History Spotlight, 11/13

The American Mafia in the 1950’s was in a time of crisis.  The tumult from the end of WWII affected all aspects of the country, including criminals.  Put the pressures from crusaders like Robert Kennedy and Estes Kafauver and the Mob was facing pressures that most other industries didn’t have to.  This caused the Mafia to split into two factions, the Liberal Faction and the Conservative Faction.   The Liberal Faction wasn’t exactly promoting socialized medicine and daycare centers; they wanted to deal drugs (to increase money coming in) and kill many more people than they were.   They were mostly the young Turks of the mob.  The Conservatives, the old bulls, wanted to keep things as they were.  No drugs and the same amount of killing.  If you’ve got two groups, one of whom wants more killing and the other who wants the same amount of killing, who do you think is going to get the upper hand? 

At about that time the only witness to one of Vito Genovese’s murders wound up mysteriously dead in his prison cell and Vito came back to the US from Sicily.  Vito called a meeting of all the big mob guys from all over the country at the estate of his friend Joe “Joe the Barber” Barara in the tiny upstate New York town of Apalachin.  Among the topics to be discussed was loansharking, narcotics trafficking, gambling, and not killing each other quite so much. 

New York State Trooper Edgar D. Crosswell had been keeping Joe the Barber’s estate in the back of his head.  The year before, noted Mafioso Carmine Galante had been stopped coming from Barbara’s estate and that made Crosswell take a little drive by every now and then.  Just casual, you know.  When Crosswell heard that Barbara’s son had been reserving large blocks of rooms at local hotels and then heard that a huge supply of meat had been delivered to Barbar’s estate he drove by a little more frequently.  When hundreds of luxury cars with out of state plates descended on the town Crosswell and his men started taking down license plate numbers.  When the results of these plates came back, they started setting up roadblocks. 

In the end, 58 mobsters were captured, including Vito Genovese.  All of them claimed to be visiting Joseph Barbara because he was sick.   Poor Joe the Barber had never wanted the meeting to be held at his estate.  The meeting had been there the previous year and he knew that Crosswell had been keeping an eye on the place.  One of the unexpected outcomes of the raid was demonstrating to the American public (and the FBI) that there was something called the Mafia.

History Spotlight 11/10

One of History’s greatest dummies is born on this day in 1565.  Have you ever known someone who is not nearly as clever as he thinks he is?  He doesn’t know when to shut up and the rest of the room is staring uncomfortably at their shoes while he digs himself deeper and deeper. That’s Robert Devereaux, 2^nd Earl of Essex. 

He managed to get in Queen Elizabeth’s good graces by being witty and charming and making fun of people she disliked.  He completely failed to grasp the concept of “Just because you can make your boss laugh, that doesn’t mean you’re friends.”   He would get into shouting matches with her and once drew his sword.   This is a guy who is profoundly unaware of the danger he is in. 

In 1589, he shipped out with Francis Drake to invade Spain, defying the Queen’s orders.  He did OK at the beginning.  He captured Cadiz, that was pretty good.  He managed to screw things up again when he was supposed to be hunting the Spanish Armada and decided instead to chase after some treasure ships, again defying the queen.  This was the Spanish Armada that showed up off the British coast and scared the wits out of everyone and was only stopped by the luck of the weather. 

Even though Devereaux should be having closed-door meetings with Human Resources at this point, he managed to talk himself into a position as head of the army that was going to go over and crush the Irish for a while.  He led a massive army into Ireland, wandered around for a bit, lost a bunch of battles and signed a truce with the very people he was supposed to be crushing.  Her Majesty was nonplussed to say the least. 

Again, against the Queen’s orders, he traveled back to London and surprised the Queen in her bedroom while she was still in her jim-jams.  He was confined to quarters but later released.  He was destitute and feeling put-upon.  He appears to have felt that this was all really unfair.  He decided to overthrow the government and got a bunch of his drinking buddies to go along with him.  He marched in to London, demanded an audience with the Queen, was immediately arrested and immediately surrendered.  It wasn’t quite that simple but it makes the Beer Hall Putsch look well-organized. 

And so he got his head cut off, less because of his stupid rebellion and more because the Queen was sick of his shit.  There’s a lesson in there somewhere.  An interesting question is, “What was Devereaux’s deal?”  He wasn’t mentally handicapped because he was famous for his eloquence and wit.  Was he, perhaps “on the spectrum” to use a modern phrase?   I like to think he was a really incompetent time traveler.

