The game was November 27, 1937. Late in the 4th quarter, Notre Dame was tied 6-6 with Southern California. The “Fighting Irish” needed a miracle. Notre Dame fullback #58 Mario Tonelli took the hand-off deep in Notre Dame territory and ran the ball 70 yards back before being tackled. Seconds later, the 5’11”, 195lb Tonelli, scored the game winning touchdown.
In some ways, Mario Tonelli himself was the miracle. At the age of 6, “Motts” Tonelli had been burned over 80% of his body, when a trash compactor toppled over on him. Mario’s immigrant father Celi, a laborer from a northern Italian marble quarry, refused to believe the doctor who said his son would never walk again. Fixing four wheels to a door, the elder Tonelli taught his first American-born son to move about with his arms. By 1935, Mario Tonelli was a football, basketball and track star at Chicago’s DePaul Academy.
After a year coaching at Providence College in 1939 and a year playing professional football for the Chicago Cardinals in 1940, Tonelli joined the Army in early 1941, assigned to the 200th Coast Artillery Regiment in Manila.
Tonelli hoped to fulfill his one years’ commitment and return to the Cardinals for the ’42 season, but it wasn’t meant to be. The radio crackled to life at 2:30am local time on December 7. “Air raid on Pearl Harbor. This is no drill!”
Military forces of Imperial Japan appeared unstoppable in the early months of WWII, attacking first Thailand, then the British possessions of Malaya, Singapore, and Hong Kong, as well as US military bases in Hawaii, Wake Island, Guam and the Philippines.
The United States was grotesquely unprepared to fight a World War in 1942, and dedicated itself to beating Adolf Hitler first. General Douglas MacArthur abandoned the “Alamo of the Pacific” on March 11 saying “I shall return”, leaving 90,000 American and Filipino troops without food, supplies or support with which to fight off the Japanese offensive.
On April 9, 75,000 surrendered the Bataan peninsula, beginning a 65 mile, five-day slog into captivity through the heat of the Philippine jungle. Japanese guards were sadistic. They would beat the marchers and bayonet those too weak to walk. Japanese tanks swerved out of their way to run over anyone who had fallen and was too slow in getting up. Some were burned alive. Already crippled from tropical disease and starving from the long siege of Luzon, thousands perished in what came to be known as the Bataan Death March.
Exhausted, sunburned and aching with thirst, Tonelli still refused when a Japanese soldier demanded his Notre Dame class ring. As the guard reached for his sword, a nearby prisoner shouted “Give it to him. It’s not worth dying for”.
Minutes later, a Japanese officer appeared, speaking perfect English. “Did one of my men take something from you?” “Yes”, Tonelli replied. “My school ring”. “Here,” said the officer, pressing the ring into his hand. “Hide it somewhere. You may not get it back next time”. Tonelli was speechless. “I was educated in America”, the officer said. “At the University of Southern California. I know a little about the famous Notre Dame football team. In fact, I watched you beat USC in 1937. I know how much this ring means to you, so I wanted to get it back to you”.
Nearly 700 Americans and over 10,000 Filipinos died on the Bataan death march. For the survivors, the ordeal was only the beginning. For 2½ years, Tonelli suffered starvation, disease and endless beatings in the squalid prison camps known as O’Donnell, Cabanatuan, and Davao. Tonelli kept his ring throughout, buried in a soap dish. He’d take it out from time to time to remind himself: life used to be better than this. It gave him something to hope for.
The hellish 60-day journey aboard the filthy, cramped merchant vessel began in late 1944, destined for slave labor camps in mainland Japan. Tonelli was barely 100 pounds on arrival, his body ravaged by malaria and intestinal parasites. He was barely half the man who once played fullback at Notre Dame Stadium, Soldier Field and Comiskey Park.
Arriving at Nagoya #7 prison camp, Tonelli was handed a piece of paper. Scribbled on it was a 58. He was prisoner number 58, the same number he once wore on his football Jersey. “From that point on,” he said, “I knew I was going to make it”.
An American military tribunal conducted after the war held Lieutenant General Homma Masaharu, commander of the Japanese invasion forces in the Philippines, guilty of war crimes. He was executed by firing squad on April 3, 1946.
