History – Page 2 – Historical Easter Eggs

October 27, 1962 The Man who Saved the World

The outside world would not learn for decades how close it had come to the abyss.

Cold War. The English writer George Orwell coined the term in 1945, describing “two or three monstrous super-states, each possessed of a weapon by which millions of people can be wiped out in a few seconds.”

Two diametrically opposite governing philosophies, each capable of exterminating the other by the push of a button.

Never in the history of the Cold War was the world so close to nuclear annihilation than the Cuban Missile Crisis of October 1962. Speaking to staffer Arthur Shlesinger, President John F. Kennedy called those 13 days “the most dangerous moment in human history.”

On no single date was the world so close to the precipice as October 27.

This newspaper map from the time of the Cuban Missile Crisis shows the distances from Cuba of various cities on the North American Continent. — Image by © Bettmann/CORBIS

On October 14, ultra-high altitude Lockheed U–2R reconnaissance aircraft photographs revealed the presence of medium and intermediate range ballistic nuclear missile sites under construction in Cuba. Located only 90 miles from the US mainland, such a facility was capable of delivering a nuclear payload anywhere in the eastern United States.

President Kennedy warned of the “gravest consequences” resulting from the introduction of Soviet offensive weapons in Cuba, while Foreign Minister Andrei Gromyko insisted that Soviet aid was purely defensive. U-2 photographs gave lie to Gromyko’s protestations. Images taken on October 17 revealed the presence of 16-32 missiles.

The President warned “It shall be the policy of this nation to regard any nuclear missile launched from Cuba against any nation in the Western Hemisphere as an attack by the Soviet Union on the United States, requiring a full retaliatory response upon the Soviet Union.” There was no mistaking American intent.

Kruschev replied, “I hope that the United States Government will display wisdom and renounce the actions pursued by you, which may lead to catastrophic consequences for world peace…”

Soviet nuclear submarines moved in response to the quarantine as Cuban waters became the scene of a tense naval standoff.

U-2 photographs of the 25^th & 26^th showed accelerated construction on the island, with several silos approaching operational readiness. US air forces were placed at DEFCON 2. War involving Strategic Air Command, was now “imminent”.

Cuban President Fidel Castro publicly urged a Soviet nuclear first strike.

On day twelve of the standoff, October 27, an American U-2 was shot out of the sky by a Soviet supplied surface-to-air missile, killing pilot Major Rudolph Anderson Jr.

Meanwhile on the ocean below, events were spinning out of control.

Soviet submarine B-59 was just outside the American blockade perimeter, with orders to monitor the situation. Vasili Arkhipov was 34 at the time, one of three officers in command of the nuclear armed sub.

Diving deep to avoid detection, B59 was unable to communicate with Moscow when she came under attack from American surface vessels.

The depth charges being used were “non-lethal”, intended to force the submarine to the surface, but perception is reality, right? Isolated from the outside world with orders to launch a first strike in the event of war, B-59 found herself under attack.

Imagine yourself in this situation. B59 sailor Anatoly Andreev described the scene in his journal:

“For the last four days, they didn’t even let us come up to the periscope depth … My head is bursting from the stuffy air. … Today three sailors fainted from overheating again … The regeneration of air works poorly, the carbon dioxide content [is] rising, and the electric power reserves are dropping. Those who are free from their shifts, are sitting immobile, staring at one spot. … Temperature in the sections is above 50 [122ºF].”

This was the atmosphere onboard the submarine on October 27, as B59 shook with every depth charge. Captain Valentin Savitsky ordered the submarine’s nuclear weapon armed, a missile capable of striking deep into the American heartland. The missile was armed with a payload equal to the bomb dropped on Hiroshima.

“We’re gonna blast them now” Savitsky reportedly said, “We will die, but we will sink them all – we will not become the shame of the fleet.”

Second captain Ivan Maslennikov agreed with Savitsky and approved the attack.

According to Soviet doctrine, such a decision needed to be unanimous among the three commanders. Such a strike was as sure as night follows day to provoke a counter attack, followed by retaliatory strikes. Deep under the Caribbean surface, Vasili Aleksandrovich Arkhipov was all that stood in the way of nuclear war.

How would you respond to such a situation?

