Raymond Brownell (17 May 1894 – 12 April 1974) was a senior officer
in the Royal Australian Air Force (RAAF) and a World War I flying ace.
He enlisted in the Australian Imperial Force at the outbreak of World
War I and served in the Gallipoli campaign before transferring to the
Western Front. Awarded the Military Medal for his actions during the
Battle of Pozières, he transferred to the Royal Flying Corps in 1917.
Moving with his squadron to Italy, he was awarded the Military Cross and
credited with shooting down 12 aircraft. After the war, Brownell
returned to Australia and was group captain at the outbreak of World
War II. Establishing the RAAF base in Singapore, he returned to
Australia in 1941 and was appointed to lead No. 1 Training Group. He
was Air Officer Commanding Western Area for over two years, then led the
No. 11 Group on Morotai. Retiring from the RAAF in 1947, Brownell
became a partner in a stockbroking firm. He died in 1974; his
autobiography was published posthumously.
Read more: <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Raymond_Brownell>
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Today's selected anniversaries:
1863:
American Civil War: At the Battle of Big Black River Bridge in
Mississippi, Union forces under John A. McClernand defeated a
Confederate rearguard and captured around 1,700 men.
<https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Battle_of_Big_Black_River_Bridge>
1900:
The first copies of the children's novel The Wonderful Wizard
of Oz by L. Frank Baum were printed.
<https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Wonderful_Wizard_of_Oz>
1954:
The U.S. Supreme Court ruled in the landmark case Brown v.
Board of Education, outlawing racial segregation in public schools
because "separate educational facilities are inherently unequal" and
therefore unconstitutional.
<https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brown_v._Board_of_Education>
1987:
An Iraqi jet fired two Exocet missiles at the American frigate
USS Stark, killing 37 personnel and injuring 21 others.
<https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/USS_Stark_incident>
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Wiktionary's word of the day:
gazetteer:
1. (archaic or historical) A person who writes for a gazette or
newspaper; a journalist; (specifically) a journalist engaged by a
government.
2. (by extension, obsolete) A gazette, a newspaper.
3. (geography) A dictionary or index of geographical locations.
4. (by extension) A descriptive list (often alphabetical) of any
subject.
5. Synonym of gazette (“to announce the status of (someone) in an
official gazette”)
6. (archaic) To report about (someone) in a gazette or newspaper.
7. (transitive, geography) To describe the geography of (a country or
other place) in a gazetteer (etymology 2, noun sense 1).
<https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/gazetteer>
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Wikiquote quote of the day:
The infirmity of human intelligence is short sight. In too
many cases, the wiseacres are dunces of a sort, who lose sight of the
simplicity of things, and stifle and obscure it with formulae and
trivialities. It is the small things that one learns from books, not the
great ones. And even while they are saying that they do not wish for
war they are doing all they can to perpetuate it. They nourish national
vanity and the love of supremacy by force. "We alone," they say, each
behind his shelter, "we alone are the guardians of courage and loyalty,
of ability and good taste!" Out of the greatness and richness of a
country they make something like a consuming disease. Out of patriotism
— which can be respected as long as it remains in the domain of
sentiment and art on exactly the same footing as the sense of family and
local pride, all equally sacred — out of patriotism they make a
Utopian and impracticable idea, unbalancing the world, a sort of cancer
which drains all the living force, spreads everywhere and crushes life,
a contagious cancer which culminates either in the crash of war or in
the exhaustion and suffocation of armed peace. They pervert the most
admirable of moral principles. How many are the crimes of which they
have made virtues merely by dowering them with the word "national"? They
distort even truth itself. For the truth which is eternally the same
they substitute each their national truth. So many nations, so many
truths; and thus they falsify and twist the truth.
--Henri Barbusse
<https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Henri_Barbusse>
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