History Spotlight, 2/27

A little before 10:30 PM on this day in 1933, the German Parliament building in Berlin (The Reichhstag) burns to the ground, paving the way for Nazi dominance of Germany. The fire was (very allegedly) set by a Dutch Communist Marinus van der Lubbe. At least that's what Hitler (who had just been elected Chancellor) said. He used this incident to press draconian measures against the Communist Party in Germany. Who actually set the fire is still a matter of heated debate among history nerds. Was it van der Lubbe? Did he act alone? Did the Nazis set the fire and frame van der Lubbe and, by proxy, German Communists in order to solidify their hold on Germany? Hell, I don't know.
In February, 1933, Hitler was in a bit of a bind. Sure, he had been elected Chancellor, but that was the junior position to President Paul von Hindenburg, the beloved war hero who detested Hitler. On top of that, his party didn't hold a majority (31%) in the Reichstag. Hitler wanted to get rid of democracy in Germany (he was a fascist, after all) but his experience after the Beer Hall Putsch led him to believe that it had to be done lawfully.
To this end, he was pushing for the passage of the Enabling Act, which would basically scuttle democracy and put him in charge. As you might imagine, this was a tough sell in the German Parliament. Hitler's election campaign had been built on a foundation of "Communists are everywhere! They could be on your street!" but the German people were, at best, lukewarm on the topic (the Communists held 17% of the seats in Parliament).
When Hitler heard about the fire that was just what he was looking for. The next day, he got Hindenburg to pass the Reichstag Fire Decree, which suspended most civil liberties and was used by Hitler to ban any publications not on the Nazi side. Although van der Lubbe consistently stated that he acted alone, the Nazis put forth the theory that it was a massive Communist plot ("They're on your front door!") and the Germans lapped it up. Hitler used the hysteria to press for a special election that gave the Nazis a whopping 52% majority in parliament. 52% doesn't sound like much here in the US, with the two party system, but when you have a system like the Germans had, with dozens of competing parties it's almost an insurmountable majority for anyone else. It wasn't, however, the two-thirds majority needed to pass the Enabling Act. But Hitler had a plan.
For starters, he kept the pressure up on the Communist party members. Then he kept banging the national security gong. Finally, he had the Social Democrat members of Parliament, the only other party who could reliably block the Nazis, rounded up and beaten by the SA (they were Hitler's private enforcers, until they got too big for their britches) and told "vote the way we want, or don't show up for the vote, or kiss your family good-bye"). On March 23, 1933, the Enabling Act passed in a walk and Hitler was the undisputed master of Germany.
Nobody really knows who set the fire. van der Lubbe was, to put it mildly, out of his head. And he was found, buck-naked running around the Reichstag while it burned. And "overthrowing a democracy" is certainly in the Communist playbook. On the other hand, Nazis are douchebags and they had tried to violently overthrow the government once before, so this sort of thing is right in their wheelhouse. In the end, it doesn't really matter. The effects of the fire are all too clear.

History Spotlight, 2/26

The RMS Britannic, sister ship of the Titanic and the Olympic is launched on this day in 1914 from Belfast, Ireland. She barely had her sea trials finished before the First World War broke out in August, 1914 and she was pressed into military service. It was originally slated to be named the Gigantic, but after the Titanic disaster the name was changed to something less inviting of trouble.
Other changes brought about because of the loss of the Titanic were more functional: a double hull was installed, 6 of the 15 watertight compartments were raised to a higher deck, and large davits were added that could lower lifeboats even in the event of a serious list.
The British government had originally envisioned the Britannic as a massive troop transport, especially with the war spreading out through the Mediterranean. After the disaster at Gallipoli, however, the Admiralty realized that the best use of the vessel was as a hospital ship. The ship was renamed with the HMHS (His Majesty's Hospital Ship) prefix and set sail for the Mediterranean It successfully completed five trips to the Middle East and back. On the sixth trip it hit a mine and sank. The end. Oh, and somebody made a really crappy movie about it to cash in on the Titanic movie craze back in the heady 90's. Here's a picture of her decked out in her "hospital whites."

History Spotlight, 2/25

Robert Deverux, 2nd Earl of Essex

Robert Devereux, the 2nd Earl of Essex completes his inevitable fall from grace on this day in 1601 as he becomes the last person to be beheaded in the Tower of London. Some 50 years later, Oliver Cromwell could have used Devereux as an example of why being rich and noble doesn't necessarily being a decent military commander. Essex was born in 1567, to the 1st Earl of Essex and his wife Lettice Knollys. Devereux was the great grandson of Mary Boleyn, Anne Boleyn's sister which makes him, in relation to Queen Elizabeth I, "absolutely nothing!" This wasn't about to stop the 2nd Earl of Essex in his social climbing.

Using connections with Robert Dudley (the Queen's good friend and maybe lover), he got into the Queen's court, where his style and skill at bootlicking set his star on the rise. In 1590 he married the daughter of the queen's spymaster Francis Walsingham. Essex got a number of sweet financial deals from the Queen, including a monopoly on wine. It is about here that we see that Essex is a bit of a dummy. He felt that, because the Queen was cordial to him, that meant that he could be cordial to her. It doesn't work that way. During one heated debate in the privy council, he ticked her off so much that she slapped him and infamously said, "Go and be hanged!" This caused him to draw his sword on the Queen of England! Not good. The other privy council members hustled him down the back stairs until tempers could be cooled, but the Queen was certainly less cordial than she had been in the past.

After a number of military disasters on the Iberian Peninsula, including several instances of directly disobeying the Queen's orders, he managed to get himself ensconced as the Lord Lieutenant of Ireland (probably because it got him the heck away from the Queen) to quell one of the various Irish rebellions. As might be imagined, he was pretty bad at it. The Irish at the time were being led by the Earl of Tyrone and being supplied on the sly by the Scots and the French (their attitude was "anything that annoys the English can't be all bad"). Essex brought with him 16,000 soldiers - the largest force sent to Ireland at the time and most people felt that even Essex couldn't botch this one. Ha ha, that's cute. Essex and his army wandered all over southern Ireland and wherever Tyrone and the rebels weren't, spent money by the handful and ticked off the locals who weren't even rebelling. He was then given a good shellacking by the Irish rebels and signed a truce with them. This was also very bad. He was sent to crush the Irish, got crushed by them instead and signed a truce which he did not have the authority to do.
Upon hearing how enraged Elizabeth was at his conduct, he abandoned his army in the field and fled back to England to explain himself. When he arrived in London, he went straight to the palace and barged directly into Elizabeth's bedroom while she was still in her jammies. This was the last straw. But, of course, Essex didn't see that. Ever know someone who just keeps talking while everyone else is looking at their feet and thinking, "Shut up shut up shut up!" Well, that was Essex. Essex was confined to his house and had his monopoly revoked, which cut off his source of funds. He was incapable of seeing that he was the one to blame and quickly grew enraged at the perceived slight.

On February 8, 1601, he and a bunch of his buddies marched on London in an attempt to force an audience with the Queen. Needless to say, it was a failure. Essex was arrested, tried and convicted of treason, and beheaded on February 25th. Of course Essex was a dummy. That much is sure. But Elizabeth also showed her well-known indecisiveness in not doing anything about him. If sat on the throne of England (and someday, God willing, I will), and one of my lower-rent nobles drew his sword on me, it would be, at least, "You need to go away from here" time. Then, when he proved himself to be completely useless in battle, I wouldn't send him to go fight the Irish who have proved themselves to be very skilled in battle.

