TIL: Today I Learned... (9 Viewers)

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faceman said:
We all came to this forum due to our passion for football and the Saints in particular. TIL something about
what was probably the most famous play in NFL history. It was the immaculate reception by Franco Harris
on Dec 24,1972. This particular shot was filmed by Steelers photographer Les Banos. This miracle play literally
saved his life. Banos was also employed by the Pittsburgh Pirates baseball team and he was a good friend
of Roberto Clemente. Banos was scheduled to be on the plane with Clemente on Dec. 31st. that was sending
relief supplies to Nicaraguan earthquake victims. That flight crashed and there were no survivors. Since the
Steelers won they had a game on Dec. 31st against the Dolphins. Banos had to work and could not make
the flight with Clemente. Banos went on to live another 39 years.




I never heard of him before a friend of mine posted it on his FB Timeline. Banos was a remarkable man.
He worked as a double agent for NATO during WW2 and gained the trust of some high ranking Nazi
officials. Banos was able to forge documents which saved some Jews from death in the gas chambers.
Here is a good article I found detailing his life.

www.behindthesteelcurtain.com

A Death in the Family: Former Steeler Photographer Les Banos dies at 88

A noted sports photographer passed away this week. What many people didn't know was that he was also a great humanitarian who risked his life to save countless others.
www.behindthesteelcurtain.com www.behindthesteelcurtain.com
Click to expand...

I'm sure you meant the Allies and not NATO, but yes, that was an amazing and well lived life.
 
faceman said:
We all came to this forum due to our passion for football and the Saints in particular. TIL something about
what was probably the most famous play in NFL history. It was the immaculate reception by Franco Harris
on Dec 24,1972. This particular shot was filmed by Steelers photographer Les Banos. This miracle play literally
saved his life. Banos was also employed by the Pittsburgh Pirates baseball team and he was a good friend
of Roberto Clemente. Banos was scheduled to be on the plane with Clemente on Dec. 31st. that was sending
relief supplies to Nicaraguan earthquake victims. That flight crashed and there were no survivors. Since the
Steelers won they had a game on Dec. 31st against the Dolphins. Banos had to work and could not make
the flight with Clemente. Banos went on to live another 39 years.




I never heard of him before a friend of mine posted it on his FB Timeline. Banos was a remarkable man.
He worked as a double agent for NATO during WW2 and gained the trust of some high ranking Nazi
officials. Banos was able to forge documents which saved some Jews from death in the gas chambers.
Here is a good article I found detailing his life.

www.behindthesteelcurtain.com

A Death in the Family: Former Steeler Photographer Les Banos dies at 88

A noted sports photographer passed away this week. What many people didn't know was that he was also a great humanitarian who risked his life to save countless others.
www.behindthesteelcurtain.com www.behindthesteelcurtain.com
Click to expand...

NATO didn't even exist during WWII, it was a post-WWII military alliance between Western European nations, U.K., US, and Canada formed to combat and curb the spread of Soviet-styled communism further after pro-Soviet Communist regimes sprang up in countries liberated from German rule by Soviet forces in the final years of WWII (Poland, Bulgaria, Czechoslovakia, East Germany, Romania, and briefly eastern Austria, including Vienna (which was broken up and divided up into 4 administrative regions, like Berlin was from 1946-1990). Soviet forces eventually agreed to leave their controlled parts of Austria and Vienna in 1955 in exchange for permanent neutrality status from Austria in European power politics. Interestingly enough, the foreign policy expert who sort of devised the idea for a NATO preventive alliance at the Bretton Woods Conference was a Canadian himself.

Banos likely worked for the OSS, a CIA-precursor like foreign intellegence service founded in 1942 by President Roosevelt and headed by John Foster Dulles, the future first head of the post-war CIA.

What's even sadder about Clemente's death is that after his plane crashed, his body was never recovered or found, so in a sense, it was a bit of a double death for his relatives and loved ones forced to mourn his tragic passing without being able to bury him.
 
Sailorsaint said:
I'm sure you meant the Allies and not NATO, but yes, that was an amazing and well lived life.
Click to expand...
The OSS was the WWII precursor to the CIA when it was founded in 1942 by President Roosevelt and headed by John Foster Dulles. The UK's equivalent was the SOE, or Special Operations Executive, now those guys were known for bombings, targeted assassinations of Nazi officials, high-ranking German generals, luminaries like assassinating Reinhard Heydrich in Prague in 1942 in an open-air Mercedes-Benz, SOE agents also collaborated with underground Norwegian saboteurs in mid-1943 on bombing the German heavy-water distribution plant in Telemark, Norway (heavy water is one of the main components of creating a nuclear weapon), SOE operatives and Norwegian saboteurs later on destroyed large stockpiles of enriched uranium the Germans had stored on a commercial ferry, thinking Allied agents wouldn't kill innocent people to prevent them from moving nuclear materials. They were wrong because the commercial ferry was blown up along with the enriched uranium on a Norwegian fjord.

Those missions, essentially, permanently crippled Germany's war-time effort to complete and build a atomic weapon, although historians believe they did experiment on using two low-key, low-grade "dirty bombs" in western Poland in January 1945. "Dirty Bombs" are essentially sheetty nuclear weapons because they spread nuclear material instead of concentrating it within a certain, specific proximity.

After WWII ended, IIRC in late May 1945, Allied investigators found tons of buried enriched uranium in Bavaria and it was calculated that German military scientists via Ahnenerbe and RSD, SS had created maybe 4-5 tons more of enriched uranium, a working Nazi prototype atomic bomb conceivably couldve been made operational by end of WWII and if Hitler had earmarked more funding for nuclear weapons research (which he didnt understand and frankly, IMHO, was ignorant of), instead of Wundewaffen (wonder weapons) like V-I/V-II ICBM's, lithium batteries, first crude-shaped helicopters, and jet-propelled fighter planes used by Luftwaffe.
 
TIL that Jim Weatherly got the spark to write the song Midnight Train to Georgia from a conversation he had on the phone with Farrah Fawcett.

www.clarionledger.com

How Farrah Fawcett is tied to the song 'Midnight Train to Georgia'

The classic tune was written by Pontotoc native and former Ole Miss quarterback Jim Weatherly — with an assist from the late actress.
www.clarionledger.com
 
TIL Hawaii technically is not protected under article 5 of the NATO treaty.

www.military.com

Hawaii May Not Be Protected Under Article 5 of the NATO Treaty

There's one notable exception to the areas protected by the original NATO agreement. It seems to have forgotten about what drew the United States into World War II in the first place: Hawaii.
www.military.com www.military.com

When Argentina invaded the Falkland Islands in 1982, it was attacking sovereign British territory. NATO was under no obligation to aid the United Kingdom, due to the language that provided limits to what was protected under the treaty's collective defense provisions. The state of Hawaii technically falls outside of those same provisions.
Click to expand...
 
Taurus said:
If you attack Hawaii, the other members of NATO will be the least of your worries.
Click to expand...
TIL that you guys like talking about NATO almost as much as the Holy Roman Empire, apparently.
 
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