Perhaps a wolf once approached some some long-dead campfire in hopes of a morsel. Maybe someone took in a sick or injured puppy. Wolf packs could have shadowed human hunting parties, the two groups learning to work together for their mutual advantage. The story is lost to the mists of time, but one thing is certain. The bond that exists between our kind and canis familiaris will be with us, until the end of days.
Is there a creature alive capable of the loyalty and fidelity of a dog? Take, for example, Miguel Guzmán of Cordoba Argentina, who died in 2006. The following day Capitán, the family German Shepherd, vanished. Mrs. Guzmán and the couple’s son searched and searched until the dog arrived at the cemetery, forty-five minutes away.
No one knows how he got there. The family claims they didn’t bring him. Cemetery director Hector Baccega remembers when he first saw the dog: ‘He turned up here one day, all on his own, and started wandering all around the cemetery until he eventually found the tomb of his master”.
Capitan. H/T Guardian, for this image
Capitán was brought home but he was back, the following day. Baccega describes what has since become, routine: “During the day he sometimes has a walk around the cemetery, but always rushes back to the grave. And every day, at six o’clock sharp, he lies down on top of the grave [and] stays there all night”.
Capitán lived to fifteen or sixteen, old for a large breed, and died in February 2018, in the cemetery in which he had lived. He was crippled and mostly blind by that time when he went to join his human “Dad”. Who knows, I certainly don’t. Maybe they really are together again.
“Greyfriar’s Bobby” was a Skye Terrier in 19th-century Edinburgh, who waited 14 years by the grave of his owner, police nightwatchman, John Gray. He died there in 1872 and was buried in the Greyfriars Kirkyard, not far from where his master lay.
Artist William Brodie created a life-sized likeness atop the Greyfriars Bobby Fountain in Edinburgh. Paid for by local aristocrat Baroness Burdett-Coutts, the memorial was dedicated November 15, 1873.
Hachikō, an Akita known to Japanese children as chūken Hachikō (“faithful dog Hachikō”), liked to tag along with his owner Hidesaburō Ueno, a professor of agriculture at Tokyo University. Ueno would commute to work, and every evening, Hachikō would wait at the Shibuya Station for the professor’s return.
In May 1925, a cerebral hemorrhage took him away while delivering a lecture. Hidesaburō Ueno was never coming home. Every day for the next nine years, nine months and fifteen days, the golden colored Akita appeared at Shibuya Station, precisely on time for that evening train.
Ruswarp was a fourteen-year old Border Collie who went hiking with Graham Nuttall on January 20, 1990 in the Welsh Mountains near Llandrindod. On April 7, a hiker discovered Nuttall’s body near a mountain stream. For eleven weeks the dog had been standing guard.
Ruswarp was so weak that he had to be carried off the mountain and died shortly thereafter. Today there’s a small monument in his memory on a platform near the Garsdale railway station.
In the early morning hours of August 6, 2011, 30 American military service members including 22 US Navy SEALs were killed along with eight Afghans, SEAL Team 6 handler John “Jet Li” Douangdara and his Military Working Dog (MWD) “Bart”. The Chinook helicopter in which they were riding was shot down by a rocket-propelled grenade in the Kunar Province, of Afghanistan.
To anyone around at that time, the images of “Hawkeye”, together for the last time with slain Navy SEAL Jon Tumilson, are hard to forget.
In 1936, a sheep handler whose name is lost to history tended his flock in the fields near Fort Benton, Montana. With him always was his four-legged partner and sheepdog, “Shep”.
The man fell ill and was taken to a local hospital. For over a week, Shep waited at the hospital for his master to return. On the 11th day, the man died, his casket taken to the local train station and placed in the cargo hold to be returned home for burial.
Shep was there throughout and watched the train chug away. He’d return to that hospital door where a kindly nun would feed him a scrap, but every time he heard that train whistle, there was a sheepdog waiting at the station.
In those days, there were four trains a day. For nearly six years, Shep returned to the station, every time he heard that whistle. He even dug a den for himself, near the track.
Passengers took the Havre to Great Falls rail line just to see the dog. Shep received so much fan mail, the Great Northern Railroad assigned a secretary to write responses.
In time, the dog wasn’t quite so fast as he used to be, his hearing not so good. On January 12, 1942, “Forever Faithful” Shep was struck and killed on the tracks, waiting for a man who could never return.
There are enough stories like this to fill a book. I keep a sign at my home to remind me. It’s on the wall in the kitchen. “Lord, make me half the man my dog thinks I am“.
Begun on November 1, 1955, the American war in Southeast Asia lasted 19 years, 5 months and a day. On March 29, 1973, two months after signing the Paris Peace accords, the last US combat troops left South Vietnam as Hanoi freed the remaining POWs held in North Vietnam.
It was the longest war in American history, until Afghanistan.
Jan Scruggs served in that war. Two tours, returning home with a Purple Heart and three army commendation medals as well as a medal for valor. Theirs was an unpopular war. Like many he found readjustment to civilian life, difficult.
In 1979 he and Becky, his wife of five years, went to see a movie. The Deer Hunter. The film seemed to bring it all back. The RPG that had left him so grievously wounded. The accidental explosion of those mortar rounds that had killed his buddies. Twelve of them.