History Spotlight, 2/24

The infamous Battle of Los Angeles gets underway on February 24, 1942. Was it Japanese sub-launched planes? UFOs? "Dry-cleaning bags full of marsh gas?" Or just plain-old war hysteria? Nobody really knows for sure.
A little over two months after Pearl Harbor, the entire West Coast and most of the US was in the grip of war fever. Nobody really knew what the Japanese were capable of and the attack on Hawaii came as a giant shock. The characterization that the senior Montgomery Burns gives them on an episode of The Simpsons as a nation of "sandal-wearing goldfish tenders" wasn't that far off the mark from how Japan was viewed in the US in the 1930s. OK, so they beat the Russians soundly in 1904 and were riding roughshod over the Chinese peasantry, that didn't mean that they stood a chance against the proud men of the US military. It was traumatic when the Japanese military effortlessly decimated the US Navy at Pearl Harbor and threw the US Army out of the Philippines and other Pacific outposts.
The Japanese submarine I-17 that surfaced off the coast of Santa Barbara and shelled an oil refinery in the early morning hours of February 24 only fed the flames. When, later that evening, and on into the morning of February 25 radar operators saw hundreds of unidentified objects over the city of Los Angeles people could be excused for thinking this was the big one. The military ordered a city-wide blackout and begin firing thousands of 12 pound antiaircraft shells at them. The all clear was finally given at about 7 am on February 25. And that was it for the Battle of Los Angeles. The death toll was three civilians hit by falling shrapnel and three civilians who had heart attacks due to the stress. But what the heck were those things? Most of the possible solutions have glaring holes:
1) Japanese air raid. The Japanese weren't operating carriers off the coast of California (they barely had enough fuel to get to Pearl Harbor, 2500 miles west of LA). True, the Japanese had been experimenting extensively in using subs as aircraft carriers, but the experiments hadn't panned out. The I-17 carried a single reconnaissance seaplane in a hanger forward of the conning tower, but that wasn't anywhere near the thousands of planes that had been seen and the plane didn't go anywhere close to 300 mph.
2) Japanese fire balloons. Towards the end of the war, the Japanese launched several hot air balloons loaded with high explosive designed to be carried over the Pacific and detonate over US soil. These weren't in use until 1945.
3) Blimps. At the time, the US was the main supplier of helium in the world and, naturally, the Japanese weren't getting any of it. After the Hindenburg, people were very leery about filling lighter-than-air craft with hydrogen.
4) War hysteria and mass panic. The US Army takes a very dim view of the notion that several hundred of its members "lost their shit" over nothing and staunchly deny this explanation. I, however, take a very dim view of human nature and am never surprised by what people will do in a moment of crisis.
5) UFOs. 'Nuff said.

The military's final say on the matter is, basically, "We don't know and we don't want to know. It was probably planes or something." Odds are that, until the invention of time travel, nobody is really going to know what happened on February 24-25 over Los Angeles.

History Spotlight, 2/23

Joe Rosenthal

It was on this day in 1946 that Associated Press photographer Joe Rosenthal snapped the famous picture of five US Marines and a Navy corps man rasing the US flag on the summit of Mount Suribachi during the Battle of Iwo Jima. The photograph would go on to be one of the few pictures to win the Pulitzer Prize in the same year it was taken. The picture would later be used as the inspiration for the USMC War Memorial in Washington, DC.The US strategy for the war in the Pacific was known as island hopping. Instead of taking every little occupied scrap of rock between Hawaii and Japan, certain strategically valuable scraps of rock were identifed and focused on. The island that weren't valuable were bypassed and isolated and left to wither on the vine. Iwo Jima was originally not on the island hopping menu, but the surprisingly quick fall of the Philippines left room in the schedule for another island. There was a Japanese early-warning radar station on the island that gave the Japanese home islands plenty of notice when the American bombers were on the way. Iwo Jima is about 750 miles southeast of Tokyo and the cruising speed of a B-29 is about 220 mph, so that's roughly four hours of warning. This made Iwo Jima a prime candidate for the next stop on the island hopping tour of the Southwest Pacific.

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On February 19, 1945, the invasion of Iwo Jima began. Shaped roughly like a pork chop, the island is dominated by the 546 foot cone of an extinct volcano called Mount Suribachi. Suribachi was riddled with tunnels and was an important Japanese outpost for artillery spotters. While they held the summit of this mountain, they were able to easily and accurately direct a rain of artillery fire on the landing beaches.

Using a combination of grenades and flame throwers to take out Japanese bunkers and pillboxes on the way, the Marines managed to secure the summit of Suribachi. A flag was raised, but it was deemed to be too small to be seen from a distance. So the famous picture was actually the second flag-raising on the summit of Mount Suribachi. A much larger flag was found in one of the landing crafts (nobody knew what it was doing there - most people figured it was leftover bunting from some stateside thing). The flag was brought to the summit and Joe Rosenthal tagged along. On the summit, while he was moving some rocks around to make a better place to stand, he saw the flag being raised out of the corner of his eye. He turned and, without thinking, "shot from the hip." He didn't know how the shot turned out until several weeks later after the film had been shipped back to Pearl Harbor and developed. It would go on to be one of the most recognizable pictures of the war. When Admiral James Forrestal saw the picture he said, "...the raising of that flag on Suribachi means a Marine Corps for the next five hundred years."

History Spotlight, 2/22

It was on this day in 1797 that the famed "Last Invasion of Britain" by the French begins. "What?" my fellow history nerds are saying, "The last time the French invaded Britain was 1066! Explain yourself, good sir!" Well, 1066 was the last successful French invasion of Britain, but 1797 was the last unsuccessful French invasion and therein hangs a tale.

In 1797, Napoleon was engaged in full-on war in Central Europe. He didn't have time to keep an eye on what the government of France (called the Directory) was up to, nor did he really care. As long as they kept the cannons and cannon fodder coming he was content to leave them alone. As anyone who works in a large corporation can tell you, unsupervised bureaucrats are a recipe for trouble. In this case, the Directory thought they could best help out Daddy by mounting an invasion of Wales and Western England and rallying the oppressed country people to march with them on Bristol and then London. The fact that the country people weren't feeling that oppressed didn't occur to them. Who comes up with a plan like that? It's like marching on North Dakota to get them to secede from the Union.

Because Napoleon had all of his really crack troops tied up at the front, the Directory scoured the local prisons and press-ganged hardened criminals into service. In military matters, nothing says, "doomed to failure" like conscripted felons. The troops (such as they were) were put under the command of an Irish-American man in his 70's named Colonel William Tate. Tate had a bone to pick with the British as his family had been killed by Native Americans under the employ of the British during the American Revolution. Unfortunately, he had less military experience than I do.

This motley corps of 1,400 soldiers set out from Camaret, France on February 18. The original plan was to land at Bristol, burn it to the ground and then march north through Wales rallying the populace. Tides and the weather worked against them, so they settled for an alternate port up the coast at Fishguard. As the ships entered the bay, they were greeted with cannon fire and promptly ran away. Unbeknown to them, that one volley comprised the sum total of all the ammunition in the town. The French ships moved up the coast to a deserted beach and unloaded the troops. Then the ships left for France to carry the news of the successful invasion of Britain.

Fishguard

The troops quickly captured the sleepy port of Fishguard. Within two days, however, the invasion fell apart. Most of the soldiers were former prisoners who were half-starved from their days in the joint. All of that rich food, coupled with the unfortunate arrival of a Portuguese ship full of wine meant that they spent most of their time looting, eating and getting drunk. When a local militia comprised of townspeople from Fishguard and nearby towns was raised, the French offered little resistance. In fact, a local woman, Jemima Nicholas, captured 12 French soldiers armed only with a pitchfork. All of the prisoners were eventually exchanged with France for British POWs and it is assumed that Napoleon gave the Directory a good ass-kicking.

