History Notes this week of August 11

778: Death of Roland, the historic Frankish captain and governor of the Breton March (under Emperor Charlemagne) at the Battle of Roncevaux Pass in the Pyrenees. The battle occurred after Charlemagne defeated the Saxons in a long-running campaign through Frankish lands into the Iberian Peninsula. The fighting began during the return march, when the Frankish army passed through a narrow defile where they were obliged to proceed single-file. Unfortunately for this victorious but tired army, this was in Basque country, and the Basques ambushed them as Roland’s section brought up the rear of the column. Roland and scores of others were killed, but the remainder of Charlemagne’s army made it out. From this point the legend begins, eventually morphing during the 12th Century into Le Chanson de Roland (The Song of Roland), a tale that focused on the noble knight sacrificing himself for the greater good of his sovereign. The Song is the oldest surviving piece of French literature, and its various iterations cemented Roland’s position as the noble defender all across Europe. 

927: A Saracen raiding army led by Slavic Sabir conquers the strategic Greco-Roman seaport of Taranto, completely reducing it to rubble and carrying all survivors off to slavery in North Africa. Saracen was a term used both in Greek and Latin writings between the 5th and 15th centuries to refer to the people who lived in and near what was designated by the Romans as Arabia Petraea and Arabia Deserta. The term’s meaning evolved during its history of usage. 

1519: Five ships under the command of Ferdinand Magellan set sail from Seville on what will become a three year voyage of discovery, death, endurance and eventual triumph as the first circumnavigation of the globe.

1776: Six weeks after it left the printer, news of our Declaration of Independence makes it to London. No telling how it was received, but we can guess.

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.

1792: Three years into the increasing chaos of the French Revolution, a mob finally storms the Tuileries Palace and arrests King Louis XVI.

1792: Three days after his physical removal from the Tuilleries Palace, French King Louis XVI is formally placed under arrest by the National Tribunal and charged as Citizen Louis Capet with being an “Enemy of the people.”

1861: Death of Eliphalet Remington (b.1793), an upstate New York blacksmith who designed and hand-made a new style of sporting rifle that became wildly popular with hunters moving into the Old Northwest. He formed the E. Remington and Sons company to manufacture low cost but highly effective rifle barrels that were then mated with receivers and stocks made by other gunsmiths. Remington’s line eventually expanded into the full range of firearm manufacturing. Its high quality machining also made it a natural fit for other precision equipment, most particularly typewriters, in 1873.

1881: Birth of pioneering and flamboyant filmmaker Cecil B. DeMille (d.1959), whose ambitious movies often were advertised as having “a cast of thousands,” because they quite literally had a cast of thousands of fully costumed extras in key scenes.

1874: Birth of 31^st President of the United States, Herbert Hoover (d.1964).

1892: Death of German aviation pioneer Otto Lilienthal (b.1848), whose nominal successes with gliders was a major inspiration to the Wright Brothers’ development of systematic and incremental advances in their flying machine project. He died when one of his gliders stalled and he fell from about 60 feet, breaking his back. Wilbur Wright visited his widow during his 1909 aviation tour de force in Europe. 

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.

1898: The United States and Spain agree to an armistice, ending hostilities of the four-month long Spanish-American War. The two sides agree to send five commissioners each to a peace treaty negotiation in Paris by the first of October.

1898: Spanish American War — Spanish and American forces stage a mock battle in Manila to create the appearance of a Spanish surrender under hostile conditions. The bottom line for both sides was to create a colonial hand-off which would prevent a large native Philippine army from sacking the city and taking revenge on the defeated Spanish citizens who remained. American Commodore Dewey and Generals MacArthur and Merritt negotiated the terms of the battle beforehand with the Spanish governor, and at 0900, Dewey’s ships began a bombardment of an abandoned and decrepit fort on the outskirts of town, including lobbing a few shells at the essentially impregnable, but manned, fortress of Intramuros, closer in to the city, wherein was a large refugee population. On schedule, Spanish forces marched out and American forces marched in, although there was a small skirmish with a Spanish company that didn’t get the word. With only that interruption, the takeover was completed without Filipino intervention, and the American occupation of the islands began in earnest.

1899: Birth of the British film director, Alfred Hitchcock (d.1980). 

1912: U.S. Marines, led by Colonel Joseph Pendleton and Captain Smedley Butler, invade Nicaragua in support of the recently-elected pro-U.S. government. Nicaragua had been destabilized by a rebel movement, the Sandinistas (sound familiar?), who threatened the plantations of the United Fruit Company and other businesses in the country. This was the first of a series of American military interventions, known as the Banana Wars, throughout the Caribbean basin that reinforced both the Monroe Doctrine (vis-à-vis European interests) and Teddy Roosevelt’s “Big Stick” (supporting direct American interests). The Marines remained in occupation in Nicaragua at varying levels of support through 1933.

1914: Completing Europe’s descent into the maelstrom of the Great War, Great Britain declares war on Austria-Hungary.

1914: The Panama Canal opens to commercial traffic. Unfortunately for the people who labored for years on this engineering and construction masterpiece, the event is completely overshadowed by the opening guns of Great Power combat in Europe.

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)).