History Spotlight, 11/9

The infamous Beer Hall Putsch is crushed in Germany on this day in 1923.  Like many events in the 20^th Century, the Beer Hall Putsch stems from the unsatisfactory end to World War I.  The winning powers in the war, mostly Britain and France (well, mostly France) wanted a vengeful peace that made sure Germany stayed down.  Previous to the war, Germany would be what modern minds would term a “First World” nation.  By the standards of the time, they were certainly up there.  They had a sweet empire (not as sweet as Britain’s), a kick-ass navy (not as kick-ass as Britain’s) and an industrial establishment that was every bit the power house that Britain’s was.  

After the war, they had nothing.  No colonies, no navy and crippling war reparation payments.  Hitler, and quite a few other Germans, felt the Treaty of Versailles was a betrayal by egghead civilians and Marxists and, let’s not mince words, Jews.  The Germans had the right to be surprised.  They had been led to believe that Germany had been winning the war that their armies could not be defeated and now everything had been lost. 

Hitler was but one of thousands of disillusioned, angry de-mobbed soldiers hanging around with nothing to do.   In the cities, violence became commonplace as different factions fought it out in the street.  This was also the high-water mark of in the infamous Weimar inflation where a wheelbarrow full of cash bought you a slice of bread.   Apparently (and I never knew this) Hitler still had some affiliations with the German army and had been ordered to infiltrate the German Workers Party (DAP) and find out what they were up to.  Secret agent Hitler?  Anyway, Hitler joins the DAP and finds out that they’re a bunch of swell guys.  Hey, these guys are crazy nationalist who hate the Jews too! It’s a match made in heaven. 

It wasn’t too long before Hitler was running the DAP and made them from a bunch of guys getting drunk and bitching about the Jews into a viable political force.  Hitler took as his model for seizing power Mussolini’s coup the year before in 1922.  But Germany ain’t Italy, as Hitler would later learn.   Hitler took 600 of his closest buds and a bunch of machine guns and surrounded the beer hall where one of Hitler’s rivals was making a speech.  Hitler stormed into the hall, fired into the air, jumped up on a table and shouted, "The national revolution has broken out! The hall is filled with six hundred men. Nobody is allowed to leave."  Not exactly, “You have nothing to lose but your chains.” 

Well, it didn’t work. The Nazis went on to cause all sort of mischief, beating people up and generally being a nuisance.  Buy November 9^th, the writing was on the wall. Nobody was signing up for the revolution, the DAP was like, “We just wanted to drink beer, man.” “And bitch about the Jews!” “Yeah, and bitch about the Jews!” and the government was starting to get tired of this shit.  The putsch was crushed and Hitler did a year in jail using his time to write Mein Kampf, one of the most unreadable books ever written.

History Spotlight 8/19

It was on this day in 1819 that the infamous Peterloo Massacre occurred at St. Peter's Field in Manchester England.

If you're in the United States, odds are when you think of "corn" you think of that delicious, starchy plant that's good in bread form or on the cob.   In Britain, when they say "corn" they mean "wheat" (when they mean "corn" they say "maize").  The Corn Laws were a series of laws in Britain that hiked the tariffs on wheat and other foods.  This was great for the wealthy landowners because their crops' value went through the roof but sucked for pretty much everyone else who had to buy the food.  They were extremely unpopular but, as those same wealthy landowners controlled Parliament, they weren't getting repealed anytime soon.

The Napoleonic Wars had also just ended a few years ago so there were thousands of demobbed soldiers with nothing to do (I can't imagine what the House of Lords of the day would have thought of the GI Bill) .   Manufacturing had also slowed down as the need for war material had dropped so so tons of people were out of work, too.

On top of that they were int he middle of a famine.  You've got thousands of out-of-work, hungry, pissed off people who feel their government isn't adequately addressing their needs.   A group, the Manchester Patriotic Union (who might be considered "Social Justice Warriors" of the day, if that's cool) decided to have a rally in favor of, among other things, a change in how things worked in Parliament. 