In 1997, in celebration of the 200th anniversary of the invasion, the town fathers of Fishguard commissioned the Fishguard Tapestry. It is a parody of the Bayeux Tapestry but instead of the 1066 invasion, it depicts the 1797 invasion. It is one of the biggest tourist attractions in Fishguard.

History Spotlight, 2/20

Joel Hodgson, creator of the greatest TV show ever, Mystery Science Theater 3000 (yes, better than Doctor Who, if you can believe that) was born today in 1960. Joel got into performing at the age of seven when he received a ventriloquist's dummy as a birthday present and soon added magic tricks to his act. While attending college in Minneapolis, Joel took class on theater of the absurd, which he says laid down to foundation for his comedic style. After graduation, Joel moved to California to take part in the great standup comedy boom of the early 1980's. While performing at the Comedy Store he was spotted by a talent scout for Late Night With David Letterman, which led to four appearances on that show and several on Saturday Night Live. After growing tired of the stand up circuit, Joel moved back to Minneapolis where he met Jim Mallon, the production manager at the low-rent independent TV station KTMA. This friendship would prove fruitful, if stormy.

In 1987, Joel combined the two loves of his life, bad movies and building robot puppets, and created Mystery Science Theater 3000. Joel's inspiration came from the 1972 Bruce Dern move Silent Running (thankfully without the Joan Baez soundtrack). Joel plays the hapless janitor Joel Robinson who gets shot into space by mad scientists who want to find the worst movie ever in order conquer and subjugate the world. They force Joel to watch the movies and "monitor his mind" to see which one drives him over the brink. In order to keep a hold on his sanity, Joel creates his "robot friends" out of spare parts who watch the movie with him and make wisecracks.

In a shocking move, Joel left the show in 1993. At the time he said it was because he was uncomfortable with being a nationally beloved figure and just wanted to build robot puppets. With the passage of time it has come out that there was a considerable degree of friction between Joel and producer Jim Mallon. Joel wanted to keep the show low-key and casual and, as producer, Mallon wanted to aim at the big time. Mallon wanted to make a theatrically-released MST3K movie and Joel didn't see the point. (In 1996, Mallon got his wish with MST3K: The Movie: This Island Earth and, while it's a great episode, it's not the kind of thing you're going to go out of your way to see in a theater.) Joel's reasoning for not being bluntly honest about his reasons for leaving the show was that he didn't want to cause a schism in the fanbase over "old MST3K" and "new MST3K" when series head writer Michael J. Nelson took over hosting duties. Good luck with that, Joel.

The internecine Great Joel vs. Mike Flamewar of 1993 divided MSTie against MSTie and proved the old adage that there isn't a TV show fun enough to prevent Internet dweebs from hating each other over it. Well, if that's not an old adage, it should be. In the wake of that war, most MSTies decided to just not talk about it, or at the very least, to take the moral high road and say that both hosts were different from each other but both were very good. Joel made a final guest appearance on MST3K in the 10th season episode "Soultaker" (episode 1001) when the axe was about to fall for the last time (the show had been canceled, saved and changed networks several times) and spoke directly to the camera when he told MSTies everywhere to "keep the flags flying!" Aw, Christ, I'm tearing up a little as I type that. Best goddamned show ever. Any year, any host. From KTMA to the SciFi Channel, it doesn't get any better than that.

I could start a whole other blog with great moments from the show, but I'll limit myself to this host segment from episode 411, The Magic Sword. An aged Estelle Winwood stars in the movie and Crow T. Robot falls hard for her and this is how he expresses his love for the fair Estelle:

History Spotlight, 2/19

On February 19, 1974, England and the Netherlands sign the Peace of Westminster, formally ending the Third Anglo Dutch War. As almost an afterthought, one of the provisions of this treaty was the transfer of the not-very-profitable colony of New Amsterdam to England which change the name to New York after King Charles II's brother James, the Duke of York (just as the English king's eldest son is called the Prince of Wales, the king's brother is called the Duke of York).
The city of New Amsterdam was founded in 1625 on the strategically important tip of Manhattan Island. It was intended to be a waypoint for the lucrative fur trade between North America and Europe. The New Amsterdam colony never really worked as envisioned by its founder. The fur trade was profitable, sure, but only when you have access to the furs and with the French and English controlling most of the interior, there wasn't any way for the Dutch furriers to get in, get furs and get them back to New Amsterdam. Like many New World colonies, New Amsterdam was built around a fort, partially to fend off Indian attacks, but mostly to fend off attacks by rival European powers. One of the roads running along the wall that comprised the northern boundary of the fort was named Wall Street. The wall is long gone, but Wall Street survives. The fort would come in handy in 1664, when four English frigates sailed into the harbor and demanded the surrender of the fort, kicking off the Second Anglo Dutch War. The town fathers looked at their military and then looked at the Royal Navy ships in the harbor and promptly (and temporarily) surrendered. The surrender didn't last long, and once the war was over, New Amsterdam was safely back in Dutch hands.
New Amsterdam was, for a 16th Century city, surprisingly cosmopolitan. For example, Jews fleeing the Portuguese conquest of Brazil found themselves acceptance in New Amsterdam.
By the time of the Third Anglo-Dutch War, the Dutch were really seeing the problems that New Amsterdam was presenting, with an unruly, heterogeneous populace, smaller-than-expected fur profits and more interesting and exciting opportunities elsewhere on the globe (namely, the cinnamon and nutmeg trade from Suriname). When the English demanded New Amsterdam, the Dutch were only too happy to give it up. Charles II promptly renamed it after his brother (well, his brother's title) and it has remained New York ever since.

History Spotlight, 2/18

I swear I am not making any of this up.

One of the greatest events in bovine aviation took place today in 1930 as Elm Farm Ollie became the first cow to not only fly in an airplane but to be milked while in flight. When people look back fondly at the early years of the 20th Century and wonder what we have left behind, bovine aviation must surely be one of those things. This must have been what Joni Mitchell meant when she sang, "You don't know what you've lost 'till it's gone."
In the 1930's, airplanes were coming into their own. Far from being an interesting mechanical curiosity, as the Wright Brothers' early models were, the possibilities for modern aircraft in the 1930's seemed limitless. It appeared as if everyone had some kind of plan for using planes in ways that nobody else had thought of and also to make a steamer trunk full of money at the same time. One of those people, whose name has been lost to history, came up with the idea of transporting cows to market via airplane rather than the train. The problem was that, different from their public perception, cows are notoriously edgy creatures. If a cow isn't happy, it won't milk very well and ti will take a long time to calm down. The planes of the day were not the place for edgy creatures.
The cow picked for the test was Elm Farm Ollie, who not only was a very mellow cow but who also gave a prodigious amount of milk, sometimes requiring a milking three times a day. Ollie's, owner Wisconsin native, Elsworth Bunce allowed the entrepreneurs to use her as a demonstration for the ease of transporting cows by air. On February 18, 1930 at the International Air Show in St. Louis, MO, Ollie took to the air, along with Mr. Bunce for moral support on a 72 mile trip from Bismack, MO to St. Louis, MO. Midway through the trip, she was milked by Mr. Bunce and the milk was put into cartons and parachuted to ground. There is an apocryphal tale of Charles Lindbergh being give a glass of this milk.
In the end, it didn't work out for the investors. Transporting beeves via air turned out to be too cumbersome, too expensive and too irritating for the cows. For her part, Ollie lived in fame and luxury for many years. Every year to this day, Madison, Wisconsin celebrates her achievements with the opera Madame Butterfat which has the lyrics:

When they squeezed her udder, ol' Ollie gave a shudder

She'd put up a fight in midair flight -- SHE WAS NOT AFRAID!

In retirement, Ollie ponders her greatest successes.

