History Notes this week of Feb 25

303AD: Roman Emperor Diocletian issues the first official Roman edict calling for the persecution of Christians. The decree gave license to hitherto unknown rampages against the Christian community, many of whom were now in significant positions within Roman society.

1570: Pope Pius V excommunicates Elizabeth I, Queen of England. Although one could speculate on the actual spiritual result of this action, the political end ably served to consolidate her position on the then-still-tenuous Protestant hold on the English crown.

1732: Birth of Virginia planter, militia colonel, delegate to the Continental Congress, General in Chief of the Continental Army, and first President of the United States of America, George Washington (d.1799). His direct military successes during the Revolutionary War were mostly in the breach, but his widely spaced victories were all crucial to the strategic victory of American arms against the British.

1732: Birth of South Carolina militia commander a leader of the modern concept of irregular warfare, Francis Marion (d.1795). Marion’s nickname, “Swamp Fox,” gives a hint of the persistent threat he created for the British forces who had earlier routed the Continental Army at the Battle of Camden.

1778: The Prussian Baron Freidrich Wilhelm von Steuben arrives at the Continental Army’s winter encampment at Valley Forge, Pennsylvania. He immediately begins training the rag-tag army in the fundamentals of professional military order and discipline. He is credited with being one of the fathers of the United States Army.

1779: Virginia Militia Colonel George Rogers Clark, the elder brother of William, captures Fort Vincennes (Indiana) from the British after a dramatic 180 mile march through the flooded flatlands of Illinois. During this march, the temps were in the low 30s, with the floodwaters not much warmer.

1786: Wilhelm Grimm, brother of Jacob, is born (d.1859). The Brothers Grimm were Jacob and Wilhelm Grimm, German academics who collected and published folklore. They are best known for their Kinder- und Hausmärchen (Children’s and Household Tales), which includes Cinderella, Hansel and Gretel, and Rapunzel. 

1807: Birth of American man of letters, Henry Wadsworth Longfellow (d.1882). Longfellow was a Harvard scholar, educator, and a leading American poet of the Victorian era. He was the first American to translate Dante Alighieri’s Divine Comedy in its entirety. Longfellow was known for using American themes in his work, writing about American history, landscapes, and the American Indian. His original works include “Paul Revere’s Ride”, “Evangeline”, and “The Song of Hiawatha”. He also pioneered the field of comparative literature. 

1815: Napoleon Bonaparte effects an escape from his island exile on Elba, not far from the coast of southern France. 

1819: Spain cedes to the United States its last territorial claim (Oregon County) on remaining Florida territory.

1836: Opening guns of Mexican general Santa Anna’s siege of the Alamo.

1836: Lieutenant Colonel William Barret Travis, whose small Alamo garrison went under siege yesterday, dispatches courier Albert Martin with a letter announcing his urgent need for supplies and reinforcements to maintain a strategic American presence in the Texas territory north of the Rio Grande. Martin rode 70 miles to Gonzalez, which served as a rallying point for reinforcements over the next week. Travis’ words electrified the population, setting the stage for the upcoming battle to sear itself into the memories of every Texan since that day.

1836: Samuel Colt is granted a US patent for the Colt revolver.

1854: First meeting of the newly formed Republican Party takes place in Michigan.

1857: Birth in England of Robert Baden-Powell (d.1941), founder of the Boy Scout movement. 
1860: Abraham Lincoln gives a speech at the Cooper Union in New York City that is largely credited with ensuring his Republican Party nomination to the presidency.

1861: On the advice of his security chief Alan Pinkerton, President-elect Abraham Lincoln arrives in Washington under the cover of darkness and disguise. His party skipped a planned stop in Baltimore in response to discovery of an active assassination plot.

1868: The US House of Representatives votes 11 Articles of Impeachment against President Andrew Johnson.
1882: Birth of Husband E. Kimmel (d.1968). Admiral Kimmel was in command of the Pacific Fleet at Pearl Harbor on December 7^th, 1941. From his headquarters he watched, clench-jawed, as Japanese carrier aircraft systematically destroyed the Navy’s complete line of battle. He and Army Lieutenant General Walter Short were both court-martialed for their roles in the disaster. Kimmel went into forced retirement as a two-star (his temporary 4-star rank stripped after the trial)

1909: The Navy’s Great White Fleet returns right here to Hampton Roads after its famous voyage around the world.

1914: Death of Joshua Chamberlain (b.1828), Colonel of 20^th Maine Volunteer Infantry during the War Between the States, hero of Little Round Top at the Battle of Gettysburg, and the officer designated to receive the surrender of the Confederate Army of Northern Virginia at Appomattox. After the war he returned to his professorship at Bowdoin College, and was elected to four terms as Governor of Maine. His Civil War wounds continued to bother him after the war, finally leading to the complications that brought his eventful life to a close at age 85, adding one more footnote as the last Civil War veteran to die of his wounds. 

1914: Launch of HMHS Britannic, sister ship to RMS Titanic. Although she was fitted with improvements designed to mitigate the issues that doomed her elder sibling (double-hull sheathing around the engine rooms, water-tight bulkheads raised to the B-deck, extensive lifeboat capability), she nonetheless met a violent end in her role as a hospital ship, hitting a German mine near the Greek island of Kea just south of Athens in November of 1916. The mine ripped a massive hole in her bow, and she plunged to the bottom in less than an hour. Of the thousand people aboard, only 30 people lost their lives.

