DAY OF TERROR: Cowardly fanatics unleashed death and mayhem at the Boston Marathon April 15, 2013.
By C. Michael Forsyth
Brace yourself! The Week From Hell has rolled around again: Nine days that have been plagued by disaster and tragedy over the course of many centuries. On April 15, 2013, the Boston Marathon was cut short when two pressure-cooker bombs exploded killing three people and injuring an estimated 264 others. But that was only one of the more recent entries in a string of heartbreaking catastrophes. Here are just a few of the past tragedies that have befallen the world between April 12 and April 20:
April 12: U.S. Civil War begins
April 13: Apollo 13 disaster
April 14: Lincoln Shot
April 15: Titanic Sinks
April 16: Virginia Tech Massacre
April 17: Russian troops slaughter gold mine workers
April 18: San Francisco Earthquake
April 19: Oklahoma City Bombing, Bay of Pigs, Waco tragedy.
April 20: Columbine High School Massacre
Until the Boston bombing I treated this historical oddity with a certain amount of gallows humor. Now I’m just praying that people around the world are spared from harm–while my family and I take shelter till the disaster-prone time frame blows over. The Titanic and the other incidents above are just the “tip of the iceberg.” Here, drawn mostly from Wikipedia, is the full list:
BROTHER vs. BROTHER: The Civil War ripped America in two.
APRIL 12
• 1861 – The U.S. Civil War begins when Confederate forces fire on Fort Sumter, in the harbor of Charleston, South Carolina.
• 1864 –The Fort Pillow massacre: Confederate forces murder most of the African American soldiers who surrendered at Fort Pillow, Tennessee.
• 1945 – U.S. President Franklin D. Roosevelt dies in office.
• 1968 – Nerve gas accident at Skull Valley, Utah.
• 1970 – Soviet submarine K-8, carrying four nuclear torpedoes, sinks in the Bay of Biscay four days after a fire on board.
• 2002 – A female suicide bomber blows herself up at the entrance to Jerusalem’s Mahane Yehuda market, killing 7 and wounding 104.
• 2007 – A suicide bomber penetrates the Green Zone and detonates in a cafeteria inside the parliament building, killing Iraqi MP Mohammed Awad and wounding more than 20 other people.
• 2010 – A train derails near Merano, Italy, after running into a landslide, causing nine deaths and injuring 28 people.
UNLUCKY NUMBER: Astronaut James Lovell was lost in space aboard Apollo 13.
APRIL 13
- 1919 — British troops gun down 100 Indian civilians in the Amritsar Massacre.
• 1945 – German troops butcher more than 1,000 political and military prisoners in Gardelegen, Germany.
• 1948 – The Hadassah medical convoy massacre: In an ambush, 79 Jewish doctors, nurses and medical students from Hadassah Hospital and a British soldier are slaughtered by Arabs in Sheikh Jarra near Jerusalem.
• 1953 – CIA director Allen Dulles launches the sinister mind-control program MKULTRA.
• 1970 – An oxygen tank aboard Apollo 13 explodes while en route to the Moon, stranding the crew in space.
• 1975 – Bus massacre in Lebanon: Attack by the Phalangist resistance kills 26 militia members of the P.F.L. of Palestine, marking the start of the 15-year Lebanese Civil War.
• 1992 – The Great Chicago Flood. Damaged wall of a utility tunnel beneath the Chicago River opens into a breach that floods basements with an estimated 250 million gallons of water.
ASSASSIN John Wilkes Booth ruins the Lincolns’ night at the theater.
APRIL 14
* 1846 – The Donner Party expedition sets out from Springfield, Illinois for California. After being trapped by heavy snow, nearly half of the 87 pioneers die, many eaten by their starving companions.
* 1865 – U.S. President Abraham Lincoln is assassinated in Ford’s Theatre by John Wilkes Booth.
• 1909 – Adana Massacre is launched by Turkey’s Ottoman Empire against Armenian civilians. Between 15,000–30,000 people are killed.
• 1944 – A massive explosion in India’s Bombay harbor kills 800.
• 1986 – President Ronald Reagan orders major bombing raids against Libya, killing 60 people including an infant girl, reportedly Colonel Gaddafi’s daughter.
• 1986 – Massive 2.2 pound hailstones fall on the Gopalganj district of Bangladesh, killing 92. These are the heaviest hailstones ever recorded.
• 1988 – The USS Samuel B. Roberts strikes a mine in the Persian Gulf.
• 1994 – In northern Iraq, two U.S. Air Force fighters mistakenly shoot down two U.S. Army helicopters, killing 26 people.
• 1999 – NATO mistakenly bombs a convoy of ethnic Albanian refugees. Yugoslav officials say 75 people are killed.
• 1999 – A severe hailstorm strikes Sydney, Australia causing $2.3 billion in insured damages, the most costly natural disaster in Australian history.
• 2010 – Nearly 2,700 are killed in a magnitude 6.9 earthquake in Yushu, Qinghai, China.
APRIL 15
• 1715 – The Pocotaligo Massacre triggers the start of the Yamasee War in colonial South Carolina. In the first year of the war, the Yamasee Indians lose about a quarter of their population, either killed or enslaved.
• 1912 – The RMS Titanic sinks in the North Atlantic at 2:20 a.m., two and a half hours after hitting an iceberg. 1,517 people are killed.
• 1941 – In the Belfast Blitz, the German Air Force (Luftwaffe) bombs Belfast, Northern Ireland, killing 1,000 people.
• 1969 – North Korea shoots down a United States Navy aircraft over the Sea of Japan, killing all 31 on board.
