125th birth anniversary of philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein (1889-1951).
100th birth anniversary of Pulitzer Prize-winning novelist Bernard Malamud (1914-86).
100th birth anniversary of WWII secret agent Lilian Rolfe (1914-44). Posthumous recipient of the Croix de Guerre and other honors.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lilian_RolfeWorld War II[edit]
At the onset of World War II, Rolfe worked at the British Embassy in Rio de Janeiro before going to London, England in 1943 to join the Women's Auxiliary Air Force. Because of her fluency in the French language, she was recruited into the Special Operations Executive (SOE), where she was trained as a wireless operator.
On 5 April 1944, she was dropped near the city of Orléans in occupied France, where she was deployed to work with the "Historian" network run by George Wilkinson. Her job was to transmit Maquis and other important radio messages to London. Beyond her wireless duties, that included reporting on German troop movements and organizing arms and supply drops, she actively participated in missions with members of the French Resistance against the German occupiers and was involved in a gun battle in the small town of Olivet just south of Orléans.
Following the D-Day landings, an increasingly aggressive manhunt by the Gestapo led to the arrest of her superior officer. Nonetheless, Rolfe continued to work until her arrest at a transmitting house in Nargis on 31 July 1944. Transported to Fresnes Prison in Paris, she was interrogated repeatedly and brutally tortured until August 1944, when she was shipped to Ravensbrück concentration camp. According to an admission made by a German officer after the war’s end, she was so ill that she could not walk. On 5 February 1945, 30-year-old Lilian Rolfe was executed by the Germans and her body disposed of in the crematorium.
Three other female members of the SOE were also executed at Ravensbrück: Denise Bloch, Cecily Lefort, and Violette Szabo.
Birth anniversary of “Mother of the Blues” Ma Rainey (1886-1939).
Birth anniversaries of artist John James Audubon (1785-1851) and landscape architect Frederick Law Olmsted (1822-1903).
Happy Birthday! Carol Burnett, Duane Eddy, Bobby Rydell
1607 - The British established an American colony at Cape Henry, Virginia. It was the first permanent English establishment in the Western Hemisphere.
1865 - John Wilkes Booth was killed by the U.S. Federal Cavalry.
1941 - An organ was played at a baseball stadium for the first time in Chicago, IL.
1945 - Marshal Henri Philippe Petain, the head of France's Vichy government during World War II, was arrested.
1982 - The British announced that Argentina had surrendered on South Georgia.
1983 - Dow Jones Industrial Average broke 1,200 for first time.
1986 - The world’s worst nuclear disaster to date occurred at Chernobyl, in Kiev. Thirty-one people died in the incident and thousands more were exposed to radioactive material.
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