Skip to main content

First To Die

March 2023
1min read

Nathan Ward’s October “Time Machine” submits that the eleven crewmen lost in the October 17, 1941, torpedoing of the Kearny were the first American servicemen to die in World War II. Although not well known outside the U.S. Army Air Corps Weather Service, it’s a fact that Capt. Robert M. Losey became the first American in the service of his country to die from hostile action in World War II more than a year earlier.

As the first chief commander of the Air Weather Service (since 1937), Captain Losey asked Gen. Hap Arnold to send him to Finland (which had been invaded by the Germans in 1939) to observe arctic aerial warfare firsthand. Arnold sent Losey to Finland in January 1940 as assistant military attaché for air. Later Losey was detailed to accompany the U.S. ambassador to Norway, Mrs. Florence J. Harriman, to that country. On April 21, after leaving Mrs. Harriman in a safe place, Losey went forward to observe the fighting and was killed instantly by shrapnel while watching a bombing raid on DombÅs.

We hope you enjoy our work.

Please support this 72-year tradition of trusted historical writing and the volunteers that sustain it with a donation to American Heritage.

Donate

Stories published from "May/June 1992"

Authored by: Barton J. Bernstein

On the twentieth anniversary of Watergate, a recently discovered diary reveals a similar conspiracy four decades earlier

Authored by: John Steele Gordon

As modern medicine has grown ever more powerful, our ways of providing it and paying for it have gotten ever more wasteful, unaffordable, and unfair. An explanation and a possible first step toward a solution.

Authored by: J. M. Fenster

Every spring thirty million Americans watch the Indianapolis 500. It’s the nation’s premier racing event and the pinnacle of a glamorous, murderous epic that stretches back nearly a century.

Authored by: Alexander O. Boulton

The Colonial Revival was born in a time of late-nineteenth-century ferment, and from then on the style resurfaced every time Americans needed reassurance

Authored by: Lynne Olson

America’s first Miss Lonely hearts advised generations of anxious lovers in the newspaper column that started it all

Authored by: John Updike

Our ancestors look gravely and steadily upon things that we cannot

Featured Articles

Rarely has the full story been told about how a famed botanist, a pioneering female journalist, and First Lady Helen Taft battled reluctant bureaucrats to bring Japanese cherry trees to Washington. 

Often thought to have been a weak president, Carter was strong-willed in doing what he thought was right, regardless of expediency or the political fallout.

Why have thousands of U.S. banks failed over the years? The answers are in our history and politics.

In his Second Inaugural Address, Abraham Lincoln embodied leading in a time of polarization, political disagreement, and differing understandings of reality.

Native American peoples and the lands they possessed loomed large for Washington, from his first trips westward as a surveyor to his years as President.