Historical Easter Eggs – Today in History – Page 6 – "Tell me a factand I'll learn. Tell me a truth, and I'll believe. But tell me a story, and it will live in my heart forever."

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

November 11, 1918 If ye Break Faith

In an alternate history, the June 1914 assassination of 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.

140604153439-19-wwi-main-timeline-0604-restricted-horizontal-large-gallery — 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.

battle_of_the_somme_in_pictures_1 — 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.

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” 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.

Jackie the 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.

WW1-animals — 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.

original-french-postcard-showing-the-wagon-in-which-the-ww1-armistice-M1B0DJ

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-soldier-killed-in-wwi-died-one-minute-before-the-war-ended — 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

800px-Lieut.-Col._John_McCrae,_M.D. — 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”.

ypres (1) — 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 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.

49a1160c9141869ce025a820a599ef56--flanders-field-lest-we-forget

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.

October 28, 1944 The Fighter Pilot had Four Legs

Before they had numbers, the “war to end wars” had Jackie the Baboon and Whiskey & Soda, the lion cub mascots of the Lafayette flying corps. World War II and Wild Bill Crump had Jeep, the only coyote and four-legged co-pilot to serve in the air war to retake Europe, from the Nazi occupier.

John William “Wild Bill” Crump was destined for the air. Born in 1924 in the Pacific Northwest village of Opportunity Washington, the boy’s first experience with the air came on a flight with his Dad, at the age of 5.

Attending nearby Edmonds High School and graduating in 1943, it is myedmondnews.com from which I have learned much of this story.

The world was at war in 1944, and badly in need of pilots. Wild Bill Crump arrived at Harding Field, Nebraska at the age of 20 to complete pilot training.

While earning his wings, Crump found the most unlikely of co-pilots. Abandoned and alone, it was a two week old puppy. A young coyote, in need of a home.

“Eugene the Jeep” came to public attention eight years earlier, in the Popeye cartoon strip by E.C. Sugar (rhymes with cigar).

Eugene was a dog sort of character, with the magical power to go…anywhere.

March 26, 1937 I Yam What I Yam

Popeye

In the early phase of World War II, military contractors labored to develop an off-road vehicle, capable of going anywhere, or close to it. Like Popeye’s sidekick Eugene, the General Purpose GP (“Jeep”) was just the thing. Eventually, the name stuck.

Of course, Crump named his new sidekick, “Jeep”.

Next came Baton Rouge and training on the iconic P-47, the high altitude fighter-bomber and foremost ground attack aircraft of the American war effort, in WW2.

The P-47 cockpit was built for only one pilot, but regulations said nothing about a coyote.

So it was that, here in Baton Rouge, the pair learned to work together. When orders came for England, there was little question of what was next. The luxury liner RMS Queen Elizabeth converted to a troop ship would hardly notice the small coyote, smuggled on-board.

Actual footage from Wild Bill’s P51 Squadron

Next came RAF Martlesham Heath Airfield in Ipswich, England and the 360th fighter squadron, 359th fighter group.

Jeep became the unit mascot with his own “dog tags” and vaccination records. He’d often entertain the airmen taking part in howling contests.

Curled up in the cockpit Jeep accompanied Crump on no fewer than five combat missions. One time, a series of sharp barks warned the pilot of incoming flak.

Crump logged 311 combat hours on 77 missions aboard the P51 Mustang “Jackie,” named after his high school sweetheart. Painted on the fuselage next to her name was the image of a coyote.

Wild Bill Crump survived the war. Sadly, his co-pilot, did not. On October 28, 1944, a group of children brought Jeep to school, to show the animal off. Tied to a tree in the rain he slipped his leash and was run over by a military vehicle, attempting to return to his base.

Jeep was buried with full military honors in a grave outside Playford Hall in Ipswich, England.

May 13, 1916 The Lafayette Escadrille

Hat tip http://www.wildbillcrump.com

September 11, 2001 Good and Evil

Twelve days a month John Ogonowski would put on his captain’s uniform, leaving the farm to fly jumbo jets out of Logan Airport. And when he was done he would always return, to the land he loved.

As the 19th century closed and made way for the next, a great wave of immigrants came into the United States, some 20 million Europeans or more making the long journey to become Americans.

Among this multitude came the Ogonowski family, emigrating from Poland to make a new home in Massachusetts’ Merrimack Valley, along the New Hampshire line.

Yankee farmers assisted these earliest members of the family, teaching the new arrivals about growing conditions in the harsh New England climate. Four generations later the Ogonowski family still tilled the soil on a 150-acre plot called the “White Gate Farm” in Dracut, Massachusetts.