That night passed without sleep, a waking nightmare of flashbacks and alcohol. By dawn he’d envisioned a memorial. With names on it. Maybe an obelisk. On the Mall, in Washington DC. Becky feared he was losing his mind.
Scruggs was working for the department of labor at the time when he took a week off, to pursue the project.
The idea received little support. The project was impractical it was said, and besides, the project would distract veterans organizations from more important work. Undaunted, Scruggs left his job to pursue the project, full time.
It was tough going. Becky was now the sole breadwinner. In two months the project raised a scant $144.50.
Always a sign of the contemptible times in which we live, the CBS Evening News ridiculed the project. Late night “comedians” joined in the mockery and yet, that CBS report attracted the attention of powerful allies. Thousands of dollars came in from not-so-powerful contributors, mostly in $5 and $10 denominations.
Chuck Hagel, then deputy administrator for the United States Department of Veterans Affairs, took interest. Likewise John Wheeler, a fellow Vietnam vet – turned attorney who’d spearheaded the effort to erect the Southeast Asia Memorial on the military academy, at West Point.
$8 million came in over the next two years and then came the competition. The actual design. There were 1,422 submissions, so many that selections were carried out in an aircraft hangar.
Much to her surprise, the winner was 1st-generation American of Chinese ancestry Maya Lin, then an undergraduate studying architecture, at Yale University.
“The Wall” was dedicated on this day. November 13, 1982.
Lin’s design takes the form of a black granite wall, 493½-feet long and 10-feet, 3-inches high at its peak, laid out in a great wedge of stone seeming to rise from the earth and return to it. The name of every person lost in the war in Vietnam sandblasted onto stone, appearing in the order in which they were killed.
Go to the highest point on the memorial, panel 1E, the very first name is that of Air Force Tech Sgt. Richard B. Fitzgibbon, Jr. of Stoneham, Massachusetts, killed on June 8, 1956. Some distance to his right you will find the name of Marine Corps Lance Cpl. Richard B. Fitzgibbon III, killed on Sept. 7, 1965. The Fitzgibbons are one of three Father/Son pairs so memorialized.
The names begin at the center and move outward, the east wing ending on May 25, 1968. The same day continues at the far end of the west wing, moving back toward the center at panel 1W. The last name on the wall, the last person killed in the war, meets the first. The circle is closed.
There you will find the name of Kelton Rena Turner of Los Angeles, an 18-year old Marine, killed in action on May 15, 1975 during the “Mayaguez incident”, two weeks after the evacuation of Saigon.
Approach from the east and the first name you will encounter is that of Sergeant Jessie C. Alba of Port Lavaca, Tex., who served in the 101st Airborne Division and was killed near Hue in a mortar attack. Sgt. Alba was engage to be married on the day he was killed. Mary Ann Lopez later wrote in an on-line tribute, “Even now after so many years past, I still think of him and what our lives, could of been.”
Those who go to war are never the only ones to serve and to sacrifice, on behalf of the rest of us.
Most sources list Gary L. Hall, Joseph N. Hargrove and Danny G. Marshall as the last to die in Vietnam, though their fate remains, unknown. These were United States Marines, an M-60 machine gun squad, mistakenly left behind while covering the evacuation of their comrades, from the beaches of Koh Tang Island. Their names appear along with Turner’s on panel 1W, lines 130-131.
There were 57,939 names inscribed on the Memorial when it opened in 1982. 39,996 died at age 22 or younger. 8,283 were 19 years old. The 18-year-olds are the largest age group, with 33,103. Twelve of them were 17. Five were 16. There is one name on panel 23W, line 096, that of PFC Dan Bullock, United States Marine Corps. He was 15 years old on June 7, 1969. The day he died.
Left to right: PFC Gary Hall, KIA age 19, LCPL Joseph Hargrove, KIA on his 24th birthday, Pvt Danny Marshall, KIA age 19, PFC Dan Bullock, KIA age 15
Eight names belong to women, killed while nursing the wounded. 997 soldiers were killed on their first day in Vietnam. 1,448 died on their last. There are 31 pairs of brothers on the Wall. 62 parents left to endure the loss of two sons.
As of Memorial Day 2015, there are 58,307, as the names of military personnel who succumbed to wounds sustained during the war, were added to the wall.
Over the years, the Wall has inspired a number of tributes, including a traveling 3/5ths scale model of the original and countless smaller ones, bringing the grandeur of Lin’s design to untold numbers without the means or the opportunity, to travel to the nation’s capital.
In South Lyons Michigan, the black marble Michigan War Dog Memorial pays tribute to the names and tattoo numbers of 4,234 “War Dogs” who served in Southeast Asia, the vast majority of whom were left behind as “surplus equipment”.
There is even a Vietnam Veterans Dog Tag Memorial, at the Harold Washington Library, in Chicago.
Ten years ago, the Vietnam Veterans Memorial Fund, www.vvmf.org began work on a virtual “Wall of Faces”, where each name is remembered with a face, and a story to go with it. In 2017, the organization was still looking for 6,000+ photographs. As I write this there remain only 200, yet to be discovered.
Check it out. Pass it around. You might be able to help.
I was nine years old in May 1968, the single deadliest month of that war with 2,415 killed. All these decades later later I still recall the way so many disgraced themselves, in the way they treated those returning home from that place.
