up the Far West was not fully appreciated until modern scholars examined the records of his far-ranging journeys. As with all of the mountain men, Smith ventured west as a practical businessman working for eastern fur companies. His goal was to find new territories to trap beaver and otter and make trading contacts with Native Americans. Nonetheless, beginning in 1822 when he made his first expedition with the fur trader William Ashley, Smith’s travels provided information on western geography and potential trails that were invaluable to later pioneers. On this day in 1831, Smith was riding alone when a hunting party of Commanche Indians attacked him. Dazed and weakened by lack of water, Smith nonetheless managed to shoot one of the Commanche before he was overwhelmed and killed;
1863 – During the American Civil War, Chief Justice Roger B. Taney of Maryland issues Ex parte Merryman, challenging the authority of President Abraham Lincoln and the U.S. military to suspend the writ of habeas corpus (the legal procedure that prevents the government from holding an individual indefinitely without showing cause) in Maryland denying the president’s authority to suspend habeas corpus. Taney denounced Lincoln’s interference with civil liberties and argued that only Congress had the power to suspend the writ. Lincoln did not respond directly to Taney’s edict, but he did address the issue in his message to Congress that July. He justified the suspension through Article I, Section 9, of the Constitution, which specifies a suspension of the writ “when in cases of rebellion or invasion the public safety may require it.” Although military officials continued to arrest suspected Southern sympathizers, the incident led to a softening of the policy. Concern that Maryland might still secede from the Union forced a more conciliatory stance from Lincoln and the military;
1905 – During the Russo-Japanese War, the Russian Baltic Fleet is nearly destroyed at the Battle of Tsushima Strait. The decisive defeat, in which only 10 of 45 Russian warships escaped to safety, convinced Russian leaders that further resistance against Japan’s imperial designs for East Asia was hopeless. Japan emerged from the conflict as the first modern non-Western world power and set its sights on greater imperial expansion. However, for Russia, its military’s disastrous performance in the war was one of the immediate causes of the Russian Revolution of 1905;
1907 – The Bubonic Plague breaks out in San Francisco;
1918 – In World War I, in the early morning hours of May 27, 1918, the German army begins the Third Battle of the Aisne with an attack on Allied positions at the Chemin des Dames ridge, in the Aisne River region of France. By mid-May 1918, General Erich Ludendorff, mastermind of the ambitious German offensive—known as the Kaiserschlacht, or the “kaiser’s battle”—launched that spring, was determined to reclaim Chemin des Dames from the French with a forceful, concentrated surprise attack on the strategically crucial ridge. There had been two previous battles in the Aisne region, in 1914 and 1917, but both had been offensives by the Allies—predominately the French—against the Germans; the second was part of the failed Nivelle Offensive, named for Robert Nivelle, the French commander-in-chief who was summarily replaced in the wake of the offensive’s disastrous outcome. Nivelle’s successor, Phillipe Petain, was aware of the likelihood of a German attack at the Chemin des Dames in 1918, but he failed to anticipate its strength and scale. As an Allied force including some 4,000 Americans scored a major victory at Cantigny, on the Somme River, on May 28, even as the German spring offensive continued in force, the Allied defense was stiffening, and as the summer of 1918 began, Petain, Foch and the rest of the Allied commanders began to shift their focus to counterattacks, knowing the outcome of the war hung in the balance;
1935 – The United States Supreme Court declares President Franklin Roosevelt’s National Recovery Act unconstitutional;
1936 – The Cunard liner RMS Queen Mary left England on its maiden voyage to New York;
1937 – The Golden Gate Bridge, connecting San Francisco with Marin County, California officially opens amid citywide celebration. Named for the narrow strait that marks the entrance to the San Francisco Bay from the Pacific Ocean, the Golden Gate Bridge was constructed from January 1933 to May 1937. At the time, it was the longest suspension bridge in the world, at 4,200 feet. By 6 a.m. on May 27, 18,000 people were lined up on both the San Francisco and Marin sides; in all, some 200,000 showed up that day. At the appointed hour, a foghorn blew and the toll gates opened, releasing the earliest arrivals, who rushed to be the first to cross. Many schools, offices and stores were closed, and the day was designated “Pedestrian Day.” The next day, the bridge opened to vehicular traffic. Across the country in the White House, President Franklin D. Roosevelt proclaimed the bridge open to the world, and by the end of the day, more than 32,000 vehicles had paid tolls and crossed. According to the official Web site of the Golden Gate Bridge, nearly 2 billion vehicles have crossed the bridge (in both north- and southbound directions) in the 70-plus years of its operation;