Graduating from UMass Lowell in 1972 with a degree in nuclear engineering, John Ogonowski joined the United States Air Force. During the war in Vietnam, the farmer-turned-pilot would ferry equipment from Charleston, South Carolina to Southeast Asia, sometimes returning with the bodies of the fallen aboard his C-141 transport aircraft.

Ogonowski left the Air Force with the rank of Captain, becoming a commercial pilot and joining American Airlines in 1978. There he met Margaret, a flight attendant, “Peggy” to her friends and family. The two would later marry, and raise three daughters.

Twelve days a month Ogonowski would leave the farm in his Captain’s uniform to fly jumbo jets out of Logan Airport, but he always returned to the land he loved.

Family farming is not what it used to be, as suburban development and subdivisions creep into what used to be open spaces. “When you plant a building on a field” he would say, “it’s the last crop that will ever grow there”.

Ogonowski helped create the Dracut Land Trust in 1998, working to conserve the town’s agricultural heritage. He worked to bring more people into farming as well. The bumper sticker on his truck read “There is no farming without farmers”.

That was the year the farm Service Agency in Westford came looking for open agricultural land, for Southeast Asian immigrants from Lowell.

It was a natural fit. Ogonowski felt a connection to these people, based on his time in Vietnam. He would help them, here putting up a shed, there getting a greenhouse in order or putting up irrigation. He would help these immigrants, just as those Yankee farmers of long ago had helped his immigrant ancestors.

Cambodian farmers learned to grow their native vegetables in an unfamiliar climate. They would lease small plots growing water spinach, lemon grass, pigweed, Asian basil, and Asian squash. There was taro and Laotian mint, coconut amaranth, pickling spices, pea tendrils and more. It was the food they grew up with. They would sell their produce into nearby immigrant communities and to the high-end restaurants of Boston.

The program was a success. Ogonowski told The Boston Globe in 1999, “These guys are putting more care and attention into their one acre than most Yankee farmers put into their entire 100 acres.”

So it was that, with the fall harvest of 2001, Cambodian immigrants found themselves among the pumpkins and the hay of a New England farm, putting on a lunch spread for visiting agricultural officials from Washington, DC. It was September 11.

By now you know that John Ogonowski was flying that day, Senior Captain on American Airlines flight 11.

He was one of the first to die, murdered in his cockpit by Islamist terrorist Mohammed Atta and his accomplices.

It’s a new perspective on a now-familiar story, to think of the shock and the grief of those refugees from the killing fields of Pol Pot, on hearing the news that their friend and mentor had been hijacked and flown into the World Trade Center.

The White Gate Farm was closed for a week, but the Ogonowski family was determined that John’s dream would not die. Peg said it best: “This is what he was all about. He flew airplanes, he loved flying, and that provided all the money, but this is what he lived for. He was a very lucky man, he had both a vocation and an avocation and he loved them both.”

John Ogonowski was working with the Land Trust at the time he was killed, to raise $760,000 to purchase a 34 acre farm in Dracut, previously slated to be developed into a golf course with housing. Federal funds were raised with help from two members of Congress. The “Captain John Ogonowski Memorial Preservation Farmland” project was dedicated in 2003, a living memorial to Captain John Ogonowski. Patriot…pilot…farmer.

Afterward:

Today, the White Gate Farm produces hay and is run today by John’s brother, Jim Ogonowski, who also runs the Ogonowski Farm located at 713 Broadway Road, in Dracut. The family farm has been in continuous operation since 1904. “Fall is the season for Ogonowski Farm” writes DracutMA.gov, “specializing in pumpkins, cornstalks, mums, hay bales and other autumnal attractions”.

They are open September 1-October 31. Ogonowski Farm may be reached at 978-455-2528, by email at ogonowskifarm@comcast.net, or visit https://www.ogonowskifarm.com”. Hat Tip Dracutma.gov

August 14, 1945 The Kiss

The message running across the Times Building read, “VJ, VJ, VJ, VJ”. George Mendonsa grabbed a random stranger in nurse’s uniform and kissed her. The moment was gone in two seconds, but Alfred Eisenstaedt’s camera was in the right place, at the right time.

The most destructive war in history ended on August 14, 1945, with the unconditional surrender of the Empire of Japan.

Even as morning dawned on the east coast, President Harry Truman had yet to receive the formal surrender. Rumors were flying throughout the small hours, while the White House official announcement was still hours away.

Born and raised in Austria, Greta Zimmer was 16 in 1939. Seeing the war bearing down on them, Greta’s parents sent her and her two sisters to America, not knowing if they would ever see them again. Six years later she was a dental assistant, working at the Manhattan office of Dr. J. L. Berke.