Perhaps it was the K-19 incident from 2 years earlier. In July 1961, Arkhipov was executive officer of the nuclear submarine K-19, on patrol south of Greenland. Developing a severe leak in her cooling system, the submarine’s 7-man engineering section frantically labored to jury-rig a secondary cooling system, exposing themselves to hours of intense radiation. The effort was a success, but all seven men died inside of a month. 15 more died from the effects of radiation over the following two years. Every sailor onboard K-19 was destined to die of radiation poisoning including Arkhipov himself, but for now, the man carried the moral authority of a Hero of the Soviet state.

Be that as it may, Arkhipov persuaded the other two that the American attack was intended not to destroy them, but to bring them to the surface. B59 came to the surface restoring communications with the outside world. World War 3 had not begun, after all.

The Cuban Missile crisis effectively came to a close the following day, B59 going quietly on her way. The outside world would not learn for decades how close it had come to the abyss.

Vasili Arkhipov died in obscurity 1998. Four years later, Director of the U.S. National Security Archive Thomas S. Blanton described him as “the man who saved the world”.

When governments make war, it is the everyday men (and these days women), who pay the price. Vasili Arkhipov was a Russian patriot, doing his duty for his nation. In so doing, the man made for us a very different world from what could have been. Let it be said, then, that personal courage in the line of fire is worthy of our respect. No matter on which side such a man finds himself.

April 5, 1761 The Female Paul Revere

Born April 5, 1761, Sybil Ludington was barely sixteen at the time of her ride. From Poughkeepsie to what is now Putnam County and back, the “Female Paul Revere” rode across the lower Hudson River Valley, covering 40 miles in the pitch dark of night, alerting her father’s militia to the danger and urging they come out for a fight.

“Listen my children and you shall hear,
Of the midnight ride of” …Sybil Ludington.

Wait…What?

Paul Revere’s famous “midnight ride” began on the night of April 18, 1775. Revere was one of two riders, soon joined by a third, fanning out from Boston to warn of an oncoming column of “regulars”, come to destroy the stockpile of gunpowder, ammunition, and cannon located in Concord.

Revere himself covered barely 12 miles before being captured, his horse confiscated to replace the tired mount of a British sergeant. Revere would finish his “ride” on foot, arriving at sunrise on the 19^th to witness the last moments of the battle on Lexington Green.

Two years later, Patriot forces maintained a similar supply depot in the southwest Connecticut town of Danbury.

William Tryon was the Royal Governor of New York, and long-standing advocate for attacks on civilian targets. In 1777, Tryon was major-general of the provincial army. On April 25th, the General set sail for the Connecticut coast of Long Island Sound with a force of some 1,800, intending to destroy the small town.

Patriot Colonel Joseph Cooke’s small Danbury garrison was caught and quickly overpowered on the 26^th, while attempting to remove food supplies, uniforms, and equipment. Facing little if any opposition, Tryon’s forces went on a bender, burning homes, farms, and storehouses. Thousands of barrels of pork, beef, and flour were destroyed, along with 5,000 pairs of shoes, 2,000 bushels of grain, and 1,600 tents.

Colonel Henry Ludington was a farmer and father of 12, with a long military career. A long-standing and loyal subject of the British crown, Ludington switched sides in 1773, joining the rebel cause and rising to command the 7th Regiment of the Dutchess County Militia, in New York’s Hudson Valley.

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In April 1777, Ludington’s militia was disbanded for planting season, and spread across the countryside. An exhausted rider arrived at the Ludington farm on a blown horse on the evening of the 26^th, asking for help. 15 miles away, British regulars and a force of loyalists were burning Danbury to the ground.

The Dutchess County Militia had to be called up. The Colonel had one night to prepare for battle, and this rider was done. The job would have to go to Colonel Ludington’s first-born, his daughter, Sybil.

By the time Sybil returned the next morning, cold, rain-soaked, and exhausted, most of 400 militia were ready to march.

Arnold’s forces arrived too late to save Danbury, but inflicted a nasty surprise on the British rearguard as the column approached nearby Ridgefield. Never outnumbered by less than three-to-one, Connecticut militia was able to slow the British advance until Ludington’s New York Militia arrived on the following day. The last phase of the action saw the same type of swarming harassment as seen on the British retreat from Concord to Boston, early in the war. 35 miles to the east of Danbury, General Benedict Arnold was gathering a force of 500 regular and irregular Connecticut militia, with Generals David Wooster and Gold Selleck Silliman.

While the British operation was a tactical success, the mauling inflicted by these colonials ensured that this was the last hostile British landing on the Connecticut coast.

