Upstate New Yorker 🙂 VP of the Empire State Passenger Association 🚂
Ballston Spa, NY
Joined September 2020
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Some today seem to have little grasp for the weight of history, including history that wasn't that long ago. My grandfather fought and was seriously wounded in WW2 thanks to clownish idiots entering politics.
"The past is never dead. It's not even past."
— William Faulkner
Benjamin Turon retweeted
Oct 25, 1760. London. King George II dies suddenly at Kensington Palace, and his 22 year old grandson becomes King George III. Sixteen years later, Thomas Jefferson would list his crimes in the Declaration of Independence.
The old king's death wasn't dignified. He got up early that morning, had his hot chocolate, went into his private closet, and collapsed. His heart had given out. He was 76.
His grandson, George, was very different from the Hanoverian kings before him. His great-grandfather and grandfather had been born in Germany and were more interested in their German territories than in Britain. George III was the first of the dynasty born in England, and he spoke English as his first language. In his first speech to Parliament he proudly said he gloried in the name of Britain.
He took over at a great moment. Britain was in the middle of winning the Seven Years' War, the French and Indian War in America. When it ended in 1763, Britain had taken Canada from France and Florida from Spain. The empire had never been bigger.
It had also never been more in debt. Paying for that war, and for troops to guard the new territory in America, was what led Parliament to start taxing the colonies. The Sugar Act. The Stamp Act. The Townshend duties. The Tea Act. George supported Parliament's right to do it, and when the colonies resisted, he backed a hard line.
At first many Americans blamed Parliament and his ministers, not the king himself. By 1776 they'd given up on him. The Declaration of Independence was written as a list of charges against George personally: a tyrant, unfit to be the ruler of a free people.
He took losing America hard. After Yorktown he even drafted a message abdicating the throne, though he never sent it.
But in 1785 he met John Adams, the first ambassador from the independent United States. George told him he had been the last to agree to the separation, but now that it was done, he would be the first to welcome the friendship of the United States as an independent power.
He reigned for nearly 60 years, longer than any British king before him. In his later years he suffered terrible bouts of mental illness and spent his last decade blind and isolated at Windsor Castle. He died in 1820.
Today he's remembered in America as the villain. He was just a young man who inherited a giant empire and lost the most important part of it.
Benjamin Turon retweeted
Diagrams and artwork made in support of the NASP spaceplane program:
flickr.com/photos/galopujacy…
Benjamin Turon retweeted
On Oct 24, 1944, more Americans died in a single sinking than on any other ship in history. They weren't sailors. They were prisoners of war. And almost nobody remembers them.
Arisan Maru was a brand new Japanese cargo ship, finished in the summer of 1944. She was built to carry freight, not people.
On Oct 11, 1944, at Manila, the Japanese loaded 1,782 Allied prisoners into her cargo holds. Most were American soldiers, sailors and Marines. Many had survived the fall of Bataan and Corregidor in 1942, the Bataan Death March, and more than two years of starvation, disease and beatings in Japanese prison camps. There were civilians among them too.
With American forces about to return to the Philippines, Japan was shipping prisoners north to be used as slave labor in Japan and China. The men called these vessels hellships.
The holds were dark, airless steel boxes. The men were packed in so tightly that many couldn't lie down. The tropical heat was suffocating. There was almost no water or food, and buckets lowered from above served as toilets.
Arisan Maru didn't even leave right away. With American planes raiding Manila, she sailed south and hid along the coast of Palawan for days, the prisoners baking in the holds the whole time. On Oct 20 she returned to Manila. On Oct 21 she finally sailed for good, joining a convoy headed north.
Like other hellships, she carried no markings to show there were prisoners aboard. To American submarines, she looked like any other Japanese freighter.
On the afternoon of Oct 24, Arisan Maru was in the Bashi Channel, between the Philippines and Taiwan. That's when an American submarine torpedoed her.
The ship didn't sink right away. The Japanese crew and guards abandoned her, taking the lifeboats. They left the prisoners in the holds.
The prisoners got out anyway. Almost every one of them climbed out of the holds and onto the deck. Some raided the ship's stores for food and water. Then the ship began to go down, and they went into the sea.
Nearly 1,800 men were now in the water, clinging to wreckage.