1940 – In World War II, units from Germany’s SS Death’s Head division battle British troops just 50 miles from the port at Dunkirk, in northern France, as Britain’s Expeditionary Force continues to fight to evacuate France. After holding off an SS company until their ammo was spent, 99 Royal Norfolk Regiment soldiers retreated to a farmhouse in the village of Paradis, just 50 miles from the Dunkirk port. Ships waited there to carry home the British Expeditionary Force, which had been fighting alongside the French in its defensive war against the German invaders. Agreeing to surrender, the trapped regiment started to file out of the farmhouse, waving a white flag tied to a bayonet. They were met by German machine-gun fire. They tried again and the British regiment was ordered by an English-speaking German officer to an open field where they were searched and divested of everything from gas masks to cigarettes. They were then marched into a pit where machine guns had been placed in fixed positions. The German order came: “Fire!” Those Brits who survived the machine-gun fire were either stabbed to death with bayonets or shot dead with pistols. Of the 99 members of the regiment, only two survived, both privates: Albert Pooley and William O’Callaghan. After the war, a British military tribunal in Hamburg found the German officer who gave the “Fire” order, Captain Fritz Knochlein, guilty of war crimes. He was hanged;
1941 – During World War II, the British navy sinks the German battleship Bismarck in the North Atlantic near France. The German death toll was more than 2,000. On February 14, 1939, the 823-foot Bismarck was launched at Hamburg. Nazi leader Adolf Hitler hoped that the state-of-the-art battleship would herald the rebirth of the German surface battle fleet. However, after the outbreak of war, Britain closely guarded ocean routes from Germany to the Atlantic Ocean, and only U-boats moved freely through the war zone. In May 1941, the order was given for the Bismarck to break out into the Atlantic. Once in the safety of the open ocean, the battleship would be almost impossible to track down, all the while wreaking havoc on Allied convoys to Britain. Learning of its movement, Britain sent almost the entire British Home Fleet in pursuit. On May 24, the British battle cruiser Hood and battleship Prince of Wales intercepted it near Iceland. In a ferocious battle, the Hood exploded and sank, and all but three of the 1,421 crewmen were killed. The Bismarck escaped, but because it was leaking fuel it fled for occupied France. On May 26, it was sighted and crippled by British aircraft, and on May 27 three British warships descended on the Bismarck and finished it off;
1942 – During World War II, United States Navy Cook 3rd Class Doris “Dorie” Miller became the first African-American to receive the Navy Cross for his “extraordinary courage and disregard for his own personal safety” during Japan’s attack on Pearl Harbor;
1943 – In World War II, a B-24 carrying U.S. airman and former Olympic runner Louis “Louie” Zamperini crashes into the Pacific Ocean. After surviving the crash, Zamperini floated on a raft in shark-infested waters for more than a month before being picked up by the Japanese and spending the next two years in a series of brutal prison camps. His story of survival was featured in the 2010 best-selling book “Unbroken” by Laura Hillenbrand. As an ex-Olympian, Zamperini was considered a propaganda tool by the Japanese and saved from execution; at the same time, however, he was singled out for particularly vicious forms of torture. The defiant American managed to survive and was released after the war ended in 1945. Back home in California, Zamperini drank heavily and was haunted by his experiences in captivity. Then, after being inspired by evangelist Billy Graham to convert to Christianity in 1949, Zamperini went on to become an inspirational speaker, forgive his captors and publish an autobiography, “Devil at my Heels.” A wider audience learned about his life with the publication of “Unbroken” by Laura Hillenbrand;
1962 – A trash dump fire in Centralia, Pennsylvania, ignited a blaze in underground coal deposits that continues to burn this day;
1965 – During the Vietnam War, augmenting the vital role now being played by U.S. aircraft carriers, whose planes participated in many of the raids over South and North Vietnam, U.S. warships from the 7th Fleet begin to fire on Viet Cong targets in the central area of South Vietnam. At first, this gunfire was limited to 5-inch-gun destroyers, but other ships would eventually be used in the mission. Organized into Task Group 70.8, the ships were assigned from the fleet’s cruiser-destroyer command, from the carrier escort units and amphibious units, from the Navy-Coast Guard Coastal Surveillance Force, and from the Royal Australian Navy. Ships and weapons included the battleship USS New Jersey (BB-62), with 16-inch guns; cruisers with 8-inch and 5-inch guns; destroyers with 5-inch guns, and inshore fire support ships and landing ships. During the 1968 Tet Offensive, Task Group 70.8 had as many as 22 ships at a time on the gun line, offering invaluable naval gunfire support to ground forces. In May 1972, as part of Operation Linebacker I, a 7th Fleet cruiser-destroyer group bombarded targets near Haiphong and along the North Vietnam coast, firing over 111,000 rounds at the enemy. One destroyer was hit by a MiG bombing attack and 16 ships were hit by communist shore batteries, but none were sunk;
1971 – During the Vietnam War, in Sweden, Foreign Minister Torsten Nilsson reveals that Sweden has been providing assistance to the Viet Cong, including some $550,000 worth of medical supplies. Similar Swedish aid was to go to Cambodian and Laotian civilians affected by the Indochinese fighting. This support was primarily humanitarian in nature and included no military aid;