The British raid on Danbury destroyed at least 19 houses and 22 stores and barns. Town officials submitted £16,000 in claims to Congress, for which town selectmen received £500 reimbursement. Further claims were made to the General Assembly of Connecticut in 1787, for which Danbury was awarded land. In Ohio.

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At the time, Benedict Arnold planned to travel to Philadelphia, to protest the promotion of officers junior to himself, to Major General. Arnold, who’d had two horses shot out from under him at Ridgefield, was promoted to Major General in recognition for his role in the battle. Along with that promotion came a horse, “properly caparisoned as a token of … approbation of his gallant conduct … in the late enterprize to Danbury.” For now, the pride which would one day be his undoing, was assuaged.The Keeler Tavern in Ridgefield is now a museum. The British cannonball fired into the side of the building, remains there to this day.

Henry Ludington would become Aide-de-Camp to General George Washington, and grandfather to Harrison Ludington, mayor of Milwaukee and 12th Governor of Wisconsin.

Gold Silliman was kidnapped with his son by a first marriage by Tory neighbors, and held for Nearly seven months at a New York farmhouse. Having no hostage of equal rank with whom to exchange for the General, Patriot forces went out and kidnapped one of their own, in the person of Chief Justice Judge Thomas Jones, of Long Island.

Mary Silliman was left to run the farm, including caring for her own midwife, who was brutally raped by English forces for denying them the use of her home. The 1993 made-for-TV movie “Mary Silliman’s War” tells the story of non-combatants, pregnant mothers and farm wives during the Revolution, as well as Mary’s own negotiations for her husband’s release from Loyalist captors.

General David Wooster was mortally wounded at the Battle of Ridgefield, moments after shouting “Come on my boys! Never mind such random shots!” Today, an archway marks the entrance to Wooster Square, in the East Rock Neighborhood of New Haven.

Sybil Ludington received the thanks of family and friends including that of George Washington, himself. And then it was as if she had stepped off the pages of history.

Paul Revere’s famous ride would have likewise faded into obscurity, but for the poetry of Henry Wadsworth Longfellow. Eighty-six years, later.

“Listen my children and you shall hear
Of the midnight ride of Paul Revere,
On the eighteenth of April, in Seventy-five;
Hardly a man is now alive…..

April 4, 1943 The Davao Dozen

The death rate for western prisoners in Japanese prisoner of war camps was seven times that of allied prisoners in Nazi Germany or Fascist Italy.

With increasing tensions between the Unites States and the empire of Japan, the “China Marines” of the Fourth Marine Regiment, “The Oldest and the Proudest”, departed Shanghai for the Philippines on November 27-28, 1941. The first elements arrived at Subic Bay on November 30.

A week later and 5,000 miles to the east, the radio crackled to life in the early – morning hours of 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.

On January 7, Japanese forces attacked the Bataan peninsula. The Fourth Marines, under Army command, were ordered to help strengthen defenses on the “Gibraltar of the East”, the heavily fortified island of Corregidor.

The prize was nothing less than the finest natural harbor in the Asian Pacific, Manila Bay, the Bataan Peninsula forming the lee shore and Corregidor and nearby Caballo Islands standing at the mouth, dividing the entrance into two channels. Before the Japanese invasion was to succeed, Bataan and Corregidor must be destroyed.

The United States was grossly unprepared to fight a World War in 1942. The latest iteration of “War Plan Orange” (WPO-3) called for delaying tactics in the event of war with Japan, buying time to gather US Naval assets to sail for the Philippines. The problem was, there was no fleet to gather. The flower of American pacific power in the pacific, lay at the bottom of Pearl Harbor. Allied war planners turned their attention to defeating Adolf Hitler.

General Douglas MacArthur abandoned Corregidor on March 12, departing the “Alamo of the Pacific” with the words, “I shall return”. Some 90,000 American and Filipino troops were left behind without food, supplies or support with which to fight off the onslaught of the Japanese 14th Army, under the command of Lieutenant General Masaharu Homma.