Japanese destroyers came back. They rescued Japanese survivors. They would not take the prisoners. Men who swam to the destroyers and tried to climb aboard were pushed back into the water.
Then the destroyers left.
Night fell. The men were weak from years of starvation and disease. One by one, they drowned.
Of the 1,781 prisoners aboard, only nine survived.
A few of them found an empty lifeboat drifting in the dark. With almost no supplies, they sailed it all the way to the coast of China, where Chinese civilians and guerrillas hid them from the Japanese and helped them get back to American lines. Others were picked up by the Japanese and spent the rest of the war as prisoners.
The submarine that fired the torpedoes is usually believed to be USS Shark. That same day, Japanese destroyers hunted Shark down and sank her with all 87 men aboard. Her crew never knew who had been inside the ship they attacked.
Arisan Maru was one of the worst disasters of a much larger horror. Across the war in the Pacific, around 20,000 Allied prisoners died aboard Japanese hellships, many of them killed by American torpedoes and bombs.
The families of most of the men on Arisan Maru didn't learn what had happened to them until after the war.
It remains the greatest loss of American life at sea in history.
Benjamin Turon retweeted
From India to Canada to the Middle East to Europe, countries no longer know whether they can trust America.
The consequences could be disastrous.
My take:
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He was 28 when he saw Nazi soldiers dragging children out of an orphanage. That day, he knew he could no longer stand by and watch.
On August 7, 1942, in the town of Boryslaw, in Nazi-occupied Poland, a young German manager named Berthold Beitz witnessed a scene that would change his life forever.
The SS were clearing out a Jewish orphanage, forcing terrified young children onto trucks heading toward extermination camps. Beitz was not a politician, a soldier, or a member of an underground resistance movement.
He was simply a commercial director for the Carpathians Oil Company, tasked with keeping local oil fields running for the war effort. Yet, seeing that moment of cruelty made it impossible for him to stay silent.
He went home that evening to his wife, Else, and their young daughter, deeply shaken by what he had seen.
"We cannot just sit here and watch this happen," he told his wife as they spoke about the roundups. "If we have the power to stop even a small part of it, we have a duty to act."
Because oil was essential to the military, people working in the industry received temporary protection from deportation. Beitz realized he could use his position to save lives.
He began issuing official work permits and forging documents for people who had no technical background at all. A local tailor became a specialized oil technician on paper.
A barber was listed as a vital machine operator. A scholar was registered as a crucial field assistant. By signing these documents, Beitz turned men and women condemned to death into essential workers for the German war effort.
His actions did not end at his desk. When deportation trains arrived at the station, Beitz walked directly onto the platforms alongside SS officers.
He pointed into overcrowded cattle cars, picked out specific individuals, and declared that they were indispensable to the oil refineries. On many occasions, his bold approach worked, and people were pulled off the trains moments before departure.
At the same time, Else Beitz turned their house into a secret sanctuary. She hid Jewish children and families in their attic, cellar, and quiet back rooms while Gestapo patrols searched the neighborhood.
Both Berthold and Else knew that a single thorough inspection would mean death for their entire family, but they chose to keep helping anyway.
In 1943, the Gestapo discovered forged documents bearing Beitz's signature and brought him in for interrogation.
Despite intense pressure and direct threats, he managed to avoid arrest because the German military desperately needed his skills to keep the oil fields running.
As soon as he was released, he went right back to saving lives.
By the end of World War II, Berthold and Else Beitz had directly saved about eight hundred men, women, and children. Over the decades, those survivors rebuilt their lives, had children, and welcomed grandchildren.
Today, thousands of people exist because one couple refused to look away.
After the war, Beitz became one of Germany's most prominent industrial leaders. Yet, he rarely bragged about his wartime actions. When asked why he risked everything for strangers, he kept his answer simple:
"It was not heroism. I was simply a human being watching what was happening, and I could not turn away."
Yad Vashem later recognized both Berthold and Else Beitz as Righteous Among the Nations. Berthold passed away on July 30, 2013, just days before his one hundredth birthday.
Most people like to believe they would stand up against injustice if they lived through a dark period of history.
Yet millions of ordinary people in the 1940s chose comfort and safety over doing what was right.
Eight hundred people survived because a young couple decided that humanity mattered more than fear.
