Good morning, Whitewater.
Father’s Day in town will be sunny and warm, with a high of eighty-nine. Sunrise is 5:16 AM and sunset is 20:36 PM, for 15h 20m 24s of daytime. We’ve a full moon, with 99.1% of its disk illuminated.
Friday’s FW poll asked about the final NBA game of the season: what did readers think would happen in Game 7 between the Cavs and Warriors? A majority (53.85%) of respondents gave the edge to Golden State.
This has been a time of exciting sports, with the NBA, and both European and Copa America soccer matches. We play the very formidable Argentinian team on Tuesday at 8 PM CT.
On this day in 1944, the Battle of the Philippine Sea begins:
The Battle of the Philippine Sea (June 19–20, 1944) was a decisive naval battle of World War II that eliminated the Imperial Japanese Navy’s ability to conduct large-scale carrier actions. It took place during the United States’ amphibious invasion of the Mariana Islands during the Pacific War. The battle was the last of five major “carrier-versus-carrier” engagements between American and Japanese naval forces, and involved elements of the United States Navy‘s Fifth Fleet as well as ships and land-based aircraft from the Imperial Japanese Navy‘s Mobile Fleetand nearby island garrisons.
The aerial theatre of the battle was nicknamed the Great Marianas Turkey Shoot by American aviators for the severely disproportional loss ratio inflicted upon Japanese aircraft by American pilots and anti-aircraft gunners.[2]During a debriefing after the first two air battles a pilot from USS Lexington remarked “Why, hell, it was just like an old-time turkey shoot down home!”[3] The outcome is generally attributed to American improvements in pilot and crew training and tactics, war technology (including the top-secret anti-aircraft proximity fuze), and ship and aircraft design.[N 1][N 2] Although at the time the battle appeared to be a missed opportunity to destroy the Japanese fleet, the Imperial Japanese Navy had lost the bulk of its carrier air strength and would never recover.[1] During the course of the battle, American submarines torpedoed and sank two of the largest Japanese fleet carriers taking part in the battle.[4]:331–333
This was the largest carrier-to-carrier battle in history.[5]
On this day in 1917, it’s a name change for Britain’s royal family:
…during the third year of World War I, Britain’s King George V orders the British royal family to dispense with the use of German titles and surnames, changing the surname of his own family, the decidedly Germanic Saxe-Coburg-Gotha, to Windsor….