Greta’s lunch break came just after 1:00 that day. Patients had been coming into the office all morning with rumors that the war was over. She set out for Times Square, knowing that the lit and moving type on the Times news zipper would give her the latest news.George Mendonsa, Greta Zimmer-Friedman

Petty Officer 1st Class George Mendonsa was on his last day of shore leave, spending the day with his new girlfriend, Rita Petry. They had heard the rumors too, but right now they were enjoying their last day together. The war could wait until tomorrow.

The couple went to a movie at Radio City Music Hall, but the film was interrupted by a theater employee who turned on the lights, announcing that the war was over. Leaving the theater, the couple joined the tide of humanity moving toward Times Square. The pair stopped at the Childs Restaurant on 7th Ave & 49th, where bartenders were pouring anything they could get hands on into waiting glasses. Revelers were scooping them up as fast as the glasses were filled.

Mendonsa’s alcohol-powered walk/run from the restaurant left Rita trailing behind, but neither one seemed to mind. Times Square was going wild.

The sailor from the USS Sullivans had seen bloodshed. He’d been there on May 11, as kamikaze planes smashed into the USS Bunker Hill. Explosions and fires killed 346 sailors that day. 43 of their bodies would never be found. Mendonsa had helped to pull the survivors, some of them hideously burned, out of the water. He had watched while Navy nurses tended to the injured and the dying.

When the sailor spotted Greta Zimmer, the dental assistant was dressed the same way. To him, she must have seemed like one of those white-clad angels of mercy from those earlier months.

Reporters from the AP, NY Times, NY Daily News and others descended on Times Square to record the spontaneous celebration.

As a German Jew in the 1930s, Alfred Eisenstaedt had photographed the coming storm. He had photographed Benito Mussolini’s first meeting with Adolf Hitler in Venice in 1934. Now he and his Leica Illa rangefinder camera worked for Life Magazine, heading to Times Square in search of “The Picture”.

The lit message running around the Times Building read, “VJ, VJ, VJ, VJ” as George Mendonsa grabbed a stranger and kissed her. Two seconds later the moment was gone, but Eisenstaedt and his camera had been in the right place at the right time.

In time, the image of the sailor kissing the nurse became as famous as Joe Rosenthal’s photo of the flag raising at Iwo Jima.

The German made camera which took the iconic image recently went to auction at the Westlicht auction house in Vienna, where it was expected to sell for $30,000. The winning bid was almost $150,000.

After the war, Greta Zimmer learned that both of her parents had died in the camps. She later married and made her home in Frederick, Maryland. Greta Zimmer Friedman never returned to Austria, and passed away in 2017, at the age of 92.

George Mendonsa and Rita Petry later married. George never saw the famous photograph until 1980. At first he wasn’t sure he was looking at his own image.

In 1918, the couple celebrated their 68th wedding anniversary. Rita says she wasn’t angry to see her husband kiss another woman like that. She can be seen herself in the famous photo, grinning in the background.

In 2018, the couple celebrated their 68th wedding anniversary. Rita says she wasn’t angry to see her husband kiss another woman. She can been seen grinning in the background, she points out. She will admit, though, ‘In all these years, George has never kissed me like that.’

July 28, 1914 The Lamps are going Out

Few could imagine a war in which many single days’ fighting produced more casualties than every war of the last century, combined.

In 1869, Germany had yet to come into its own as a sovereign nation. Forty-five years later, she was one of the Great Powers of all Europe.

Alarmed by the aggressive growth of her historic adversary, the French government increased compulsory military service from two years to three, to offset the advantage conferred by a German population of some 70 million, contrasted with a French population of 40 million.

Joseph Caillaux was a left wing politician, once Prime Minister of France and, by 1913, a cabinet minister under the more conservative administration of President Raymond Poincare.

Never too discreet with his personal conduct, Caillaux paraded through public life with a succession of women, who were not Mrs Caillaux. One of them was Henriette Raynouard.

In 1911, Madame Raynouard became the second Mrs Caillaux.

A relative pacifist, many on the French right considered Caillaux too “soft” on Germany. One of them was Gaston Calmette, editor of the leading right-wing newspaper Le Figaro, who regularly excoriated the politician.

On March 16, 1914, Madame Caillaux took a taxi to the offices of Le Figaro. She waited for a full hour to see the newspaper’s editor before walking into his office and shooting him at his desk. Four out of six rounds hit the mark. Gaston Calmette was dead before the night was over.