Mario Tonelli always hoped to meet the officer who’d returned his ring, but it wasn’t meant to be. He probably didn’t survive the war. Tonelli still had that ring when he passed away, in 2003.
Last year, nearly 10,000 gathered in New Mexico, to commemorate the 75th anniversary of the Bataan death march. 7,200 retired and active duty military personnel and civilians gathered to run the 26.2 “Death March” through the hilly desert terrain of the White Sands Missile Range, a race described by DoD.mil as “one of the toughest marathon-length events in the U.S.”
Ed Broadnax of El Paso, Texas, ran the course in full uniform, boots and 45-pound backpack. “As a veteran who served 26 years in the US Army and deployed three times to combat and experienced the horrors of war, I feel pain for the men and women who suffered intensely under the deadly Japanese Imperial Forces, as they were marched through the Philippine jungle. This is what drives me to run in their honor.”
Hundreds of others walked a 14.2 mile course, including Bataan Death March survivor Ben Skardon, who turned 100 last July. Mr. Skardon walked 8½. “The word hero doesn’t apply to me, at all”, Skardon said. “As I said in my talk, ‘no greater love hath any man, than to lay down his life for his friends’. That’s in the bible”.
Seven survivors of the Death March of 1942, turned out for the March 31, 2017 event. The 2018 edition held on March 25, had one fewer.
The coming cataclysm would lay waste to a generation, and to a continent.
On November 11, Armistice Day, the casket was removed from the Rotunda of the Capitol and escorted under military guard to the amphitheater at Arlington National Cemetery. In a simple ceremony, President Warren G. Harding bestowed on this unknown soldier the Medal of Honor, and the Distinguished Service Cross.
Many of the secular symbols associated with Easter trace back to the pagan goddess of spring and the dawn, Ēostre or Ostara, from the Old English Ēastre. History fades into mythology in the pre-Christian usage and accounts differ, but this Teutonic deity was frequently depicted with eggs symbolizing the rebirth of Spring. And rabbits.
The story involves no less a figure than Napoleon Bonaparte. In July 1807, Napoleon had just signed the Treaty of Tilsit, ending the war between the French Empire and Imperial Russia. Looking to celebrate, Napoleon suggested a rabbit hunt, and ordered his Chief of Staff Alexandre Berthier to make it happen.
The hunt was supposed to start when all those cages opened up but, instead of scattering, a swarm of rabbits thought it was dinner time and pelted straight across the field.
Napoleon retreated to his carriage, but still the attack continued. Historian David Chandler picks up the story. “With a finer understanding of Napoleonic strategy than most of his generals, the rabbit horde divided into two wings and poured around the flanks of the party and headed for the imperial coach.” The tide of bunnies continued. Some even got into the carriage. The assault finally ebbed away, only as the Royal Conveyance, drove out of sight.
The boy had a talent for music. He was taught by another kid from Williamsburg, named Buddy Rich. By 14 he was good enough to be playing drums for money.
At one point, Kaminsky’s unit gathered along a River. The Americans were so close they could hear German soldiers singing a beer hall song, from the other side. Kaminsky grabbed a bullhorn and serenaded the Germans back, crooning out an old tune that Al Jolson used to perform, in black face: “Toot Toot Tootsie, Goodbye”. After he was done, polite applause could be heard, drifting across the river. I can’t imagine many Allied soldiers ever tried singing to their Nazi adversaries, during World War II. The ones who actually pulled it off, must number precisely, one.
Brooks started doing stand-up, when the regular comedian at one of the clubs was too sick to perform. By ’49 he was “Tummler”, the master entertainer at Grossinger’s, one of the most famous resorts in the Borscht Belt.
On Easter Monday, March 30, 1282, the Church of the Holy Spirit outside Palermo was just letting out after evening vespers (prayers), when a French soldier thought he’d “inspect” a Sicilian woman for weapons.
The Italian physician John of Procida had been a loyal subject of Manfred’s, fleeing to Aragon after the Anjou invasion. John proceeded directly to Sicily where he spent several weeks stirring up Sicilian resentment against the French King. Sicily then appealed to the Spanish King to intervene, while John sailed for Constantinople to procure the help of Michael VIII Palaeologus.
