History Notes this week of Aug 17

43BC: Octavian- after the Battle of Alexandria (2 weeks back), exercises his influence to get himself elected as part of the Second Triumvirate (i.e., three-way dictatorship) of the Roman Senate. Interesting tidbit on his name: he was born into a noble household as Gaius Octavius Thurinus; adopted in 44BC by Julius Caesar, he became known as Gaius Julius Caesar, and after the battle in Egypt, Gaius Julius Caesar Augustus. To keep things straight, historians use a three part shorthand to designate the phases of his life: Octavius (64-44), Octavian (44-27), and Augustus (27BC- 14AD). 

1227: Traditional date for the death of Genghis Khan (b. circa 1162), the great Mongol warlord and leader of an empire that spread from China’s coastal plains, across the steppes of central Asia to the banks of the Dnieper River and the gates of Kiev. He is credited on the positive side with consolidating the Silk Road into a peaceful trading confederation*, for instituting a nominal level of meritocracy in his governmental postings, and for creating a unifying political structure across a fractious region. On the other hand, he is also correctly portrayed as a brutal conqueror who gained most of his distant territories through genocide and random murder. As a military commander he had no peer during his lifetime.

1473: Birth of Richard, Duke of York, one of the two “Princes in the Tower” (with his brother Edward, Prince of Wales ) whose arrest and mysterious disappearance made the way clear for their uncle to assume the throne of England as Richard III. It is an ugly, ugly story, made more famous by the Bard, William Shakespeare, in his play, Richard III. All references to the two young heirs end without a trace sometime in 1483.

1587: Birth of Virginia Dare, granddaughter of the governor Roanoke Colony, John White. Miss Dare was the first English child born in the Americas.

1754: Birth of Banastre Tarleton (d.1833), the British Lieutenant-Colonel who distinguished himself during the American Revolution as an exceptionally brutal commander during the British Southern Campaign. His actions in that theater earned him the nickname of “Bloody Ban,” a result of the mass killing of American militia who were in the act of surrendering at the Battle of Waxhaw Creek in North Carolina. The action inflamed the rest of the colonies and led to the battle cry of “Tarleton’s Quarter!” when Americans came back into contact with the Redcoat army.

1774: Birth of Meriwether Lewis (d.1809), the other half of the leadership team that surveyed the new Louisiana Territory in the great Corps of Discovery expedition of 1803. 

1777: An American militia force, under the leadership of General John Stark, completely routs a detachment of British General Burgoyne’s army who were tasked with rounding up horses and other supplies in the area. The Battle of Bennington decisively weakened Burgoyne’s strength in upper New England, providing bracing encouragement to the nascent United States, and helped lay the groundwork for France’s eventual alliance against Great Britain. 

1780: Battle of Camden (SC). Between the improving prospects of the American revolutionaries in the northern colonies and France’s recent alliance with America, Britain decides to execute a “Southern Strategy” to crush the relatively weak Southern militias (i.e., Francis Marion’s Swamp Foxes) and consolidate the larger Southern Tory political factions behind the Crown. The British under Lord Cornwallis had already re-taken Savannah and Charleston, and now made plans to subdue the interior by capturing Camden, South Carolina, which was a major crossroads for inland travel. In response, the Continental Army began to re-form in Charlotte, North Carolina under General Horatio Gates, the hero of the American victory in Saratoga, NY. Before his army and militia was fully formed, Gates ordered an immediate deployment down to Camden to meet Cornwallis’ army before it could take the town. The haste was his undoing; on the morning of the battle, the poorly organized and worse disciplined left wing of the militia crumbled and ran after the first volleys. The adjacent militia subsequently turned and ran with Gates himself in company, even before they engaged, leaving the lone Continental regiment to be destroyed in detail by the British Regulars and the cavalry of the notorious Lieutenant Colonel Banastre Tarleton. For his part, Gates never held command again, but because of his earlier service he was never held to account for the disaster at Camden.

1786: Birth of the Tennessee frontiersman, soldier, twice-elected Member of Congress, and hero of Battle of the Alamo, Davy Crockett (d.1836).

