It was Thursday, the 12th of October 1972, when the Uruguayan Air Force turboprop departed from Carrasco International Airport. On board were 5 crew, along with 40 members of the Old Christians Club rugby union team from Montevideo, on the way to a match in Santiago, Chile. It’s a relatively short flight, equivalent to a trip from Boston to Chicago, with one major difference. The Andes Mountains.
Poor mountain weather forced an overnight stop. They resumed flight on Friday the 13th, making their way through a mountain pass that afternoon. The pilot notified air controllers that he was over Curicó, Chile, but it was a fatal error. With zero visibility, he was forced to rely on dead reckoning, but strong headwinds had slowed them significantly. Cleared to descend 55 miles east of where he thought he was, the plane clipped two peaks at 13,800′, first losing a wing, then the vertical stabilizer, and finally the other wing. The battered fuselage crashed down on an unnamed peak, later called “Glaciar de las Lágrimas”, “Glacier of Tears”.
12 died instantly or shortly after the crash, including the team doctor. By the next morning another five were gone. Several had their legs broken as the plane’s seats piled together. Those who could move built walls of suitcases to shut out the cold. For a week they waited for rescue, while aircraft from three countries searched in vain for a white aircraft in snow covered mountains. I can only imagine the despair they felt on the 8th day, when survivors heard on their small transistor radio that the search had been called off.
Stranded and alone in the high Andes, meager supplies soon gave out. A few chocolate bars, assorted snacks and several bottles of wine. It was gone within days, as the survivors scoured the wreckage for crumbs. They ate leather from suitcases, tore apart seats hoping to find straw, finding nothing but inedible foam. Nothing grew at this altitude. There were no animals. There was nothing in that desolate place but metal, glass, ice and rock, and the frozen bodies of the dead.
The conclusion was unavoidable, one by one the survivors agreed. They had to eat their dead friends or none of them would survive.
An avalanche swept down on October 29, killing another 8 and burying the fuselage under several feet of hard packed snow. The survivors were buried alive, compressed into a horrifyingly small space from which it took three full days to claw their way out.
The days were above freezing as what passes for summer spread over the Andean highlands, but nights were bitter cold. Several set out soon after the avalanche, but had to return to the crash site after nearly freezing to death in the open.
They spent several weeks scrounging materials and sewing them into a makeshift sleeping bag for three. Three of the strongest, Nando Parrado, Roberto Canessa and Antonio Vizintín, began their trek out of the mountains on December 12, 1972. It was two months after the crash.
It soon became clear that the distances were vastly greater than they had believed. Three were rapidly going through their meager rations, so Vizintín left the small expedition and returned to the crash site. This hike down the mountains was their only chance, and now there were two.
The Juan Valdez of the coffee commercials is an “arriero”, a person who transports goods using pack animals. Parrado and Canessa had hiked for almost two weeks when they were building a fire by a river, and they spotted such a man on the other side. Sergio Catalán probably didn’t believe his eyes at first, but he shouted across the river. “Tomorrow”.
The 14 survivors waiting and hoping at the crash
site heard the news on their transistor on December 22, that they were saved. The first helicopters arrived that afternoon, flying out with the weakest of the survivors. Altitude sickness, dehydration, frostbite, broken bones, scurvy and malnutrition. They were one decrepit bunch, but they were alive. The second expedition arrived on the morning of December 23, removing the last survivors around daybreak.
Warm and well fed members of the media made a hysterical fuss in the days that followed, about the manner in which those last few had survived. There were lurid headlines and grisly images of cannibalism, while others treated the whole thing like it had been some kind of glorious adventure. It was neither. Nando Parrado later wrote that “there was no glory in those mountains. It was all ugliness and fear and desperation, and the obscenity of watching so many innocent people die”.
For two days, a desperate defense of the nearby villages of Noville and Foy held back the 2nd Panzerdivision, as 11,000 men and 800 officers of the 101st joined a combined force of 11,000 converging on Bastogne. By the 21st, Bastogne’s field hospital was overrun, they were surrounded by forces outnumbering them 2½ to one. Poorly supplied for the cold winter conditions with air supply made all but impossible by weather conditions, the citizens of Bastogne gave their blankets to the American soldiers, along with white linens which they used for camouflage.
later, ending the German encirclement.
entire siege tending to the wounded, along with Dr. Jack Prior. Once, she even ran through enemy fire to collect the wounded from the field. On Christmas eve, she was blown off her feet and through a wall. She got up and went back to it, despite the direct hit that killed 30 American wounded, along with the only other nurse at the Rue Neufchatel aid station, Renée Lemaire. 
