The Brooklyn Dodgers and Boston Braves split a doubleheader 65 years ago today at Ebbets Field. It was a Saturday. At the conclusion of the day, the Dodgers were in first place by 13 games. (Over the next six weeks, the New York Giants played their way up the standings, into a three-game playoff against the Dodgers, and beat the Dodgers to play the New York Yankees in the World Series. “The Giants win the pennant!”)

WCBS-TV in New York broadcast the games on August 11 in color that year. These were the first-ever color broadcasts of a live baseball game. There were not yet many color television sets in private homes ready to receive the broadcast, but that day was coming. The ad above, for a CBS television set declares: “Color television is what you’ve been waiting for.”
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The Swedish warship Vasa (above) was immense: 226 feet long, 172 feet tall, festooned with decorative woodwork, and loaded with cannons. The king, Gustavus Adolphus, ordered that it carry 72 24-pound cannons, far more than any other warship. Ultimately, it was built to carry 64 cannons of various sizes, but on two gun decks. Even without loading the guns on board, two decks above the water line would make the ship top heavy. With the guns, the ship would certainly be top heavy. And if the ship actually needed to fire any of the weapons, the ship ran the risk of blowing itself onto its side with the recoil.

Vasa was launched on this date in 1628 with huge crowds along the waterfront in Stockholm to see it off. The moment that it unfurled its sails and was hit with any wind at all, the tall ship was knocked on its port side, water started rushing in through its open gun windows, and it sank, killing thirty sailors. Its maiden voyage lasted about one thousand feet.
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The United States Of America became the first nation to drop a second nuclear weapon on an enemy nation in wartime on this date in 1945. The city of Nagasaki, Japan, had a population of about 263,000 people at the time. About 50,000 were killed instantly after the bomb, nicknamed “Fat Man,” detonated. About 30% of the city was obliterated in seconds.

Nagasaki was the second-level target for the bombing run; the city of Kokura had been the primary, intended, target, but smoke from the previous day’s firebombing of the nearby city of Yamata denied the team visual sighting. Upon arriving at Nagasaki, the flight team discovered it was under a cloud cover, but the plane was running low on fuel, so radar contact was established. At the last second, clouds over Nagasaki parted, and visual sighting led to the bomb being dropped between Mitsubishi’s two major factories.
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