History Notes this week of Oct 25

312: At the Battle of Milvian Bridge (crossing the Tiber), the Emperor Constantine sees a Vision of the Cross, which inspired him to victory in the battle and began the process of his subsequent conversion to Christianity.

1295: A treaty of alliance is signed between the crowns of Scotland and France, pledging that if one of them is attacked by England, the other will attack England in return. The treaty, known informally as the Auld Alliance, was formally renewed by every sovereign of the two countries through 1560, when Scotland became officially Protestant, and after which the accession of Scotland’s James VI (as England’s James I) formally joined the two island antagonists.

1415: An English army under the command of King Henry V decisively defeats a larger and better equipped French army at the Battle of Agincourt. The battle is notable for the effective use of English longbows and the high number of casualties among the French nobles who fought there. It was also the central scene in William Shakespeare’s play Henry V, which gave us one of the greatest inspirational speeches in history:

“We few, we happy few, we band of brothers;
For he to-day that sheds his blood with me
Shall be my brother
be he ne’er so vile
This day shall gentle his condition:
And gentlemen in England now a-bed
Shall think themselves accursed they were not here,
And hold their manhoods cheap whiles any speaks
That fought with us upon Saint Crispin’s Day.”

[Kenneth Branagh as Henry V (1989), making that speech (the movie’s theme song Non Nobis Domini is stirring as well)]

1456: Death of John of Capistrano (b.1386), Italian priest, Franciscan monk, theologian, and at age 70 (!)- a warrior accompanying the Hungarian army on a Crusade to Constantinople, and before which he personally led a military contingent that raised the siege of Belgrade. If you’re familiar with California history, you know that the Spanish Mission San Juan Capistrano, situated just north of San Diego, is the only one of the missions on El Camino Real that retains its original adobe construction on site. It is famous for the annual return of a huge flock of migrating swallows, the harbingers of Spring (which, given the weather in southern California, is really kind of moot, but we’ll let it go)
[Himself, tonsured and armored]

1618: Death of Sir Walter Raleigh (b.1552), on the order of King James I of England, by beheading. Raleigh was a nobleman-adventurer, a favorite of Queen Elizabeth I, who commissioned his self-financed but ill-fated attempt to colonize “Virginia” down in what we now know as Dare County, NC.
Raleigh fell out of Elizabeth’s favor when he secretly married one of her (pregnant) ladies-in-waiting without the Queen’s permission. For this crime, he was arrested and held in the Tower of London for a short time before his wife was released from Royal service.
In 1594 he read a Spanish report concerning Muana, a supposed city of gold in South America. A year later he led an expedition that explored the northeast coast of that continent, particularly in and around the region of Guiana. A year after his return he published an account of the voyage, exaggerating somewhat the lurid concept of the golden city, as yet still undiscovered, and now known as the famous El Dorado. But I digress. When the Protestant Elizabeth died in 1603, the Catholic James I had Raleigh arrested for treason based on circumstantial evidence linking him to an unsuccessful plot to overthrow the king. Back to the Tower he went, where he remained for thirteen years, writing prolifically, and where his son Crewe was conceived, although as a guilty traitor, Raleigh was legally “dead” during the conception. I wonder how that worked…
James authorized Raleigh’s release in 1616 to undertake another expedition to find El Dorado. Again, they didn’t find it, but during the trip they did take the opportunity to plunder the Spanish town of San Tome. News of this act infuriated the Spanish ambassador, and for the sake of the already tenuous relationship between England and Spain, James had Raleigh re-arrested and executed. Always ready for the next adventure, as Raleigh lay his head on the block waiting for the axe to fall, he called to the executioner, “Strike man! Strike!”