A crowd of up to 80,000 people showed up.  I tried to find out if this was a larger crowd than was expected, like at Woodstock, but I couldn't find anything that indicated that.  At any rate, it was a really big crowd.  The local government got nervous and asked the local military to arrest the organizers and run off the crowd.  The military took "disperse the crowd" to mean "charge into the crowd on horseback with sabres drawn hacking and slashing."  Well, it dispersed the crowd but it also killed 15 people and injured 400.

 Peterloo was one of those defining massacres of a generation, like Kent State or Amritsar.  Soldiers who had fought with Wellington at Waterloo were among the dead.

History Spotlight, 8/14

The first of the Tillamook Burn series of forest fires started on this day in 1933 in Oregon's Northern Coast Range.   Between 1933 and 1951, this series of fires would burn more than 350,000 acres of old growth forest.

It was all actually an accident.  A steel cable pulling a downed tree dragged against the dry bark of another tree. Friction did its work and the fire started.  It wouldn't be extinguished until the fall rains came in September.  Ships as far as 500 miles at sea could smell smoke from the fire.  Total estimated loss of wood was estimated to be 8.5 billion dollars (in current terms).

A combination of low humidity and dry, blustery conditions led to the fire spreading at an unheard of rate.  At its fastest, it was burning at a rate of 21 square miles an hour along a 15 mile front.

After the last of the fires a determined effort was made to reforest the region.  Because paper and lumber companies can't pay taxes on land that doesn't have any trees on it, much of the land had fallen into the hands on the local governments because of  foreclosure sales.  Everyone from schoolchildren to prisoners to specially-designed helicopters planted over a millions trees.  This was only a fraction of the estimated 72 million trees that had been lost but still, a quality effort.  In 1973, the Oregon governor Tom McCall dedicated the Tillamook Burn as the Tillamook State Forest.

The current controversy is that, now that those trees are reaching maturity, should they be harvested.  Every one in the 40's thought that was the plan, but people these days aren't so sure.

In his book "Northwest Corner: Oregon and Washington" author Stuart Holbrook said:

[Reforestation] can never compensate for that tragedy we call the Tillamook Burn, as somber a sight as to be viewed this side of the Styx. There they stand, millions of ghostly firs, now stark against the sky, which were green as the sea and twice as handsome, until an August day of 1933, when a tiny spark blew into a hurricane of fire that removed all life from 300,000 acres (1,200 km2) of the finest timber even seen. It was timber, too, that had been 400 years in the making. It was wiped out in a few seething hours which Oregon will have reason to remember well past the year 2000. To this day the forest stands powerless against the threat of wildfires.

I'm back!

Eight years is a big longer hiatus than I was expecting.

Shuttering the blog for awhile

I'm under tremendous pressure at work and I'm not feeling well, so something's got to give and it's this blog. I'm closing it down for awhile - I don't know how long.
Thanks to everybody for reading it and offering helpful feedback. I've learned quite a lot writing these little things everyday,

History Spotlight, 4/16

The worst industrial accident in US history, the Texas City Disaster, takes place on this day in 1947 when two ships laden with ammonium nitrate detonated, killing at least 581 people.

Ammonium nitrate is quite useful in replenishing depleted soils as it provides a nitrogen boost. It is also, under the right conditions, highly explosive. You may recall that was what Tim McVeigh used in the bombing of the Alfred P. Murrah Federal building back in 1995. In case of Texas City, the ship Grandcamp was full of ammonium nitrate, ammunition, and bales of sisal hemp, all bound for Europe's post war rebuilding process. The ammonium nitrate was stored at a temperature that caused a chemical reaction to take place and dock workers reported that the paper sacks were warm to the touch.

At about 8:10 AM on April 16th, a fire was reported in the hold of the Grandcamp. Theories differ as to what started the fire. Given the temperature in the hold, it is possible that it was a case of spontaneous combustion. This being in the middle of one of the periodic Red Scares, the government immediately jumped to the conclusion that it was sabotage. Another possibility is that a discarded cigarette landed into one of the bales of hemp. The ammunition started cooking off, and people reported the sound of gunfire from within the hold. Upon being notified of the fire, the captain followed standard procedure and flooded the hold with steam. Steam was considered better than liquid water as it did less damage to the cargo. Unfortunately, when dealing with the extremely heat sensitive ammonium nitrate, it was exactly the wrong thing to do. The steam accelerated the chemical reaction that was already going on.