It was the crime of the century. This one had everything: left vs. right, the fall of the powerful and all the salacious details anyone could ask for. It was the OJ trial, version 1.0, and the French public was transfixed.

The British public was similarly distracted by the latest in a series of Irish Home Rule crises.

The Austro-Hungarian Empire, a sprawling amalgamation of 17 nations, 20 Parliamentary groups and 27 political parties, desperately needed to bring the Balkan peninsula into line, following the June 28 assassination of the heir apparent to the dual monarchy.

That individual Serbians were complicit in the assassination is beyond doubt, but so many government records of the era have since disappeared it’s impossible to determine official Serbian complicity.

Be that as it may, Serbia had to be brought to heel.

Having given Austria his personal assurance of support in the event of war with Serbia, even if Russia entered in support of her Slavic ally, Kaiser Wilhelm of Germany left on a summer cruise in the Norwegian fjords.

The Kaiser’s being out of touch for those critical days in July has been called the most expensive maritime disaster in naval history.

The Austro-Hungarian Empire produced a deliberately unacceptable ultimatum delivered to Serbia on the 23rd. It was little more than a bald pretext for war. Czar Nicholas wired Vienna as late as July 27, proposing an international conference concerning Serbia. To no avail. Austria responded that same day. It was too late for such a proposal.

The Austro-Hungarian Empire declared war on Serbia on July 28. Madame Caillaux was acquitted on the same day, on the grounds that hers was a “crime of passion”.

Russia mobilized in support of Serbia. Imperial Germany feared little more than a two-front war with the “Russian Steamroller” to the east and the French Republic to the west.

On August 3, British Foreign Secretary Sir Edward Grey announced before Parliament, his government’s intention to defend Belgian neutrality, in accordance with the Treaty of London, signed decades earlier.

German diplomats dismissed the 1839 commitment as a “scrap of paper”.

Germany invaded neutral Belgium on August 4 in pursuit of the one-two punch strategy by which she sought first to defeat France before turning to face the larger and presumably slower Russian adversary.

True to her commitments, the United Kingdom declared war on Germany the same day.

Meticulously prepared timetables took over where the diplomatic bungling of the “July crisis” left off. France alone had some 3,781,000 military men under orders before the middle of August, arriving at the western front on trains arriving as often as every eight minutes.

This time there would be no “Phoney War”, no “Sitzkreig”, as wags were wont to call the early days of WWII.

Few could imagine a cataclysm to rock a century and beyond, a war in which many single day’s fighting produced casualties equal to that of every war of the preceding 100 years, combined.

Fewer still understood on this date, one-hundred and nine years ago, today. The four horsemen of the Apocalypse, had come.

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June 1, 1917 Retreat, Hell. We Just Got Here.

The United States came late to World War 1, the first 14,000 Americans arriving ‘over there’ in June 1917.

After three years of hard fighting, the Great War seemed like two great prize fighters, evenly matched, exhausted, unable to deal the killing blow and yet, scarcely able to withstand the blows of his opponent.

Great swaths of the European countryside were literally torn to pieces. Every economy on the continent tottered on the edge of destruction, or close to it. The Austro-Hungarian and Ottoman Empire were on the verge of extinction. The Russian Empire was dying.

No fewer than 1.7 million Russian troops lay dead at the dawn of 1917, while food shortages plagued the population at home. By that February, the last of the 300-year Romanov dynasty was forced to abdicate. The largest belligerent of the Great War descended into civil war. The following month, Imperial Russia was all but out of the war.

Before the had numbers, this was the War to End Wars, a conflict destined to destroy the lives of more Wuropeans, civilian and military, than every war of the preceding 100 years…combined.

The United States came late to World War 1, the first 14,000 Americans arriving ‘over there’ in June 1917. General John ‘Black Jack’ Pershing wanted his troops to be well trained and equipped before entering combat, and refused to disperse them piecemeal. Desperately wanting the Americans to fill in gaps in his own lines, British Field Marshal Douglas Haig called Pershing ‘Obstinate and Stupid. Ridiculous’. French Marshall Ferdinand Foch was apoplectic, but Pershing refused to use his troops as cannon fodder.

The first small-scale American action occurred that October, near the trenches of Nancy. Meanwhile, a mighty force was building at the French harbors of Bordeaux, La Pallice, Saint Nazaire and Brest. Passenger liners, seized German vessels and borrowed Allied ships poured out of New York, New Jersey, and Newport News, as American engineers built 82 new ship berths, nearly 1,000 miles of railroad track and 100,000 miles of telephone and telegraph lines across the French countryside.

By May 1918, those initial 14,000 had grown to over a million, ‘over there’.