History Spotlight, 2/17

On this day in 1867, the first ship passes through the modern Suez Canal. There had been a canal there since at least the 2nd millennium, BC, but the rise and fall of civilizations and the vagaries of the desert climate meant that it spent a lot of time being buried by sand.
Of course, it was much easier to do such things in the Classical Age than it was in the late 19th Century. For starters, labor was free and you didn't have to care too much if any of them died, so long as the job got done. It is estimated that 120,000 slave died in the construction of the canal during the years of the Egyptian ascendancy. On top of that, climate change was causing the Red Sea to retreat from its ancient boundaries making it that much more difficult to get the canal to the water's edge.
By the time of Cleopatra's regin the canal was mostly out of service. Workarounds and modifications continued until the 8th Century AD when it was put out of commisssion for the forseeable future.
During Napoleon's adventures in Egypt in the late 18th and early 19th Centuries, the remains of the ancient canal were discovered by archaeologists. This led to a swarm of archaeoligists descending on the area and planted a germ of an idea in Napoleon's mind. "If those grubby Egyptians could do it," he reasoned, "why not the greatest empire the world has ever seen?" That would be the French, at least in Napoleon's mind. Unfortunately for Napoleon, time and the Duke of Wellington were working against him and he found himself an exile before he could do much more than a preliminary survey.
The idea stuck around however. The 18th Century was the dawn of the age of massive engineering projects that would culminate with the construction of the World Trade Center in the 1970's. There wasn't anything mankind couldn't do if he (and in the 18th Century, it was he) threw enough money and forced labor at a project. The famed French engineer and diplomat Ferdinand de Lesseps offered a sweetheart deal to the viceroy of Egypt, Said Pasha, for a 99-year lease on the property through which the canal was to run and a nice cut of the profits. Pasha, no dummy, figured that if these crazy Europeans wanted to go digging in the desert and give him a lot of money, who was he to disagree with them?
The Suez Canal Company was formed in December, 1858 and would ultimately take 11 years and use over 30,000 forced laborers. You may be asking, "What's the difference between forced labor and slavery?" It's easy: slavery was illegal in France and forced labor wasn't. The British saw the canal as a major threat to their dominance of the seas and pointed out the hypocrisy of the forced labor system. It didn't do them very much good as they had used almost the exact same system of slavery-in-name-only in Egypt. The canal opened officially for shipping on November 11, 1869. After Egypt was forced by crushing debt to sell their share of the canal to Britain, the British found themselves suddenly less pouty over it.

History Spotlight, 2/16

The seas in the early 19th Century were not a safe place, especially if you're a country that is no longer under the protection of the Royal Navy and you don't have much of a navy yourself. This was the position the US found itself in 1801. Pirates back then weren't the low-rent-yet-still-dangerous types we have today, running around with pawn-shop Kalashnikovs and refurbished 30 foot Chris Crafts. No, these guys were serious. They regularly captured the ships of lesser navies and converted them to their own uses. Imagine if pirates today captured the USS Harry S. Truman! But that's just about what they did on October 31, 1803 when the 36 gun frigate USS Philadelphia ran aground on an uncharted reef off the coast if Tripoli.

The Barbary States were a very loose confederation of North African states that tacitly supported piracy operation in the Mediterranean. A combination of bribes and military force had largely kept British ships safe from piracy by the Barbary States. The British made it very clear to the Barbary States that the end of the American Revolution mean that that American ships were not covered by their deal. The pirates saw an new nation, almost broke from a war with a tiny navy and their eyes grew big cartoon dollar signs. "Let's see what we can extort from the rubes," must have been on their minds. At a peace negotiation in 1786 in London, the pirates' emissary gave the figure: $1 million a year for 15 years for safe passage in the Mediterranean and the return of hostages. That was about 20% of the total US government revenues at the time.

At first, the US grudgingly paid the money. The idea was to play nice with the pirates until a decent navy could be built and then yank the rug out from under them. Thomas Jefferson, who was Ambassador to France at the time, argued quite vociferously for the secession of payments to the pirates because he felt that it would only embolden them. President Washington soon came around to his way of thinking.

When Jefferson became the third US President in 1801, the pirates immediately demanded $225,000 as sort of a "Welcome to the Presidency!" bribe. To quote Bugs Bunny quoting Groucho Marx, "Of course you know, this means war!" The war was made more difficult by Jefferson's dislike of the Navy and the capture of the Philadelphia made matters worse. Plus, imagine the embarrassment on the international scene when one of your own ships is captured by pirates.Putting on the appearance of a ship in distress, Decatur maneuvered the Intrepid close enough to the Philadelphia and set it ablaze. Admiral Horatio Nelson called it "the most bold and daring act of the age."

History Spotlight, 2/14

The Saint Valentine's Day Massacre took place on this day in 1929 in Chicago, Illinois. Henry VIII probably would have appreciated Al Capone's management style. As with most of these gangland slayings, it involved one gang (in this case Bugs Moran's Irish gang) muscling in on the racket of another gang (Al Capone's Italians). In this case, Bugs Moran's people were hijacking Al Capone's liquor shipments and selling them as their own. I think we've all seen enough movies to know how this is going to come out.
Moran's North Side gang was lured to a warehouse/garage at 2122 North Clark Street with the promise of truckloads of cut-rate hootch that formerly belonged to Capone. Capone (who was conveniently on vacation in Florida) had arranged for a lookout in a rented office across the street to alert the hit men when Moran arrived. Fortunately for Moran, he was late to the scene, but the lookout saw one of the other men and misidentified him as Moran and gave the go-ahead.
Two cars disguised as police cars and full of men dressed in Chicago Police Department uniforms (or as plain clothes detectives) screeched up outside the ware house and ushered the soon-to-be victims inside. Moran's gang thought that they were real cops and that this was one of the phony busts the notoriously corrupt Chicago PD would occasionally run to get people off their backs and complied.
Once inside, the phony cops had Moran's people line up facing the back wall and opened fire with their Tommy guns and that was that.
The massacre was one of the most sensational of the time. Previously, the common public perception of the bootleggers was that they were modern-day Robin Hoods, fighting against government oppression. The Saint Valentine's Day Massacre knocked the shine off that myth, exposing the mobsters for the vicious thugs they really were. Bugsy Moran got whacked for good a few years later and Al Capone would be sent to prison on tax evasion charges in 1931.

History Spotlight, 2/13

Oh, hell, let's just keep flogging that Henry VIII pony for one more day, at least. On this day, in 1542, Henry VIII's fifth wife, Catherine Howard was beheaded for treason (or, as we call it these days, adultery). Just so we're on the same page, here's where Cathy stands in the Henry VIII lineup:
1) Catherine of Aragorn - divorced, gave birth to Mary
2) Anne Boleyn - executed, gave birth to Elizabeth
3) Jane Seymour - died after childbirth, gave birth to Edward
4) Anne of Cleves - marriage quickly annulled on account of being ugly
5) Catherine Howard - executed
6) Catherine Parr - outlived Henry

Henry gets such a bum rap for executing his wives, but he really only executed two out of six. That's a pretty good batting average, don't you think? Anyway, by this time Henry already had his son, and was an old, fat syphilitic nutjob and was only getting married for political reasons.
That's why he agreed to get married to Anne of Cleves, sight unseen except for a portrait, for some kind of political thing with the Germans (I forget what). When Henry first laid eyes on her he was, to put it mildly, disappointed. The marriage was never consummated and, six months later, Anne was back on a boat bound for Europe probably breathing a sigh of relief that she didn't have to sleep with this old weirdo. By all accounts (except Henry's), Anne wasn't the pooch Henry made her out to be and Henry wasn't exactly a prize pig himself. He reminds me of those fat guys who go around with a "No Fat Chicks" T-Shirt on. Henry, look in the mirror, buddy. You're the aging second-rate king of a third-rate power. The crowned heads of Europe aren't exactly lining up to throw their daughter's panties at you.