France re-occupied the region following the Japanese defeat ending WWII, but soon faced the same opposition from the army of Ho Chi Minh and Vo Nguyen Giap. What began as a low level rural insurgency, later became a full-scale modern war when Communist China entered the fray in 1949.
US policy makers feared a “domino” effect, and with good cause. The 15 core nations of the Soviet bloc were soon followed by Eastern Europe, as Poland, Bulgaria, Romania, Hungary and Czechoslovakia fell into the Soviet sphere of influence. Germany was partitioned into Communist and free-enterprise spheres after WWII, followed by China, North Korea and on across Southeast Asia.
Even then it wasn’t over. Communist forces violated cease-fire agreements before they were signed. Some 7,000 US civilian Department of Defense employees stayed behind to aid South Vietnam in conducting an ongoing and ultimately futile war against communist North Vietnam.
Imagine feeling so desperate, so fearful of this alien ideology invading your country, that you convert all your worldly possessions and those of your family to a single diamond, bite down on that stone so hard it embedded in your shattered teeth, and fled with your family to open ocean in a small boat. All in the faint and desperate hope, of getting out of that place. That is but one story among more than three million “boat people”. Three million from a combined population of 56 million, fleeing the Communist onslaught in hopes of temporary asylum in other countries in Southeast Asia or China.
themselves, and came to feel as I do to this day, that anyone who has a problem with our country’s war policy, needs to take it up with a politician. Not with a member of the Armed Services.
Seaman George Samson received a white feather on the same day he was awarded the British Commonwealth’s highest military award for gallantry in combat, equivalent to the American Medal of Honor: the Victoria Cross.
James Lovegrove was sixteen when he received his first white feather: “On my way to work one morning a group of women surrounded me. They started shouting and yelling at me, calling me all sorts of names for not being a soldier! Do you know what they did? They struck a white feather in my coat, meaning I was a coward. Oh, I did feel dreadful, so ashamed.” Lovegrove went straight to the recruiting office, who tried to send him home for being too young and too small: “You see, I was five foot six inches and only about eight and a half stone. This time he made me out to be about six feet tall and twelve stone, at least, that is what he wrote down. All lies of course – but I was in!”.
Some of these people were not to be put off. One man was confronted by an angry woman in a London park, who demanded to know why he wasn’t in uniform. “Because I’m German“, he said. She gave him a feather anyway.
Private Norman Demuth was discharged from the British Army, after being wounded in 1916. A woman on a bus handed Demuth a feather, saying “Here’s a gift for a brave soldier.” Demuth was cooler than I might have been, under the circumstances: “Thank you very much – I wanted one of those.” He used the feather to clean his pipe, handing it back to her with the comment, “You know we didn’t get these in the trenches.”
Years later, the Japanese Consul in New York learned of the First Lady’s interest in the Sakura, and suggested the city of Tokyo make a gift of Cherry trees, to the government of the United States.
It was the second such effort. 2,000 trees had arrived from Japan two years earlier, in January 1910, but they had fallen prey to disease along their journey. A private Japanese citizen donated the funds to transport a new batch of trees. The 3,020 were taken from the bank of the Arakawa River in the Adachi Ward suburb of Tokyo, to be planted along the Potomac River Basin, East Potomac Park, and the White House grounds.
The strip was around for ten years or so, when Olive & co. decided to recruit a sailor to get them to the casino on Dice Island. Approaching a rough looking character on the docks, “Popeye’s” first line was “Ja think I was a cowboy? He was supposed to be an extra, but he became so popular he soon developed into the center of the strip.
Before spinach, Popeye gained his superhuman strength patting the head of a magical “whiffle hen” named “Bernice”.
Popeye’s pet “Eugene the Jeep” first appeared in a 1936 strip called “Wha’s a Jeep?”. Eugene was sort of magical dog who could go anywhere. Five years later, military contractors worked to develop the iconic off-road vehicle of WWII. Like Popeye’s pet Eugene, the General Purpose GP (“Jeep”) could go anywhere. Eventually, the name stuck.
Historical Easter Eggs - Today in History 
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