It was imperative at this stage for the German war effort, to throw a knockout punch before the Americans entered in force. With close to 50 divisions freed up from duty in the east following the Russian surrender, Spring of 1918 set the stage for the ‘King’s Battle’. The Kaiserschlacht.

Operation Michael, the first of four German offensives exploded against the British 3rd and 5th Armies at 4:40am on March 21. In the space of five hours, 1,100,000 shells crashed into an area of only 150 miles square. This “Storm of Steel” was followed by storm troopers, fast, elite German infantry armed with flame throwers and small arms, following a moving curtain of fire known as the ‘Feuerwalze’. The Swath of fire. Crown Prince Rupprecht was succinct. “We chop a hole. The rest follows.”

At first, Michael was so successful that German troops outran their own supply lines. The German advance began to falter as exhausted forces faced waves of fresh British and Australian troops. The western front had returned to stalemate by April 5 at the cost of 255,000 British, British Empire and French troops. 239,000 were lost to the German side.

‘Operation Georgette‘, the Battle of Lys, opened after preliminary bombardment on April 9. The main attack all but destroyed the Portuguese Expeditionary Corps, the British 2nd Division and elements of the British 40th Division. Field Marshal Sir Douglas Haig described the situation with his “Order of the Day” of April 11: “With our backs to the wall and believing in the justice of our cause, each one of us must fight on to the end.”

Technically a German victory insofar as they held the ground when the shooting stopped, Georgette too was a pyrrhic victory. Killed, wounded and missing stood at roughly 220,000, split evenly between both sides.

Operation Blücher–Yorck, known to history as the Third Battle of the Aisne, began with a German attack on May 27, toward Rheims. The sector was nominally held by six British divisions, badly depleted and basically ‘resting’, following the mauling suffered in earlier fighting. Making matters worse, French General Denis Auguste Duchêne was openly contemptuous of Marshall Philippe Petain’s order to maintain defense in depth, insubordinately massing his troops in forward trenches.

The results of the Feuerwalze were devastating, if not predictable. Allied lines were smashed as German armies poured through, taking 19 kilometers in three days and reaching the Marne River, 50 miles from Paris. On May 31, a dogged defense by the US 3rd Infantry Division turned the German advance at Château-Thierry, and toward Belleau Wood.

This and the following week’s fighting earned for the 3rd I.D. the nickname “The Rock of the Marne”. To this day, the unit out of Ft. Stewart, Georgia, is known as the “Marne Division”.

On June 1, German Forces penetrated French lines to the left the US Reserve. The US Army 23rd Infantry Regiment, the 1st Battalion, 5th Marines, and an element of the Marine Corps 6th Machine Gun Battalion conducted a forced march overnight, covering over 6 miles to plug the gap and oppose the German line.

Arriving to find French forces retreating, Marines were urged to turn back. 2nd Battalion, 5th Marines Captain Lloyd Williams’ response would go down in Marine Corps History. “Retreat? Hell, we just got here”. Belleau Wood was one of the bloodiest battles US forces would fight in WW1. Six times over the following days, 5th & 6th Battalion Marines attacked the better part of five German divisions in Belleau Wood. The once-beautiful hunting preserve was reduced to a wasteland of blood and shattered timber.

An overwhelmingly superior German force threw everything it had at these two brigades of Marines, a few hundred soldiers and a handful of Navy corpsmen. Mustard gas rained down amid interlocking and mutually supporting fields of machine gun fire. Fighting became hand to hand with rifle, bayonet and even fists. And still they came.

At Belleau Wood, Marines first heard the name “Höllenhunde” (“hellhound”), and an appellation which goes down in Marine Corps lore, to this day. “Teufelshunde”. “Devil Dogs.” In one attack on June 11, only 1 of the 10 Marine officers and 16 out of 250 enlisted men survived, or came out unscathed.

On June 26, Major Maurice Shearer was able to report, “Woods now U.S. Marine Corps entirely,” Belleau Wood was the first major engagement for American forces in WW1. They came out of it with nothing left to prove.

On June 30, the French 6th Army Commanding General Jean Degoutte officially renamed Belleau Wood as “Bois de la Brigade de Marine” – Wood of the Marine Brigade.

A German private, one of only 30 men left out of 120, may have made the understatement of the war when he wrote “We have Americans opposite us who are terribly reckless fellows.”

March 20, 1703 The 47 Rōnin

code of Bushidō or “Way of the Warrior” prized fearlessness in battle. Athletic and martial skill was emphasized and personal honor, inviolate. Filial loyalty ranked high on this code of conduct, and yet not so high as the supreme obligation: that of the samurai to his lord. Even at the expense of his own parents. Or his own life.

