On June 4, 1942, the Battle of Midway—one of the most
decisive U.S. victories against Japan during World War II
—began.
During the four-day sea-and-air battle, the outnumbered
U.S. Pacific Fleet succeeded in destroying four Japanese
aircraft carriers while losing only one of its own, the
Yorktown, to the previously invincible Japanese navy.
Arch Oboler and Boris Karloff on Lights Out.
Lights Out is an old-time radio program devoted mostly to
horror and the supernatural.
Created by Wyllis Cooper and then eventually taken over by
Arch Oboler, versions of Lights Out aired on different networks,
at various times, from January 3, 1934 to the summer of 1947
and the series eventually made the transition to television.
Lights Out was one of the earliest radio horror programs,
predating Suspense and Inner Sanctum.
Wyllis Oswald Cooper
(January 26, 1899 – June 22, 1955)
On May 24, 1941, Germany’s largest battleship, the Bismarck,
sunk the pride of the British fleet, HMS Hood.
The Bismarck was the most modern of Germany’s battleships,
a prize coveted by other nation’s navies, even while still in the
blueprint stage (Hitler handed over a copy of its blueprints to
Joseph Stalin as a concession during the days of the Hitler-
Stalin neutrality pact).
The HMS Hood, originally launched in 1918, was Britain’s largest
battle cruiser (41,200 tons)-but also capable of achieving the
relatively fast speed of 31 knots. The two met in the North
Atlantic, northeast of Iceland, where two British cruisers had
tracked down the Bismarck.
Commanded by Admiral Gunther Lutjens, commander in chief
of the German Fleet, the Bismarck sunk the Hood, resulting in
the death of 1,500 of its crew; only three Brits survived.
Some six weeks after the United States formally entered
the First World War, the U.S Congress passed the Selective
Service Act on May 18, 1917, giving the U.S. president the
power to draft soldiers.
By the end of World War I in November 1918, some 24 million
men had registered under the Selective Service Act. Of the
almost 4.8 million Americans who eventually served in the
war, some 2.8 million had been drafted.
On May 11, 1960, Adolf Eichmann, the Nazi SS officer who
organized Adolf Hitler’s “final solution of the Jewish question,"
was captured in Argentina. On May 23, Israeli Prime Minister
David Ben-Gurion announces to the world that he will stand
trial in Israel.
Rafi Eitan, the Mossad agent who led the Israeli team that captured
Nazi Adolf Eichmann, died at aged 92 in 1919.