1812: Captain Issac Hull, commanding the frigate USS Constitution, engages the British heavy frigate HMS Guerriere off the coast of Nova Scotia and blasts her into a useless and splintered hulk, killing a third of her crew and sending shock waves throughout the Royal Navy and joy throughout the United States. Continuing to close through the Briton’s early cannonades, Hull withheld the order to fire back until they were a mere 25 yards off, at which point he ordered a shattering broadside that swept Guerriere’s decks and almost immediately began her dismasting. Though damaged in the rigging, Constitution comes out of the battle essentially intact. During the battle, Guerriere’s cannonballs were seen bouncing off the stout oaken sides of the Constitution, prompting the cry, “Huzzah! Her sides are made of iron!”

1831: Just down the road from here in Southampton County, the slave Nat Turner leads what he believes will be a God-inspired revolt to throw off the chains of slavery. After months of planning, he and a handful of compatriots during the night of 20-21^st of August begin to gather an “army” by stealthily moving from farm to farm, killing the whites with knives, axes and blunt instruments, and enjoining the now-freed slaves to join them to continue the process until they have enough forces for an expected stand-up fight with the inevitable militia pursuit. By the time militia formed up in the morning, Turner’s forces had killed 55 whites and swelled their own ranks to approximately 70 slaves and free blacks. The rebellion was quickly suppressed the day after it started, but Turner escaped the dragnet until October 30^th, after which he was tried and executed on November 5^th.  Turner’s Rebellion came to stand for all that was wrong with the slave system, between the moral and physical degradation of the practice, to the latent threat of this kind of uprising, to the expense of maintaining slaves during the long downturn in tobacco prices; the system had been for nearly ten years prior showing signs of collapse, particularly in the mid-Atlantic states. Further emphasizing the point, the Liberian repatriation movement was already in full swing, but the brutality of the uprising, and the potential scope of a similar threat in the future led to a significant hardening of Southern attitudes, all of which figured in  the development of the new cotton plantations in the Deep South and the burgeoning slave trade that supported that new labor market. It also represented the enslaved souls’ unending desire for freedom and a willingness to take action to gain that freedom. 

1838: Wilkes Expedition. In a long-delayed follow up to the Corps of Discovery, six US Navy ships of the United States Exploring Expedition weigh anchor from right here in Hampton Roads to begin a four-year journey around the American continents and into the Pacific basin. Their mission was to create accurate surveys of newly found lands, promote American commerce abroad, and conduct scientific surveys of resources in previous discoveries. The expedition was under the command of Lieutenant Charles Wilkes, USN, for whom the expedition is named.

1839: The French government, after granting Louis Daguerre a lifetime pension for his invention, announces that the Daguerreotype photographic process is “Free to All.” This is great news except in England, where Daguerre filed a patent a year earlier, which limited the island to only one licensed photographer through the life of the patent.

1848: Eight months after the discovery of loose gold near Coloma, California, the New York Herald becomes the first East Coast newspaper to announce the news to the rest of the world. The gold rush that began during this summer became a veritable flood of Easterners chartering clipper ships to San Francisco, which transformed the city from a sleepy fishing town and army post to a booming den of iniquity and gold-fueled wealth. Because of the one-way nature of the commerce, hundreds of ships were left abandoned on the San Francisco waterfront, where their remains are still excavated today during many construction projects.

1862: The flamboyant Virginia horseman J.E.B. Stuart is assigned command of the cavalry for the Army of Northern Virginia.

1863: A carefully planned raid by rebel-Rebel gunmen, led by William Clark Quantrill, attacks the anti-slavery town of Lawrence, Kansas, burning a quarter of its buildings to the ground, killing over 200 military-aged men, and pillaging whatever remained. Quantrill’s Raid, also known as the Lawrence Massacre, became one of the bloodiest events in Kansas’ history, which had seen more than its share of abolitionist violence since the first Sack of Lawrence in 1856, and helped cement the title of “Bleeding Kansas” on that front line of the ongoing battle between expanding or restricting slavery in the western territories.

1896: A rich vein of Placer gold is found in the Rabbit Creek (now Bonanza Creek) tributary of the Klondike River in the Alaska Territory. The discovery was made by three prospecting partners, Skookum Jim Mason (a native Eskimo), Dawson Charlie (ibid) and his nephew Patsy Henderson (ibid). Their discovery triggers the Klondike Gold Rush, that lasted only a few years, but yielded over twelve and half million ounces of gold since the discovery.