1628: After 14 months of siege, the Huguenot seaport of La Rochelle surrenders to the forces of King Louis XIII and his Chief Minister, Cardinal Richelieu. La Rochelle was the center of French Protestantism, and despite having formal permission under the Edict of Nantes (1598) to worship as they chose, the Catholic restoration under Louis put the city- third largest in France at 30,000- in direct opposition to His Most Catholic Majesty. Richelieu’s determination to crush the Huguenots was the main force that consolidated central political power in the hands of the King, creating the concept of a strong, centralized state that defines nationhood to this day. The British, no surprise, made three significant attempts to intervene on behalf of La Rochelle, but were unable to sustain it by sea after the French fortified all the seaward approaches to the city.

1634: The legislature of the Massachusetts Bay Colony establishes the charter for Harvard College, with the specific injunction later noted in a 1645 brochure: “To advance Learning and perpetuate it to Posterity; dreading to leave an illiterate Ministery to the Churche.”[sic].

1642: The first battle of the English Civil War(s) is fought to a desultory conclusion at Edgehill. It is a nominal victory for King Charles I, but does little to change the course of the deep conflict between Royalist and Parliamentarian armies.

1648: Final ratification of the Peace of Westphalia, which brought to an end the Thirty Years’ War. It is no stretch to call this the first “world war” in history, as it wracked the continent of Europe from one end to the other.
The fighting centered in what is now Germany, but what was then the Holy Roman Empire, which was actually 255 fiercely independent city-states and territories, nominally confederated under the Holy Roman Emperor, of the Austrian House of Hapsburg. Does that all make sense? Good.
The initial fighting was itself a spillover from earlier Catholic-Lutheran conflicts, made more complicated by the growth of Calvinism in many Protestant districts. All this unrest to the East held the attention of the Bourbon dynasty in both Spain (with its not-quite adjacent holdings in the Netherlands and northern Italy), and France, with its long Rhineland border with the fractious Germanic states.
Because of the huge political undertones of the religious fighting, the emphasis shifted during the course of the war from the rights of Protestants and Catholics, to the general balance of power on the continent, especially as it played out between the Bourbons and Hapsburgs. Even Sweden- who held extensive lands on the northern tier- and England, whose mercantile economy was intimately tied in with Continental trade, were pulled into the seemingly perpetual conflict.
The whole point here is this: when the diplomats were finished negotiating this treaty, the sovereigns of Europe found themselves functioning within the concept of the State System: a system of recognized sovereignty and law, for which the sovereign was the custodian, not the arbiter. What we understand today as “Poland” or “Switzerland” or “Sweden” did not exist until Westphalia. The Peace drastically curtailed the already tenuous hold of the Emperor on his German states, focusing his core attentions on his Austrian domains. For France, the Peace consolidated its position as the major power in western Europe, giving it a relatively free hand to disabuse Spain of any continuing influence east of the Pyrenees, and ensuring that the German states would never become a unitary power of their own, at least within the lifetime of the Westphalia diplomatic corps.

1704: Death of English philosopher John Locke (b.1632), whose writing on the nature of government, property, price theory and the life of the mind set the foundations for the Scottish Enlightenment and the Age of Reason. Thomas Jefferson considered Locke as one of the three “…greatest men that have ever lived, without any exception…”

1728: Birth of the great British explorer James Cook (d.1779).

1760: Upon the death of his father, George II, George III becomes King of Great Britain.

1776: Philadelphia printer and inventor Benjamin Franklin departs as the United States’ first Ambassador to France. His mission is to secure France’s support for the fledgling republic across the water, and he uses his utmost charm to engage the Crown on our behalf. For some reason, Franklin’s wry, rustic charm makes him tres populaire with the denizens of Court.

1795: After six years of political turmoil, intentional terror against its own citizens, regicide and war against virtually all of Europe, France dissolves its National Convention (its third legislature since the revolution began) and establishes a bicameral legislature consisting of the Council of Ancients (upper house) and the Council of 500 (lower house), both of whom will today appoint a 5-member Directory as the Executive agency. The Directory system will last for four years, after which that fiery Corsican general- old what’s his name– will overthrow the toothless executive and replace it with a Consulate, headed by… himself, of course.