Battered by wounds and starvation, decimated by all manner of tropical disease and parasite, the 75,000 “Battling Bastards of Bataan” fought on until they could fight no more. Some 75,000 American and Filipino fighters were surrendered with the Bataan peninsula on April 9, only to begin a 65-mile, five-day slog into captivity through the unbearable heat and humidity, of the Philippine jungle.The Japanese were sadistic. Guards would beat marchers and bayonet those too weak to walk. Tormented by a thirst few among us can even imagine, men were made to stand for hours under a relentless sun, standing by a stream from which none were permitted to drink. The man who broke ranks and dove for the water was clubbed or bayoneted to death, on the spot. Japanese tanks would swerve out of their way to run over anyone who had fallen and was too slow in getting up. Some were burned alive, others buried alive. Already crippled from tropical disease and starving from the long siege of Luzon, wanton killing and savage abuse took the lives of some 500 – 650 Americans and between 5,000 – 18,000 Filipinos.

For those who survived the “Bataan Death March”, this was only the beginning of their ordeal.

United States Marine Corps 1st Lieutenant Austin Shofner came ashore back in November, with the 4th Marines. Shofner and his fellow leathernecks engaged the Japanese as early as December 12 and received their first taste of aerial bombardment, on December 29. Promoted to Captain and placed in command of Headquarters Company, Shofner received two Silver Stars by April 15 in near-constant defense against aerial attack.

For three months, defenders on Corregidor were required to resist near constant aerial, naval and artillery bombardment. All that on two scant water rations and a meager food allotment of only 30 ounces per day.

I don’t know about you, but I’ve eaten Steaks bigger than 30 ounces.

Beset as they were, seven private maritime vessels attempted to run the Japanese gauntlet, loaded with food and supplies. The MV Princessa commanded by 3rd Lieutenant Zosimo Cruz (USAFFE), was the only ship to arrive in Corregidor.

Japanese artillery bombardment intensified, following the fall of Bataan. Cavalry horses killed in the onslaught were dragged into tunnels and caves, and consumed. Japanese aircraft dropped 1,701 bombs in the tiny island during 614 sorties, armed with some 365-tons of high explosive. On May 4 alone, an estimated 16,000 shells hit the little island.

The final assault beginning May 5 met with savage resistance, but the outcome was never in doubt. General Jonathan Wainwright was in overall command of the defenders on Corregidor. Some 11,000 men comprised of United States Marines, Army and Navy and an assemblage of Filipino fighters. The “Malinta Tunnel” alone contained over a thousand, so sick or wounded as to be helpless. Fewer than half had even received training in ground combat techniques.

All were starved, sick, utterly exhausted. The 4th Marines was shattered, no longer an effective fighting force. With the May 6 landing of Japanese tanks, General Wainwright elected the preservation of life over continued slaughter in the defense of a hopeless position. Maine Colonel Samuel Howard ordered the regimental and national colors burned to prevent their capture, as Wainwright sent a radio message to President Roosevelt:

“There is a limit of human endurance, and that point has long been passed.”

Isolated pockets of marines fought on for four hours until at last, all was still. Two officers were sent forward with a white flag, to carry the General’s message of surrender. It was 1:30pm, May 6, 1941.Nearly 150,000 Allied soldiers were taken captive by the Japanese Empire during World War 2. Clad in unspeakably filthy rags they were fed a mere 600 calories per day of fouled rice, supplemented only by the occasional insect or bird or rodent unlucky enough to fall into desperate hands. Diseases like malaria were all but universal as gross malnutrition led to loss of vision and unrelenting nerve pain. Dysentery, a hideously infectious disease of the large intestine reduced grown men to animated skeletons. Mere scratches resulted in grotesque tropical ulcers up to a foot in length exposing living bone and rotting flesh to swarms of ravenous insects.

The death rate for western prisoners was 27.1% across 130 Japanese prison encampments. Seven times the death toll for allied prisoners in Nazi Germany, or Fascist Italy.Given such cruel conditions it’s a wonder anyone escaped at all but it did happen. One time.

Austin Schofner and his group were moved from camp to camp. Bilibid. Cabanatuan. Davao. Throughout early 1943, Schofner and others would steal away from work details to squirrel away small caches of food and tools, in the jungle. Nine fellow Marines and two Filipino soldiers were in on the scheme. On April 4, the 12 men quietly slipped away from work parties.

Over the long hours of April 5-6, the group crept through the jungle, dodging enemy patrols and managing to avoid detection, arriving on the 7th at a remote Filipino Guerrilla outpost. Guided by wild mountain tribesmen of the Ata Manobo, the Marines rejoined the 110th Division, 10th Military District, at this time conducting guerrilla operations against the Japanese occupiers.