Anne of Cleves

In any event, with Anne gone, Henry was back on the marriage train again. Wife Number Five was to be Catherine Howard. Catherine was a cousin of the doomed Anne Boleyn and her family saw in Catherine a chance to get back into Henry's good graces. They quickly got Catherine a spot in the court as one of Anne of Cleves's ladies in waiting. Since Henry was not getting any from his current wife, his eye fell on Catherine. Once Anne was out of the picture, Henry and Catherine were married with unseemly speed.

Catherine Howard

Henry was 50 years old and Catherine was 20. Henry weighed 300 pounds and had a reeking, suppurating sore on his upper thigh that had to be drained daily by, guess who, Catherine. It wasn't long before the vivacious, young, pretty Catherine's eyes started to wander to gentlemen who weren't so nasty and that would wind up being her downfall. She started up an affair with one of the palace courtiers, Thomas Culpepper. When you're the center of attention, it's nearly impossible to keep these kinds of dalliances secret and it wasn't long before the court gossips were doing what they do best. Many of those gossips used their knowledge to put the screws to Cathy and get themselves choice spots in the court.
The other shoe finally dropped on November 2, 1541 when Bishop Thomas Cranmer presented Henry with a list of accusations against Cathy. A light bit of torture later and Culpepper confessed everything, including giving up a love letter written in Cathy's handwriting. To the last, Catherine refused to confess any infidelity. The most she gave up was that she might have let a couple of guys get to first base before being married. In the end, it was her refusal to confess that doomed her. If she had come forth and begged forgiveness, the marriage would have been annulled and she would have been exiled with no money and no family to the Continent, but her head would have still been attached to her shoulders. The lesson is, of course, don't get married to Henry VIII.

History Spotlight, 2/12

Lady Jane Grey

More fun with Henry VIII and his ill-fated relations. Lady Jane Grey, grand-niece of Henry was executed for treason today after reigning for only nine days.
As always with Henry, it all goes back to his obsession with having a son to carry on the Tudor line. Henry's first wife, Catherine gave him Mary - no good. His second wife, Anne, give him Elizabeth, also no good. His third wife, Jane Seymour (not that one) finally managed to give him a son, Edward in 1537, and then conveniently died two weeks later. That was the kind of wife Henry liked: produced sons and not a lot of sass back. Edward was quickly named to the succession and Mary and Elizabeth were tacked on as afterthoughts. So, at that point, the line of succession went: Edward, Mary, Elizabeth.
Henry kicked off in 1547 and Edward became King Edward IV at the tender age of nine. As might be imagined of a nine-year old king, Edward was heavily influenced by his advisors, and they milked their role for all it was worth. Edward was always a very sickly lad. The various diseases of the time, coupled with tuberculosis and a case of syphilis inherited from his old man meant that his reign was destined to be short. In 1553, at the age of fifteen he was laying on his deathbed. One of his advisors, John Dudley, Duke of Northumberland had the idea of one, making sure the Catholic Mary didn't get the throne and two, putting one of his own relations, his cousin Jane, on the throne. He got Edward to sign a "Devise for the Succession" which disowned Mary and Elizabeth and made Jane the next in line.
When Edward died on July 6, 1553, Jane was proclaimed Queen, even though that violated the Third Succession Act of 1543 which was very specific in the Edward > Mary > Elizabeth line. As you might imagine, Mary would have something to say about this.
Mary rallied her followers from the outlying counties (because of Jane's imprateur of a usurper, Mary had supporters from both Catholic and Protestant factions) and they marched on London. In English rebellions, London is always the lynch pin. Many a successful revolt has died at the gates of London, even though it managed to win in the sticks. In this case, London opened it's gates for Mary's army and Jane found herself in the Tower of London after only nine days on the throne. Mary toyed with the idea of letting Jane go - after all it was her uncle that was causing all the problems. But you don't get the nickname "Bloody Mary" by letting people go and, in the end, Jane, her uncle, her husband and anyone remotely connected to her aborted reign went to the chopping block.

History Spotlight, 2/11

King Henry VIII had a problem. He desperately wanted a son and his wife, Catherine Parr wasn't delivering the goods. It's the same old story: Henry wanted to ditch his wife for a younger, prettier, more open-minded gal but couldn't get an annulment from the Church because his current wife's nephew was holding the Pope prisoner.
So, Henry decides to just take his ball and go home. He says to himself, "The Church won't give me what I want so I'll make a new church with me as the head." And Rule Number One of that church is going to be "The King can get a divorce whenever he wants." On February 11, 1531 he had himself declared head of the Church of England.
This, in effect, jump-started the Protestant Reformation in England which had been staunchly Catholic before. Parliament began to pass anti-Catholic legislation, for example, forbidding English citizens from appealing judicial rulings to the Pope. This squarely answers the question (for Henry, at least) of "Who is the supreme head of government? The King or the Pope?" For Henry, it was the King and appealing to the Pope would not only not do you any good, it would probably get you executed for treason. Henry also decreed that any church in England (whether it was the Church of England or the Church of Rome) had to seek his consent before implementing any rules changes.
Not only was speaking out against the King made a crime, not speaking out with a joyous voice upraised in favor of the King was also a crime, punishable in all sorts of unpleasant ways. For example, scholar, historian and all-around good guy (but devout Catholic) Thomas More didn't approve of the King's actions. He had enough respect for the King not to say anything, but he refused to sign a letter saying how awesome it was that the King broke from the Church and later on skipped out on the coronation of Anne Boleyn, which cheesed King Henry off to no end. Although he never denied that Henry was the legitimate head of the Church of England and Anne Boleyn was the rightful Queen, he didn't take the various oaths and things that were expected of him. In fact, he didn't say anything at all, which made attempts to try him for treason very difficult. It didn't help that More was a genius lawyer and one of the few honest judge in England. They had nothing to try him on and you can't execute a guy for not doing anything. In the end, Henry said, "Hey, I'm the King!" and had More tried, convicted and executed on trumped-up charges and perjured witnesses. Check out the movie "A Man For All Seasons" for a cracking good film version. His last words were, "I die the king's good servant, but the Lord's first."

History Spotlight, 2/10

It was on this day in 1567 that Henry Stuart, Lord Darnley, second husband of Mary, Queen of Scots, was gruesomely (and ineptly) murdered, setting off the chain of events that would end up with Mary's head on the chopping block.

With an eye on the English throne (she was next in line) Mary chose a husband based on his place in the line of succession. That man was Henry Stuart, who was good looking, dynamic and a hell of a lot of fun at parties. He also had the benefit of having Tudor blood flowing through his veins, but, as the historian Simon Schama notes, "...a lot of whiskey was flowing through them as well."

Henry Stuart, Lord Darnley

Darnley proved to be almost as useless as a husband as he was a monarch. From the start, Darnley was completely not interested in the day-to-day workings of government. He used his connections to get his pals good business deals but he mostly spent his time getting loaded and hunting. That wouldn't be so bad if that was the sum total of his ambitions, but he wanted Mary to give him the Crown Matrimonial. This would have made him the King of Scotland, rather than just the queen's husband. If Darnely was king, he'd be running Scotland because, in the Great Chain of Being, the husband outranks the wife and the king outranks the queen. (This is why Elizabeth wasn't into marriage.) On top of that, it would put him at number one with a bullet for the throne of England.