Today, those eight hundred lives have bloomed into thousands of children, grandchildren, and great-grandchildren.
Love and courage truly carry a ripple effect that outlasts the darkest moments of human history ♥️♥️
Benjamin Turon retweeted
Gas prices are “temporarily” high, says the president.
That’s because Republicans are temporarily in power.
Vote.
Benjamin Turon retweeted
September 1982. The 16-inch guns on the forward deck of Battleship New Jersey, photographed during sea trials. Each turret extends about 50 feet down into the ship and turns as a single unit, rotating at four degrees per second. The three guns in each turret can also raise and lower independently, at 12 degrees per second. You can find out more about these powerful guns when you visit the ship.
Benjamin Turon retweeted
Oct 24, 1944. A single Japanese bomb sinks an American aircraft carrier. And the ship that came to save her pays an even heavier price.
That morning, while American planes were hammering Musashi, Japanese aircraft went after Halsey's carriers.
Most were shot down. One got through.
A lone Japanese dive bomber dropped a single bomb onto the light carrier USS Princeton. It punched through her flight deck and exploded in the hangar, right among aircraft loaded with fuel and torpedoes.
Fire tore through the ship. Her sprinkler system failed. Explosions rocked her. Destroyers came alongside and took off hundreds of crew.
The cruiser USS Birmingham pulled right up next to the burning carrier, her crew pouring water onto Princeton's fires. For hours, they fought to save her. Hundreds of Birmingham's sailors were out on deck, manning hoses, helping with towlines.
At 3:23 p.m., Princeton's bomb storage blew up.
The explosion ripped off a huge section of the carrier's stern and swept across Birmingham's crowded decks like a giant shotgun blast of steel.
On Princeton, 108 men were killed. On Birmingham, which had come to help, 241 men died and 412 were wounded. Her decks were covered in dead and dying men.
Princeton couldn't be saved. American torpedoes sank her that evening. She was the only fast carrier of her class lost in the war.
Birmingham survived and limped home for repairs. Her crew never forgot the day they tried to save a sister ship and were nearly destroyed with her.
Benjamin Turon retweeted
I took the last flight out of New Orleans before Hurricane Katrina and returned a few days later.
The federal response was impressive in many respects, but I still believe we should have launched a full-scale amphibious operation. The U.S. military had the ships, aircraft, engineering units, logistics capabilities, and manpower to bring overwhelming relief to a devastated American city.
Eventually we launched the US Merchant Marine’s disaster relief fleet but it was too late to do much good.
That fleet went untested until Trump’s first term when we found that 60% couldn’t be deployed o short notice. @SecDuffy hasn’t even tried to test it.
Fast-forward to Hurricane Maria. We dispatched Navy ships to Puerto Rico but failed to fully exploit the Army’s huge fleet of landing craft. Those vessels were built to move heavy equipment and supplies onto shores without functioning port infrastructure.
Helicopters are fast but have very limited lift capacity so landing craft were Exactly the capability a shattered island desperately needed.
When the Army got called out for sitting on the sidelines what did General Mark Milley do? He sold the bulk of the fleet at auction to avoid future bad press.
Everyone saw what a disaster the Gaza Pier was but not a single Pentagon reporter drew the conclusion that if it doesn’t work overseas, it can’t help Americans at home either.
Then came Maui and the Pacific Palisades fires. Local authorities refused to dispatch a single fireboat to help.
Hurricane Helene? Everyone was shocked at the poor federal response in North Carolina but I didn’t see a single reporter ask the most obvious question? Where the hell were all the white and orange USCG helicopters? Turns out a large number of spares were down for maintenance.
The Baltimore Bridge that Pete Buttigieg promised us the Army Corps of Engineers would have rebuilt pronto? They still haven’t cleared out the old bridge years later.
My proposal is simple: America should maintain dedicated, forward-deployed maritime disaster-response forces on all three coasts, built around amphibious ships, Army watercraft Marines, Navy Seabees, Army Virps of Engineers, aviation, medical teams, and prepositioned emergency supplies.
Not ships sitting in port awaiting orders. Forces already at sea, equipped and ready to respond.
Imagine what a Marine Expeditionary Unit, supported by naval aviation, landing craft, combat engineers, and thousands of tons of supplies, could accomplish within the first critical days of a catastrophe.