Meanwhile, a crowd of spectators had gathered on shore. who felt that they were at a safe distance. At 9:12 am the ammonium nitrate detonated. A 15-foot tall wave rushed ashore over 100 miles of the Texas coastline and almost 1,000 buildings were leveled, including many chemical refineries which didn't help matters any. The Grandcamp's two ton anchor was hurled over a mile away and buried itself in a 10 foot crater. The huge bales of now-burning hemp rained down upon the city, starting more fires. People in Galveston, 10 miles away were forced to their knees by the shock wave. In Houston, 40 miles away, windows were shattered. The shock wave was felt as far away as Louisiana, 250 miles away.

As if that wasn't bad enough, the explosion set the nearby ship, the High Flyer, on fire. It was loaded with - guess what - ammonium nitrate. Crews worked desperately to free the ship from other wreckage to tow it out to sea but, as the entire 28 member Texas City Fire Department had been vaporized when the Grandcamp went up, there weren't nearly enough skilled workers to deal with it. 15 hours after the explosion of the Grandcamp, the High Flyer followed suit.

The total death toll came out to 581 people, but that's just a guess, as many of the victims were never found. There were 5,000 people injured and 500 homes destroyed. The total estimated damage was $100 million

History Spotlight, 4/15

In the early morning hours of April 15, 1865, Abraham Lincoln dies of wounds he received from John Wilkes Booth the previous evening. This would be one of the most influential assassinations of American history, with effects ranging from the Reconstruction of the South, to the assimilation of freed slaves to the relationship between Congress the President.

Booth's plan had been originally to kidnap Lincoln, sprit him away to a safe haven in the South and then hold him hostage in return for the resumption of the prisoner of war exchange program (which had been halted because exchanged prisoners immediately went back to the front lines). Booth attended Lincoln's second inauguration ball in March of 1865 and was astounded at how easy access to the President was. He mused that, if he had been armed, he could have killed him then and there. There were a couple of aborted kidnapping attempts that were called off for various reasons. After hearing Lincoln make a speech on April 11 where he voiced support for giving black people voting rights, Booth was so enraged that he decided that assassination was the only way to proceed. Booth took his kidnapping team and changed it to an assassination team. His plan was to kill Lincoln, Secretary of State William Seward and Vice President Andrew Johnson in hopes that the US government would collapse and give the Confederacy time to regroup. In actuality, Booth was a bit naive and unrealistic (he was an actor, after all). Lee had just surrendered at Appomattox - Lee, the hero of the Confederacy, one of the most tactically brilliant generals of this or any other war had surrendered his army to the Union and other Confederate armies were falling rapidly. The South had lost and the loss of the first three links of the Union chain of command weren't going to change that.

While hanging out at Ford's Theater, Booth overhead that Lincoln and General US Grant were going to be attending a production of the comedy, "Our American Cousin" that evening and realized that was his chance to kill Lincoln and Grant at the same time and, with a little quick planning to do Vice President Johnson and Seward too. Having performed at Ford's Theater on several occasions, Booth was acquainted with the layout so he took that part of the plan. He assigned Lewis Powell to the job of killing Seward and George Atzerodt to Andrew Johnson. The plan was to go down at 10:00 PM. Unbeknownst to Booth, Grant had cancelled at the last minute.

Booth was well-known at the theater and gained admittance through the stage door. Booth made his way via a back passage to the Lincoln's box and barricaded the door. Mrs. Lincoln was holding Lincoln's hand and asked him, "What will Mrs. Harris think of my hanging on to you so?" Lincoln replied, "She won't think anything of it." These were the last words spoken by President Lincoln. Booth was familiar with the play and waited for a suitable laugh line to mask the sound of the gun. The line was: "Don't know the manners of good society, eh? Well, I guess I know enough to turn you inside out, old gal; you sockdologizing old man-trap!" No, I don't get it either, but it had the crowd in stitches. Booth burst through the door, shot Lincoln, stabbed his bodyguard and attempted to leap from the box to the stage below. On the way down, his spurs caught on some bunting hung for the occasion of the presidential visit and he landed awkwardly on the stage, breaking his leg. He uttered his immortal line, "Sic semper tyrannis!" the Virginia state motto, Latin for "Thus always to tyrants." Booth then made his escape out the back door.

