This Day In History with Dale Robbins

06/06/2026

14/05/2026

This Day in History - May 13, 2026

OMG: Trump arrives to "pomp and circumstance" in China - Xi is playing him masterfully. Unlike Putin, who is just evil - Xi is probably one of the smartest of the modern day Authoritarian World Leaders. Trump engaging Xi in a mental duel can end only one way - Bad for the United States /Taiwan / rest of the world.

21/04/2026

On This Day in History

The Red Baron, Manfred von Richthofen, was shot down and killed on April 21, 1918. He was killed in action during a low-level chase over the Somme valley near Vaux-sur-Somme in France at approximately 25 years of age.

Location: Near the Somme River, France.
Cause: A single bullet through the torso while in pursuit of a Canadian pilot, leading to a forced landing.

Legacy: Despite being an enemy, Allied forces gave him a full military funeral.

His final, official air victory (number 80) occurred just one day earlier on April 20, 1918.

20/04/2026

Tribute to Ben Franklin!
https://www.facebook.com/share/p/1BCC3nyBts/

236 years ago today, the most extraordinary American who ever lived died in his bed in Philadelphia at the age of 84. He had been a candle maker's apprentice, a runaway teenager, a printer, a scientist, an inventor, a diplomat, a philosopher, a Founding Father, and the man who talked France into helping America win its independence. Twenty thousand people came to his funeral. The French National Assembly went into mourning for three days. 🎖️🇺🇸
His name was Benjamin Franklin.
Born January 17, 1706, in Boston, Massachusetts — the fifteenth of seventeen children of Josiah Franklin, a candle and soap maker who had emigrated from England, and Abiah Folger, a woman of Nantucket. The family was poor. Benjamin had two years of formal schooling — just two years — before his father pulled him out because he could not afford the fees.
At ten years old he was working in his father's candle shop. At twelve he was apprenticed to his older brother James, a printer. At fifteen he was secretly writing essays for his brother's newspaper under the pseudonym Silence Dogood — a sharp-tongued, witty, fiercely independent widow who became one of the most popular voices in Boston without anyone knowing she was a twelve-year-old boy.
At seventeen he ran away.
He walked into Philadelphia on a Sunday morning in 1723 carrying everything he owned — hungry, tired, with three rolls of bread, one under each arm and one in his mouth. A girl named Deborah Read watched him from her front doorstep and thought he looked ridiculous. He noticed her. Seven years later they were married.
He spent the next sixty years building one of the most remarkable lives in the history of civilization.
As a printer and publisher he became one of the most influential voices in colonial America. The Pennsylvania Gazette — his newspaper — was the most widely read in the colonies. Poor Richard's Almanack — published every year from 1732 to 1757 under the pen name Richard Saunders — sold nearly ten thousand copies a year and filled American homes with the wit and practical wisdom that still echo in American culture. A penny saved is a penny earned. An ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure. Early to bed and early to rise makes a man healthy wealthy and wise. These were not folk sayings. They were Franklin's.
As a scientist he was the most celebrated in the world. He proved that lightning was electricity — through the kite experiment in 1752, flying a kite with a metal key in a thunderstorm and drawing the electrical charge down a wet string into a Leyden jar. He invented the lightning rod that protected buildings across the world. He invented bifocals. He invented the flexible urinary catheter. He invented the Franklin stove. He invented swim fins. He discovered the Gulf Stream. He invented a musical instrument — the glass armonica — for which Mozart and Beethoven both composed pieces. He did all of this with two years of formal schooling.
He was elected to the Royal Society of London — the most prestigious scientific body in the world — on the strength of his electrical experiments. The French philosopher Kant called him the Prometheus of modern times. David Hume called him America's first great man of letters.
But his greatest work was political.
When the American Revolution came he was already 70 years old — an age at which most men of his era were dead. He had spent years in London arguing the colonies' case to the British Parliament. He had helped draft the Declaration of Independence in 1776. He had signed it. Then Congress sent him to France — the most important diplomatic assignment in American history.
He spent nine years in Paris as America's minister to France. He was the most famous American alive and one of the most famous people in the world. The French adored him. He played the role perfectly — the plain Quaker hat, the simple clothes, the wit, the warmth, the total absence of European court pretension. He secured the military alliance with France in 1778 that was absolutely essential to American victory. Without French troops and the French fleet, Washington almost certainly could not have won at Yorktown in 1781.
Without Benjamin Franklin there is no Treaty of Paris. Without the Treaty of Paris there is no United States.
He came home in 1785. He was 79 years old. He served as president of Pennsylvania. At 81 he was the oldest delegate to the Constitutional Convention — carried to the sessions in a sedan chair because he was too frail to walk. He used his enormous prestige to broker the compromises that got the Constitution signed.
His very last public act — signed two months before he died — was a petition to Congress calling for the immediate abolition of slavery.
He died on April 17, 1790, at eleven o'clock at night. His last words, spoken to his daughter who had asked him to shift position in bed so he could breathe more easily, were: A dying man can do nothing easy.
Twenty thousand people attended his funeral. The French National Assembly went into three days of official mourning. George Washington wore black.
In his will he left money to the cities of Boston and Philadelphia — to be held in trust for two hundred years and then used for the public good. When the trusts matured in 1990 they were worth more than six million dollars. They funded trade schools, science museums, scholarships and community projects. He had planned it all before he died. Of course he had.
The candle maker's son who taught the world about lightning. The runaway teenager who helped create a nation. The old man in the sedan chair who used his last breath to say that all men deserved to be free.
Born with nothing. Built everything.
236 years ago today.