We should be able to put an extraordinary amount of American military power ashore not to fight a war, but to save American lives.
And please don’t tell me we can’t afford it.
@DataRepublican has found ~$39 Billion per year flowing through government-funded NGO networks organizations undermining the constitution.
We’re willing to spend billions projecting military power halfway around the world. Why shouldn’t we maintain comparable capabilities to rescue Americans at home?
I would gladly spend $10 million per family if that’s what it took to bring overwhelming relief to a devastated American community.
Ships. Helicopters. Hospitals. Engineers. Water. Food. Shelter. Communications. Heavy equipment. Sealift. Airlift.
Flood the disaster zone with everything we’ve got.
Problem is no service except the USCG is eager to put the tab for relief efforts on their budgets and the USCG is struggling to pay for basic maintenance because it does.
Now that we have increased DOW spending by 50% there is no excuse.
Let’s put America First!
If someone asks you how much a single family's life is worth to the United States Navy, tell them the exact price: ten million dollars of steel.
On April 29, 1975, as Saigon fell, a tiny two-seat wooden-and-fabric Cessna plane with almost no fuel left circled desperately above the American aircraft carrier USS Midway.
Inside that tiny cockpit, a father named Major Buang-Ly had crammed his wife and five small children, including a baby. He scribbled a note on a map, wrapped it around his pistol so it would not blow into the ocean, and dropped it onto the carrier deck.
A young American sailor picked up the crumpled paper and ran it up to Captain Lawrence Chambers.
The note read: "Can you move these helicopter to the other side, I can land on your runway, I can fly 1 hour more. Please rescue me. Major Buang, Wife and 5 child."
The flight deck of the USS Midway was completely jammed from bow to stern with military helicopters. A Cessna has no tailhook to catch carrier wires, and its pilot had never landed on a ship in his life.
By every military regulation, Captain Chambers had been in command for only five weeks. Throwing millions of dollars of U.S. government aircraft into the sea without permission from Washington could end his career in a court-martial.
Chambers looked up at the tiny plane circling in the wind with five children inside. He did not call an accountant in Washington.
"Clear the deck," the captain ordered.
Hundreds of young American sailors in yellow and green jerseys ran to the edge of the ship, put their shoulders against massive Huey helicopters, and shoved ten million dollars worth of machinery straight off the cliff into the South China Sea.
Captain Chambers turned the giant carrier into the wind at twenty-five knots. The tiny Cessna came down, bounced once on the steel runway, and rolled to a safe stop with feet to spare.
When the cockpit door opened and five small children stepped out onto the deck, three thousand American sailors roared so loud it drowned out the engines, and immediately passed around a hat to collect cash for the family's new life in America.
When the math says a child's life is too expensive, an American throws the math into the ocean.
Benjamin Turon retweeted
“Russia invaded Ukraine, committed atrocities in the territories it occupied, and when it failed to force the government to fall or achieve its aims on the battlefield, began targeting civilians, seeking to terrorize the population into accepting Russian domination. The first Trump Administration shook off the Obama Administration’s reticence to assist and admirably sent both weapons and military trainers to help Ukraine. After the full-scale invasion in 2022, the Biden Administration orchestrated a herculean international effort to assist Ukraine, which the Trump Administration has abandoned.”-@KoriSchake @AEI aei.org/foreign-and-defense-…
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October 23–26, 1944. The Battle of Leyte Gulf, recognized as the largest naval battle of World War II, followed the American landings on Leyte that began the effort to retake the Philippines. It unfolded as four separate actions: the Sibuyan Sea, Surigao Strait, Samar and Cape Engaño. Surigao Strait saw the last battleship-versus-battleship action in history, and by the end of the battle Japan had lost three battleships and four aircraft carriers. Battleship New Jersey served as the flagship of Admiral William Halsey’s Third Fleet. This photo, taken from the deck of USS Hancock on October 12, 1944, shows New Jersey steaming with Task Force 38, 11 days before the battle began.
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Oct 24, 1781. Off the Virginia Capes. A huge British fleet carrying thousands of troops finally arrives to rescue Cornwallis at Yorktown. They're five days late.