1810: The United States annexes the Republic of West Florida from Spain. What we now know as the Panhandle (between the Apalachicola and Perdido Rivers) was originally settled by Spain, was taken by Britain during French and Indian War, given back to Spain as part of the negotiations that ended the Revolution, and was briefly declared by its American settlers as an independent Republic in early 1810, under the “Bonney Blue Flag.”

1825: Opening of the Erie Canal, connecting Albany, NY (and hence the port of NYC) to Lake Erie (and hence the agricultural riches of the Ohio valley). Not only did it eliminate the need for portage, it also cut shipping costs by 95%, which fueled an economic boom in western New York and points west.

1854: In a crucial decision during the Crimean War, FizRoy Somerset, 1st Baron Raglan, orders an unnecessary attack on Russian positions of unknown strength. It lead to the debacle of the Charge of the Light Brigade, who rode under the direct leadership of Lord Cardigan, who survived the battle* but who remained furious at the tendentiousness of the original order. The battle is best remembered, of course, by another brilliant bit of English poetry, this time from Alfred Lord Tennyson.

1858: Birth of Nobel Laureate, scholar, author, Rough Rider, Assistant Secretary of the Navy and 26th President of the United States, Theodore Roosevelt (d.1919).

1861: President Abraham Lincoln, under the provisions of Article I, section 9 of the Constitution, suspends the writ of habeus corpus, giving the federal government the ability to hold suspected rebels indefinitely without trial. Here’s the pertinent Constitutional clause, because I know you’re curious: “The privilege of the writ of habeas corpus shall not be suspended, unless when in cases of rebellion or invasion the public safety may require it.” Given the events of the previous six months, Lincoln certainly was dealing with a significant rebellion south of the Potomac River.

1861: Completion of the United States’ first transcontinental telegraph line, effectively killing the more romantic but hopelessly archaic 18 month run of the Pony Express. [Installing a high tech 12-bar version of the once ubiquitous poles (c.1895). Note the extension on the LH side of the pole in the background, which is a mere 11-bar pole]

1863: Under the leadership of Swiss businessman Henry Dunant, a group of 18 nations meets in Geneva and agree to form an “International Committee for Relief to the Wounded” with the specific charter that centered on:

1. The foundation of national relief societies for wounded soldiers;
2. Neutrality and protection for wounded soldiers;
3. Utilization of volunteer forces for relief assistance on the battlefield;
4. Organization of additional conferences to enact these concepts into legally binding international treaties, and;
5. The introduction of a common distinctive protection symbol for medical personnel in the field, namely a white armlet bearing a red cross.
   A year later, the Committee added two more requirements:
6. The national society must be recognized by its own national government as a relief society according to the convention, and
7. The national government of the respective country must be a state party to the Geneva Convention.
   So if you’ve ever wondered how a “neutral” organization could make such a lasting impact on the lives and well-being of war casualties world-wide, look again at the elegance of those seven standards, and thank the ICRC for its powerful work.

1869: Birth of Ohio sportsman John Heisman (d.1936), a great player in his own right, and a better football, basketball and baseball coach for ten (!) universities and colleges between 1892 and 1927, retiring with a football record of 186-70-18 and a baseball record of 219-119-7. It’s no wonder the NCAA named the trophy after him.

1870: France suffers a second crippling defeat at Prussian hands at the siege of Metz, during the Franco-Prussian War. The collapse was a direct result of the earlier capture of an entire French army with the Emperor at Sedan in early September.

1877: Death of Nathan Bedford Forrest (b.1821), whose brilliance as a Confederate cavalry commander was tarnished by his post-war association with the Ku Klux Klan. When asked about his successes during the Civil War, he was widely credited with explaining it to people by “…being the fustest with the mostest.”

1881: Birth of avant garde artist Pablo Picasso (d.1973).

