May 27 Birthday
On May 27, 1941, the German battleship Bismarck was sunk in the Atlantic Ocean, 400 miles west of Brest, France. The Bismarck had sunk the HMS Hood three days earlier — the Hood exploded with the loss of 1,415 men, only three survived. The British sent every available ship to find and destroy the Bismarck. A torpedo from a Swordfish biplane — a canvas-and-wire relic from the 1930s — struck the Bismarck's rudder, jamming it and forcing the ship to steam in circles. The British fleet caught up the next morning. The Bismarck sank after being hit by hundreds of shells and torpedoes. 2,131 German sailors died. 115 survived. The wreck was found in 1989 by Robert Ballard, 15,000 feet down. Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn returned to Russia on May 27, 1994, after twenty years of exile in Vermont. He had been expelled from the Soviet Union in 1974 after publishing The Gulag Archipelago abroad. The book documented the Soviet prison camp system through thousands of interviews and personal experience — Solzhenitsyn had spent eight years in the camps for criticizing Stalin in a letter. The Gulag Archipelago was published in Paris in 1973 and smuggled into the Soviet Union. It destroyed whatever remained of the Soviet Union's moral legitimacy among Western intellectuals. When Solzhenitsyn returned, he took a train from Vladivostok to Moscow, stopping in towns along the way. He was disappointed by what post-Soviet Russia had become — he found it materialistic and morally bankrupt. Christopher Lee, born this day in 1922, was 6'5" and spoke six languages. He was a special operations executive during World War II — his exact activities remain classified. He played Dracula, Frankenstein's monster, Scaramanga in The Man with the Golden Gun, Saruman in Lord of the Rings, and Count Dooku in Star Wars. He was a step-cousin of Ian Fleming. He released a heavy metal album at ninety. People born on May 27 fall under the zodiac sign of Gemini. The birthstone is Emerald and the birth flower is Lily of the Valley. Historical events on May 27 include 1933: Walt Disney releases Three Little Pigs (first animated short with distinct personality characters), 1941: German battleship Bismarck sunk by Royal Navy (2,000+ crew dead), 1994: Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn returns to Russia after 20 years of exile. Famous people born on May 27 include Christopher Lee (1922), Henry Kissinger (1923), Don Henley (1947).