November 12, 2023 – Historical Easter Eggs

November 23, 1944 Thanksgiving on the Front

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 1^st 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.

ARMY PUMPKIN PIE FILLING FOR 12-15 PIES

• 25 pounds pumpkin
• 6 pounds sugar
• 20 eggs
• 1 nutmeg
• 1/8 ounce cloves
• 1/8 ounce ginger
• 1 ounce salt
• 2 cans evaporated milk.

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

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.

November 12, 1912 To Strive, to Seek, to Find, and Not to Yield

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).

a0a85691e405edb91673335150d4f571--robert-falcon-scott-robert-scott — 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”.

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.

article-2087811-001f786700000258-615_964x687 (1) — 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.

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”.

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

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“To strive, to seek, to find, and not to yield”.

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