1914: Two weeks after Albert I, King of Belgium, denies the Imperial German Army passage into France, the Germans occupy Brussels

1920: After nearly 75 years of increasingly powerful campaigning, this day sees the final ratification of the Nineteenth Amendment to the Constitution, guaranteeing women’s suffrage.

1920: Founding of the National Football League.

1929: Riots begin in British Palestinian Mandate after the Mufti of Jerusalem gives a fiery sermon excoriating Jewish worshipers who erected a temporary screen** between men and women at the Wailing Wall. The thinly-manned British police were unable to stop the violence, which burned prayer books and notes left in the foundation stones by the Jews. The rampage continued through the night, eventually leading to the stabbing death of a young Sephardic Jew named Abraham Mizrachi. His funeral, in turn, became a political rally, which further inflamed the Arab “street.” Flaming editorials were published in both Arab and Jewish newspapers, and the tensions led directly to two pogroms: the 1929 Hebron Massacre (where 68 Jews were killed (23-23 August)), and the 1929 Safed Massacre (where 15 Jews were killed and 80 wounded (29 August)).

1938: The “Iron Horse” of the New York Yankees, Lou Gehrig, smashes his 23^rd grand slam home run, a record that stood until the former Yankee slugger Alex Rodriguez hit his 24th in the 2013 season. At the close of his career in 2016, Rodriguez finished with a total of 25 of them.

1940: Death of Leon Trotsky (b.1879),  Vladimir Lenin’s right-hand* man, organizer and commander of the Red Army, Commissar of Foreign Affairs who negotiated the Brest-Litovsk Treaty with Imperial Germany, and staunch opponent of Joseph Stalin’s rise to power in the Communist Party leadership. Trotsky resented Stalin’s emphasis on consolidating Communism in Russia, rather than continuing along the pure path of global revolution. His comment on the problems inherent with bureaucratizing a revolution: “In inner-party politics, these methods lead, as we shall yet see, to this: the party organization substitutes itself for the party, the central committee substitutes itself for the organization, and, finally, a “dictator” substitutes himself for the central committee.”  Trotsky wrote passionately against Stalin after he was exiled to Mexico: “Bureaucracy and social harmony are inversely proportional to each other… In Stalin each [Soviet bureaucrat] easily finds himself. But Stalin also finds in each one a small part of his own spirit. Stalin is the personification of the bureaucracy. That is the substance of his political personality.” On the night before today, the bureaucracy had had enough, and NKVD agent Roman Mercader connived his way into Trotsky’s Mexican home and plunged an ice-axe into his head. Amazingly, it did not kill him immediately; after a futile surgery, Trotsky’s last words were, “Stalin has finally accomplished the task he attempted unsuccessfully before.”

1943: The United States Army Air Corps Eighth Air Force loses 60 B-17s, with severe damage to over 90 more aircraft during a combined raid on the Schweinfurt-Regensburg industrial complex deep in Germany. 376 bombers were assigned to the daylight mission, which was designed to cripple the German aircraft industry by destroying the factories that produced ball-bearings for the engines. Of note, the B-17s were required to spend over three hours un-escorted over German territory in order to reach their targets, time which allowed the Luftwaffe to wreak havoc on the lumbering machines. For you military planners out there, note too that the bomber “waves” were spaced far enough apart to allow the Germans time to re-fuel and re-arm their fighters for continued defense. Operationally, the results were little short of a complete disaster, with the strikes creating only a temporary loss of about 30% of pre-strike ball-bearing capacity.

1943: The U.S. Seventh Army under General George S. Patton enters the strategic city of Messina, Sicily, several hours ahead of the British Eighth Army under General Bernard Montgomery.

1947: Death of Ettore Bugatti (b.1881), Italian engineer and automobile designer, who set up a French company bearing his name that produced some of the most successful and beautiful cars of the 1920s-30s. The name Bugatti was associated with precision and high performance throughout the pre-war period. The marque was revived in 1987 by an Italian entrepreneur who, in 1996, designed and built the stunning EB 110 supercar. Volkswagen Group acquired the marque in 1998 and used its deep financial pockets and engineering prowess to produce the Veyron 16.4, the world’s fastest production car (top speed just shy of 270 mph). 