Seward managed to survive his assassination and Atzerodt, who had always said that he was a kidnapper, not a murderer, didn't go through with his attempt on Johnson. Lincoln suffered through the night, never regained consciousness and died the next day, April 15, 1865. Booth fled into Maryland and was cornered in a barn on April 26th. He refused to surrender and was shot by Union troops.

History Spotlight, 4/14

At 11:40 PM on the night of April 14, 1912, the RMS Titanic strikes an iceberg in the North Atlantic and, in under three hours, sinks about 700 miles off the coast of Nova Scotia. 1,517 people went down with her. At the time, it was the deadliest maritime disaster in history. Long held up as an example of man's hubris before an uncaring Nature or a wrathful God (or both), the sinking of the Titanic is really just a case of minor and major screwups by individuals combining to create a disaster.

The Titanic featured, for the time, a novel design in its watertight doors. The Titanic's hull had been divided into sixteen compartments that could be isolated from each other in the event of damage to the hull. It was designed to have as many as four of the compartments completely flooded and yet still remain afloat. Unfortunately, on the night of April 14th, five of the compartments flooded which revealed another design flaw. When the water reached certain height in the ship, it overtopped the watertight door be began to flood the adjacent compartment. Think of filling an ice cube tray. As that compartment flooded, the ship sank lower and the next compartment began to flood.

The lifeboats were another issue, as in, there weren't nearly enough of the. British shipbuilding rules hadn't been updated in many years (since 1894) and were never intended to encompass a ship the size of the Titanic. They stated that any ship must have 16 lifeboats - no mention of the capacity of the lifeboats, just 16 of them. So, that's what the White Star Line installed. 16 lifeboats and four collapsible boats with a capacity for only 52% of the population of the ship. Obviously, they were banking of the watertight doors.

On the afternoon of April 14th, iceberg warnings were issued over the radio and Captain John Smith shifted the Titanic's course to the south. The ship received a warning from the SS Amerika of large icebergs in its path, but the message never made it to the bridge but was sent to the US Navy Hydrographic Office. Other warnings were received but the radio room operators of the time were employees of the Marconi Company and were paid to get massages to and from the passengers and not to get messages to the bridge. There were lookouts in the crow's nest, but there were no binoculars, no moon, no wind and the dirk side of the iceberg was facing the ship.

At about 11:39 on April 14, lookouts spotted an iceberg directly in front of the ship about 450 yards ahead. They quickly wired down to the bridge and First Officer William Murdoch ordered "Hard a'starboard" and ordered either full stop or hard astern (reports vary). For a ship that size, it was completely impossible to stop or maneuver within 450 yards but they came close. Rather than hit the iceberg straight it hit a glancing blow and bragged the berg all down the starboard side. And the rest is history portrayed with varying amounts of accuracy in song and film.

History Spotlight, 4/13

Today is the 90th anniversary of the Jallianwala Bagh Massacre in Amritsar, India. At the time, Amritsar was right in the middle of Northern India - in these post-partition days, it's on the border of Pakistan and India.

General Reginald Dyer (who my Dungeons and Dragons character - a disgraced former nobleman who killed a bunch of people through his own incompetence and corruption - is named after, but that's not important right now) ordered his soldiers to open fire on a peaceful gathering of men, women and children. For ten minutes and 1650 rounds the firing continued until all were down. The British Raj estimated 379 deaths, other sources say it was close to 2,000.

Tensions on the subcontinent were already running high. Despite a massive outpouring of support for Britain's war effort in both men and material by the Indian government and the various princes of India, there were still some areas that weren't 100 percent with the program. What we would call terrorist attacks continued to pop up in the Indian provinces of Punjab and Bengal, crippling the regional administration and making the British even more distrusting of their native charges. During the war, the German and Turkish governments enacted plans to foment insurrection in India by trying to go for a repeat of the 1857 revolt, which nearly toppled Britain's hold on India.

In addition to all this mess, there was post-war inflation, high taxes on dirt-poor people to pay for a war they never gave a damn about and the 1919 Spanish Flu pandemic. The Indians were disappointed that the 1.3 million men who served the Crown in the war didn't mean an ounce more freedom or home rule from the British. Combine an irritated, subjugated underclass who aren't feeling appreciated for all the blood they've shed for the mother country and a jumpy, nervous, trigger-happy over class who feel that the underclass are a bunch of ungrateful wretches and you've got a recipe for trouble.