Bastogne. Chiwy married after the war, and rarely talked about her experience in Bastogne. It took King a full 18 months to coax the story out of her. The result was the 2015 Emmy award winning historical documentary, “Searching for Augusta, The Forgotten Angel of Bastogne”.
States Marine Corps in 2006. The dog’s second deployment began in November, when he was paired with Marine Corporal Dustin J. Lee, stationed in the military police department at Marine Corps Logistics Base (MCLB), “Albany”.
The most dreadful moment in the life of any parent, is when they receive word of the death of a child. It wasn’t long after Jerome and Rachel Lee were so notified, that they began efforts to adopt Lex. Dustin was gone, but they wanted to make his partner a permanent part of their family.
In telling this story, I wish in some small way to honor my son in law Nate and daughter Carolyn, who together experienced Nate’s deployment as a Tactical Explosives Detection Dog handler with the US Army 3rd Infantry Division in Soltan Kheyl, Wardak Province, Afghanistan. Months after departing “The Ghan” in 2013, the couple was reunited with Nate’s “Battle Buddy”, MWD Zino, who is now retired and lives with them in Savannah. “Here & Now”, broadcast out of ‘Boston’s NPR News Station’ WBUR, did a great story on the reunion. You can hear the radio broadcast 
At the age of 26, Franz Stigler was an Ace. The Luftwaffe pilot of a Messerschmitt Bf-109 fighter, some of his kills had been revenge, payback for the death of his brother August earlier in the war. But this man was no Nazi. He was a German Patriot with 22 confirmed kills. On December 20, 1943, he needed one more for a Knight’s Cross. He tossed his cigarette aside and climbed into his fighter as the crippled American B17 bomber lumbered overhead. This was going to be an easy kill.
named “Ye Olde Pub”. The earlier attack on the munitions factory in Bremen had been a success, but the pilot and crew paid a heavy price for it. Their aircraft had been savaged by no fewer than 15 German fighters. Great parts of the air frame were torn away, one wing severely damaged and part of the tail torn away. The aircraft’s Plexiglas nose was shattered and the #2 engine seized. Six of the ten-man crew were wounded and the tail gunner dead, his blood frozen in icicles over silent machine guns. Brown himself had been knocked out at one point, coming around just in time to avert a fatal dive.
took out an ad in a fighter pilots’ newsletter. It said that he was searching for the man ‘who saved my life on Dec. 20, 1943.’ Stigler saw the ad, and the two met for the first time in 1987. “It was like meeting a family member”, Brown said at their first meeting, “like a brother you haven’t seen for 40 years”.
The two became close friends and occasional fishing buddies until their passing in 2008, six months apart. Stigler was age 92 and Brown 87. Their story is told in a book called “A Higher Call”, if you want to know more about it. In their obituaries, both were mentioned as the other man’s “special brother”.
He left with a copy of “The Lowell Offering”, a literary magazine written by those same mill girls, which he later described as “four hundred good solid pages, which I have read from beginning to end.”
No longer a maritime power, Hannibal set out in the spring of 218BC, crossing into hostile Gaul (France) and arriving at the Rhône River in September with 38,000 infantry, 8,000 cavalry, and 37 war elephants. His crossing of the Alps that winter is one of the great feats of military history, costing him almost half of his force before entering Italy in December.
The British author H. G. Wells wrote The War of the Worlds in 1897, telling the story of an alien invasion of earth by Martians fleeing from the desiccation of their planet. The story was adapted to a radio drama broadcast on Halloween, 1938, so realistic that many listeners sued the network for “mental anguish” and “personal injury”.
California at Berkeley is running a “distributed computing effort” to identify extraterrestrial life, called SETI@home. With an original objective of 50,000-100,000 home computers, SETI@home currently operates on over 5.2 million computers. With the introduction of the Berkeley Open Infrastructure for Network Computing, or “BOINC” (I didn’t make that up), SETI@home users can even compete with one another, to see who can process the maximum number of “work units”.
The website explains their mission: “SETI@home is a scientific experiment that uses Internet-connected computers in the Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence (SETI). You can participate by running a free program that downloads and analyzes radio telescope data”.
the “Regulars” sent to enforce the will of the Crown. Two years later, Sons of Liberty looted and burned the HMS Gaspee in Narragansett Bay, RI.
That night, somewhere between 30 and 130 Sons of Liberty, some dressed as Mohawk Indians, boarded the three ships in Boston Harbor. There they threw 342 chests of tea, 90,000 pounds in all, into Boston Harbor. £9,000 worth of tea was destroyed, worth about $1.5 million in today’s dollars.
Boston by British troops. Minutemen clashed with “Lobster backs” a few months later, on April 19, 1775. No one alive today knows who fired the first shot at Lexington Green. History would record it as “The shot heard ’round the world”.
Historical Easter Eggs - Today in History 
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