Even today as veterans of the war in Vietnam know the appreciation that is their due, the scars run deep for the recognition too often denied, those many years ago.
Now in the modern era we trust and expect our countrymen will remember. Any issue taken with US war policy, needs to brought up with the politicians who craft that policy. Not a member of the Armed Services, doing what his nation called on him to do.
The military went out of its way during World War 2 to provide the traditional Thanksgiving meal for soldiers and Marines at home, as well as overseas. Thousands of turkeys with all the trimmings fanned out in a worldwide effort to make sure every uniformed member of the armed services had a holiday meal.
In the English tradition, days of Thanksgiving first came about during the Reformation, in the time of King Henry VIII.
Historian Michael Gannon writes about the “real first Thanksgiving” in America taking place in 1565, when Pedro Menéndez de Avilés landed in modern-day Florida. Avilés “had the Indians fed and then dined himself,” likely on a diet of salt-pork stew and garbanzo beans. Yumm.
According to the Library of Congress, the English colony of Popham in present-day Maine held a “harvest feast and prayer meeting” with the Abenaki people in 1607, nearly two decades before the “first Thanksgiving” we all learned about in 5th grade.
In 1619, thirty eight settlers departed Bristol, England on board the ship Margaret bound for Virginia, under the leadership of Captain John Woodliffe. London Company proprietors instructed these settlers that “the day of our ships arrival . . . shall be yearly and perpetually kept as a day of Thanksgiving.” So it was the December 4 landing at Berkeley Hundred became a day of prayer and Thanksgiving, nearly a year before the “pilgrims” landed on the outer reaches of Cape Cod.
Surprisingly little comes down to us from that “first Thanksgiving”, of 1621. Governor William Bradford’s Of Plymouth Plantation and Mourt’s Relations by Edward Winslow provide only hints of a harvest feast, sometime between September and November of 1621.
“Waterfowl” were surely on the menu and, the Wampanoag being a coastal peoplE. Shellfish were likely included along with dried fish and maybe a seal, or a boiled eagle.
The 1st Continental Congress proclaimed a national day of thanksgiving in 1777, a time of national thanksgiving and celebration following the Patriot victory, at Saratoga.
“…It is therefore recommended to the legislative or executive Powers of these UNITED STATES to set apart THURSDAY, the eighteenth Day of December next, for SOLEMN THANKSGIVING and PRAISE:…”
November 1, 1777
George Washington proclaimed the first National day of Thanksgiving on November 26, 1783, “to recommend to the People of the United States a day of public thanksgiving and prayer to be observed by acknowledging with grateful hearts the many signal favors of Almighty God especially by affording them an opportunity peaceably to establish a form of government for their safety and happiness“.
Echoing President Washington’s 1789 declaration, Confederate President Jefferson Davis declared a “day of fasting, humiliation and prayer” to be observed on November 15, 1861. Major General Thomas Jonathan “Stonewall” Jackson ordered drills suspended for the day. While it must have seemed a welcome break to the soldier in the field it wasn’t a day of fasting Abraham Lincoln had in mind, two years later.
On October 3, 1863, President Lincoln declared a general day of Thanksgiving to be observed on the last Thursday of November. The following year, the Union League Club of New York determined to provide a feast for every federal soldier and sailor in the Union military. Private funds were raised for the occasion resulting in an estimated 373,586-pounds of poultry, “an enormous quantity of cakes, doughnuts, gingerbread, pickles, preserved fruits, apples, vegetables, and all the other things which go to make up a Northern Thanksgiving Dinner.”
Thanksgiving 2023 marks 160 such celebrations, since that time. Many times since that day in 1863, military service members have celebrated the day in foreign lands.
The Spanish American War of 1898 was America’s first foreign war. Even then, the widespread and timely distribution of perishable items made a broad-based celebration of Thanksgiving overseas, impractical.
The US was a late arrival to World War 1 with the congressional declaration of war in April 1917, following the sinking of six American vessels and the “Zimmermann note“, a diplomatic communication offering US territories in exchange for a Mexican declaration of war, against the United States.
Two million American service members were deployed “over there” before it was over with another two million training ‘stateside’, preparing to go.
While bland by modern standards the ‘doughboys’ of the Great War enjoyed greater dietary variety and more fresh foods than in previous conflicts. Commissaries at home and overseas pulled out the stops to provide a traditional Thanksgiving day meal in 1917, patterned nearly entirely on the traditional New England feast.
Thanksgiving Menu for Company A, 134th Infantry Training at Camp Cody, New Mexico, 1917
Mess sergeants the world over sought to upgrade the standard ration in 1917 with the Army standard issue, pumpkin pie.
Troops enjoying Thanksgiving following the end of World War I, November 1918. Hat tip http://www.worldwar1centennial.org, for this image
Meanwhile on the home front, American civilians pitched in to help the war effort with home grown vegetables, and sugarless ice cream.
“USMC Lieutenant Colonel W. W. Stickney preparing to cut a Thanksgiving holiday cake with a captured Japanese sword, Guadalcanal, Solomon Islands. 26 November 1942”. – H/T warhistoryonline
The military went out of its way during World War 2 to provide the traditional Thanksgiving meal for soldiers and Marines at home, as well as overseas. Thousands of turkeys with all the trimmings fanned out in a worldwide effort to make sure every uniformed member of the armed services had a holiday meal.
