LIFE Magazine cover with a Fletcher Martin war painting.

Fletcher Martin (April 19, 1904 – May 30, 1979)

CARLATA BRADLEY

Pat Sajak ( Patrick Leonard Sajdak) is 76 years old today.

Sajak is a television personality and game show host. He is
best known as the host of the American television game
show Wheel of Fortune, a position he has held since 1981.

   
Undated photo released by the Defense POW/MIA Accounting Agency.

WASHINGTON (AP) — The remains of a sailor from Massachusetts
who died when the USS Oklahoma was struck by multiple torpedoes during the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor in 1941 are being buried
at Arlington National Cemetery on today.

The interment comes more than 80 years after the attack that drew
the U.S. into World War II and nearly four years after the Defense POW/MIA Accounting Agency announced that Electrician’s Mate
18 year old 3rd Class Roman W. Sadlowski, of Pittsfield, had
been accounted for using advanced DNA and anthropological
analysis, as well as circumstantial and material evidence. 

"The Star-Spangled Banner" is the national anthem of the United
States. The lyrics came from the "Defence of Fort M’Henry", a
poem written on September 14, 1814, by 35-year-old lawyer and
amateur poet Francis Scott Key after witnessing the bombardment
of Fort McHenry by British ships of the Royal Navy in Outer
Baltimore Harbor in the Patapsco River during the Battle of
Baltimore in the War of 1812 (below). Key was inspired by the large
U.S. flag, with 15 stars and 15 stripes, known as the Star-Spangled
Banner, flying triumphantly above the fort during the U.S. victory.        

The poem was set to the tune of a popular British song written by
John Stafford Smith.

Francis Scott Key   (1779 – 1843)

He became a successful lawyer in Maryland and
Washington, D.C., and was later appointed U.S.
attorney for the District of Columbia.

WW1 British first prototype tank called Little Willie. It was an
Armored Personnel Carrier. It can be found at the Tank
Museum, Bovington, Wareham, United Kingdom.

On September 6, 1915, a prototype tank nicknamed Little Willie
rolled off the assembly line in England. Little Willie was far from
an overnight success. It weighed 14 tons, got stuck in trenches
and crawled over rough terrain at only two miles per hour.

However, improvements were made to the original prototype
and tanks eventually transformed military battlefields.

The British developed the tank in response to the trench
warfare of World War I. In 1914, a British army colonel named
Ernest  Swinton and William Hankey, secretary of the Committee
for Imperial Defence, championed the idea of an armored vehicle   
with conveyor-belt-like tracks over its wheels that could break 
through enemy lines and traverse difficult territory.        

The men appealed to British navy minister Winston Churchill,
who believed in the concept of a “land boat” and organized a
Landships Committee to begin developing a prototype. To keep
the project secret from enemies, production workers were
reportedly told the vehicles they were building would be used
to carry water on the battlefield (alternate theories suggest the
shells of the new vehicles resembled water tanks). Either  
way, the new vehicles were shipped in crates labeled “tank”
and the name stuck.