1881: Doc Holliday and the Earp Brothers kill 3 of the 5 Bad Guys, led by Ike Clanton, at the famous Shootout at the OK Corral in Tombstone, Arizona.

1891: Birth of radio preacher Father Charles Coughlin (d.1979), whose fiery populism originally supported, but later turned on the New Deal and the Roosevelt administration. His on-air and public shtick descended steadily into virulent anti-Semitism, which eventually led to an increasingly bitter battle between himself and broadcast regulators, finally causing him to be silenced from radio ministry in 1939.

1901: Annie Edson Tyler becomes the first person to go over Niagara Falls in a barrel. She was 63 at the time, and when she was finally uncorked from the almost-coffin, she declared: “If it was with my dying breath, I would caution anyone against attempting the feat… I would sooner walk up to the mouth of a cannon, knowing it was going to blow me to pieces than make another trip over the Fall.”

1911: Reprising the brothers’ 1903 success with their flying machine, Orville Wright returns to Kill Devil Hill, NC with a newly designed glider that incorporates many of the lessons they learned during their Huffman Prairie flights** back in Dayton. The new machine uses a now-conventional elevator and rudder combination at the rear of the plane, and the pilot sits upright with hand controls, as opposed to lying prone in a hip cradle. On this day, with 40 knot winds blowing up the hill, Wright and his team get the machine airborne and remain aloft, under complete control, for 9 minutes 45 seconds, a record for non-powered flight that will stand for ten years.

1914: Birth of Welsh poet Dylan Thomas (d.1953).

1914: Birth of Jonas Salk (d.1995).

1917: A Russian mob, under the leadership of Vladimir Lenin and his Bolsheviks, storms and captures Tsar Nicholas II’s Winter Palace in St. Petersburg, thus creating the opening battle of the “October Revolution” phase of the larger Russian Revolution.

1925: Birth of funnyman Johnny Carson (d.2005), whose years on The Late Show kept us in stitches just in time to go to bed.

1926: Birth of NFL great Y.A. Tittle (d.2017), quarterback for the San Francisco 49ers (1950-1960) and then for three championship years with the New York Giants (1961-63).

1929: Wall Street suffers the original Black Monday, which put the exclamation point on two weeks of already-sagging stock prices that failed to rally from two earlier interventions. This one day’s losses amounted to a 13% drop in market value. On Tuesday, the market dropped another 12%, and the week ended with total losses of over $30,000,000,000.00 (with a B). Those are 1929* dollars, by the way. The index at its September peak was around 290 (two hundred ninety).

1940: Birth of Brazilian soccer superstar Pele (d.2022), who is probably the only soccer star most of us can name outside of David Beckham.

1940: First flight of the P-51 Mustang, widely considered the ultimate propeller-driven fighter plane.

1944: Opening guns of the Battle of Leyte Gulf, which over the course of three days became the largest naval battle in history. The battle’s first shots were actually a highly successful torpedo attack by two American submarines yesterday against a Japanese cruiser force getting underway from Brunei. Two cruisers of the force went to the bottom, forcing a Japanese reversal overnight. The primary battles took place on the 24th & 25th, so we’ll have to wait to talk about them, maybe a Day Late or so…

1944: Battle of Leyte Gulf, Day 2– The torpedo shot in Brunei yesterday should have given the Imperial Japanese Navy pause as they sortied toward the central Philippines, but it didn’t. As the American invasion fleet continued its offload in Leyte Gulf, two of the six carriers of the US Third Fleet intercepted Admiral Kurita’s Japanese Center Force of battleships and cruisers in the Subuyian Sea east of Leyte, making a furious and continuing attack on the Japanese super-battleship Musahsi in particular, which eventually sank after taking direct hits from at least 17 bombs and 18 torpedoes. The IJN Yamato and Nagato also took several hits, but remained operational as the Japanese fleet turned around for several hours to get out from under the American attackers. Late in the afternoon they reestablished their course for San Bernardino Strait. During the ensuing melee, land-based Japanese fighters swarmed toward the American striking aircraft, but were completely overpowered by the supporting American fighter aircraft. Commander David McCampbell distinguished himself this day with 9 confirmed kills. As the day wound down, the Third Fleet Commander, Admiral William “Bull” Halsey, acting on intelligence about the discovery of the Japanese Northern Force, withdrew the two carriers to join with his other four carriers and their associated battleship forces to dash north east to intercept and destroy Japan’s remaining carriers. The American surface fleet that expected to be guarding the San Bernardino Strait was included in the run north, leaving the entire northern approaches of Leyte Gulf un-monitored and un-protected by the US Navy.

