Stars with a Purple Heart
QUESTION How did Charles Bronson win the Purple Heart? Have any other actors won this U.S. military decoration??
The Purple heart is awarded to members of the U.S. armed forces who are wounded in action.
Charles Bronson is famous for his tough guy persona, starring in films such as Once Upon A Time In The West, The Magnificent Seven, The Dirty Dozen and Death Wish. he was tough in real life, too. Director John huston described him as ‘a hand grenade with the pin pulled’.
Born Charles Buchinsky on november 3, 1921, in Pennsylvania, he was the 11th of 15 children born to a coal miner and his wife, who were Lithuanian immigrants. As a youth, Bronson worked in the mines, where he was paid $1 per ton of coal.
he was drafted into the U.S. Army in 1943. his started out maintaining messes and was later assigned to the 39th Bomb Group in Selena, Kansas.
After being transferred to Batista Field in havana to complete operational flight and navigational training over the Gulf, Bronson was sent to Guam, where he took part in 26 bombing missions on the Japanese mainland. In his perilous role as nose-gunner in a B-29, he earned two Distinguished Unit citations and the Purple heart for a wound in his arm sustained during combat.
Bronson was a private man who never discussed his war experiences. Following his death in 2003, it was wrongly reported he hadn’t participated in these missions and had just been a truck driver.
A number of his former Army comrades spoke out in his defence, which resulted in apologies from U.S. newspapers, including the new York Times, which had omitted his service record in their obituaries.
Alan Finch, Wolverhampton, W. Mids. JAMeS GARneR made his reputation in the late Fifties as the shrewd, anti-heroic gambler Bret Maverick in the iconoclastic Western series of the same name and sealed it as Seventies private investigator Jim Rockford in The Rockford Files.
Born James Bumgarner in 1928 in Oklahoma, he joined the Merchant Marine
aged 16 near the end of World War II. he later recalled this was a poor choice as he suffered from seasickness. he then served in the national Guard for seven months before joining the 24th Infantry for 14 months during the Korean War.
he was injured twice: he was hit in the hand and face by shrapnel from a mortar round; and he was shot in the buttocks by U.S. fighter jets as he dived into a foxhole. As a result, he was awarded two Purple hearts, though he didn’t receive the second one until 1983 — 32 years after the friendly fire incident.
It is not just hollywood actors who have received this award. Director Oliver Stone enlisted in the U.S. Army in 1967 and requested combat duty in Vietnam. he was injured twice and received the Purple heart with bronze oak leaf cluster to denote two awards.
Stone’s Vietnam service strongly influenced his later movie career. he has directed three films about the war: Platoon is a semi-autobiographical film about his experience in combat; Born On The Fourth Of July is based on the autobiography of U.S. Marine turned peace campaigner Ron Kovic; and heaven & earth is the memoir of a Vietnamese girl caught up in the fighting.
D. Thompson, Newcastle upon Tyne.
QUESTION Gin was once known as mother’s ruin and is said to trigger depression. Is there an ingredient (other than alcohol) that causes this?
GIn is often associated with triggering outpourings of emotion, with the comic Dylan Moran claiming it is ‘less of a drink and more of a mascara thinner’. however, it is a myth that it causes depression.
Chemically, gin will make you no more or less melancholic than any other alcoholic drink. The notion it causes depression is a collective hangover from the 18th-century gin craze.
At that time, england was awash with gin due to protectionism restricting imports of liquor from Catholic europe. Combined with a glut in grain (its main ingredient) and poor regulation, this led to gin being as cheap as beer.
Campaigners against gin, such as the artist William hogarth, portrayed it as a depraved and vile liquor depriving the lower classes of their moral virtue, causing mothers to abandon their children, and even leading to cases of spontaneous human combustion.
Gin at that time was produced on the cheap and often made with inferior and even dangerous ingredients.
Taxes and quality control levied throughout the 1700s solved the problem, but the popular memory of that time remains strong.
When Public health Wales recently interviewed 30,000 people aged 18 to 34, it found that drinking spirits in general was more likely to elicit negative feelings. This was down to the strength of the liquor, speed of consumption and the circumstances in which it was drunk.
Mike Wells, Cardiff.
QUESTION Why is Bolton Strid, a narrow stream in Yorkshire, so dangerous?
FURTheR to the previous answer about the deadly combination of fast currents and underwater rocks at The Strid near Bolton Abbey, at least one person has gone in and survived, as I well recall.
In 1958, Mrs Crabtree, my teacher at Tuel Lane Infants in Sowerby Bridge, West Yorkshire, had the good fortune to emerge downstream alive.
her husband, Selwyn, was charged with attempted murder, having allegedly pushed his wife into the dangerous torrent. The jury found him not guilty, accepting his defence that she had merely slipped.
Stephen Ainsworth, Halifax, W. Yorks.
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