During the week of April 10, 1919, over 5000 people had gathered at the marketplace of Jallianwala Bagh in Amritsar to protest the taxation and crushing anti-conspiracy laws that had been passed. Over the next few days, the protests got more and more unruly with isolated outbreaks in violence on both sides. On April 13, the protest inadvertently combined with celebrations of the Sikh new year at the marketplace. 90 soldiers, along with two armored cars commanded by General Dyer arrived to restore order. The marketplace was basically a closed courtyard, bounded on all sides by houses. The armored cars were unable to fit through the narrow openings and settled for blocking them off.

At 12:40 pm, General Dyer ordered his troops to open fire. With the exits to the marketplace either blocked by the armored cars or locked, the Indians had nowhere to go and were cut down. 120 bodies alone were found in the well at the center of the market. Even as the crowd dispersed, Dyer ordered his troops to keep firing, contending later that he thought those were his orders. Dyer's cold-blooded defense of his actions in ordering his troops to fire, "I think it quite possible that I could have dispersed the crowd without firing but they would have come back again and laughed, and I would have made, what I consider, a fool of myself." and in not providing medical assistance to the wounded, "Certainly not. It was not my job. Hospitals were open and they could have gone there," made him reviled not only amongst the Indians, but by many British citizens as well.

While some in Britain defended him for suppressing "another Mutiny" the inquest afterward found him stripped of his command, stripped of his rank and formally censured by the British Government. Dyer, for his part, never felt the slightest bit sorry for his actions and, in fact, felt that he had been overly merciful.

History Spotlight, 4/9

The American Civil War effectively ends today in 1865 as Robert E. Lee surrenders the Army of Northern Virginia to Ulysses S. Grant's Army of the Potomac at Appomattox Courthouse. After the Battle of Appomattox, Lee's army found itself exhausted, surrounded and outgunned. A dialogue began between Lee and Grant, via messengers. Knowing that his surrender of the Army of Northern Virginia would start a cascade of surrenders (is that a word?), Lee was loathe to take that action, but he saw know other way out. Grant, suffering from a splitting headache and getting pretty damned sick of the war, wasn't inclined to offer Lee any flexibility.

At about 10:30 am on April 9th, the two generals met in the farmhouse of Wilmer McLean. Lee wore his full dress uniform while Grant was dressed in muddy cast offs with only his tarnished epaulets as insignia of rank. Grant, suddenly unwilling to get the job underway, made small talk with Lee about them having served together in Mexico. The talk shifted to terms of surrender. Lee wanted to make sure that Grant knew that Lee didn't have the authority to surrender for the Confederacy, but only for the Army of Northern Virginia. Grant took out his notebook and wrote out the terms of surrender. Grant wrote non stop for several minutes and, at the end, decided not to humiliate the Confederate soldiers and officers by confiscating their sword, side arms and personal belongings.

By 4:00, the deed was done. the next day, Union General Joshua Lawrence Chamberlain was informed that he had been selected to preside over the formal surrender of the Confederates at Appomattox Court House. Chamberlain was, at heart, a professor but he had the "soul of a lion" and he had no desire to see his former enemy prostrate before him. When the Confederate troops marched down the main street of Appomattox to surrender their rifles and regimental colors, Chamberlain ordered his men to attention and to present arms in salute. This move was unpopular with many in the North, but for the rest of his life Chamberlain never wavered in his determination that it was the right thing to do. The Confederate commander on the scene, General John Brown Gordon called Chamberlain, "...one of the Knightliest soldiers of the Federal Army."

History Spotlight, 4/8

The Entente Cordiale is signed today in 1904, ending almost a thousand years of hatred and acrimony between the United Kingdom and France. As with most European diplomatic overtures of the day, it was less about peace and friendship and more about the efficient exploitation of the dusky-hued peoples of the world. It was one-third of the Triple Entente, the other two parts being the Anglo-Russian Entente and the Franco-Russian Alliance.

Throughout the latter half of the 19th century, France had been becoming progressively more isolated from its Continental neighbors. After Napoleon tried - and nearly succeeded - in conquering Europe, the Russians and Germans had been keeping their distance. With France's disastrous loss in the Franco-Prussian War in 1871, Germany really ramped up the pressure. It got to the point where the only European power that would even speak to France was Great Britain.