1944: Battle of Leyte Gulf, Day 3. There are three climactic actions this day:

1. Battle of Suriago Strait, the world’s final all-gun naval battle. Rear Admiral Jesse Oldendorf positioned himself at the northern end of the passage with a massive blocking formation of 6 battleships (five of which were Pearl Harbor survivors), 4 heavy cruisers, 4 light cruisers, 28 destroyers and 39 PT boats, creating a gauntlet of fire that would, for six hours on this night, destroy the Japanese Southern Force in detail, sinking both of its battleships, two heavy cruisers and at least three destroyers outright, with several more surviving Japanese ships sunk by aircraft later in the morning as they tried to escape back south through the strait.
2. Battle off Samar. Admiral Kurita’s still-potent Central Force slipped through San Bernardino Strait unopposed overnight, making its way down the eastern coastline of Samar Island with what appeared to be a clear run to General MacArthur’s invasion fleet. Kurita’s four battleships, including the massive Yamato, six heavy cruisers, two light cruisers and eleven destroyers carried enough firepower to systematically obliterate the American landing force, which would be ranged by their guns in mere hours. Nothing now stood between Kurita and his targets except a handful of startled escort carriers (CVE) carrying only ~30 planes each, and another handful of destroyers, armed with 5″ guns and torpedoes.
   Rear Admiral Clifton Sprague ordered all of his planes- about 90 total- to launch as the CVEs scuttled toward rain squalls to the east. The old Wildcats and Avengers attacked with such fury that Kurita believed he had roused the large carriers of Third Fleet rather than nearly hopeless escorts of the Seventh Fleet. When the planes ran out of ammunition, they kept making dry runs to try to force the Japanese out of ammo. The destroyer squadrons also ran at flank speed into the Japanese formation, firing their little 5 inchers into the huge armored targets before them. The CVEs themselves came under direct Japanese gunfire, with USS Gambier Bay (CVE-73) the particular object of IJN Yamato’s 18″ artillery, which crippled and sank the thin-skinned carrier, the only carrier in the war to be sunk by naval gunfire. Then suddenly, when the American position looked doomed, Admiral Kurita fired one last salvo at the American ships and turned around to the north to retire from the fight, a stroke of luck in the famous “fog of war” that no-one anticipated. May I recommend a book, The Last Stand of the Tin Can Sailors (2004) by James D. Hornfischer. It will give you a mesmerizing insight into the reality of this nearly point blank David-and-Goliath slugfest.
3. Battle of Cape Engano. The Japanese Northern Force of four aircraft carriers and old battleships, the decoy fleet designed to draw off Halsey’s Third Fleet from the main event, actually did decoy Halsey and his five fleet carriers, five light carriers, six battleships, eight cruisers and forty destroyers to chase them several hundred miles away from the main fight at Leyte. But they paid for it, as they expected. Admiral Ozawa’s 108 aircraft were no match for Halsey’s 7-800, and after his planes were swept from the skies, the virtually undefended ships came under withering attack from the Americans, who sank three carriers and a destroyer, and heavily damaged the two light carriers. Despite these important victories, the main story of this battle was the fact that it happened at all, epitomized by the message to Halsey from Fleet Admiral Nimitz at the height of the crisis off Samar: “Where is Third Fleet? The World Wonders.”