1953: In coordination with Great Britain’s MI-6, the CIA assists in the coup d’etat of Iranian Prime Minister Mohammed Mosaddegh, a virulent Persian nationalist who campaigned incessantly against Britain’s economic ties with Iran. His 1951 election brought with it a host of Progressive social reforms and wholesale nationalization of the oil industry, which was not seen in Britain’s best interests. Winston Churchill let it be known to the U.S. that Mosaddegh was also leaning heavily communist, which of course helped secure American interest. 
 
1960: U.S. Air Force pilot, Captain Joseph Kittinger (b.1928, d.2022), leaps out of a balloon from 102,800 feet, and freefalls for over four minutes, reaching 614 mph. The jump was Kittenger’s third from high altitude (the first two were from 76,400 and 74,700 feet respectively) as part of the Excelsior tests of high altitude ejection parachute systems for modern jet aircraft. On his first jump the six foot drogue stabilizer wrapped around his neck and started him spinning at 120 rpm, which knocked him unconscious, but he was saved by the automatic systems that opened his main chute at 10,000 feet. On this test, the pressurization failed in his right glove and he lost use of it from the onset of frostbite. He didn’t tell the flight surgeon until just before stepping out. The jump set records for highest jump, fastest human speed through the atmosphere, longest freefall and longest drogue freefall. After the test series, he served three combat tours in Vietnam, getting shot down in 1971 and serving as POW in the Hanoi Hilton for eleven months. He retired as a Colonel. Kittinger and lived in Orlando, Florida until his death in 2022.

1968: Increasingly concerned about the dangerous liberalism undertaken by Czech premier 
Alexander Dubcek, the Soviet Union invades Czechoslovakia in a vivid demonstration of the 
Brezhnev Doctrine, wherein the USSR retains the right to “protect the gains of the socialist revolution” in any country it could reach.

1969: Hurricane Camille slams into the Mississippi Gulf Coast. The Category 5 storm kills 248 people and causes $1.5B in damage.

1977: Death of Groucho Marx (b.1890), who famously quipped, among other famous quips, “Please accept my resignation. I don’t care to belong to any club that will have me as a member”.

1981: Two F-14 Tomcats flying from USS Nimitz (CVN-68) shoot down two Libyan SU-22 Fitters during a Freedom of Navigation exercise in the Gulf of Sidra.

1987: Death of Nazi Deputy Fuehrer Rudolf Hess (b.1894), who remains perhaps one of the most enigmatic figures of the World War II era. In May of 1941, Hess piloted an ME-110 fighter on an extended range, low level flight to Scotland, where he parachuted out and, once on the ground, requested a meeting with the Duke of Hamilton, ostensibly to negotiate a separate peace with Great Britain. The British government immediately arrested him and confined him to the Tower of London, the last actual prisoner to serve there, where he was extensively debriefed on the internal workings of the Nazi government. The supposed negotiations regarding a separate peace would have allowed Germany to apply all its power against the Soviet Union, and the silence of the British government on the subject made the already paranoid Soviet state absolutely insane about Hess. At the Nuremburg Trials he was convicted of war crimes and crimes against the peace, and sentenced to life in Spandau Prison, where the Soviets insisted to the end under their Four Power rights that he never be released. Hess died in Spandau at age 93, the only prisoner at the facility for many years, by suicide in the prison garden. 

1991: The August Coup– First full day of the coup attempt by Soviet hardliners against the reform government of Mikhail Gorbachev. On this day the Red Army was ordered into Moscow to shell the “White House” parliament building. Moscow mayor Boris Yeltsin climbs up onto a tank with a bullhorn and exhorts the crowd of over 100,000 to keep demonstrating for reform and freedom.

1991: Estonia releases a statement re-asserting its status as an independent Baltic nation, in defiance of the Soviet Union’s 1941 annexation of it and its two sister republics.
 
2007: Death of hotel and real estate mogul, Leona Helmsley (b.1920), the Queen of Mean, who famously declaimed at her tax-evasion trial: “Only the little people pay taxes.”

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Wayne Creed

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