1932: Death of film start, the original Rin Tin Tin (b.1918).

1933: Birth of American race car driver Parnelli Jones (d.2024), winner of the 1963 Indy 500, and the near-winner again in 1967, driving the radical STP turbine car, which dominated the race until three laps to go, when a transmission bearing failed.

1935: Deaths of American humorist Will Rogers (b.1879) and aviation pioneer Wiley Post (b.1898) on takeoff in their float-plane near Fairbanks, Alaska. Post was on a mission to scout out potential float-plane routes between the United States and Russia, and Rogers invited himself along to gather more material for his newspaper columns. On the trip northward, Rogers would pull out a typewriter after takeoff and write his articles on his lap while Post flew the airplane. The machine they were using was a one-off combination of a Lockheed Explorer wing fitted to a Lockheed Orion fuselage with a set of custom floats designed for neither. It was notoriously nose-heavy, but Post managed to make it work until this day.

1941: Final day of four days of meetings between British Prime Minister Winston Churchill and U.S. President Franklin Roosevelt aboard USS Augusta (CA-31) in Placentia Bay, Newfoundland. Their secret rendezvous was the end result of planning that began back in February, but was delayed by multiple disasters in the European war. Both leaders traveled to the site on capital ships (Churchill aboard the new battleship HMS Prince of Wales). The outcome of the meeting was a joint declaration on this day, which published eight points that would guide the post-war world. It was quickly dubbed The Atlantic Charter, and its prescriptions were treated with the force of law. No signed copies of the document were ever made, although Roosevelt’s papers contained one copy with a single signature on it. Churchill noted the ambiguity of the Charter in his memoirs on the Yalta Conference [paraphrasing] “The British Constitution is like the Atlantic Charter- the document did not exist, yet all the world knew about it…”

1944: Allied armies under the command of US Army Generals Jacob Devers, Alexander Patch and Lucian Truscott, land in southern France in Operation DRAGOON (formerly Operation ANVIL). This second front in the western theatre opens up the seaports of Marseille and Toulon to Allied supplies, greatly augmenting what could otherwise be put into France through the heavily damaged Cherbourg and the nearly-destroyed Mulberry facilities near Normandy. Despite German preparations and knowledge of the impending landings, the invasion was executed very much as planned, and caused the German forces to quickly abandon their positions and withdraw into northern France to join with Army Group B near the Swiss frontier.
 
1945: Japanese Emperor Hirohito, having witnessed the complete destruction of his Imperial Navy, his air force, the cream of his army, the capture of Okinawa, the firebombing of Tokyo and the sudden obliteration of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, publicly announces via recorded radio transmission that he is prepared to accept the Allied** terms of surrender. Most of his cabinet and leading military officers disagreed, and an unsuccessful coup attempt was staged on the 12^th -13^th, but the Emperor held firm with his decision [excerpt]: “I have given serious thought to the situation prevailing at home and abroad and have concluded that continuing the war can only mean destruction for the nation and prolongation of bloodshed and cruelty in the world. I cannot bear to see my innocent people suffer any longer. … It goes without saying that it is unbearable for me to see the brave and loyal fighting men of Japan disarmed. It is equally unbearable that others who have rendered me devoted service should now be punished as instigators of the war. Nevertheless, the time has come to bear the unbearable. … I swallow my tears and give my sanction to the proposal to accept the Allied proclamation on the basis outlined by the Foreign Minister.”

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. 

1961: The government of the communist German Democratic Republic closes all its border crossings into West Berlin and begins construction of the Cold War’s most notorious artifact, The Berlin Wall.  In a typical communist abomination of language, what passed for a government in East Germany called it an “anti-fascist protective rampart.” Most Osties were not impressed.

1969: Three weeks after arriving back on their home planet, Apollo 11 astronauts Neil Armstrong, Buzz Aldrin and Mike Collins are finally released from biological quarantine. They are feted with a ticker tape parade (remember those?) in NYC and a state dinner in Los Angeles, where President Nixon awards them the Presidential Medal of Freedom. 

1969: Opening acts of the Woodstock Music and Arts Festival.

1977: First free-flight of prototype Space Shuttle Enterprise, which made a series of five atmospheric glides to verify flight control systems and algorithms, among other shuttle systems tests. It was displayed at the Smithsonian Air & Space Museum Dulles Annex until Shuttle Discovery arrived for its permanent display in 2012. Stewardship of Enterprise passed to the USS Intrepid Sea-Air-Space Museum in New York City in June, 2012, where it is now on display on the flight deck.The spacecraft was lightly damaged during Hurricane Sandy, when the storm deflated its inflatable hangar, a strap of which then broke off a small portion of the vertical stabilizer, which has since been repaired. [The moment of release from the NASA 747 carrier (there’s some negative-G going on in that airliner); turning toward the nearly-infinite runway at Edwards AFB] Note: the aerodynamic tailcone was used to stabilize the airflow around the carrier aircraft’s vertical stabilizer. The cone was removed after the first three free-flights, exposing the main engine and orbital maneuvering system engine components for the remaining two flights. 

1990: The Magellan space probe reaches the planet Venus. This might be a coincidence on the date, but then again, maybe not.