• 1970 – During the Cambodian Civil War, massacres of the Vietnamese minority results in 800 bodies flowing down the Mekong River into South Vietnam.
• 1979 – A disastrous 7.1 earthquake occurs on Montenegro coast.
• 1989 – British soccer fans crush together at Liverpool’s Hillsborough Stadium in the FA Cup Semi Final, causing 96 deaths.
• 1989 – The Tiananmen Square protests of 1989 begin in the People’s Republic of China. Thousands are massacred by Communist troops.
• 2002 – Air China Flight CA129 crashes into a hillside during heavy rain and fog near Busan, South Korea, killing 128.
* 2013 — An estimated 264 runners and spectators are injured and 3 are killed when a pair of young terrorists detonate bombs at the Boston Marathon.
CRAZED student went on killing spree at Virginia Tech.
APRIL 16
• 73 A.D. – Roman legions crush the Jewish revolt at Masada after months of seige. Hundreds of Israelites commit suicide rather than be taken as slaves.
• 1945 – About 7,000 civilians and wounded soldiers perish when the German refugee ship Goya is sunk by a Soviet submarine torpedo, marking one of the worst tragedies in maritime history.
• 1947 – Texas City Disaster: An explosion on board a freighter in port causes the city of Texas City, Texas, to catch fire, killing almost 600.
• 1990 – “Doctor Death” Jack Kevorkian carries out his first assisted suicide.
• 1992 – The Katina P. runs aground off of Maputo, Mozambique and 60,000 tons of crude oil spill into the ocean.
• 2007 – Virginia Tech massacre: The deadliest spree killing in modern American history. Seung-Hui Cho kills 32 and injures 23 before committing suicide.
THE KILLING FIELDS: Millions were slaughtered by Cambodia’s Khmer Rouge fanatics.
APRIL 17
• 1912 – Russian troops open fire on striking goldfield workers in northeast Siberia, killing at least 150.
• 1941 – Germany conquers Yugoslavia.
• 1975: Khmer Rouge forces take over Cambodia. About 1.7 million people are slaughtered by this tyrannical regime, most dumped in the infamous mass graves known as The Killing Fields.
• 2006 – Sami Hammad, a Palestinian suicide bomber, detonates an explosive device in Tel Aviv, killing 11 people and injuring 70.
MASSIVE earthquake laid waste to San Fransico.
APRIL 18
*1880 — A powerful tornado rips through Marshfield, Missouri, leaving 99 people dead and 100 injured.
• 1897 – The Greco-Turkish War is declared between Greece and the Ottoman Empire. About 8,000 die in the brief but bloody conflict also known as The 30 Day War.
• 1902 – Quetzaltenango, the second largest city of Guatemala, is destroyed by an earthquake, killing about 900 people.
• 1906 – San Francisco earthquake destroys much of city. Death toll of 700 is often cited but experts believe as many as 2,800 may have perished in quake and resulting fires.
*1942 – U.S. planes bomb Tokyo in the Doolittle Raid as revenge for Pearl Harbor, killing 50. All the aircraft are shot down and 11 crewmen are killed or captured. After Chinese civilians help other aviators escape, Japanese massacre 250,000 of them retaliation.
• 1983 – A suicide bomber destroys the United States embassy in Beirut, Lebanon, murdering 63 people.
• 1996 – Israeli army shells the U.N. compound at Quana, Lebanon, blowing to smithereens at least 100 civilian refugees who’d taken refuge there.
• 2007 – A series of bombings wreak havoc in Baghdad, killing 198 and injuring 251.
UP IN FLAMES: The seige of a cult compound in Waco, Texas, ended in tragedy.
APRIL 19
• 1943 – German troops crush the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising. An estimated 13,000 Jews are killed, about half of those burned alive or killed by smoke inhalation. Of the 50,000 survivors, most are shipped to extermination camps.
• 1943 – Swiss chemist Dr. Albert Hofmann deliberately takes LSD for the first time, introducing the drug that will destroy thousands of minds.
• 1961 – The Bay of Pigs invasion of Cuba ends in a fiasco for the U.S., in which most of the 1,500 C.I.A.-trained invaders are captured or killed.
• 1989 – A gun turret explodes aboard the USS Iowa, killing 47 sailors.
• 1993 – The 51-day siege of the Branch Davidian compound outside Waco, Texas ends when a fire breaks out. Eighty-one people die, including 20 children and two pregnant women.
• 1993 – South Dakota governor George Mickelson and seven others are killed when their plane crashes in Iowa.
• 1995 – Oklahoma City bombing: Timothy McVeigh blows up the Alfred P. Murrah Federal Building, killing 168.
• 1997 – The Red River Flood of 1997 overwhelms region from North Dakota to Minnesota, inflicting $3.5 billion in damage.
EVIL punks massacred classmates in cafeteria of Columbine High School.
APRIL 20
• 1792 – France declares war on Austria, the beginning of French Revolutionary Wars in which tens of thousands die.
• 1889 – Nazi madman Adolf Hitler is born. He launches World War 2 in which over 60 million people are killed.
* 1914 – In the heat of a Colorado miners’ strike, coal company goons and the Colorado National Guard gun down nearly two dozen people including 11 innocent children in the Ludlow Massacre.
• 1999 – Columbine High School massacre: Eric Harris and Dylan Klebold fatally shoot 13 people and injure 24 others before committing suicide in Jefferson County, Colorado.
• 2010 – The Deepwater Horizon oil well explodes in the Gulf of Mexico, killing twelve workers and causing the BP oil spill which lasts six months.
ON A HAPPIER NOTE:
If you found this article by C. Michael Forsyth interesting, check out his novels including Houdini Vs. Rasputin.
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