A Fierce Green Fire

      The film A Fierce Green Fire by PBS focused almost entirely on current around the world pollution and environmental hazards like whaling in the oceans, the cutting down of the world's rain forests and chemical pollution of the ground and its water. The film includes several different sections all following different people trying to drive a point across their governments and try to enforce change. The film really focused on the different groups and organizations that sprung up in times of environmental disaster all around the world. The film was very well done and extremely inspiring.

A Fierce Green Fire." PBS. PBS, n.d. Web. 24 Apr. 2014.

Trying to Move Towards Solar Energy: Today less than one tenth of the energy produced worldwide comes from solar panels. Solar panels are used to capture the sun's energy that it gives off and turns it into electricity. This way of capturing energy is extremely clean and if used properly could power entire towns and maybe cities, it also makes virtually no sound when in use. Today the US, Germany, and Japan are the leaders in the production and use of solar energy. The solar panel companies like SEIA are working on ways to improve solar energy and bring it to the majority of people in the US. Solar energy would be great replacement form coal energy when it creates no pollution wile coal burning emits harmful substances into the air and water. Hopefully one day the leading form of energy on the planet will be from solar panels.
     
One way to help would be to donate to the various solar companies and/or buy and install solar panels for your home or business.

- Cordel Bever

Sources:  

http://environment.nationalgeographic.com/environment/global-warming/solar-power-profile/       

http://www.seia.org/about/solar-energy

Band Of Brothers

E Company, 506th Regiment, 101st Airborne

Band-Of-Brothers

      The WWII nonfiction book Band Of Brothers by Stephen E. Ambrose follows an elite fighting group through their battles in Europe. The boys of E Company, or Easy Company, were an airborne assault force that would drop from C-47s into the heat of battle. They were the first to drop into the Battle of Normandy on D-Day with the task to take out naval artillery guns pointed at Utah Beach. Without their courage on this historical day there would have been little to no chance for the men on the beach to have made it up; furthermore, they could easily have been the most important players in the battle.

      The men from Easy were the best trained men of the war in Europe, they were able to push themselves harder and longer than any other group of men in in the war. Thanks to their training and dedication to their work in the States they came into battle for the first time with better knowledge than the battle hardened Veterans. After the Battle of Normandy the airborne and men from the 506th Regiment were tasked to secure the town of Carentan, France to set up a field HQ (Head Quarters). The battle was a house by house street by street battle, though they had little resistance at times it took 8 days for the men of Easy to secure the town of Carentan. When the 101st were nearing the end of the battle they received a message confirming a large German armored counteroffensive on the town within the next couple of hours. The three different companies in the town took up different defensive positions on the outskirts of the town; one to the left, one on the right, with Easy Company right in the middle. They took positions behind hedgerows, large hills ranging from 4 to 8 feet used to separate different plots of farmland, providing good cover and  an advantage from the attacking German tanks. As the German armor started to climb the rows of hedgerows it would expose the tank's unarmored underbellies and give the airborne just enough time to take out tanks with a rocket to their underside. The battle raged on for a wile longer until the US's 1st tank battalion ant the 1st mechanized infantry battalion came in and pushed back the Germans. The town of Carentan was finally captured by the US on the 12th of June, 1944, and the battles outside the town ended on the 14th.     
      The 101st Airborne of Easy Company were the major backbone of all the attacks and defensive actions they were apart of in the battles of Europe, their intense training and combat abilities made them nearly unstoppable. From the Invasion of Normandy to Hitler's Eagle's Nest and every battle in between the 101st served their country well and fought with a force never seen before in modern combat.            

WWII Vocabulary and Information

Cost Plus Contract: The government agreed to pay a company whatever it cost to make a product plus a guaranteed percentage of the cost as profit.

Reconstruction Finance Corporation: The RFC, a government agency set up in during the Depression, was now permitted to make loans to companies to help them cover the cost of converting to war production. 

Tank Factories: The automobile industry replaced their car production with the mass production of tanks, trucks, jeeps and artillery. 

B-24 Liberator: Henry Ford launched a project that created an assembly line for the B-24 bomber at Willow Run Airport near Detroit. They built 8,600 bombers by the end of the war. 

Liberty Ship: The Liberty Ship was the basic cargo ship used during the war. The ships were welded instead of riveted making them cheaper and harder to sink. They were built at the Kaiser Shipyard. 

Problem With The Training Of US Troops: The amount of people that were drafted into the army initially overwhelmed the army's training camps, and many recruits were forced to live in tents and use temporary facilities. They also suffered through equipment shortages. Troops carried sticks instead of guns, threw rocks instead of grenades, and used trucks with the word 'TANK' on the side to simulate a tank. In an early battle a soldier raised his rifle in the air wile pointing at it and shouted "how do I load this thing?" that shows how bad the training was at the beginning of the war.

'Double V' Campaign: A campaign that urged African Americans to support the the war in order to achieve a double victory- a victory over Hitler's racism in Europe and over America's racism at home. 

Role of African Americans in The War: African Americans were first allowed to fight in combat in WWII after the Double V campaign convinced the Army Air Force, Navy, and Marine Corps to accept African Americans. Many African Americans went on to be great heros, for example the first all African American Army Air Force unit the 99th Pursuit Squaron which fought in several battles in the Mediterranean. 

Role of Women in The War: The US Congress first allowed women into the armed forces in May of 1942, though they were not allowed in combat they served as nurses and more in more administrative areas. Over 68,000 women served as nurses in the Women's Army Corps and others like it during the war. 

Noor Inayat Khan

    Noor Inayat Khan was born on the first of January, 1914 in Moscow, Russia to an Indian father and an American mother. Her family moved to London then Paris. She later fled to England during the fall of France and joined the WAAF (Woman's Axillary Air Force) in late 1942, before becoming a radio operator shortly after. In June of 1943 she was flown to France as a radio operator for the Prosper network in the French Resistance in Paris. Most of her group was arrested by the Germans, but she escaped and continued to travel from place to place giving out messages to England about German plans. In October, she was betrayed by a French woman and was turned in and arrested by the Gestapo. She had kept copies of the messages that she had sent to London and the Germans found them and used them to send messages to the British. The Germans gave out false information and told them to send more agents, so they could capture them. Later in November of 1943, Khan was sent to Pforzheim prison in Nazi Germany where she was tortured to try and get information out of her but she never said a word. A year later, in 1944, she and three others were transferred to the Dachau concentration camp where they were shot and killed on the thirteenth of September. Khan was awarded the George Cross in 1949 for her bravery during the war. France also honored her service and bravery by awarding her the Croix de Guerre. Her story lives on in London where they made a memorial to honor her courage in the second world war. 

By Cordel Bever
Sources:  http://www.bbc.co.uk/history/historic_figures/inayat_khan_noor.shtml
Sources:  http://www.noormemorial.org/