Emaciated, sick and weak, these men had reached the end of an ordeal a year and a half in the making. It would be understandable if they were to seek out the relative safety of a submarine bound to Australia, but no. Those physically able to do so joined the guerrillas in fighting the Japanese.

Davao escapees from left to right, Maj. Stephen Mellnik, Lt. Cmdr. “Chick” Parsons, Lt. Cmdr. Melvyn McCoy, Capt. William Edwin Dyess, and Capt. Charley Smith pose for a photo before commencing their trek to rendezvous with the USS Trout. Image from nationalww2museum.org

Austin Shofner and his Marines were evacuated that November, aboard the submarine USS Narwhal. For the first time, Japanese atrocities came to light. The Death March, the torture, mistreatment and summary execution of Allied POWs. The public was outraged, leading to a change in Allied war strategy. No longer would the war in the Pacific take a back seat to the effort to destroy the Nazi war machine.

Now-Colonel Shofner volunteered to return to the Pacific where his experience helped with the rescue of 500 prisoners of the infamous POW camp at Cabanatuan on January 30, 1945.

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.

The Davao Dozen conducted the only successful escape from a Japanese Prison camp in all World War 2. They deserve that we remember their names.

The only successful escape from a Japanese Prisoner of war camp in all World War 2, The “Davao Dozen” include Here are the names of the Americans in the Davao Dozen:

Second Lieutenant Leo Boelens
First Lieutenant Michiel Dobervich
Captain William Edwin Dyess
Second Lieutenant Samuel Grashio
First Lieutenant Jack Hawkins
Lieutenant Commander Melvyn McCoy
Sergeant Paul Marshall
Major Stephen Mellnik
Captain Austin Shofner
Sergeant Robert Spielman
Benigno de la Crus
Victorio Jumarong

April 3, 1860 Pony Express

Six riders died in service to the Pony Express, but that wasn’t the most dangerous job.

From the time of Lewis and Clark, a growing nation expanded ever westward. First came the trappers and the traders. In 1834, merchant Nathaniel Wyeth led the first religious group westward along what would become the Oregon Trail. In 1848, James W. Marshall discovered gold at a place called Sutter’s Mill. Countless prospectors swelled the ranks of homesteaders flooding ever westward. The California Gold Rush was on.

That same year, the Postal Department awarded a contract to the Pacific Mail Steamship Company to deliver mail to the western territories. Under the contract, a letter would ship south from New York, transferred by horseback and rail across the Isthmus of Panama or the Isthmus of Tehuantepec in Mexico before returning to sea, destined for San Francisco. The process required three to four weeks under the best of circumstances, but it was more reliable than the old stage coach.

California became the 31st state in 1850. Ten years later some 380,000 people lived there. With coast-to-coast rail still years away, simmering tensions hurtling the nation toward Civil War proved the new system inadequate, even as the rapid transfer of information became ever more important.

Businessmen William Russell, Alexander Majors and William B. Waddell were in the shipping business, employing some 75,000 oxen, thousands of wagons and 6,000 men. One of those was the pioneer, future banker and Mayor of el Paso, Charles Robert Morehead. With experience running wagon trains through Wyoming and Utah, several attacked by Indians, Morehead was dispatched to Washington DC to meet with President Hames Buchanan. The subject, a proposed relay carrying mail to the west and back. A Pony Express.

The Central Overland California & Pike’s Peak Express Company officially opened on April 3, 1860, horse-and-rider relays carrying letters the 1,966-mile distance from St. Joseph, Missouri to Sacramento, California, and back.

Individual riders covered 75 – 100 miles at a time changing horses every 10-15 miles, at relay stations. Westbound delivery was compressed from weeks to ten days, on average. Riders carrying President Abraham Lincoln’s inaugural address covered the run in 7 days, and 17 hours.

Alone in a wilderness of bandits and sometimes hostile natives, riders traveled around the clock, their way lit only by lighting, or the light of the moon. In May 1860, 20-year old Robert “Pony Bob” Haslam finished a 75-mile run only to learn his replacement, as terrified of Paiute Indians, who’d been attacking stations along the way. Jumping on a fresh horse, Haslam encountered another station burned out by Paiutes. Pony Bob covered 370 miles in 40 hours before it was over, a Pony Express record.

