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ON THIS DAY

April 18, 2008 by

ON THIS DAY

12 April 1961: Soviets win space race. The Soviet Union has beaten the USA in the race to get the first man into space. At just after 0700BST, Major Yuri Alexeyevich Gagarin was fired from the Baikonur launch pad in Kazakhstan, Soviet central Asia, in the space craft Vostok (East). Major Gagarin orbited the Earth for 108 minutes travelling at more than 17,000 miles per hour (27,000 kilometres per hour) before landing at an undisclosed location. The Soviet leader Nikita Khrushchev has congratulated Major Gagarin on his achievement. He sent the cosmonaut a message from his holiday home on the Black Sea. “The flight made by you opens up a new page in the history of mankind in its conquest of space,” Mr Khrushchev said. The Soviet news agency, Tass, made the first official announcement of Major Gagarin’s flight at just before 0800BST. Radio Moscow then interrupted its schedule to give details to a jubilant nation. Major Gagarin’s safe return has laid to rest worries that space flight would be fatal for humans. It is also a blow to the Americans who had hoped to be the first to launch a man beyond Earth’s atmosphere. However, President Kennedy has congratulated the Soviets on their achievement. It would be some time before the United States caught up with the Soviets in the fields of rocket boosters, the president added. Rumours that a Soviet launch attempt was imminent began some days ago. It was the culmination of two years of highly secretive training for Yuri Gagarin, 27, who beat off thousands of other hopefuls. The previously obscure army major has returned to earth a national hero. He has already been awarded the title of “Master of Radio Sport of the Soviet Union” and a big reception for him at the Kremlin in Red Square is being planned. (Source: BBC)

15 April 1945: British troops liberate Bergen-Belsen. British troops have entered the German concentration camp of Bergen-Belsen. Inside the camp the horrified soldiers found piles of dead and rotting corpses and thousands of sick and starving prisoners kept in severely overcrowded and dirty compounds. Belsen, near Hanover in Germany, is the first concentration camp to be liberated by the British. Details of the conditions inside are likely to horrify a public which until now has only heard limited descriptions from the camps in Poland freed by the Red Army. The first British soldiers who entered Bergen-Belsen have described seeing a huge pile of dead, naked women’s bodies within full view of several hundred children held at the camp. One of the reasons the Germans agreed to surrender Belsen was because so many of the inmates were diseased. There was no running water in the camp and there were epidemics of typhus, typhoid and tuberculosis. There were thousands of sick women, who should have been in hospital, lying on hard, bare bug-ridden boards. Of the 1,704 acute typhus, typhoid and tuberculosis cases, only 474 women had bunks to sleep on. There were fewer male prisoners, but they were also kept in severely overcrowded and dirty conditions. One of the British senior medical officers, Brigadier Llewellyn Glyn-Hughes, told the Reuters news agency he saw evidence of cannibalism in the camp. There were bodies with no flesh on them and the liver, kidneys and heart removed. He said their first priority was to remove the dead bodies from the camp. He was told some 30,000 people had died in the past few months. He said typhus had caused far fewer deaths than starvation. Men and women had tried to keep themselves clean with dregs from coffee cups. Medical supplies were severely limited – there were no vaccines, or drugs and no treatments for lice. The only food available for the prisoners was turnip soup and British guards had to fire over the heads of prisoners to restore order among those desperate to get at the food stores. Those prisoners who were too weak to get up and collect their food went without and died. The camp commandant, who was described as “unashame

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