History Notes this week of June 12

1184 B.C.: After 10 years of fruitless siege against the citadel of Troy, the Greek armies of Odysseus set sail from their encampment, leaving behind a huge offering to their goddess Athena, in the form of a massive, wheeled wooden horse. Despite ominous warning from the Trojan priest Laocoon: “Do not trust the horse, Trojans! Whatever it is, I fear the Greeks. even bringing gifts.” (Virgil: Aenid, Book II), the besieged army and people of Troy, realizing their enemy has abandoned their camps, rapturously wheel the statue into the city, and use it as the centerpiece of their victory celebrations. For his efforts, Laocoon is strangled by two snakes. The Trojan “victory” celebration continues into the night, and in the ‘wee hours of morning darkness and quiet, 30 hand-picked Greek soldiers slip out of their hiding places inside the horse to unlock the city gates and signal the Greek fleet to return to the beaches. The result is a complete slaughter of Troy’s population, and a comprehensive sack of its wealth, and when the Greek army finally vacated the city, it left it a pile of smoldering rubble…1184 BC: (Cont.) The ruins of the Hellenic city of Troy are located on the Anatolian coastal plain. It was conclusively discovered in 1873 by German Heinrich Schliemann, one of the fathers of modern archeology. He believed the veracity of The Iliad, by Homer and worked downward from there.

323BC: Death of Alexander the Great (b.356BC). The young King of Macedon initiated a series of conquests that spread Hellenic civilization essentially throughout the known world of his day. He was never defeated in battle, but died at age 32 in Babylon, in the palace of Nebuchadnezzar II, just prior to beginning a planned campaign against Arabia. 

1157: Albert “The Bear” of Saxony, is appointed Margrave of Brandenburg by the Holy Roman Emperor. So what? you might ask. The margraves were principalities (“marches”) out on the borderlands of the Empire, tasked with protecting the Empire from invasion. They required and were authorized to maintain significant military forces, with the Margrave himself given a great deal of autonomy to act in defense of the realm. In reality, the margraves became de facto independent kingdoms. Albert’s accession as Margrave began the process of expanding Brandenburg into the strongest and most prosperous of the northern Germanic states. Added to this its role as Elector of the Holy Roman Emperor, meant that Germany’s most powerful and ambitious families would continually seek a role in Brandenburg’s politics. In 1415 the Hohenzollern family was named Prince-Elector of Brandenburg. The next six hundred years in Central Europe;: Brandenburg–> Brandenburg-Prussia–>Prussia–> Kingdom of Prussia–> German Empire–> Germany–> Third Reich–> East and West Germany–> Germany.  See? I told you it was interesting.

1190: Enroute to the Third Crusade, the Emperor of the Holy Roman Empire, Fredrick Barbarossa (name means “red beard”) (b.1122), drowns in the Saleph River. His loss causes his Germanic army to nearly collapse, but the remnants eventually join the armies of France’s Philip II and England’s Richard Coeur de Lion in Acre.

1215: King John- a.k.a., Prince John whom Robin Hood harassed and who finally assumed the throne of England after the death of his popular brother Richard Lionheart- signs the Magna Carta on Runnymede Plain. The 64-article “Great Charter” is the first royal acknowledgment that the king is subject to the rule of law rather than divine right. It laid the foundation for the revolution in civil governance that gave us English Common Law and eventually the Constitution of the United States. Four copies of the original are extant: one at Salisbury Cathedral, two at the British Museum, and one on loan to the world through various museums.

1389: Battle of Kosovo, in which a Serb nationalist army under the command of Prince Lazar Hrebeljanovic fights an Ottoman Turk army under Sultan Murad I. The battle was fought on Kosovo Field just outside of present day Pristina, and was a bloodbath for both sides. The Ottomans secured a nominal victory on the field, having not only killed tens of thousands of soldiers, but also the Serbs’ leadership cadre as well. Owing to the Ottoman’s massive manpower reserves back in the empire, they were able to force Serbia into submission as a tribute-paying principality. For the Serbs this battle represented all that was good in the Serbian character- the bravery and sacrifice (and simmering resentment)- and it remains a cultural touchstone to this day, most notably when President Slobodan Milosevic invoked it in a speech during the Kosovo War in 1998.