Six riders died along the way, but even that wasn’t the most dangerous job. Livestock stations were little more than dirt floor hovels in remote locations with corrals for horses. Stationery and unmoving, livestock handlers were constantly at risk of ambush by desperados, and raiding Indians. In 18 months as many as 16 stock hands lost their lives.

80 to 100 riders aged 11 to 40 covered some 650,000 miles before it was over, delivering some 35,000 pieces of mail for an average of $100-$150 per month. Riders themselves were required to weigh 125-pounds or less and swear out the following oath, on pain of termination:

“I, (name), do hereby swear, before the Great and Living God, that during my engagement, and while I am an employee of Russell, Majors, and Waddell, I will, under no circumstances, use profane language, that I will drink no intoxicating liquors, that I will not quarrel or fight with any other employee of the firm, and that in every respect I will conduct myself honestly, be faithful to my duties, and so direct all my acts as to win the confidence of my employers, so help me God.”
Oath sworn by Pony Express Riders

Costs started out at $5.00 per ½ ounce and dropped to $1.00 per ½ ounce, after the introduction of a newer, lighter-weight paper. Even so, $5.00 in 1860 is equal to $130 today. The system was a financial disaster.

In the 19th century, the Pony Express was to the old methods as email is to snail mail. Even so, the system never did turn a profit. Far too expensive for ordinary people, the Pony Express carried mostly newspaper reports, business documents and government dispatches. For everyone else, the Central Overland California and Pike’s Peak Express Co. (C.O.C.&P.P.) stood for “Clean Out of Cash & Poor Pay!”

An expensive stopgap leading to the first transcontinental telegraph, the founders declared bankruptcy in only 18 months. The Pony Express came to a halt 18 months after it began, ending service in October 1861.

April 2, 1722 Who is Silence Dogood?

“Without freedom of thought there can be no such thing as wisdom and no such thing as public liberty without freedom of speech.” – Silence Dogood

The fifteenth child of Josiah and Abiah Franklin was born in a little house on Milk Street in Boston, across from the Old South Church.

The family moved to a larger house at Union & Hanover Street when little Benjamin was six. As the tenth son, Ben was destined to be “tithed” to the church, but Josiah changed his mind after the boy’s first year in Boston Latin School. Considering the small salary, it was too expensive to educate a minister of the church.

The boy was sent to George Brownell’s English school for writing and arithmetic where he stayed until age ten, when he went to work in his father’s shop making tallow candles and boiling soap. After that, “Dr.” Benjamin Franklin’s education came exclusively from the books he picked up along the way.

By twelve the boy was “Hankering to go to sea”. His father was concerned about his running away. Knowing of the boy’s love of books, the elder Franklin apprenticed his son to the print shop of James Franklin, one of his elder sons, where he went to work setting type for books. And reading them. He would often “borrow” a book at night, returning it “early in the Morning lest it should be miss’d or wanted.”

By 1720, James Franklin began to publish The New England Courant, the second newspaper to appear in the American colony.

Franklin often published essays and articles written by his friends, a group describing itself as “The Hell-Fire Club”. Now 16, Benjamin desperately wanted to be one of them, but James seemed to feel that little brothers should be seen and not heard.

Sometime around March 1722, a letter appeared beneath the print shop door. “Sir”, the letter began, “It may not be improper in the first Place to inform your Readers, that I intend once a Fortnight to present them, by the Help of this Paper, with a short Epistle, which I presume will add somewhat to their Entertainment”. The letter went on in some detail to describe the life of its author. It was signed, Mrs. Silence Dogood.

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That first letter was published on April 2. True to her word, Silence Dogood wrote again in two weeks. And then again. And again. Once every other week, for over half a year. The Dogood letters were delightful, cleverly mocking the manners of Boston “Society” and freely giving advice, particularly on the way that women should be treated. Nothing was sacred. One letter suggested that the only thing students learned at Harvard College, was conceit.

James Franklin and his literary friends loved the letters, and published every one. All of Boston was charmed with Silence Dogood’s subtle mockery of the city’s Old School Puritan elite. Proposals of marriage came into the print shop, when the widow Dogood coyly suggested that she would welcome suitors.

James was jailed at one point, for printing “scandalous libel” about Massachusetts Governor Joseph Dudley. The younger Franklin ran the shop in his absence, when Mrs. Dogood came to his defense. Quoting Cato, she proclaimed: “Without freedom of thought there can be no such thing as wisdom and no such thing as public liberty without freedom of speech.”