For weeks Cornwallis had been told help was coming. In late September, Gen. Henry Clinton in New York wrote him that a relief fleet would sail around Oct 5. Believing it, Cornwallis pulled his men out of his outer defenses and waited. That decision helped doom him.
The fleet didn't sail Oct 5. Many of the ships had been badly damaged in the Battle of the Capes against the French in early September and needed repairs. Masts, rigging, hulls. Supplies were short. Arguments dragged on among the admirals and generals. Every day the departure slipped.
It finally left New York on Oct 19. That was the very day Cornwallis's army marched out of Yorktown and laid down its arms.
Admiral Thomas Graves had around 25 ships of the line, plus Clinton himself and roughly 7,000 soldiers crammed aboard. It was a serious force. If it had shown up two weeks earlier, things might have gone very differently.
On Oct 24 the fleet reached the mouth of the Chesapeake. Out on the water they started picking up small boats. In them were people who had slipped away from Yorktown, including a Black man and some others who had escaped in the confusion after the surrender. They brought the news. Cornwallis had surrendered. The army was gone.
At first some of the officers didn't want to believe it. But more reports came in, and the French fleet was sitting right there in the bay, bigger than theirs.
The fleet hung around off the Capes for a few days, trying to confirm what had happened and deciding what to do. There was nothing left to save. On Oct 29 they turned around and sailed back to New York.
Clinton and Cornwallis spent the rest of their lives blaming each other. Clinton said Cornwallis never should have dug in at Yorktown. Cornwallis said Clinton had ordered him there and then promised help that never came. They published pamphlets attacking each other for years.
The truth is they both played a part. But the image that sticks is a fleet of warships and an army of 7,000 men sitting off the Virginia coast, just in time to be too late.
Benjamin Turon retweeted
Oct 24, 1944. One of the most feared American submarines of the war fires her very last torpedo. It turns around and comes back for her.
Richard O'Kane learned submarine warfare from the best. As executive officer of USS Wahoo, he served under Dudley "Mush" Morton, one of the most aggressive skippers in the Navy. Morton taught him to attack hard, attack close, and attack on the surface at night.
In 1943, O'Kane left Wahoo to take command of a brand new boat, USS Tang. A few weeks later, Wahoo and Morton disappeared with all hands.
O'Kane took everything Morton had taught him and pushed it further.
In less than a year, Tang became one of the deadliest submarines in the Pacific. She sank ship after ship. On one patrol off Truk, she surfaced again and again under enemy fire to rescue 22 downed American airmen.
In October 1944, Tang set out on her fifth war patrol, into the Formosa Strait between Taiwan and China.
On the night of Oct 23, she found a big Japanese convoy. O'Kane took Tang right in among the ships on the surface and tore into them. Tankers and freighters burned and sank.
The next night, Oct 24, she found another convoy, even bigger, packed with transports and escorts. Again Tang went in on the surface. Again ships exploded around her.
By the early hours of Oct 25, she was down to her last two torpedoes. A damaged transport was still afloat. O'Kane decided to finish it.
At 2:30 a.m. he fired torpedo number 23. Then number 24, the last one aboard.
Torpedo 24 broke the surface, veered sharply to the left, and began turning in a circle.
Straight back toward Tang.
O'Kane ordered emergency full speed and a hard turn to get out of its path. Tang twisted and fishtailed in the water.
It wasn't enough. About 20 seconds after it was fired, Tang's own torpedo slammed into her stern.
The explosion tore open the after torpedo room. Tang sank by the stern in seconds. O'Kane and the others on the bridge were thrown into the black water.
Below, the submarine hit bottom about 180 feet down.
Inside, roughly 30 men were still alive. They made their way forward through the flooding, smoke-filled boat to the forward torpedo room, which had an escape hatch. They burned the secret papers so the Japanese couldn't get them.
Above them, Japanese escort ships began dropping depth charges.
Then a fire broke out in the battery compartment. Smoke and heat crept toward the torpedo room. The air was turning poisonous.
At about 6 a.m., the men began to escape.
They used Momsen lungs, simple rubber breathing bags designed to let a man rise slowly from a sunken submarine. It was the only known time in the entire war that anyone used one to escape a sub that had gone down.
Thirteen men made it out through the hatch. Some couldn't hold on during the long climb to the surface. Others drifted away in the current. Only five lived until they were picked up.