28/02/2026

This Day In History, February 29, 2026

A question we should be asking.

06/01/2026

Great read. https://www.facebook.com/share/p/17iDTBYoJV/

That's what President Roosevelt told George Marshall when explaining why he wouldn't be commanding D-Day the operation Marshall had spent years planning, the assignment every general dreamed of leading.

Instead, Roosevelt gave it to Eisenhower. And Marshall, without complaint, went back to his desk in Washington.

He was the most powerful military organizer in American history. Under his direction, the U.S. Army grew from fewer than 200,000 men to 8.3 million—a forty-fold increase in three years. Winston Churchill called him "the organizer of victory."

But Marshall had never actually led troops in combat. He worked behind the scenes. No glory. No headlines. Just the machinery of war running smoothly because one man refused to let it break down.

When Roosevelt kept asking him to state his preference for the D-Day command, Marshall kept refusing to lobby for himself.

"I wanted him to feel free to act in whatever way he felt was to the best interests of the country," Marshall later recalled, "and not to consider my feeling in any way. I would cheerfully go whatever way he wanted me to go."

Roosevelt chose Eisenhower. Eisenhower became the most famous general of World War II. Marshall stayed in Washington and won the war anyway.

Then he did something even harder.

He tried to win the peace.
June 5, 1947. Harvard University. Marshall, now Secretary of State, stood before a commencement crowd of 15,000 and delivered an eleven-minute speech that would reshape the twentieth century.

Even Harvard's president didn't know what was coming. The State Department had told reporters it would be "a routine commencement speech—nothing of any importance."

It was the most important commencement address ever given at Harvard.

Marshall proposed the European Recovery Program—soon known as the Marshall Plan. The United States would pour $13 billion into rebuilding the shattered economies of Western Europe. That's roughly $135-150 billion in today's dollars.

Not just allies. Enemies too.
Germany. Italy. The same nations that had bombed London, conquered France, and sworn to destroy American democracy.
"Our policy is directed not against any country or doctrine," Marshall said, "but against hunger, poverty, desperation, and chaos."

He had seen what desperation breeds. After World War I, the Treaty of Versailles had crushed Germany with punitive reparations. From that economic collapse rose the Third Reich. Marshall refused to let history repeat.

The plan faced opposition. But Marshall's integrity—built over decades of service—carried the day. Senators who trusted few people trusted George Marshall. The Economic Cooperation Act passed: 69-17 in the Senate, 329-74 in the House.

Over the next four years, Western Europe transformed.
Industrial production surged. Cities rose from rubble. Former enemies became trading partners, then allies. Germany and Italy joined the democratic West. The European Coal and Steel Community formed—the seed that would become the European Union.

The Marshall Plan didn't just rebuild economies. It rewrote the rules of how victors treat the vanquished.

In October 1953, Marshall learned he had won the Nobel Peace Prize. He was bedridden with the flu. His response was typical: he told the press the award was really "a tribute to the American people."

He became the first—and still the only—professional soldier in history to receive the Nobel Peace Prize.

Some protested. At the ceremony in Oslo, three men rushed the balcony, dropping handbills accusing him of war crimes, screaming "Murderer!"

Marshall looked up calmly. King Haakon VII of Norway and the entire audience rose to their feet and gave him a thunderous standing ovation.

In his acceptance speech, Marshall addressed the controversy head-on:

"There has been considerable comment over the awarding of the Nobel Peace Prize to a soldier. I am afraid this does not seem as remarkable to me as it quite evidently appears to others. The cost of war in human lives is constantly spread before me, written neatly in many ledgers whose columns are gravestones. I am deeply moved to find some means or method of avoiding another calamity of war."

Marshall retired to his home in Leesburg, Virginia. He wrote no memoirs. He gave no lectures. He sought no further recognition.
He died on October 16, 1959, after a series of strokes. He was buried at Arlington National Cemetery.

His legacy?