Already accustomed to a better class of rations, US Navy sailors enjoyed a sumptuous repast in 1943 as seen by this menu from the escort carrier, Wake Island.
Thanksgiving in Italy, 1944. H/T National World War 2 Museum, for these photos
By November 1944, Romania and Italy had switched sides. Despite mixed success the Soviet Red Army was inexorably driving, from the east.
Half a world away in the jungles of New Guinea, Chaplain Russell C. Stroup of the 6th U.S. Infantry, Pacific Theater, wrote home:
“The big moment was the noon meal. The government got a plentiful supply of frozen turkeys to us – whole birds, just as they would be at home. Each company of about 150 to 200 men had about 200 pounds of turkey. Since the turkeys had to be cooked on just two field ranges in each company, cooking began the night before and continued through the morning. There was fruit cocktail from cans, mashed potatoes, dressing, peas, pickles, cranberry sauce, fresh rolls, pumpkin pie, and coffee. Plenty of everything filled every nook and cranny of the men. They left the groaning boards as stuffed as the turkeys had been, to lay around for a sunlit afternoon. By supper, we were back to bully beef, but no one cared since no one was hungry yet”.
Thanksgiving Day, November 23, 1944
President Franklin Delano Roosevelt proclaimed from the US Capital:
“…Now, Therefore, I, Franklin D. Roosevelt, President of the United States of America, in consonance with the joint resolution of the Congress approved December 26, 1941, do hereby proclaim Thursday the twenty-third day of November 1944 a day of national thanksgiving; and I call upon the people of the United States to observe it by bending every effort to hasten the day of final victory and by offering to God our devout gratitude for His goodness to us and to our fellow men”.
Proclamation 2629—Thanksgiving Day, 1944
Some 10 hours by modern road to the northwest of Italy lay Luxembourg, at roughly the center of the allied lines. Late Autumn was quiet in the Luxembourg sector, protected as it was by the “impenetrable” Ardennes, and Our River. Newly recaptured following four years under the Nazi bootheel, Luxembourgers welcomed American troops as liberators, units depleted by near constant fighting following D-Day now recuperating as the American war machine rebuilt, and re-supplied.
So quiet were parts of the tiny nation GIs took to calling this, the “Ghost Front”. Sporadic machine gun fire from occasional German combat patrols was so desultory as to be dismissed, as “social calls”. Young boys sneaked into frontline movie theaters to watch wild west movies, even if they didn’t understand a word of it. Countless young Luxembourgers learned their first words of English: “gum”, and “chocolate”.
Hopes ran high in November 1944 that the war would soon be over. In larger locales USO shows entertained the troops. Marlene Dietrich was expected to make an appearance that December. Villagers could hardly believe their eyes when trucks pulled up with tons of frozen turkeys and some, very much alive. As with that traditional first Thanksgiving, GIs shared with the locals, despite language differences.
Locals had never experienced such a thing as that American style thanksgiving, 1944. After the war, the holiday took hold. This November 23 families all over Luxembourg will enjoy an American style thanksgiving, albeit followed up with a holiday game on the pitch, replacing the gridiron.
“U.S. Ambassador James “Rand” Evens celebrates Thanksgiving in Luxembourg in 2019”. H/T Sofrep
As it turned out, the peace of Thanksgiving 1944 was never meant to last. The largest German offensive in years burst from the frozen Ardennes forest on December 16, 1944, that sleepy Saturday morning the ghost front roared to terrifying life from the barrels of 8,000 artillery weapons. The Battle of the bulge had begun.
There are places in this world no human was meant to go. Places so inhospitable, so savage, the visitor is lucky to get out alive. Where returning with the body of one not so lucky, is not possible. The frozen side of Everest is such a place where no fewer than 300 climbers have perished in the last six decades. A third of those will spend eternity on the frozen slopes where they perished.
As long as he could remember, Roald Amundsen wanted to be an explorer. As a boy in Norway, he would read about the doomed Franklin Expedition to the Arctic, in 1848. As a sixteen-year-old, Amundsen was captivated by Fridtjof Nansen’s epic crossing of Greenland, in 1888.
The period would come to be known as the “Heroic Age” of polar exploration. Roald Amundsen was born to take part.
Not so, Robert Falcon Scott. A career officer with the British Royal Navy, Scott would take a different path to this story.
Clements Markham, President of the British Royal Geographical Society (RGS), was known to “collect” promising young naval officers with an eye toward future polar exploration. The two first met on March 1, 1887, when the eighteen-year old midshipman’s cutter won a sailing race, across St. Kitt’s Bay.
In 1894, Scott’s father John made a disastrous mistake, selling the family brewery and investing the proceeds, badly. The elder Scott’s death of heart disease three years later brought on fresh family crisis, leaving John’s widow Hannah and her two unmarried daughters, dependent on Robert and his younger brother, Archie.
Now more than ever, Scott was eager to distinguish himself with an eye toward promotion, and the increase in income to be expected, with it.
