Declassified documents shed new light on notorious sinking of USS Thresher

Story by Stephen J. Thorne

At 8 a.m. on April 9, 1963, USS Thresher (SSN-593), the lead boat in its class of nuclear-powered attack submarines, left port at Kittery, Maine, for a series of dive tests in the deep ocean 350 kilometres east of Cape Cod, Massachusetts, after a nine-month overhaul.

Some 25 hours later, while Thresher was nearing test depth during its first deep-dive trials, USS Skylark, the submarine rescue ship that was on station at the time, received a garbled message via underwater telephone.

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Paratrooper medic received the Victoria Cross

Story by Sharon Adams

On the morning of March 24, 1945, 1st Canadian Parachute Battalion jumped into heavily defended territory on the east bank of the Rhine River, part of the airborne assault during the Battle of the Bulge.
“They called it Operation Varsity,” recalled Herb Harris, a member of the battalion. “Our group of 2,000 men jumped together in six minutes, going out one on top of the other. We landed across the Rhine and we were right on top of the Jerries. It was intense fire—the Germans just opened up on us.”

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Adrift in the Bay of Biscay

Story by Sharon Adams

Just after 7:30 p.m. on St. Patrick’s Day in 1945, survivors of the minesweeper HMCS Guysborough were in frigid Atlantic waters awaiting rescue. About half of them wouldn’t make it.

Guysborough was about 300 kilometres off the coast of France in the Bay of Biscay en route from Lunenburg, N.S., to England when it was hit in the stern by an acoustic torpedo from U-868 just before 7 p.m. on March 17.

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The new Space Jam: General calls for traffic cops in crowded orbit

Story by Stephen J. Thorne

The head of space operations in the United States is seeking new ways to manage the traffic jam of satellites and space junk crowding the skies over Earth—and to prevent fender-benders and extraterrestrial road rage in the process.

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