1972 – During the (first) Cold War, Soviet President Leonid Brezhnev and U.S. President Richard Nixon, meeting in Moscow, sign the Strategic Arms Limitation Talks (SALT) agreements. At the time, these agreements were the most far-reaching attempts to control nuclear weapons ever. Nixon and Brezhnev seemed unlikely candidates for the American and Soviet statesmen who would sign a groundbreaking arms limitation treaty. Both men carried reputations as hard-line Cold War warriors. Yet, by 1972, both leaders were eager for closer diplomatic relations between their respective nations. In August 1972, the U.S. Senate approved the agreements by an overwhelming vote. SALT-I, as it came to be known, was the foundation for all arms limitations talks that followed;
1985 – In Beijing, China, representatives of Britain and China exchanged instruments of ratification for an accord returning Hong Kong to Chinese control in 1997;
1994 – Two decades after being expelled from the USSR, Nobel laureate Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn returns to Russia in an emotional homecoming. In 1945, Solzhenitsyn was sentenced to eight years of hard labor for criticizing Stalin in a letter to a friend. His prison experiences formed the basis for One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich, his famous first novel. In 1970, he was awarded the Nobel Prize in literature and began work on The Gulag Archipelago, his vast history of the Soviet totalitarian system, from Lenin’s ascension to the official Soviet denunciation of Stalin. Foreign publication of this work led to his expulsion from the USSR in 1974;
1997 – A tornado in Jarrell, Texas destroys the town and kills nearly 30 people. This F5 tornado—a rating indicating it had winds of more than 260 miles per hour–was unusual in that it traveled south along the ground; nearly all tornadoes in North America move northeast. The storm formed just north of the capital city of Austin, Texas, in the afternoon. The Jarrell tornado hit at 3:50 p.m., just as many students were heading home from school. The twister, almost 800 feet wide, picked up so much soil that it caused a powerful mud storm. Roofs were torn off storm shelters and water was sucked out of deep wells. There were even reports of shafts of wheat impaling cattle, and other cows being picked up, their hides stripped by the winds, before being slammed to the ground. The tornado then slowed, becoming nearly stationary as it hit the Double Creek home development. Cars in the subdivision were reduced to rubble and homes were picked up right off their foundations. The twister simply obliterated everything in its direct path, leaving no recognizable remains. One item from the neighborhood was found 100 miles away. About three-quarters of the residents of Double Creek were killed;
1999 – The International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia in The Hague, Netherlands indicts Slobodan Milošević and four others for war crimes and crimes against humanity committed in Kosovo;
2004 – Mustafa Kamel Mustafa, a Muslim cleric, was arrested in London and accused of trying to build a terrorist training camp in Oregon. Mustafa, also known as Abu Hamza al-Masri, was extradited to the United States in the fall of 2012; his trial began in New York in April 2014;
2005 – It was the third day that Carl Edward Roland, 41, wanted by police in connection with the murder of his ex-girlfriend Jennifer Gonzalez, spent perched on a crane 18 stories above Atlanta’s Buckhead neighborhood. Police in Pinellas County, Florida discovered the badly beaten body of Gonzalez, 36, in a retention pond on May 24. She had been last seen with Roland, for whom police issued an arrest warrant after he did not return to his Clearwater, Florida, home. Finally, after ignoring the authorities’ offers of food and water for more than 56 hours, Roland agreed to accept some water at about 12:30 a.m. on May 28. He edged toward police, who then tasered, tackled and restrained him. He was then wrapped onto a stretcher and lowered down the 350-foot crane. After a visit to a nearby hospital, Roland was taken to the Fulton County Jail to await extradition to Florida;
2009 – President Barack Obama announced more spending for renewable energy after touring a large field of solar panels at Nellis Air Force Base, near Las Vegas;
2013 – While the European Union decided to lift an arms embargo on the Syrian opposition while maintaining all other sanctions against President Bashar Assad’s regime after June 1, 2013, U.S. Sen. John McCain, a proponent of arming Syrian rebels, quietly slipped into Syria for a meeting with anti-government fighters;
2013 – It was one year ago TODAY!!!
Number 22 of 50 beautiful pictures from 50 beautiful states:
Lake of Clouds, Porcupine Mountains Wilderness State Park, Michigan
As I
A thought
How important is grace? Paul said that telling about that grace was more important to him than his life! In fact, that was his life after his conversion to Jesus!
Leads to a verse
But my life is worth nothing to me unless I use it for finishing the work assigned me by the Lord Jesus – the work of telling others the Good News about the wonderful grace of God.
– Acts 20:24
That brings a prayer
Almighty God, thank you for your lavish grace demonstrated and fully expressed in sending Jesus to die for me. As your child, and in thanks to your sacrificial gift, I pledge to you my life, my love, and my all. In Jesus name I pray. Amen
Until the next time – America, Bless GOD!!!