In the Royal Navy, limited opportunities for career advancement were aggressively sought after, by any number of ambitious officers. Home on leave in 1899, Scott chanced once again to meet the now-knighted “Sir” Clements Markham, and learned of an impending RGS expedition to the Antarctic, aboard the barque-rigged auxiliary steamship, RRS Discovery.
What passed between the two went unrecorded but, a few days later, Scott showed up at the Markham residence and volunteered to lead the expedition.
The Discovery expedition of 1901-’04 was one of science as well as exploration. Despite a combined polar experience of near-zero, the fifty officers and men under Robert Falcon Scott made a number of important biological, zoological and geological findings, proving the world’s southernmost continent was at one time, forested. Though later criticized as clumsy and amateurish, a journey south in the direction of the pole discovered the polar plateau, establishing the southernmost record for this time at 82° 17′ S. Only 530 miles short of the pole.
Discovery returned in September 1904, the expedition hailed by one writer as “one of the great polar journeys”, of its time. Once an obscure naval officer, Scott now entered Edwardian society, moving among the higher social and economic circles, of the day.
A brief but stormy relationship ensued with Kathleen Bruce, a sculptress who studied under Auguste Rodin and counted among her personal friends, the likes of Pablo Picasso, Aleister Crowley and Isadora Duncan. The couple was married on September 2, 1908 and the marriage produced one child. Peter Markham Scott would grow up to found the World Wide Fund for Nature (WWF).
Kathleen Bruce Scott
The elder Scott would never live to see it.
The “Great Southern Journey” of Scott’s Discovery officer Ernest Shackleton, arrived 112 miles short of the pole on January 9, 1909, providing Scott with the impetus for a second attempt, the following year. Scott was still fundraising for the expedition when the old converted whaler Terra Nova departed Cardiff, in South Wales. Scott joined the ship in South Africa and arrived in Melbourne Australia in October, 1910.
Meanwhile, and unbeknownst to Scott, Roald Amundsen was preparing for his own drive on the south pole, aboard the sailing vessel, “Fram” (Forward).
Scott was in Melbourne when he received the telegram: “Beg leave to inform you Fram proceeding Antarctic Amundsen“. Robert Falcon Scott now faced a race to the pole.
Unlike Amundsen who adopted the lighter fur-skins of the Inuit, the Scott expedition wore heavy wool clothing, depending on motorized and horse-drawn transport and man-hauling sledges for the final drive across the polar plateau. Dog teams were expected to meet them only on the way out, on March 1.
Ponies, poorly acclimatized and weakened by the wretched conditions of Antarctica, slowed the depot-laying part of the Scott expedition. Four horses died of cold or had to be shot, because they slowed the team.
Expedition member Lawrence “Titus” Oates warned Scott against the decision to locate “One-Ton Depot” at 80°, 35-miles short of the planned location. “Sir, I’m afraid you’ll come to regret not taking my advice.” Titus’ words would prove prophetic.
Mount Erebus, the southernmost active volcano, in the world. Robert Falcon Scott took this photograph in 1911
Unlike the earlier attempt, Robert Falcon Scott made it to the pole this time. Amundsen’s Norwegian team had beat him. By a mere five weeks. A century later you can still feel the man’s anguish, by the words in his diary: “The worst has happened…All the day dreams must go…Great God! This is an awful place”.
Norwegian flag at the South Pole
Utterly Defeated, the five-man Scott party turned to begin the 800-mile, frozen slog back from the Pole on January 19, 1912. By the 23rd, the condition of Petty Officer Edgar “Taff” Evans, began to deteriorate . On February 4, a bad fall on Beardmore Glacier left the man concussed, “dull and incapable”. A second fall two weeks later left the man dead at the foot of the glacier.
Defeated by only weeks, the Scott party spends a moment at the south pole, before turning for the frozen, 800-mile slog, back.
The appointed time came and went in early March and the dog teams, failed to materialize. Severely frostbitten, Lawrence Oates struggled on. Soldier, explorer, he was “No Surrender Oates”, a moniker earned years before when he refused to surrender before a superior force in the Boer Wars. In the end, it was impossible to go on.
A Very Gallant Gentleman, 1913, by John Charles Dollman (1851–1934), 70in by 40in, The Cavalry and Guards Club, London
Lawrence Oates knew he was holding up the team. There was but one option and leaving that tent, was a deliberate act. Final. Suicidal.
Let Robert Falcon Scott’s diary tells us the story, in his own words:
March 16, 1912 “He was a brave soul. This was the end. He slept through the night before last, hoping not to wake; but he woke in the morning – yesterday. It was blowing a blizzard. He said, ‘I am just going outside and may be some time.’ He went out into the blizzard and we have not seen him since.”
His body was never found.
The last three made final camp on March 19, with 11 miles to go before the next food and supply cache. A howling blizzard descended on the tents and lasted for days as Scott, Henry “Birdie” Bowers and Dr. Edward Wilson wrote good-bye letters to mothers, wives, and others.
March 22, 1912 “Blizzard bad as ever. Wilson and Bowers unable to start. Tomorrow last chance. No fuel and only one or two of food left — must be near the end. Have decided it shall be natural. We shall march for the depot with or without our effects and die in our tracks.”
Starving, frostbitten, Robert Falcon Scott wrote to his diary during the final hours of his life.