As Japan emerged from the medieval period into the early modern age, the future Nippon Empire transformed from a period of warring states and social upheaval. This “Sengoku period” came to an end on October 21, 1600 at the Battle of Sekigahara, pitting a coalition of clans led by one Ishida Mitsunari against forces loyal to the first of “Three Great Unifiers” of Japan, called Tokugawa Ieyasu.

Defection of several of these clans led to victory for the Tokugawa faction, paving to the way to a feudal military government or Shōgunate. Ruled from the Edo castle in the Chiyoda district of modern-day Tokyo, Tokugawa ruled as Shōgun over some 250 provincial domains called han.

The role of the emperor, the supreme monarch dating back to the mythical Jimmu in the year 660BC, was largely ceremonial at this time.

The military and governing structure of the Tokugawa or Edo period rested on a rigid and inflexible class system placing feudal lords or daimyō at the top, followed by a warrior-caste of samurai and a lower caste of merchants and artisans. At the bottom of it all stood some 80% of the population, the peasant farmer forbidden to engage in non-agricultural work and expected to provide the income to make the whole system work.

The samurai caste adopted a Confucian ethic at this time, developing a code of honor and conduct known as Bushidō, loosely analogous to the chivalric practices of European knights of an earlier era.

This code of Bushidō or “Way of the Warrior” prized fearlessness in battle. Athletic and martial skill was emphasized and personal honor, inviolate. Filial loyalty ranked high on this code of conduct, and yet not so high as the supreme obligation: that of the samurai to his lord. Even at the expense of his own parents. Or his own life.

This system paved the way for an incident, destined to become one of the great legends in Japanese history. The small han of Akō at this time was the domain of a young daimyō called Asano Naganori. In 1701, Asano was called upon to assist in ceremonial duties surrounding a visit from emissaries of the 113th monarch according to traditional order of succession, Emperor Higashiyama.

The emperor’s representative in the matter was one Kira Yoshinaka. Accounts vary as to what happened next. Kira was officious, arrogant and insistent on a bribe. Asano was young and inexperienced with the “ways “gift giving” traditions of the royal court. Be that as it may the next part, is not in dispute. Asano took offence at the official’s actions and drew his sword.

Kira survived the attack but Asano’s actions were a grave breach of protocol. The Lord of Akō was ordered to perform seppuku, on the spot. It was December 14, 1701.

Seppuku, often called hara-kiri in the west, is a grisly form of suicide by self disembowelment originated by Japan’s ancient samurai warrior caste. The event is often accompanied by ceremony including the drinking of sake, and the condemned composing a death poem. The practitioner will then plunge a short bladed sword deep into his abdomen, cutting sideways and then upward, to be sure the process is fatal. Some will complete the nightmarishly painful process only to die, slowly. Others will employ a kaishakunin or “second, whose job it is to hack off the head of the sufferer, after his honor was restored through that first cut.

A staged version of the Japanese ritual suicide known as Seppuku or Hara-Kiri, circa 1885. The warrior in white plunges a knife into his belly, while his second stands behind him, ready to perform the decapitation. (Photo by Sean Sexton/Getty Images)

Asano’s 300 Samurai retainers were now Rōnin. Samurai without a master. 47 of their number vowed to avenge the death of the daimyō led by one Ōishi Kuranosuke, even though they knew it would cost them their lives.

The 47 Rōnin broke up and went their own way. Many became monks and tradesmen. Ōishi himself carried out the life of an inebriate and frequenter of geisha houses. He even went so far as to divorce a loyal wife of twenty years and send her away, so she would not be associated with the plot.

For nearly two years the 47, carried out the ruse. While drunk and insensate one Satsuma man went so far as to kick Ōishi in the face and spit on him, for the disgrace he had brought on the samurai caste. It was a grave breach of protocol which, under ordinary circumstances, would have cost the man his life. Little did anyone suspect, least of all Kira’s spies. It was all a massive head fake.

The chance for vengeance came in late January, 1703. Kira and the Shōgun’s officials had at last taken the bait and relaxed their defenses.

By this time there were 46 as the oldest, now in his eighties, dropped out of the plot. Forcing their way into Kira’s residence the official’s loyal samurai fought bravely, but were soon overwhelmed. Kira himself was found cowering in an outhouse and summarily decapitated.

The entire cohort now walked the ten or so miles past an astonished populace, to the Sengaku-ji Temple. The head was washed in a well and laid on Asano’s grave. And then they turned themselves in.