Mary, Queen of Scots, in a kicky hat

But Darnley wasn't just lazy and dissolute, he was mean-spirited and violent and Mary hated his guts. They had a son, but Darnley wouldn't have anything to do with him and constantly made smug comments about it not being his. Finally, the rumors got so bad that Darnely had to come out and make a public statement to the effect of, "The kid is mine." This was almost as bad, because it got people talking about just why Darnley had to make the statement in the first place. "What is the royal family trying to hide, anyway?" The appearance of impropriety was as important back then as it was now.
Things pretty much stayed like that until Darnley got into his head that Mary was having affair with her friend and secretary, the Italian Catholic David Rizzio. On March 9, 1566, Darnley and several of his drinking buddies stormed into the Queens dining room, held her at gunpoint (pointing the gun at her heavily pregnant belly), threw Rizzio down a flight of stairs and stabbed him 57 times. If the marriage hadn't been over before, it was certainly over now.

David Rizzio

The funny thing is that Mary couldn't divorce him or have him strung up or anything like that. She needed to present a unified family for the Scots and the English, especially as she either wanted to get herself or her son on the English throne.
But that didn't mean that she wasn't open the concept of Darnley having some kind of unfortunate accident. As we saw with Mary's imprisonment in England, she had a knack for batting her eyes and flirting with conspiracies, but never quite sealing the deal. And this is what she did when a group of nobles came calling with a plan to take care of the Darnley Situation once and for all.
On the night of February 10, 1567 a group of Scottish nobles placed many, many kegs of gunpowder in the basement of the house Darnley was staying in and lit the fuse. Darnley heard the noise and lowered himself from a window with a rope made of bedsheets (he really did). But it's not that easy. As he made his escape through the garden who should he run into, but the very nobles who were trying to blow him up. They strangled him and got the hell out of Dodge.

Obviously, a huge scandal. What always gets me is that the nobles left Darnley's stiff laying around to be discovered. Why not feed him to the pigs and say the body was vaporized in the blast? But, I'm not a 16th century Scottish noble, so nobody asked me. Unfortunately, Mary didn't adopt a position, of "grieving, outraged widow bravely carrying on." It was more like "barely-disguised glee." In fact, she later married the Earl of Bothwell, one of the very nobles who almost everyone believed to be one of the main Darnley-stranglers. It finally got so bad that there was open civil war in Scotland.

James Hepburn, Earl of Bothwell

Bothwell proved to less capable on the field of battle than he was in the field of Darnley-strangling and Mary's side lost, hard. (Bothwell pretty much said, "I'm goin' for, uh, reinforcements" and bravely ran away.) She wound up fleeing to England, where she would get her head cut off 17 years later. Her son would later go on to be King of England after Elizabeth's death.

History Spotlight, 2/9

right: Senator Reed Smoot (R-UT)
left: Congressman Willis C. Hawley (R-OR)

Senator Reed Smoot, Republican from Utah and co-sponsor of the infamous Smoot-Hawley Tarrif Act, died today in 1941. During the economic expansion after the Industrial Revolution, a trend began to be noticed in industrialized nations: there seemed to be an upper limit to what was needed from industry. For example, the car industry can churn out many more cars than anyone actually needs. At some point, there's going to be a glut of cars on the market and the car market will crash. This lays off lots of auto workers and they no longer can buy the things that they want and that causes other manufacturing markets to crash or at least have difficulty. Throw enough of these mini-crashes into the mix at the same time and you've got yourself a maxi-crash. This is why you see, in histories of the various 19th Century empires, that they're always looking for "new markets" for their manufactured goods. Heck, half of the Great Game between Britain and Russia was about selling tin pots to the Afghanis.
Mostly, nobody knew what to do about this, but they did have plenty of ideas. Senator Smoot embraced the notion of raising tariffs on imported goods. The idea was to make cheap foreign goods less attractive to the consumer. The consumer would then buy domestically produced goods which would keep more factories running and more people employed and they could keep buying stuff. As a bonus, you get a more money into the federal government from tariffs. It seems pretty simple and the Smoot-Hawley Tariff Ace became law on June 17, 1930. In the end, it raised tariffs on over 20,000 different imported goods, some as high as 60%. But that law of unintended consequences is a bitch and she showed herself before the ink was dry on Hoover's signature.
First, Canada raised tariffs on US goods and lowered tariffs on goods from the British Commonwealth. France and Britain followed suit soon after and then several other nations joined in. From 1929 to 1933, imports in the US dropped 66% and exports dropped 61%. This in turn caused the already trouble manufacturing industry to completely auger into the dirt and the Depression got that much worse.

History Spotlight, 2/8

Mary, Queen of Scots is beheaded today for (allegedly) taking part in the Babington Plot to overthrow Queen Elizabeth I.
Mary, Queen of Scots was, as you may expect, the queen of the Scots. She was also next in line for the English throne and, as Elizabeth I was clearly not making any heirs any time soon, the sure bet. Trouble was, she was Catholic and Elizabeth (and most of England was Protestant). After being thrown out of Scotland due to no fault of her own (some little thing about having her husband, Lord Darnley, murdered and then marrying the guy who did the hit) she sought shelter from her cousin, Elizabeth I.
Elizabeth, for her part, didn't know what to make of Mary. On one hand, Elizabeth was pretty annoyed at Mary's treatment at the hands of the Scots. Imprisoning the queen, painting mocking nude pictures of her as a mermaid (at the time, mermaid imagery was used to indicate a prostitute) and then forcing her to flee the country dressed in rags went against everything Elizabeth believed about the proper placement of monarchs in relationship to their subjects. She had half a mind to send the army up the and put Mary back on the throne, so long as Mary would agree to keep her hands off the English throne, just to make a point about who was in charge in Scotland or anyplace else. Hint: not the peasant, not the nobles, the monarch and nobody else.
But...on the other hand, Mary was a rival for the throne, a Catholic rival to the throne. A Catholic rival to the throne who made a habit of affecting a passive-aggressive phony humility that seemed designed specifically to get on Elizabeth's nerves. Elizabeth decided to punt.
Elizabeth had Mary locked up in a variety of luxurious prisons for 17 years, while she hemmed and hawed about what to do. All during that time, Elizabeth's spymaster, Sir Francis Walshingham, was assiduously reading Mary's mail and reporting on the contents to Elizabeth. Which was a good idea, because Mary was flirting with people trying to overthrow Elizabeth, but just not enough for him to do anything about.
Then came the Babington Plot, which is another post entirely. Suffice to say, a Catholic noble, Anthony Babington and a bunch of his pals had the idea of murdering Elizabeth and putting Mary on the throne. That's it. Babington and Mary exchanged coded letter smuggled to Mary in the stoppers of beer barrels. But Walsingham had already identified the six main conspirators, had the code broken and had been reading the smuggled letters almost all along. On August 18, 1586, the conspirators were arrested and tortured into confessing. That gave them enough cause to have Mary arrested, more than she already was. Then Elizabeth started dithering again. She didn't want to be the one to order the execution of the rightful queen of Scotland, but she also wanted to get rid of the Mary problem once and for all. She wound up signing the death warrent but saying, essentially, "Don't use it." Her privy council decide to use it before she changed her mind again. And so, on February 8, 1587, Mary, Queen of Scots was executed before 300 witnesses wearing the red cloak of a Catholic martyr.