But there were two problems with that. First there was the racial animosity between the two powers that went back to Hastings, 1066. Second, there was Britain's innate isolationism from squabbles on the Continent. They felt that it was best to let the bally Continentals settle things amongst themselves rather than get involved. The Napoleonic Wars took care of that. During those wars, the British had a hard lesson learned that just ignoring what happened on the Continent could come back and bite them in the ass in a serious way, especially when it threatened their globe-spanning empire. On top of that, the rise of Germany as a world power, especially in Africa, had Britain worried that an isolationist policy was making them weaker, not stronger.

The first feelers were sent out in the 1880's between Britain's Prince Albert and France's Leon Gambetta and they found some common ground: they didn't like Germany and they liked pushing natives around. The diplomatic rancor that led up to the Russo-Japanese War in 1904 saw them face the prospect of having to go to war against each other because of their respective allies (France with Russia and Britain with Japan) neither of whom they liked very much. To get out of this, France and Britain decided to let bygones be bygones and settled their differences.

The Entente Cordiale consisted, roughly of:

1) Britain gets Egypt and France gets Morocco. Both parties get access to the Suez Canal.
2) Britain gets Newfoundland (France retains fishing rights off the coast) and France gets a coastal town in Africa and Guinea in South America.
3) Britain gets Siam (now known as Thailand) and France gets Madagascar. They agreed to split the New Hebrides, an island chain in the South Pacific.

Honestly, with the exception of the Suez Canal, I don't know why anyone would go to war for any of these possessions, unless they actually lived there. But colonial politics have always baffled me.

The entente worked, and celebrated its centennial in 2004. That old devil, The Law of Unintended Consequences reared its ugly head in the guise of Germany. Germany was feeling very pouty and left out by the Anglo-French love fest. France made matters worse by pushing Germany around even more - after all, they were allies with the British! They could do whatever they wanted. Germany didn't like that one bit and it led to the gradual increase of bad feelings in the Germanic states that led, inexorably, to World War I.

History Spotlight, 4/7

The largest battleship in history, the Japanese Battleship Yamato goes to a watery grave on this day in 1945 on its way to a suicide attack on the US forces engaged in the Battle of Okinawa. The Yamato was an impressive piece of engineering, but it was also obsolete before the ink was dry on the blueprints. It's big (really big - 18 inches in diameter) guns would ruin your day if you caught the business end of one but, by the time WWII really got rolling, the aircraft carrier was well on its way to becoming the undisputed master of the sea. The previous contestant for biggest battleship/biggest guns, the German Bismarck, was sunk by a pair of wire and fabric Swordfish biplanes launched from a carrier. Just like killing fly with a .357 doesn't work, shooting down aircraft with massive coastal bombardment artillery pieces is just as futile.

In the late 1930's Japan recognized that war with the US was coming. It was just a question of when and on whose terms. Japan had the industrial capacity to push around Chinese peasants with ease, but it didn't stand a chance at matching the nation with the largest industrial base in the world. Rather than try to match the US ship-for-ship, a competition it would lose, it decided to build several really big ships and hope that their massive guns would offset the US's industrial might.

The Yamoto put to sea in early 1941 and was used mostly to put out various regional fires that had been popping up in the Japanese Empire. The locals were less likely to continue with their revolt with this beast at anchor off their shores. After Pearl Harbor, the Yamato became the flagship of Admiral Isoroku Yamamoto (which can get confusing - Yamamoto commands the Yamato). The Yamato was the command ship on the scene for Japan's disastrous defeat at the Battle of Midway in June of 1942, in which it lost almost all of it's carrier fleet.

After the battle, on the way to the island of Truk, the Yamato was spotted by the American sub, the USS Flying Fish. The Fish fired four torpedoes and all four missed. American torpedoes in the early war period were extremely (and, for the sub crews, maddeningly) prone to failure and veering wildly off course. After this, the Yamato is surprisingly absent from many of the great Pacific naval battles. Either it was in the wrong place at the wrong time or it was the wrong ship for the job. It was at the Battle of the Philippine Sea but, as that was and almost entirely carrier-based battle, it didn't do much more than get some bombs dropped on it.