March 29, 1912 “We had fuel to make two cups of tea apiece and bare food for two days on the 20th. Every day we have been ready to start for our depot 11 miles away, but outside the door of the tent it remains a scene of whirling drift. I do not think we can hope for any better things now. We shall stick it out to the end, but we are getting weaker, of course, and the end cannot be far.
It seems a pity, but I do not think I can write more.
R. SCOTT.
The frozen corpses of Robert Falcon Scott and his comrades were found on November 12, 1912. You can almost feel his frozen, dying fingers writing final words on that final page:
“Last entry. For God’s sake look after our people”.
Meteorological conditions for those last days in the Scott camp went unrecorded, and must only be imagined. The lowest ground level temperature ever recorded was measured in 1983, at the Soviet Vostok Antarctic Station: −128.6° Fahrenheit.
There are places in this world no human was meant to go. Places so inhospitable, so savage, the visitor is lucky to get out alive. Where returning with the body of one not so lucky, is not possible. The frozen side of Everest is such a place where no fewer than 300 climbers have perished in the last six decades. A third of those will spend eternity on the frozen slopes where they perished.
The final camp of the Scott expedition is such a place. A high cairn of snow was erected over it all, that final camp becoming the three men’s tomb. Ship’s carpenters built a wooden cross, inscribing on it the names of those lost: Scott, Edward Wilson, Henry Bowers, Lawrence Oates and Edgar Evans. A line from Alfred Lord Tennyson’s poem, Ulysses, was carved into the cross:
“To strive, to seek, to find, and not to yield”.
The grave of the southern party
If only they had made it that next eleven miles.
Amundsen said on hearing the fate of his rival, “I would gladly forgo any honor or money if thereby I could have saved Scott his terrible death”.
A continental glacier or “ice sheet” covers a minimum of 50,000 square kilometers (19,000 square miles). Today there are two, Greenland and Antarctica , comprising some 99% of the planet’s fresh water supply. (Hat tip National Geographic).
An ice sheet is anything but the stable mass it first appears. Annual snowfall and cycles of freezing and partial thaw converts surface snow into a dense, grainy snow called “firn”, as the weight of new snowfall compresses that of earlier years, into the glacier. Firn layers compress ever downward with each fall of snow, forming a solid ice mass at a depth of 50 meters.
Taken as a whole, the ice sheet behaves as a fluid. Driven by its own weight, the mass spreads ever outward, in places moving as fast as .7 miles in a year.
So it is that, more than a century later, the last camp of the southern party now lies deep within the heart of the glacier. Pressed ever downward, their corpses are now some 75 deep in the Ross Ice Shelf and inching their way outward, toward the sea.
One day in a distant future none alive today will ever see, the Scott party will break off and float away at the heart of some nameless iceberg
In an alternate history, the June 1914 assassinationof the heir-apparent to the Habsburg Empire may have led to nothing more, than a regional squabble. Wiser heads could have prevailed, the diplomatic crisis of July resulting in nothing more than a policing action in the Balkans.
As it was, mutual distrust and entangling alliances combined with slavish obedience to mobilization timetables, to draw the Great Powers of Europe into the vortex. On August 3, the “War to End All Wars” exploded across the European continent.
Many of the soldiers who went off to war in those days, viewed the conflict as some kind of grand adventure. Many of them sang patriotic songs as the young men and boys of Russia, Germany, Austria and France stole last kisses from wives and sweethearts, and boarded their ships and trains.
Believing overwhelming manpower to be the key to victory, British Secretary of State for War Lord Horatio Kitchener recruited friends and neighbors by the tens of thousands into “Pal’s Battalions”, to fight for King and country.
The signs could have been written in any number of languages, in the early phase of the war
Over the next four years a generation would be chewed up and spit out, in pieces.
Many single day’s fighting of the great battles of 1916 produced more casualties than every European war of the preceding 100 years, civilian and military, combined.
6,503 Americans lost their lives during the savage, month-long battle for Iwo Jima, in 1945. The first day’s fighting during the 1916 Battle of the Somme killed three times that number on the British and Commonwealth side, alone.
Over 1.5 million shells were fired in the days leading to the battle of the Somme
Over 16 million were killed and another 20 million wounded while vast stretches of the European countryside were literally, torn to pieces. Tens of thousands remain missing, to this day.
Had you found yourself in the mud and the blood, the rats and the lice of the trenches during the New Year of 1917-’18, you could have heard a plaintive refrain drifting across the barbed wire and frozen wastes of no man’s land, sung to the tune of “Auld Lang Syne”.
We’re here, because we’re here, because we’re here, because we’re here, we’re here, because we’re here, because we’re here, because we’re here.
Cher Ami
Those who fought the “Great War”, were not always human. The carrier pigeon Cher Ami escaped a hail of bullets and returned twenty-five miles to her coop despite a sucking chest wound, the loss of an eye and a leg that hung on, by a single tendon. The message she’d been given to carry, saved the lives of 190 men.
“Warrior” was the thoroughbred mount to General “Galloper” Jack Seely, arriving in August 1914 and serving four years “over there”. “The horse the Germans can’t kill” survived snipers, poison gas and shellfire to be twice buried alive in great explosions, only to return home to the Isle of Wight, and live to the ripe old age of 33.