The rebuilt cities of Europe. The alliance that kept the peace. The demonstration that mercy could be stronger than revenge.
When Marshall visited Westminster Abbey for Queen Elizabeth II's coronation in 1953, the entire congregation rose to their feet as he walked down the aisle. He looked behind him to see who the dignitary was. Then he realized they were standing for him.

He was the only non-royal seated at the Queen's table that night.

George C. Marshall never sought glory. He built the greatest army in American history, then used America's fortune to save the enemies that army had defeated.

True power isn't domination. It's the courage to heal what hatred destroyed.

08/12/2025

Interesting story about Singapore

24/11/2025

This Day in History - November 22, 1963...if you are older than 67 you remember exactly when you heard the news....

Today, is the 62nd anniversary of the John F. Kennedy assassination.

Hear from Retired Secret Service Agent Clint Hill as he recalls hearing the gunshots to his phone conversation with Attorney General Robert F. Kennedy. Clint Hill was one of the agents escorting President Kennedy through the streets of Dallas and the lone agent who heroically jumped on the back of the Lincoln Continental as it sped away to Parkland Memorial Hospital.

Let us all take a moment today to remember President Kennedy, his family, and those who responded 62 years ago.

10/11/2025

One tough hombre!

https://www.facebook.com/share/1ZZqGiSXMc/

On this day, 18 years ago, November 9, 2007, 20-year-old Specialist Kyle J. White of the United States Army was serving as a radio telephone operator with Company C, 2nd Battalion (Airborne), 503rd Infantry Regiment, 173rd Airborne Brigade in Nuristan Province, Afghanistan.

His unit was returning from a meeting with village elders in the Aranas Valley when they were ambushed by a well-organized enemy force estimated at over 100 Taliban fighters.

The squad was pinned against a steep mountainside with little cover and took heavy casualties.

During the intense firefight, White was struck by a rocket-propelled gr***de blast that knocked him unconscious and caused multiple concussions.

He regained consciousness but found himself gravely wounded, yet he refused medical attention to continue fighting.

Noticing that all communication radios were knocked out, White crawled under heavy enemy fire to retrieve a radio from a fallen comrade.

He then provided critical battle updates and coordinates to incoming air support, allowing for precise air strikes against the enemy.

White tended to casualties throughout the night, moving wounded soldiers to safety and directing the Afghan Army troops assisting them for security.

He refused to fall asleep despite the pain and exhaustion, relentlessly working to keep his team alive.

He marked the landing zone for medevac helicopters and helped load wounded onto the aircraft once they arrived.

Only after the last casualty was evacuated did White permit himself to be extracted.

He treated his team with bravery and selflessness under fire for over 20 hours of continuous combat.

Specialist Kyle J. White survived his wounds and left the Army in 2011.

For his valorous actions, White was awarded the Medal of Honor by President Barack Obama on May 13, 2014.

He later pursued higher education and a career outside the military.

09/11/2025

Borrowed from another site: https://www.facebook.com/share/17oonpDCnx/

On this day, 81 years ago, November 7, 1944, 26-year-old Private First Class Joe M. Nishimoto of the United States Army was in the fight of his life near La Houssiere, France.

He was serving as acting squad leader with Company G, 2nd Battalion, 442nd Regimental Combat Team, attached to the 36th Infantry Division.

For three days, his company had been attempting to drive the entrenched German forces off a strongly defended ridge with no success.

On November 7, Nishimoto boldly crawled forward alone through a heavily mined and booby-trapped area, ignoring the threat of instant death.

Spotting a German machine gun nest, he crept close under enemy eyes, hurled a gr***de, and wiped out the entire position.

As rounds snapped past and mines surrounded him, he circled to the rear of another enemy machine gun, charged point-blank, and raked the nest with submachine gun fire, killing one gunner and wounding another.

Without pausing, he pursued two enemy riflemen who had broken from cover; he killed one, forcing the other to flee in terror.

Nishimoto then spotted another machine-gun crew guarding a key point of the defense.

He assaulted their position head-on, forcing the German troops to abandon their gun and retreat.
With their last strongpoints collapsing, the enemy was finally forced to withdraw from the blood-soaked sector.

His solo attacks crippled the German lines, allowing the battered American unit to advance and break the stalemate.

Nishimoto’s actions were so aggressive and vital that he was posthumously awarded the Distinguished Service Cross.

Decades later, after review of Japanese American valor cases, his Distinguished Service Cross was upgraded to the Medal of Honor.

On June 21, 2000, President Bill Clinton presented the Medal of Honor to Nishimoto’s oldest sister, Akie Ishida, at a White House ceremony honoring twenty-two Asian American World War II heroes.​

Private First Class Joe M. Nishimoto was killed in action one week after his Medal of Honor actions, on November 15, 1944, near La Houssiere, France.