History Spotlight, 2/7

President Jean-Claude "Baby Doc" Duvalier is overthrown and flees Haiti ending 28 years of single family rule on this day in 1986. Baby Doc was actually progressive and lenient compared to his father, Francois "Papa Doc" Duvalier, but that' not saying much.
Papa Doc started out pretty good - as good as it gets for someone born in poverty in Haiti in the early part of the 20th Century. His father was a justice of the peace and his mother was confined to a mental institution (put "early 20th Century Haitian asylum" on my list of places not to go) so he was mostly raised by his aunt. He got a medical degree from the University of Haiti and spent a year studying public health issues at the University of Michigan. When he returned to Haiti, he was a prominent figure in the campaign against the tropical diseases that ravaged the island.
During that period, Haiti went through a succession of brutal, incompetent, just plain nasty US-backed puppet rulers. This instilled in Papa Doc the two main ideals that would guide his life: first, the black majority, rather than the wealthier mulatto minority, are an untapped well of power and second, the US is evil, unless they're on your side. He became active in the black pride movement and studied voodoo, Haiti's native religion.
In 1956, the president Paul Magloire resigned the presidency and Baby Doc ran for the office in an election widely seem as stolen. Drawing on his study of voodoo, Baby Doc modeled his image on that of Baron Samedi, the voodoo spirit of death. He almost always wore sunglasses to hid his eyes and often spoke with the high, nasally voice of Baron Samedi.
In 1958, he successfully put down a coup attempt and, in 1961, he had the country's constitution amended to make him president for life. He also weakened the power of the army (they had been behind the coup attempt) and started his own secret police force called the Tonton Macoutes, after the voodoo bogeyman. The Tonton Macoutes didn't get paid, as such - their salary was wholly derived from crime and extortion. As you might imagine, they got very good at it.
When he died in 1971, his 19-year old son, Jean-Claude became president. Baby Doc never really wanted to be president. He was perfectly happy being a wealthy playboy on his father's (or rather, the people of Haiti's) dime and mostly left the day-to-day operations of the county to his mother and a hand-picked cadre of old line Papa Doc cronies (known as the dinosaurs). Baby Doc made of couple of mostly symbolic gestures such as releasing a couple of political prisoners and easing up on press censorship. But mostly he raided the treasury. All during this time things were getting worse in Haiti. Baby Doc had squandered the political goodwill he had received when he ascended the throne and then he went and made it worse by marrying a light-skinned mulatto woman, Michele Bennet Pasquet. Papa Doc's power base had been built on black pride from the dark skinned people and when Baby Doc married a mulatto, the black people of Haiti saw that as a betrayal of his father's ideals. Not helping was the extravagant, $3 million price tag of the wedding. Also not helping was the fact that the bride's family had notoriously shifty dealing that revolted the populace, like selling Haitian cadavers to foreign medical schools.
When an outbreak of swine fever virus nearly destroyed the pig population of the island (many people had their one pig as an investment) and the AIDS virus rampaged, completely unchecked, people felt desperate. In 1983, Pope John Paul II visited the island and called for democratic and social reforms. A groundswell of revolt started in the clergy and spread to the laymen. Two years later, in 1986, a revolution started in the rural areas and quickly spread to the cities. By February, he had fled the country for France, where he still lives today in a one bedroom apartment in Paris.

History Spotlight, 2/6

A classic case of "nations only obey treaties until they become inconvenient," the Washington Naval Treaty was signed on February 5, 1922 in Washington, DC. In this case, it lasted about a week.
The treaty itself came about from the spasm of international unity following World War I. At the time, Britannia still ruled the waves, but the US was coming up fast on her stern with Japan in a distant third place but also coming on strong. Britain wasn't too worried about the US and the US, for its part, wasn't worried about Britain, but they were both worried about Japan. While it's true that, at the time, Britain had a mutual defense pact with Japan nobody in His Majesty's government or in the Emperor's court thought this was anything but a temporary alliance of convenience. Also along for the ride were France and Italy because, well, why not - they both still had the imprateur of being world powers.
The treaty had two main purposes, one which was known to all parties and one which was not. The first, known, point of the treaty was to limit the size of a nation's navy in order to encourage the peaceable use of the sea lanes. The second purpose, known only to the US and Britain, was to limit the size of the Japanese navy, which was already being viewed as a threat. What was even more unknown, even to the British, was that the US intelligence service had been listening in to all of the delegates conversations with their respective governments and knew exactly where each nation's deal-braking point was.
The terms of the treaty itself aren't really that interesting: none of the signatory nations could have a ship over 35,000 ton and none of the ships guns could be larger than 16 inches in diameter. The weight restriction did not include fuel or water for boilers. Britain lobbied hard for this point because of their globe-spanning empire. An additional limitation was placed on the new aircraft carriers that were coming out: no nation was to have more than two carriers over 27,000 tons.
What's more interesting is the lengths the signatory nations went to get around the treaty:
The US used new boiler designs to get a faster ship in a smaller frame. It also built a fleet of carriers that came in just under the weight limit.
Britain built ships that could have additional armor added in the event of war.
Germany, while not a signatory to the treaty, was still bound by the limitations imposed by the Treaty of Versailles. They used a new form of high-strength steel to put more armor in a lighter package.
France pouted and complained that the treaty was unfair.
Italy lied about their ships' tonnage.
Japan withdrew from the treaty in 1936 and, really, never had any intention of following it anyway.
In the end, there were five (six, if you count Germany) nations either following the letter of the treaty but not the spirit or completely ignoring the treaty. By the time World War II rolled around, it had been tossed in the trash.

History Spotlight, 2/5

On this day in history, the US Air Force lost a hydrogen bomb off the coast of Georgia. The bomb has never been recovered. As with many of these things, it all started with a training exercise.
A B-47 bomber out from Homestead Air Force Base in Florida on a simulated combat mission collided with an F-86 Sabre fighter. The fighter pilot ejected and his place crashed into the sea. The B-47 sustained heavy damage and, in order to make it to an air strip, jettisoned the bomb. Now, the Air Force has always been quick to say that the bomb was not armed. It had the high explosives and the enriched, yummy uranium, but it didn't have the physics package that would allow the bomb to be detonated. Cold comfort to the residents of nearby Tybee Island.
Starting the next day the Air Force spent the next two months trying to find the thing with no success, and they finally had to admit that they couldn't find it. They feel that it is lying somewhere under about 10 feet of mud and silt in Warsaw Sound between Tybee Island and Warsaw Island. Other people have tried on their own to find it as well. Retired Air Force Colonel Derek Duke spent a good deal of time trawling the sound with a Geiger counter. He found a place where the radiation reads about 10 times higher than the surrounding area, but the Air Force says that's just naturally occurring elements.
Most recently, the Air Force has decided to let sleeping dogs lie. Dredging the sound would create the risk of either accidental detonation or spreading enriched uranium all over the place.


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History Spotlight, 2/4

On February 4, 1957, the world's first operational nuclear submarine, the USS Nautilus, logged its 60,000th nautical mile, matching the endurance record set by its fictional namesake in Jules Verne's 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea. The Nautilus was the dream of Admiral Hyman Rickover who is known as "The Father of the Nuclear Navy."

Prior to the Nautilus, submarines weren't truly underwater vessels. In reality, they were surface ships that could travel underwater for brief periods of time. Subs during WWII functioned off a combination of diesel engines and batteries. When the sub was on the surface, it used its diesels to propel the ship and charge the batteries. When it was submerged, it used the batteries to drive the engines. When the ship was submerged, it was slow. I don't recall how slow, but it was something like four knots. When it surfaced, it went much faster, but was visible on radar and vulnerable to attacks. On top of that, their limited depth ability (something like less than 500 feet) made them visible to aircraft, especially in the crystal-clear waters of the South Pacific. While it's true that some subs had a snorkel apparatus hooked to the periscope to allow the diesels to run while submerged (the Germans tried this when their wolf packs were being hunted down in the North Atlantic) it still made the sub visible to radar. And, if you've ever been snorkeling and had a wave overtop your snorkel, you know what that's like.

Hymie Rickover was trained as an electrical engineer and served on a sub during the pre-WWII years so he was well aware of their limitations After the war he received training in nuclear engineering at the Oak Ridge National Laboratory and saw the light and organized a team to design a nuclear generator to power a submarine. The obstacles were substantial, but the biggest one was that a reactor that would generate the amount of power needed was the size of a city block. Hymie Rickover was not a man who let "It's impossible" stand in the way of his dreams, however, and on September 30, 1954 the USS Nautilus was commissioned. It went to sea on January 17, 1955 and sent the famous radio message, "Underway on nuclear power."