1509: Henry VIII marries his brother’s widow, Catherine of Aragon.

1525: Four years after his excommunication at the Diet of Worms, and in defiance of the Vatican’s rules on priestly celibacy, Martin Luther marries the former nun Katharina von Bora. The two of them not only make beautiful music together (A Mighty Fortress is his most famous hymn), they raise six children of their own in addition to adopting four orphans.

1723: Birth of Adam Smith (d.1790), one of the key figures of the Scottish Enlightenment, best known for his theories on the free market and the “invisible hand” that allows a market to establish a natural price that provides a reasonable return on land, labor and capital. His magnum opus, The Wealth of Nations (1776), expands on the theme, including the dangers inherent in any concentration of wealth or power that distorts natural market effects. 

1752: Philadelphia printer, inventor, and philosopher Benjamin Franklin conducts his famous kite-flying-in-a-thunderstorm experiment, proving that lightning is electricity.

1770: During his First Voyage of Discovery, Captain James Cook runs aground in HMS Endeavour on the Great Barrier Reef. When the ship does not float off with a kedged anchor during the next high tide, Cook immediately orders the crew to lighten ship, eventually discharging all of Endeavour’s fresh water, stores, and all but four cannons over the side. The weight loss, combined with a Herculean effort with two more kedge anchors, frees the ship from the reef. Now afloat again, but 24 miles from the mainland and with large hole below the waterline, the ship is now in danger of sinking before they can safely beach it for repairs.  Midshipman Jonathon Monkhouse was sent over the side with a wadded-up mass of old sailcloth and oakum. He swam down to the hole and thrust the mass into the flow, where it acted like a huge cork, staunching the leak long enough that Cook could cut back from three pumps to one. That process, by the way, is called fothering, and it can be done either as a plug or as a gigantic patch, i.e., sliding an entire sail under the ship from one side to the other.

1775: Eight weeks after the failed raids on Lexington and Concord, British General Thomas Gage declares martial law in Massachusetts. He offers amnesty to any of the American rebels who will lay down their arms, except for Samuel Adams and John Hancock, whom he promises to hang on the spot.

1775: Virginia militia Colonel George Washington accepts a commission to lead the fledgling Continental Army.

1776: The Continental Congress appoints a “Committee of Five” led by Virginian Thomas Jefferson to draft a declaration of independence from Great Britain.

1793: The Jacobin faction of the French revolutionary leadership takes over control of the ill-named Committee of Public Safety and converts it into the Revolutionary Dictatorship. You will not be surprised to know that Madame Guillotine begins to increase the pace of her work.

1815: Battles of Ligny and Quatre Bras, both fought on the same day, setting the stage for Napoleon Bonaparte’s final defeat at Waterloo. Ligny was a small town on the right of the French advance northward into Belgium; the sharp, house-to-house fighting there saw the tactical defeat and withdrawal of von Blucher’s Prussian army and was Napoleon’s final victory in battle. Napoleon’s left was ordered to capture the nearby crossroads at Quatre Bras, but they were held off by the Western coalition forces under the Duke of Wellington who, after confirming the French withdrawal from the battlefield late in the afternoon, executed a strategic re-positioning of his army northward to a low ridgeline just south of the town of Waterloo. Although Napoleon’s grand strategy was designed around keeping Wellington and von Blucher’s forces separated, they in fact maintained active communications despite the increasing distances between them during their withdrawal and repositioning on the 17th.

1825: The cornerstone is laid for Fort Hamilton, sited on the north shore of the Verazzano Narrows, protecting the approaches to New York’s great harbor. 