1951: Birth of Dirk Kempthorne (d.2026), United States Senator, 49th Secretary of the Interior, 30th Governor of Idaho, and my classmate at the University of Idaho, where he was President of the Student Body.

1956: First day of direct military action in the Suez Crisis of 1956. The dispute, centering on control of the Suez Canal, pitted a coalition of Britain, France and Israel against the United Arab Republic (Egypt) of President Gamal Abdul Nasser. The United States found itself in the awkward position of diplomatically opposing and militarily threatening its two closest Cold War and WWII allies in order to maintain its favorable position vis-à-vis its primary Arab ally, Saudi Arabia.
The crisis had been playing out for the better part of 1956, with the nationalist Nasser overthrowing the pro-British King Farouk, followed by nationalizing the Canal itself, much to the dismay of Britain and France in particular. In a parallel slap to the United States, after the U.S. withdrew support for the Aswan High Dam project, Nasser took pains to also formally recognize Red China in defiance of the U.S.
The secret Anglo-Franco-Israeli scheme was to have Israel capture the Sinai Peninsula and both sides of the Canal, after which Britain and France would call for UN disengagement between the Israeli and Egyptian forces, all the while they provided major air support from six aircraft carriers in the Mediterranean and three airfields on Cyprus. The expected end state was the restoration of British control over the Canal.
On this day Israeli armed forces launched their attack to capture Mitla Pass and began a systematic destruction of Egyptian forces in the remainder of the Sinai. The actual end state was a highly successful Israeli military campaign, complemented by highly effective Anglo-French attacks on Egyptian infrastructure. For its part, the United States then itself quite effectively threatened the United Kingdom with bankruptcy if it persisted on its course, and re-positioned two U.S. carriers between the Anglo-French fleet and the coast of North Africa. The success of this threat underscored Britain’s (and to a lesser extent France’s) diminishing role on the international stage in the Cold War era.

1962: Soviet Premier Nikita Khrushchev announces the withdrawal of Russian SS-3 nuclear missiles from their new launching sites in Cuba, effectively ending the Cuban Missile Crisis. The United States, for its part, agreed publicly to not invade Cuba or allow anyone else to invade the island via U.S. assistance. Secretly, President Kennedy also agreed to withdraw our Jupiter missiles from Turkey and Italy, deployments that the Soviet leadership used to justify their installation of SS-3s in Cuba. In Soviet circles, Khrushchev was seen as having been disgraced by Kennedy, a situation that led to his dismissal as Party Secretary two years later.

1972: Death of Los Angeles Dodger, Jackie Robinson (b.1919)

1973: Last day of the Yom Kippur War, which didn’t turn out as expected for Egypt and Syria.

1981: Birth of swimmer and 7-time Olympic medalist Amanda Beard. [Herself, after a dip]

1983: The barracks of United States Marine peacekeepers at the Beirut airport is attacked by a suicide truck bomb, killing 241 Marines. Simultaneously, another suicide bomber attacks the French barracks, killing 51 French soldiers.

1998: Space Shuttle Discovery launches into orbit on STS-95. One of the crew was 77 year old former Marine combat pilot, test pilot, astronaut and Senator, John Glenn. In the control room for his historic return to space was his Capsule Communicator for the riveting Friendship 7 mission at the dawn of American space flight, Scott Carpenter, who reprised for this launch his famous quote from the first one: “Godspeed John Glenn.”

2002: Arrest of Washington, D.C. sniper terrorists John Allen Muhammad and Lee Boyd Malvo at a rest stop in Maryland. Muhammad has already gone on to his well-deserved reward. Malvo will get his later.

2004: Death of comedian Vaughn Meader (b.1936), whose fifteen minutes of fame came in the form of hilarious LP albums* mimicking the accents and proclivities of President John F. Kennedy and his family.

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Wayne Creed

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