1917: The Zimmermann Telegram is exposed, making public Germany’s attempts to engage Mexico as an active belligerent ally in the Great War. In the coded message, Foreign Minister Arthur Zimmermann promised money and arms to Mexico if they would make war on the United States. One of Zimmerman’s key “sweeteners” was his suggestion that Germany would fully support a Mexican reconquista of Texas, New Mexico and Arizona. The telegram was electronically intercepted by British Intelligence when it was sent on 16^thJanuary, and the fully de-coded text was finally shown to the American embassy staff in London on 17^th February. The message circulated through classified U.S. Government channels until this day, when the Hearst newspaper chain broke the story. Not surprisingly- and pleasantly for His Majesty’s Government- it created immediate outrage in the United States against Germany, and was one of the triggers for our eventual entry into the Great War in April.

1932: In England, birth of actress Elizabeth Taylor (d.2011).

1932: Birth of country singer, Johnny Cash (d.2003)

1933: USS Ranger (CV-4) is launched up the James River in Newport News, Virginia. Although it is the fourth US Navy ship to carry a full flight deck, it is the first one designed from the keel up as a dedicated aircraft carrier. Ironically, despite its large number of innovative features, it was far less successful operationally than the two earlier cruiser conversions, USS Lexington (CV-2) and USS Saratoga (CV-3). Among other things, Ranger featured folding smokestacks to pull boiler gasses and smoke away from the flight deck, and thin parking outriggers to help move parked airplanes off of the deck’s operational area. Pilots’ “ready rooms” were nothing more than wide spots in the passageways. Because of the large number of its un-tried innovations, the whole system failed to live up to its warfighting promise. But its design errors were well noted and rectified by the follow-on designs of the Yorktown and Essex class carriers that went on to glory in the Pacific war. Ranger spent most of WWII on anti-submarine patrol in the Atlantic, in addition to ferrying USAAF aircraft to the ETO. 

1935: After 12 years of running a “civilian” flight training service, and two years operating the German Aviation Sport Unit (DLV), German Chancellor Adolf Hitler orders Hermann Goering to form a formal air force in direct violation of the Treaty of Versailles. The Luftwaffe’s rapid growth and fitting out with the most modern combat aircraft in Europe was met with shock, but no sanctions, by the League of Nations.

1942: President Roosevelt orders General Douglas MacArthur to evacuate himself from the collapsing defense of the Philippines. MacArthur defies the President’s order for two weeks before turning over his Corregidor command to LTG Jonathan Wainwright.

1942: A Japanese submarine shells an oil refinery in Ellwood, California, near Santa Barbara. Damage was minimal, but coming so soon after the disaster at Pearl Harbor, the attack was directly responsible for renewed anti-Japanese panic and the accelerated internment of Japanese-Americans to camps Nevada.

1945: American Marines raise the U.S. flag on Mount Surabachi, Iwo Jima. 

1946: American Charge d’Affairs in Moscow George Kennan sends his famous Long Telegram to the State Department. The 800 word paper outlines the intellectual rationale for the policy of containment against an expansionist Soviet Union, and was the basis of our national security policy until the collapse of the soviet state in 1991. Ambassador Kennan died in 2005 at the age of 101.

1959: Lee Petty wins the first Daytona 500.

1964: 22 year old Cassius Clay defeats Sonny Liston for the boxing heavyweight title. This was the first bout between the two, and after Liston retired after seven rounds, Clay darted around the ring screaming, “I am the greatest! I must be the greatest!” Clay and Liston would meet again in May for one of the most iconic fights of the century.

1968: After a three week battle, South Vietnamese and US Marines re-capture Hue City, thus ending the Tet Offensive. The Tet Offensive was a series of attacks by North Vietnamese and Viet Cong forces on South Vietnam in January 1968. The attacks took place during the Vietnamese lunar new year holiday, or Tet. 

1974: Newspaper heiress and debutante Patty Hearst is kidnapped by the Symbianese Liberation Army, a typically violent group of left-wing radicals bent on destroying American society.

1980: The Miracle on Ice. The US Olympic hockey team, made up of mostly college players with an average age of 22, defeats the Soviet Union team 4-3 in the silver medal round at the Lake Placid Olympics, and then went on to beat Finland for the gold medal. The team was earlier routed by the Soviets 10-2 at an exhibition game in Madison Square Garden.

1984: President Ronald Reagan orders U.S. forces to withdraw from their tenuous toe-hold at the Beirut airport, where they had been under essentially constant attack for the last two years.

1991: American and coalition forces cross the line of departure in Saudi Arabia to begin the ground phase of the First Gulf War. 

1991: President George H. W. Bush announces on national television: “Kuwait is Liberated!”

1993: Inspired by the “blind sheikh” Omar Abdul Raman, Islamic terrorists detonate a massive truck bomb in the parking garage of the World Trade Center’s north tower. Seven people are killed and over a thousand are injured by the attack. After his trial and conviction, his co-conspirators went on to finish the job eight years later. Raman passed in 2017 after two decades in a U.S. prison where he continued to issue fatwas against the infidel West.

1997: Birth of Dolly the sheep, the world’s first cloned mammal.

2008: Death of William F. Buckley, Jr. (b.1925). The founder of National Review and the godfather of the conservative intellectual movement, he made a stunning impact on the Ivy League status quo with the publication of his first book, God and Man at Yale in 1951, the same year the young Yale graduate was recruited to the CIA. He worked two years for that organization and only knew the name of one supervisor, E. Howard Hunt. In 1955 Buckley published the first edition of National Review, noting that its mission was to “…stand athwart History, shouting stop!” In addition to his print journalism, Buckley hosted the nation’s longest-running television program, PBS’ Firing Line. He was an avid sailor (making two crossings of the Atlantic, and one of the Pacific).