1829: Birth of Geronimo, the great Apache warrior and medicine man, who fought both US and Mexican expansion into tribal lands from 1858 until his capture in 1886. He was renowned for his close calls and narrow escapes, the most famous of which came in the Robledo Mountains of New Mexico. Under hot pursuit by the US Army, Geronimo and his followers ducked into a cave. US soldiers set up a perimeter to catch them, but they never came back out. After several days Geronimo was spotted nearby, but the second exit from the cave was never found(remember “Injun Joe’s Cave” in Tom Sawyer). After his capture, Geronimo was shuffled between Fort Pickens in Pensacola, Mount Vernon Barracks in Alabama, and finally, Fort Sill, Oklahoma, where he died in 1909.

1837: In Boston, a race riot breaks out between “native” Yankee firefighters and immigrant Irish. The commotion began in the afternoon as a group of Yankee firemen left a pub together and forced themselves through a line of mourners in an Irish funeral procession. The whole interaction went peacefully, until, well, it didn’t. Estimates suggest there were about 800 principal pugilists, and another 10,000 or so cheering and egging them on. I have NO IDEA whether alcohol was a factor, but it may have been. The Broad Street Riot lasted around three hours, and was finally broken up by the mayor calling up several national guard (-type) units, both cavalry with lances and infantry with fixed bayonets. As the dust settled, the city decided it was time to professionalize and to a certain extent integrate the fire and police departments in the city.

1854: First graduation of midshipmen from the new US Naval Academy.

1864(a): With both armies having made strategic movements away from the battlefield of Cold Harbor, Union guns open fire on the crucial Confederate transportation junction of Petersburg, Virginia. Lee’s army throws up breastworks and entrenchments that will eventually stretch for miles around the eastern edges of the city as the siege deepens.

1864(b): Secretary of War Edwin Stanton authorizes a national cemetery on 200 acres of Robert E. Lee’s Arlington plantation across the river from Washington, D.C. One of the early burials of Union soldiers takes place in a mass grave in the garden very near the residence itself.

1886: On the shore of Lake Starnberg, searchers late at night discover the body of King Ludwig II of Bavaria (b.1845), along with Doctor Gudden, who declared him clinically insane a day earlier, thus completing the planned usurpation of the Bavarian throne by his uncle Prince Luitpold. The death was ruled “suicide by drowning” but not surprisingly, controversy remains as to the reality of what really occurred that evening. Ludwig is best remembered as patron to composer Richard Wagner, and for his nearly continuous construction of fanciful palaces and castles.

1903: Deaths of Serbian King Alexander Obrenovic (b.1876) and his wife, Queen Draga Masin. Their murders were part of a general restlessness within the officer corps of the Serbian army over Serbia’s status vis-à-vis the decaying Ottoman Empire, the Austro-Hungarian Empire, the Balkan League, the Russian Pan-Slavic movement, and their own irredentist goals regarding Bosnia & Herzegovina. As a group, the officer corps strongly objected to the marriage of their young king (an only child) to a foreign widow 12 years his senior, who was therefore unlikely to produce a legitimate heir. One of her brothers was rumored to be named as heir apparent at some point, which finally triggered the conspiracy between the officers and members of (believe it or not) the Black Hand: you’ll recall them as the anarchists that planned the 1914 assassination of Archduke Ferdinand. Although the formal Balkan wars didn’t start for another 8 years, this event can be seen as one of the myriad facets of the buildup to the eventual Great War.

1913: Birth of Vince Lombardi (d.1970), whose life defined the sport of professional football as player, coach and general manager.

1917: German Gotha bombers attack central London, killing 162 and injuring 450.

1919: Thoroughbred 3-year old Sir Barton wins the Belmont Stakes, becoming the first horse to win the Triple Crown of American horse racing (Kentucky Derby, Preakness and Belmont). Between the Preakness and Belmont races, he also won the Withers Stakes, making it four wins in 32 days.