The authorities were in a quandary. These men had followed the warrior’s code and avenged the death of their master. They had also defied the will of the Shōgun. Letters of support began to arrive from an admiring public and so, it was decided. The 47 Rōnin would be spared the death by execution meted out to criminals. Shōgun Tokugawa Tsunayoshi, a man so horrified by cruelty to animals he once proclaimed it a capital offence to kill a dog, ordered the Rōnin to commit seppuku.

On March 20, 1703, 46 carried out the sentence and bared their bellies, to the blade. All were buried in death with their master in life, at the Sengaku-ji Temple. Terasaka Kichiemon alone was pardoned by the Shōgun, on account of his age. He was 15.

Sometime later the Satsuma man who had mocked and spat on a drunk visited Ōishi Kuranosuke’s grave and apologized, that he had ever doubted the heart of a samurai. And then he bared his belly to the blade and committed seppuku, right then and there. He too went to his rest Sengaku-ji shrine, along with the the 47 Rōnin.

Terasaka lived to the ripe old of 87 and then he too went his final rest, alongside his comrades.

March 19, 1956 The Agony of Defeat

The most lopsided college football game ever was in 1916, when Georgia Tech rushed for 1,650 yards and didn’t allow a single first down by Cumberland College. Final score, 222-0.

During one 1965 regular season game, the Major League St. Louis Cardinals played a single 40-minute inning scoring seven unearned runs in a 12-2 victory over the Milwaukee Braves. Wags coined the term “Blowout”.

Over the years, plenty of other sporting events have qualified for that term:

• Russia’s 1976 Olympic victory over Japan in men’s basketball, 129-63.
• The St. Francis College Fighting Saints ’96 baseball season run record of 71-1.
• Secretariat’s 1973 Belmont Stakes victory, of 31 lengths.

The most lopsided college football game ever occurred in 1916, when Georgia Tech rushed for 1,650 yards and didn’t allow a single first down by Cumberland College. Final score, 222-0.

In 1927, Kansas City’s Haven High School football team beat Sylvia High 256-0. In a record-setting season of blowouts, the 1901 Michigan Wolverines team defeated every opponent they faced that season by a combined score, of 550-0.

In 1940, Chicago Bears’ coach George Halas showed his players newspaper clippings, in which the Washington Redskins’ owner called Bears players “crybabies and quitters” after losing 7-3 during regular season. Chicago went on to beat Washington 73-0 in post-season, in a game so lopsided it had to be finished with practice balls. Chicago had deposited all the game balls in the stands by that time, kicking extra points.

In 1987, the National League Chicago Colts defeated Louisville, 36-7. The modern Major League Baseball record for margin of victory was set in 2007, when the Texas Rangers defeated the Baltimore Orioles, 30-3. Those 30 runs remain a modern-era record for runs scored in a nine-inning MLB game by one team.

On this day in 1956, the Minnesota Lakers scored one of the most lopsided round ball victories ever over the St. Louis Hawks, 133-75. That blowout was second only to the 1991 Cleveland Cavaliers victory over the Miami Heat, 148-80.

In 2009, Dallas’ Christian Covenant High School girls basketball skunked Dallas Academy, 100-0. The victory was widely condemned: Dallas Academy, a school for students with learning disabilities, had a team of eight out of an entire student body population of 20 girls, and yet Covenant continued a full-court press with three-point shots well after taking a halftime lead of 59-0. Covenant’s administration called for a forfeit of its win, calling the performance “shameful and an embarrassment.” The coach declined to apologize, and was fired.

CRAWFORDVILLE, FLA. 12/9/11-PASCOFB120911HACKLEY05-Pasco quarterback Jacob Guy and Nick Wilson kneel dejected on the field after loosing to Wakulla 41-38 in triple overtime Friday in Crawfordville, Fla. COLIN HACKLEY PHOTO

Three players have won PGA Tour matches by 16 strokes: J.D. Edgar at the 1919 Canadian Open; Joe Kirkwood, Sr., at the 1924 Corpus Christi Open; and Bobby Locke at the 1948 Chicago Victory National Championship. Tiger Woods has the largest margin of victory in the modern era, with a 15-stroke win at the 2000 U.S. Open.

For nearly thirty years, one skier’s wipeout in Oberstock Germany, introduced ABC’s “Wide World of Sports”

The Detroit Red Wings beat the New York Rangers 15-0 in 1944, but some of the worst sports disasters ever, have been in international hockey. The 2007 Slovakia women’s team defeated Bulgaria 82-0 in a 2010 Winter Olympics qualifying tournament. At the 1998 Asia-Oceania Junior Championships, South Korea eclipsed Thailand 92-0. South Korean forward Donghwan Song alone scored 31 goals.