By the spring of 1945, the Japanese Empire was shrinking every day. The Americans were attempting to wrest control of the island of Okinawa, the westernmost part of the Japanese home islands. To the Japanese, this wasn't just some meaningless island: this was their back yard. It was with this note of desperation that the Yamato and six other ships were assigned to Operation Ten-Go, a suicide mission to destroy the US ships that were supporting the invasion and occupation forces of Okinawa. It didn't go as planned. The US subs Threadfin and Hackleback spotted the flotilla early, signaled the rest of the US fleet and the ships were intercepted by carrier based aircraft and sunk.

For anime nerds, the Yamato was resurrected and turned into a star cruiser in the 70's era cartoon, Space Battleship Yamato, or, as it was known in the US, Starblazers. It was one of the first anime shows to gain a wide following in the US. Why anyone with the industrial and technical capacity to build craft capable of interstellar travel would have to raise and refurbish old wrecks from the bottom of the Pacific is beyond me.

History Spotlight, 4/6

On April, 6, 1320, Scotland signs the Declaration of Arbroath, reasserting its position as a independent nation. It all started when King Edward I of England (who never, ever signed an alliance with the Mongols, but that's beside the point) was invited to arbitrate in a dispute over the succession. Edward, not a dummy, saw this as a perfect way to take over Scotland and added as a precondition that he be named overlord of Scotland. Edward always had a dream of being the "British Caesar," uniting the Britons under one ruler, preferably him.

The Scots reluctantly agreed, with the prerequisite that the overlordship be a temporary affair. Edward said, "Oh, yeah, temporary!" and probably rolled his eyes a little. After a long, long (long) process, Edward selected the person most likely to be a good little servant, John Balliol, a low-rent noble who was many steps away from Scotland's old king, David I . This irked Balliol's main competitor, Robert Bruce, who was not only closer to David than Balliol, but was the fan favorite to win.

Edward didn't get the nickname "Hammer of the Scots" for his skill with the vibraphone. Upon Balliol's accession to the throne on November 30, 1292, Edward immediately stated that he wasn't going to give up his overlordship and that the Scots were welcome to try and make him. To make matters worse, the Pope recognized Edward's overlordship. As a bonus to Edward, the Pope excommunicated Robert Bruce for murdering John Comyn, another one of the competitors to the throne. Well, he did stab him to death in the middle of church. That's kind of frowned upon by the Holy Mother Church.

OK, we've all seen Braveheart. As any history nerd will tell you, it's ahistorical but it gets the broad strokes right. With the Hammer of the Scots having just finished hammering the Welsh, Longshanks had nothing better to do than whale on Scotland. With Robert the Bruce almost being an unperson (being excommunicated isn't that big a deal these days - I'm not even sure they do it anymore - but it was a big deal back then) Scotland lacked any kind of useful leadership. Edward made mincemeat out of them.

But then he died, and his son Edward II took over. Was he gay? Wasn't he? I don't know and it's not really any of my business. What I do know is that he wasn't a very good king. Every time he went to war against Robert the Bruce (by now the Scots no longer cared about the state of his immortal soul) he lost. Sometimes he lost hard and sometimes he lost soft, be he always lost, men, machines and, most importantly, hard-fought and hard-won land. You can almost hear Edward I's spirit screaming out in impotent rage against the incompetence of his son.

Robert the Bruce was, in many ways, quite similar to Edward I although I think I'd get a dirk in my chest if I said that to either one of them. Both were ruthless, brutal ambitious men with no time for being nice. At the Battle of Bannockburn on June 24, 1314, Edward II showed just how much not like his father he was. The battle took place on a big wide, marshy area and Edward had his giant siege machines and war wagons driven down onto it, where they promptly bogged down and the Scots had a field day, hacking and slashing. it is considered the worst defeat for the English since the Battle of Hastings in 1066.

OK, so we're almost there. Due to Edward II's incompetence and Robert the Bruce's ruthlessness, the hated English have been driven almost all the way out of Scotland. At some point (I don't remember when), Bruce had Balliol unthroned and put himself in his place. He and 52 nobles and various Scottish dignitaries signed the Declaration of Abroath.. The main thrust of the declaration was that 1) Scotland was independent, had always been independent, and always would be independent, 2) that Edward I was a dick and, 3) that Scotland was independent because its people wanted to be independent and if the ruling monarch thought differently, well, there are ways to deal with that.

The Declaration of Arbroath is what we consider to be one of the earliest expressions of popular sovereignty - that is to say that a people choose their ruler rather than God.