On its shakedown cruise, it traveled, underwater, 1,100 miles from Groton, Connecticut to San Juan, Puerto Rico, a record for underwater travel at the time. On August 3, 1959, it became the first water vessel to reach the geographic North Pole while traveling from the Bering Strait to Greenland. These days, the Nautilus is a floating museum in Groton, Connecticut. If you're ever in Groton and have a few hours to kill, I highly recommend checking it out.

History Spotlight, 2/3

On February 3, 1787, the newly formed US government crushed Shay's Rebellion in Western Massachusetts. As with most of these things, it all came down to taxes and injustice.
After the American Revolution, the new government owed all kinds of money to various European powers and private investors and they wanted their money in silver or gold. None of this weird "dollars" nonsense, either, they wanted cash. There wasn't enough gold in the federal treasury and so the debt got passed on to the states. The states didn't have it, either and one state, Massachusetts, passed it on to the farmers. The farmers, many of who fought in the revolution, didn't like that one bit. They obviously didn't have the gold to pony up so they were faced with the prospect of losing their land and winding up in debtor's prison all because of the federal debt. They had a meeting and decided to petition the legislature in Boston.
Other veterans of the revolution, also treated quite shabbily, joined the cause and attempted to get local judges to stay the confiscation of land until the legislature had met to hear their case. At the local courthouses, they learned that the local militia had been called up to keep them away. The problem was that most of the members of these local militias were also veterans or farmers or friends and neighbors of the protesters. More often than not, the militias wound up joining the rebellion.
This outraged the upper class in Boston who couldn't believe that the commoners in Western Mass were daring to rebel against them, their rightful rulers. Sound familiar? Samuel Adams tried to claim that the rebellion was being fomented by agents of the British.
An army was raised in Boston and sent to protect the court in Springfield so that it could continue to process foreclosures. One of the farmers, Daniel Shays, tried to get in touch with another revolutionary leader, Luke Day, to propose that they should get their forces to Springfield and take the armory before the Boston army got there. Day never got the message and Shays and his forces headed into battle not knowing that they were on their own.
For his part, the leader of the Boston Army, General William Shepard, was having his own problems with Congress. His troops were unpaid and ill-equipped. He wanted that armory more than anyone, except Shays. Shepard got to the armory before Shays, but Secretary of War Henry Knox denied him permission to use those weapons because only Congress could issue that order and they were out of session. Shepard did what anyone else would have done and ignored the order.
So, here's the situation: We have Shays approaching the armory, thinking it's deserted and expecting Day's army to be coming up any time now. We have Shepard lying in wait, not really looking forward to firing on his own countrymen. Shepard ordered a warning shot over their heads and then, when that didn't work, a single round (from each of his men in front) into the massed rebels. Many were captured, most fled north. By March, the rebellion was over.

History Spotlight, 2/2

The 1925 serum run to Nome, Alaska ended today and inspired the yearly Iditarod dogsled race today. Nome is only two degrees south of the Arctic Circle and it's harbor is icebound between November and July. Nome was scheduled to get a shipment of diphtheria vaccine, but the especially cold weather that fall froze the harbor earlier than was predicted. It was right about then that the town doctor discovered that what diphtheria vaccine they did have on hand had expired.
Just as the last ship was leaving at the end of November, a two-year old Native American boy from a nearby village was brought to the town doctor, Curtis Welch, with a sore throat. Welch originally diagnosed this as tonsillitis, rather than diphtheria, because no one else in the village had showed symptoms and diphtheria is extremely contagious. The boy died the next day and there were several other cases of tonsillitis, including one fatality, by the end of December. At this point, I have to think Dr. Welch is getting a case of wishful thinking. When there was finally a case that couldn't be diagnosed as anything else, the doctor administered the expired vaccine, but the patient died anyway. Dr. Welch then asked the town mayor to send a radio massage to the Alaskan territorial government asking for at least a million units of diphtheria vaccine to stave off an epidemic.
There were two proposals for getting the vaccine to Nome. The first was via airplane - the first winter landing on snow had taken place recently. The second was with a relay team of dog sleds. There were two problems with using the plane. First, the only two qualified pilots were out of the territory and wouldn't be back for a week. There was a trainee available and willing to take the risk, but the second problem is that the aircraft available were all WWI-surplus, with an open cockpit and water-cooled engines - two big problems in -40 (and below) weather. The dog sleds were the way to go. Five relay teams were set up and braved blizzard conditions and hurricane force, but the serum made it to Nome before the epidemic got out of hand.

History Spotlight, 2/1

On this day in 1943, the encircled and beleaguered German 6th Army surrender to the Soviets, ending the Battle of Stalingrad. As most people know by now, the whole idea of invading Russia was a bad one. Germany's technological advantage only held up as long as they could keep the supplies flowing. Across the vast Russian steppes it was nearly impossible to keep the great German war machine gassed up and the feared German infantry well-fed. Couple that to the brutal Russian winter and you have a recipe for disaster.
It was never supposed to be that way. The German invasion of Russia, Operation Barbarossa, started on June 22, 1941, was supposed to take six months, tops. Hitler figured that the Russians, badly led and poorly supplied, would go down like field mice under a thresher. At the beginning, they did. But Stalin had two things Hitler didn't: an almost infinite supply of cannon fodder and an almost infinite supply of land on which to retreat. Stalin kept the pressure up on the Germans (if you've ever seen the first 10 minutes of Enemy at the Gates, that's not too far off from reality) while destroying anything of use to the Germans on the way.
That's where things ended up: the Germans were stalled at the Siege of Leningrad in the north, they were stalled at the gates of Moscow in the middle and they were mired in some of the worst city warfare in history at Stalingrad in the south. The three-pronged strategy of invasion was working out to be a bust.
There was actually a method to Hitler's madness. Moscow was the capitol of the Soviet Union - a must-capture, especially if Stalin came with it. Leningrad (which has reverted to its pre-revolution name of St. Petersburg these days) had a valuable rail infrastructure and coastline. And Stalingrad (Volgagrad today) was at the tail end of the massive Baku oil fields. Controlling Stalingrad would control these fields.
The German army was hampered in the field by Hitler's micromanagement and unwillingness to be flexible. For example, the commander of the 6th Army, Friederich Paulus, wanted to withdraw from Stalingrad to get out of that impossible hellhole and attempt to draw the Russian army out onto more favorable land. Blitzkrieg works fine for huge set piece battles on a vast open plain but it's much less effective in brutal house-to-house fighting. Hitler said no. The Wehrmacht had never retreated before and he wasn't about to let them start now, even for a strategically sound reason. This is a good indicator of the gaps in Hitler's knowledge (apart from being crazy that is). Hitler had served in the military, but only as a corporal, and he lacked the training or vision to understand the risky strategic moves that his generals were proposing. Hitler knew: going back bad, going forward good. Feints, double-feints, false retreats, these all went above him.
So, in the end, the 6th Army was trapped in Stalingrad. The city was soon encircled by the Red Army, making Paulus's plan moot. Hitler had Paulus promoted to Field Marshall but not for meritorius service. No German Field Marshall had ever surrendered and what Hitler was saying to Paulus was, "Commit suicide first." Paulus surrendered anyway.
A coda to this battle is that most of the German soldiers captured died in the gulags after the war.
Here's my not-really-all-that-accurate approximation of the Eastern Front. The line runs from Leningrad through Moscow and down to Stalingrad. Notice, for starters, that that's a front nearly a thousand miles long! Also notice all that Russia stretching out to the east of the line.


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