For those of us who rooted for the New England Patriots during the losing years, the 1986 Super Bowl XX was the worst moment…evah. Everyone was wearing their “Berry the Bears” shirts. Life was good when New England took the earliest lead in Super Bowl history with a field goal, at 1:19.

After that, the room got quiet. Real quiet. Chicago held the Patriots to -19 yards. In the first half. Game MVP went to a defensive end with the spectacularly appropriate name of Richard Dent. “Da Bears” set or tied Super Bowl records that day for sacks (7), and fewest rushing yards allowed (also 7). Final score, 46-10.

The day of ignominy lived on for another fourteen years, until the Denver Broncos took us out of our misery with a 55-10 drubbing at the hands of the San Francisco 49ers, in Superbowl XXIV.

March 18, 37 Little Boots

2,000 years ago, the Roman General Germanicus would bring his young son on campaign, the little boy with the not-so-little name Gaius Julius Caesar Augustus Germanicus. Soldiers of the legions called the boy “Little Boots”, after the diminutive caligae or soldier’s footwear, the boy liked to wear in camp. The future emperor hated the nickname “Caligula”, but it stuck.

Around the year 14 or 15, the youngest son of the Roman war hero Germanicus found himself growing up around the Legions. As a boy of just two or three, little Gaius Caesar accompanied his father on campaigns in the north of Germania. Centurions were amused to see him dressed in miniature soldier’s uniform, including the boots, the “Caligae”, and the segmented Roman armor – the “lorica segmentata”.

Soldiers of the Legions called him “Little Boots”, “Caligula” in Latin, after the little soldier’s boots the boy liked to wear in camp. The future dictator was said to hate the nickname, but it stuck.

On this day in the year 37, the Roman Senate annulled the will of the Emperor Tiberius, proclaiming 24 year old Caligula, Emperor. After years of purges and treason trials, Caligula’s ascent to the throne was as a welcome breath of fresh air. A period of relative peace and prosperity, the first two years of Caligula’s reign did little to dispel expectations.

The obelisk at St. Peter’s Square was originally erected in Alexandria, in 30-28BC. Caligula had it brought to Rome and erected in the year 40, where it stands to this day. The “Piazza San Pietro Obelisk” is the only such obelisk to have survived from Roman times.

In the year 39, Caligula suffered a protracted and severe illness, hovering between life and death for over a month. It may or may not have had anything to do with his subsequent behavior. The man who emerged from that illness was widely believed, insane.

The soothsayer Thrasyllus of Mendes had once prophesied that Caligula had “no more chance of becoming emperor than of riding a horse across the Bay of Baiae”. Caligula had the last word on that with a spectacular stunt, ordering a temporary floating bridge to be built over the two miles of open water separating Baiae from the neighboring port of Puteoli. Despite not being able to swim, the young emperor rode his favorite horse Incitatus across the bridge, clad in the breastplate of Alexander the Great, no less.

In case you’re wondering, Incitatus was the same horse which Caligula appointed as priest and planned to make a Consul of Rome, the top official of the Roman government.

Before long, the emperor’s eccentricities became erratic…and terrifying. Caligula regularly made Roman senators run alongside his chariot. He would order executions on a whim. Caligula once had an entire crowd section at the Roman Games thrown into the arena, to be eaten alive by wild animals. He said he was bored.

Caligula began to appear in public dressed as various gods or demigods: Hercules, Mercury, Venus and Apollo. He’d refer to himself as a god when meeting with politicians. He built temples for his own worship, where the heads of statues were replaced by his own likeness.

Later stories of wanton hedonism, cruelty, and sexual depravity are probably exaggerated, but none seem without a grain of truth. Caligula was murdered by his own Praetorian guard in the year 41, after fewer than five years in power.

Most historians dismiss the floating bridge story as a myth, since no archaeological evidence has ever surfaced. Caligula’s two “pleasure barges”, extracted from the bottom of Lake Nemi in the 1920s and 30s, are a different story. Measuring 23 and 240-feet respectively, their lavish furnishings included marble décor, mosaic floors, statuary and gilded copper roofs. One wreck carried a lead pipe, bearing the inscription “Property of Gaius Caesar Augustus Germanicus”. In 1944, Allied bombing resulted in a fire. Archaeological treasures both, these living connections to the ancient world were consumed, in the inferno.

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

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“If ye break faith with us who dieWe shall not sleep, though poppies grow In Flanders fields”

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Sharing Today in History:

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“If ye break faith with us who die
We shall not sleep, though poppies grow
In Flanders fields”