CNN news 2015-08-22 加文本

cnn news 2015-08-22

This Wednesday takes us out to the American West. There are almost 100 wildfires burning, directly affecting ten U.S. states from Washington and California, to Colorado and Montana and those in between.

Breaking down the numbers: hundreds of homes have been destroyed, more than a million acres, think a million football fields have burned. Twenty-five thousand firefighters are working to contain these things. For the first time since 2006, the U.S. military has been called in to help, about 200 active duty personnel.

The military is also sending C130s, large cargo planes to help douse the flames.

Time for the first shoutout of the school year. Who famously said, "Never in the field of human conflict was so much owed by so many to so few"? If you think you know it, shout it out.

Was it Franklin D. Roosevelt, George Washington, Winston Churchill, or Henry VIII?

You've got three seconds. Go!

These were the words of British Prime Minister Winston Churchill, speaking to British pilots during the Battle of Britain. That's your answer and that's your shoutout.

That battle lasted from July to October, 1940. It was a series of relentless air raids on Britain by Nazi Germany's air force, the Luftwaffe.

Yesterday was the 75th anniversary of the battle's hardest day when British and German forces combined lost more than 130 planes.

British pilots were ultimately successful in defending their country from the Nazis. Still, Germany dropped so many bombs during the battle that even today, they're turning up in Britain.

London's darkest hour during World War II. Thousands upon thousands of German bombs raining down on the city.

"The air war has long been at peak."

Eight months in history simply known as "The Blitz". Each dot here represents a strike in London. Pull back and you can see its enormity. But some never exploded and generations later, they are still being unearthed.

The latest, a 500-pound bomb found by builders in East London. Authorities quickly evacuated more than 100 residents, some to a nearby school.

Residents maybe barely nonchalant about having an unexploded bomb in their neighborhood, just a few blocks away. But you have to remember, the 1940s, this death from above instilled absolute terror inside the people of London.

Roughly 30,000 Londoners would lose their lives among the rubble. Bomb disposal experts, veterans of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan successfully diffused and removed the explosive. It's unknown how many bombs from World War II remained entombed under London.