On the surface, O'Kane and a few others from the bridge had been swimming for hours.
In the end, 9 of Tang's 87 men survived.
They were pulled from the water by a Japanese escort ship. It was carrying survivors of the ships Tang had just sunk. Those men, many of them badly burned, beat the Americans with clubs. O'Kane later said that once they realized who was doing the beating, the burned and mutilated survivors of their own handiwork, they understood.
The nine spent the rest of the war in a secret Japanese interrogation camp where prisoners were starved and abused.
They were freed when the war ended. In 1946, President Truman presented Richard O'Kane with the Medal of Honor for Tang's final two nights of combat.
Tang is credited with sinking more ships than almost any other American submarine of the war. Her last victim was herself.
Benjamin Turon retweeted
One of the most famous inventions in science fiction was created because a TV show couldn't afford to land its spaceship. đź––
When Star Trek premiered in 1966, creator Gene Roddenberry faced a problem.
Every time Captain Kirk and his crew visited a new planet, the Enterprise would somehow have to land, and then take off again.
For a weekly television series with a limited budget, filming those sequences would have been expensive and time-consuming.
So the production came up with a much simpler solution.
Why land a spaceship when you can make the crew disappear from one place and reappear somewhere else?
The transporter was born.
With a glowing platform, some clever camera effects, and that unforgettable shimmering sound, the Enterprise crew could travel from ship to planet in seconds.
And just like that, a practical production shortcut became one of the most recognizable pieces of technology in television history.
The funny part? The transporter eventually inspired decades of conversations about whether human teleportation could ever be possible.
All because a television show needed a cheaper way to get its actors onto a planet.
Sometimes the best science fiction begins with a budget problem.
Benjamin Turon retweeted
Concept art for Close Encounters Of The Third Kind (1977) by Ralph McQuarrie
Benjamin Turon retweeted
On this night in 1944, a Japanese fleet steamed into a narrow strait in the dark and straight into a trap, where a line of American battleships, several of them raised from the mud of Pearl Harbor, was waiting to take its revenge. It was the last time in history battleships would ever fight battleships. This is the Battle of Surigao Strait.
As the great Battle of Leyte Gulf raged, a southern Japanese force under Admiral Shoji Nishimura was ordered to force its way through the Surigao Strait and fall on the American landings from below. To get through, Nishimura had to pass up a long, narrowing channel in the night. And waiting for him at the far end was the American commander Jesse Oldendorf, who had arranged one of the most perfect ambushes in naval history.
First, as the Japanese column pushed up the dark strait, American patrol boats and then waves of destroyers slashed at it from the flanks, racing in to launch torpedoes and then darting away. Torpedoes found their marks, and Japanese ships began to blow up and sink in the blackness, the column shredded before it ever reached the main battle. And then came the hammer blow. Across the top of the strait, Oldendorf had drawn up his battle line, and as the surviving Japanese ships steamed up toward him, he executed the classic maneuver every admiral dreamed of, crossing the enemy's T. His battleships and cruisers, strung out in a line across the head of the strait, could fire all their guns in full broadsides at the oncoming Japanese, while the enemy, approaching bows on, could barely reply.
The result was annihilation. The American line erupted, pouring a storm of heavy shells down the strait into the head of the Japanese column. Nishimura's flagship was smashed and sunk and the admiral killed. His force was almost completely destroyed, shattered by torpedoes and gunfire in the dark.
And there was a special meaning in it for the American crews. Several of the old battleships in Oldendorf's line had been at Pearl Harbor on the day of the Japanese surprise attack in 1941. They had been bombed and torpedoed, some sunk at their moorings, then raised from the harbor mud, rebuilt, and sent back to war. Now, three years later, those same resurrected battleships stood in the line at Surigao and poured their broadsides into the Imperial Japanese Navy, a long awaited revenge for Pearl Harbor delivered from the guns of the very ships that had been its victims.
Surigao Strait was a crushing, one sided American victory. And it holds a unique place in history, because it was the last time battleships ever dueled battleships with their big guns. The weapon that had dominated the seas for generations fought its final gun line action here, in the dark of a Philippine strait, on this night in 1944, even as the aircraft that would replace it was sinking the Musashi not far away.