First division Rags
“First Division Rags” ran through a torrent of shells, gassed and blinded in one eye, a shell fragment damaging his front paw, yet still, he got his message through.
Jackiethe baboon lost a leg during heavy bombardment from German guns while frantically building a protective rock wall to shelter himself from what the German soldier Ernst Jünger later called, the “Storm of Steel”.
Tirpitz the German pig jumped clear of the sinking light cruiser SMS Dresden and would serve out the war not in a frying pan but as mascot to the HMS Glasgow.
Sixteen million animals served on all sides and in all theaters of WW1: from cats to canaries, to pigeons and mules, camels, donkeys and dogs. As “dumb animals”, none were given the choice to “volunteer”. And yet serve they did, some nine million animals making the supreme sacrifice.
British Army mules in the mud of the western front, 1918
In the end, starvation and malnutrition stalked the land at home as well as the front with riots at home and mutiny, in the trenches. The Russian Empire of the Czars had collapsed into a Bolshevik hellhole, never to return. Nearly every combatant saw the disintegration of its domestic economy, or teetering on the brink.
A strange bugle call came out of the night of November 7, 1918. French soldiers of the 171st Régiment d’Infanterie, stationed near Haudroy, advanced into the fog and the darkness, expecting that they were about to be attacked. Instead, they were shocked to see the apparitions of three sedans, their sides displaying the German Imperial Eagle.
Imperial Germany, its army disintegrating in the field and threatened with revolution at home had sent a peace delegation, headed by the 43-year-old politician Matthias Erzberger.
The delegation was escorted to the Compiegne Forest near Paris, to a conference room fashioned from a railroad dining car. There they were met by a delegation headed by Ferdinand Foch, Marshall of France.
Adolf Hitler would gleefully accept French surrender in the same rail car, some twenty-two years later.
The German delegation was shocked at the words that came out of Foch’s mouth. ‘Ask these gentlemen what they want,’ he said to his interpreter. Stunned, Erzberger responded. The Germans believed they were there to discuss terms of an armistice. Foch dropped the hammer: “Tell these gentlemen that I have no proposals to make”.
Ferdinand Foch had seen his country destroyed by war. He had vowed “to pursue the Feldgrauen (Field Grays) with a sword at their backs”. He had no intention of letting up.
Marshall Foch now produced a list of thirty-four demands, each one a sledgehammer blow on the German delegation. Germany was to divest herself of all means of self-defense, from her high seas fleet to the last machine gun. She was to withdraw from all lands occupied since 1870. With the German population at home facing starvation, the allies were to confiscate 5,000 locomotives, 150,000 rail cars and 5,000 trucks.
With 2,250 dying every day on the Western Front, Foch informed Erzberger he had 72 hours in which to respond. “For God’s sake, Monsieur le Marechal”, responded the German, “do not wait for those 72 hours. Stop the hostilities this very day”. Even so, the plea fell on deaf ears. Fighting would continue until the last minute, of the last day.
The German King, Kaiser Wilhelm, abdicated on the 10th as riots broke out in the streets of Germany. The final surrender was signed at 5:10am on November 11 and back-timed to 5:00am Paris time, scheduled to go into effect later that morning. The 11th hour, of the 11th day, of the 11th month.
The order went out to that effect. The war would be over in hours, but there were no other instructions.
Some field commanders ordered their men to stand down. Why fight and die over ground they could walk over in just a few hours?
The last six hours
Many continued the attack, believing that Germany had to be well and truly beaten. Others saw their last chance at glory or promotion. An artillery captain named Harry S Truman, kept his battery firing until only minutes before 11:00.
English teacher turned Major General Charles Summerall had a fondness for the turn of phrase. Ordering his subordinates across the Meuse River in those final hours, Summerall said “We are swinging the door by its hinges. It has got to move…Get into action and get across. I don’t expect to see any of you again…”
No fewer than 320 Americans were killed in those final six hours, another 3,240 seriously wounded.
Still smarting from the disastrous defeat at Mons back in 1914, British High Command was determined to take the place back, on the final day of the war. The British Empire lost more than 2,400 in those last 6 hours.
The French 80th Régiment d’Infanterie received two orders that morning – to launch an attack at 9:00, and cease-fire at 11:00. French losses for the final day amounted to 1,170. The already retreating Germans suffered 4,120.
One-hundred-five years ago today, all sides suffered over 11,000 dead, wounded, and missing in those final six hours. Some have estimated that more men died per hour after the signing of the armistice, than during the D-Day invasion, 26 years later.
Over in the Meuse-Argonne sector, Henry Gunther was “visibly angry”. Perhaps this American grandson of German immigrants felt he had something to prove. Anti-German bias had not reached levels of the next war, when President Roosevelt interned Americans of Japanese descent. Yet, such bias was very real. Gunther’s fiancé had already broken up with him. He’d recently been busted in rank, after writing home complaining about conditions at the front.
Bayonet fixed, Gunther charged the enemy machine gun position, as German soldiers frantically waved and yelled for him, to go back. He got off a “shot or two”, before the five round burst tore into his head. Henry Nicholas John Gunther of Baltimore Maryland was the last man to die in combat, in the Great War. It was 10:59am. The war would be over, in sixty seconds.