1920: At the Republican National Convention in Chicago, party leaders gather in a small meeting room in the Blackstone Hotel to privately come to consensus on the eventual Republican nominee, Warren G. Harding. 

1927: After making a celebratory tour of France and England, Charles Lindbergh returns to New York aboard ship, with the Spirit of St Louis carefully disassembled and stored in the cargo hold. He is greeted this day by a rapturous ticker tape parade. 

1929: Birth of Dutch diarist Anne Frank (d.1945).

1937: Soviet premier Joseph Stalin, increasingly frustrated at the slow pace of communism’s acceptance by Russian society, initiates the military phase of the Great Purge, when he put on trial for treason the brilliant Marshall** of the Soviet Army Mikhail Tukhachevesky and 8 other Soviet Generals. The Purge is one of those astonishing facts that today’s leftist and Progressive stooges often refuse to acknowledge, other than to repeat Stalin’s pathetic quote: “If you want to make an omelet, you have break a few eggs.” Unfortunately for the voluptuaries of collectivism, that omelet never turned out much better than scrambled eggs, and runny ones at that (with no salt and pepper). Total arrests during the Purge reached over 1.5 million nominal “citizens” of the Soviet Union, 680,000 of whom were summarily shot for the “crime” of disagreeing with the direction Stalin and his leadership circle were taking the Soviet state. As in the case of Marshall Tukhachevesky, you didn’t even have to actually disagree- simply the threat of potential disagreement in the mind of Stalin was enough to initiate torture to extract a confession, preparatory to the inevitable bullet to the head at the hands of the NKVD (a.k.a. KGB, a.k.a SVD today).

1940: Smelling blood up north and using as cover the Pact of Steel with Germany, Italy declares war on France and Great Britain.

1940: Under the command of Field Marshall Erwin Rommel, the German Wermacht reaches the English Channel.

1940: Canada declares war on Italy.

1940: Norway surrenders to Germany.

1940: Only days after the British evacuation from Dunkirk, the roughly 50,000 remaining Allied troops on the continent surrender to the overwhelming juggernaut of Field Marshal Erwin Rommel. French General Maxime Weygrand orders Paris to be an open city- “A cessation of hostilities is compulsory-” to save it from certain destruction. Weygrand bitterly blames the British for France’s defeat. France formally capitulates to German arms on the 25^th.

1944: United States Marines land on the South Pacific island of Saipan in Operation Forager. Despite intense naval gunfire support at near point-blank range, Japanese defensive preparation at the landing zone allowed for quick recovery from the barrage, and created devastating accuracy from their defending artillery as the AMTRACS swam ashore. Over half the Marine amphibious tractors are destroyed in the first wave of the assault, and it takes the Marines over three days to expand their toehold beyond the surf zone. The three-week operation finally achieved Saipan’s eventual capture at a cost to the Marine Corps of 16,525 casualties, including 3,426 dead. It became the first operational B-29 base in the Pacific Theater.

1955: Two hours into the 24-hour race at Le Mans, a Mercedes-Benz doing 150 mph on the front straightaway clips an Austin Healey, launches into the air and careens into the grandstand, exploding into a fireball of burning magnesium and debris that kills 77 spectators and injures scores of others. Mercedes withdrew entirely from racing at the close of the season and did not return until 1987. The crash spurred a huge review and overhaul of auto racing safety procedures, including the creation of catch fences and restrictions on crowd placement, among others. Because of this crash, Switzerland immediately banned auto racing on its territory; a ban still in effect to this day.

1958: Death of Imre Nagy (b.1896), former communist Prime Minister of Hungary, whose reforms in 1954-56 led to his forced ouster by the Hungarian Communist Party. A broad cross-section of Hungarian society rose up in revolt, with riots and burnings across the country demanding Nagy’s return to power and removal of the Communist Party from the country. The Soviet Union responded with an invasion of 200,000 soldiers and 2,500 tanks, crushing the uprising and killing thousands. Nagy was captured and imprisoned by the now-reinforced hard-liners, who convicted him of treason and hanged him by the neck until dead on this day. As the communist empire collapsed in 1990-91, Nagy was reburied with full state honors in a funeral attended by over 100,000.