After eight months on the front lines Corporal Joe Rodier of Worcester Massachusetts, was jubilant. “Another day of days“. Rodier wrote in his diary. “Armistice signed with Germany to take effect at 11 a.m. this date. Great manifestations. Town lighted up at night. Everybody drunk, even to the dog. Moonlight, cool night & not a shot heard“.
Matthias Erzberger was assassinated in 1921, for his role in the surrender. The “Stab in the Back” mythology destined to become Nazi propaganda, had already begun.
AEF Commander General John “Black Jack” Pershing believed the armistice to be a grave error. He believed that Germany had been defeated but not beaten, and that failure to smash the German homeland meant that the war would have to be fought, all over again. Ferdinand Foch agreed. On reading the Versailles treaty in 1919, Foch remarked “This isn’t peace! This is a truce that will last for 20 years”.
The man got it wrong, by 36 days.
Afterward
Dr. John McCrae
John McCrae was a physician and amateur poet from Guelph, Ontario. Following the outbreak of the “Great War” in 1914, he enlisted in the Canadian Expeditionary Force at the age of 41.
Based on his age and training, Dr. McCrae could have joined the medical corps, but volunteered instead to join a fighting unit as gunner and medical officer.
McCrae had previously served in the Boer War. This was to be his second tour of duty in the Canadian military.
Dr. McCrae fought in one of the most horrendous battles of the Great War, the second battle of Ypres, in the Flanders region of Belgium. Imperial Germany launched the first mass chemical attack in history at Ypres, attacking the Canadian position with chlorine gas on April 22, 1915. The Canadian line was broken but quickly reformed in an apocalyptic bloodletting lasting more than two full weeks.
Dr. McCrae later described the ordeal, in a letter to his mother:
“For seventeen days and seventeen nights”, he wrote, “none of us have had our clothes off, nor our boots even, except occasionally. In all that time while I was awake, gunfire and rifle fire never ceased for sixty seconds … and behind it all was the constant background of the sights of the dead, the wounded, the maimed, and a terrible anxiety lest the line should give way”.
Stop and imagine for a moment please, what this looked like, what this horror smelled like, in color.
Dr. McCrae presided over the funeral of friend on May 3, fellow soldier Alexis Helmer, who had died in the battle. McCrae performed the burial service himself when he noted how quickly the red poppies grew on the graves of the fallen. Sitting in the back of a medical field ambulance just north of Ypres, he composed this poem, the following day. He called the verse, “We Shall Not Sleep”.
Today we remember Dr. McCrae’s work as:
In Flanders Fields
In Flanders fields the poppies blow Between the crosses, row on row, That mark our place; and in the sky The larks, still bravely singing, fly Scarce heard amid the guns below.
We are the Dead. Short days ago We lived, felt dawn, saw sunset glow, Loved and were loved, and now we lie In Flanders fields.
Take up our quarrel with the foe: To you from failing hands we throw The torch; be yours to hold it high. If ye break faith with us who die We shall not sleep, though poppies grow In Flanders fields.
Moina Michael
Moina Belle Michael was born August 15, 1869 near Good Hope Georgia, about an hour’s drive east of Atlanta. She began teaching at age fifteen. Over a long career Michael worked in nearly every part of the Peach State’s education system.
In 1918 she was working at the YMCA Overseas War Secretaries headquarters, in New York. Browsing through the November Ladies Home Journal Moina came across Dr. McCrae’s poem. It was Saturday morning, November 9, 1918.
Two days before the armistice.
John McCrae lay in his own grave by this time, having succumbed to pneumonia while serving in the No. 3 Canadian General Hospital, in Boulogne. He was buried with full military honors at the Wimereux cemetery where his gravestone lies flat, due to the sandy, unstable soil.
Michael had seen McCrae’s poem before but it got to her this time, especially that last part:
“If ye break faith with us who die We shall not sleep, though poppies grow In Flanders fields”
Michael was so moved she made a personal pledge to “keep the faith”, vowing always to wear a red poppy, in honor of the dead. She scribbled a response, an act of remembrance on the back of a used envelope. She called this:
We Shall Keep the Faith
Oh! you who sleep in Flanders Fields, Sleep sweet – to rise anew! We caught the torch you threw And holding high, we keep the Faith With All who died.
We cherish, too, the poppy red That grows on fields where valor led; It seems to signal to the skies That blood of heroes never dies, But lends a luster to the red Of the flower that blooms above the dead In Flanders Fields.
And now the Torch and Poppy Red We wear in honor of our dead. Fear not that ye have died for naught; We’ll teach the lesson that ye wrought In Flanders Fields.
The vivid red flower blooming on the battlefields of Belgium, France and Gallipoli came to symbolize the staggering loss of life brought about by the Great War, the “War to End all Wars”. Before they had numbers, this was a war where the death toll from many single day’s fighting exceeded that of every war of the preceding century, military and civilian, combined.
A century and more has come and gone since the events related in this story. The red poppy is now an internationally recognized symbol of remembrance, lest we neglect to remember the lives lost in All wars. I keep one Always, pinned to the visor in my car. A reminder of where we come from, the prices paid to bring us to this place and to always keep the faith, with those who have come before.
Historical Easter Eggs - Today in History 
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