1962: Three men escape from Alcatraz prison using sharpened spoons and an improvised raft. They are never found and are assumed dead from drowning in the frigid waters of San Francisco Bay. 

1961: President John F. Kennedy authorizes the expansion of the U.S. Assistance Mission to Vietnam, from 900 to 3200 advisors.

1963: Russian skydiver Valentina Tereshkova becomes the first woman in space, making a 71-hour, 48-orbit journey in a Voshkod capsule. She remained the only woman cosmonaut or astronaut until the 1980s, with the launch of American Mission Specialist Sally Ride in 1983.

1963: President John F. Kennedy announces from the Oval Office that his administration will seek a comprehensive Civil Rights Bill in order to guarantee equal access to public facilities, ending segregation in education, and guaranteeing federal protection for voting rights.

1964: Senate majority whip Senator Robert Byrd (D-WV) finally sits down after 14 hours and 13 minutes of continuous talking at the end of a marathon 57-day Democratic filibuster of the 1964 Civil Rights Bill. Once the “Conscience of the Senate” yielded the floor, his colleague Senator Richard Russell (D-GA) made his closing argument against the bill. Minority Leader Senator Everett Dirksen (R-IL) then took the floor to invoke cloture: “The time has come for equality of opportunity in sharing in government, in education, and in employment. It will not be stayed or denied. It is here!” The final vote was 71-29, the first time since civil rights bills began moving through Congress in the 1950s that a cloture motion actually ended a filibuster.

1964: Nelson Mandella and others from the African National Congress are sentenced to life in prison for treason and sabotage. Mandella never denies the charge and in fact proudly asserted that the violence planned by the ANC was a legitimate reflection of South African blacks’ grievances. After 27 years of hard labor he is released in 1990 and four years later is elected President of the now-desegregated country.

1967: With the complete collapse of Syrian defenses in Golan, and the frontiers with Jordan and Egypt stabilized, Israel signs a ceasefire with Syria, thus ending the Six Day War.

1971: The New York Times begins the publication of a set of classified documents that came to be known as The Pentagon Papers. They were a 1968 top secret report ordered by Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara, originally titled: United States–Vietnam Relations, 1945–1967: A Study Prepared by the Department of Defense. The report outlined in close detail the thinking and decision-making behind the United States’ buildup and early execution of the Vietnam War and bolstered the cause of the anti-war protesters nationwide. The legal wrangling that followed led to an extensive review and affirmation of First Amendment rights. The person who gave the classified report to the Times was one of the defense contractors who contributed to the report, Daniel Ellsberg. He justified releasing the documents on in a statement: “I felt that as an American citizen, as a responsible citizen, I could no longer cooperate in concealing this information from the American public. I did this clearly at my own jeopardy and I am prepared to answer to all the consequences of this decision”.

1977: Death of German-American rocket engineer and NASA visionary Wernher von Braun (b.1912). Von Braun led the brain trust of captured Nazi engineers who brought V-2 technology to the United States. He also lead the conceptual design work for the multi-stage rocket, which allowed for much higher payloads and altitudes than “conventional” single-stage rockets. He was the chief architect of the massive Saturn V that launched the Apollo program to the moon and back. 

1987: In what may be the defining speech of his presidency, Ronald Reagan stands in the shadow of Berlin’s Brandenburg Gate and issues his stirring call to Soviet premier Mikhail Gorbachev: “Mr. Gorbachev, tear down this wall!”

2023: Daniel Ellsberg, who leaked the Pentagon Papers that detailed U.S. actions during the Vietnam war, died Friday, June 16th at this home in Kensington, Calif. He was 92. The cause, his family said in a statement, was pancreatic cancer. See 1971 above.

About the Author

Wayne Creed

Administrator

View All Posts