And then the letters stopped, much to the dismay of the Courant and its readership. One wrote to the editor, saying the paper had “lost a very valuable Correspondent, and the Public been depriv’d of many profitable Amusements.”

On December 3, James Franklin ran an ad. “If any Person . . . will give a true Account of Mrs. Silence Dogood, whether Dead or alive, Married or unmarried, in Town or Country, . . . they shall have Thanks for their Pains.” It was only then that his sixteen-year-old brother fessed up. Benjamin Franklin was the author of the Silence Dogood letters.

All of Boston was amused by the hoax Not James. He was so furious with his little brother, the younger Franklin broke his terms of apprenticeship and fled, to Pennsylvania.

So it was a future Founding Father of the Republic, the inventor, scientist, writer and philosopher, the statesmen who appears on our $100 bill, came to Philadelphia. Within a few years, Franklin had set up his own print shop, publishing the Philadelphia Gazette as well as his own book bindery, in addition to buying and selling books.

Thanks in no small part to Franklin’s efforts, literacy standards were higher in Colonial America than among the landed gentry of 18th century England.

Franklin’s diplomacy to the Court of Versailles was every bit as important to the success of the Revolution, as the Generalship of the Father of the Republic, George Washington. Signatory to both the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution, it is arguably Ben Franklin who broke the impasse of the Convention of 1787, paving the way for ratification of the United States Constitution.

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By that time too old and frail to deliver his own speech, Franklin had someone else read his words to the deadlocked convention.

“ON THE WHOLE, SIR, I CAN NOT HELP EXPRESSING A WISH THAT EVERY MEMBER OF THE CONVENTION WHO MAY STILL HAVE OBJECTIONS TO IT, WOULD, WITH ME, ON THIS OCCASION, DOUBT A LITTLE OF HIS OWN INFALLIBILITY, AND, TO MAKE MANIFEST OUR UNANIMITY, PUT HIS NAME TO THIS INSTRUMENT”.

Doubt a little of his own infallibility. That seems like good advice, even today.

A Trivial Matter

Despite ending his formal education at the age of ten, Benjamin Franklin is considered to be one of the great polymaths along with the likes of Aristotle, Leonardo da Vinci and Albert Schweitzer. A prolific inventor, Franklin never patented a single one, believing such innovations should be shared, freely. A brief list of Franklin’s inventions include bifocal glasses, the lighting rod and the Franklin stove. The founding father’s personal favorite was a musical instrument which came to be played by the likes of Mozart and Beethoven: the Glass Armonica

December 16, 1775 Boston Tea Party

The hated Tea Act actually reduced the price of tea, but colonists saw the measure as an effort to buy popular support for taxes already in force.

During the time of Henry VIII, military outlays as a percentage of British central government expenses averaged 29.4%. During the 18^th century that number skyrocketed to 74.6%, and never dropped below 55 percent.

The Seven Years’ War alone, fought on a global scale from 1756 – 1763 saw England borrow the unprecedented sum of £58 million, doubling the national debt and straining the British economy.

For the American colonies, the conflict took the form of the French and Indian Wars. In the view of the British government, the colonists themselves were the beneficiaries of much of that expense, for which the government expected reimbursement.

In the Americas, a never-ending succession of English wars meant until this time that colonists were left alone to run their own affairs.

Several measures were taken to collect revenues. Colonists bristled at the heavy handed taxation policies of the 1760s. The Sugar Act, the Currency Act: in one 12-month period Parliament passed the Stamp Act, Quartering Act, and the Declaratory Act, and deputized Royal Navy Sea Officers to enforce customs laws in colonial ports.

The merchants and traders of Boston cited the “late war” and related expenses, concluding the Boston Non-Importation Agreement of August 1, 1768. That agreement prohibited the importation of a long list of goods, ending with the statement ”That we will not, from and after the 1st of January 1769, import into this province any tea, paper, glass, or painters colours, until the act imposing duties on those articles shall be repealed”.

The ‘Boston Massacre’ of 1770 was a direct result of the tensions between colonists and the “Regulars” sent to enforce the will of the Crown. Two years later, Sons of Liberty looted and burned the HMS Gaspee in Narragansett Bay, RI.

The Tea Act, passed by Parliament on May 10, 1773, was less a revenue measure than it was an effort to prop up the British East India Company, by that time burdened with debt and holding eighteen million pounds of unsold tea. The measure actually reduced the price of tea, but Colonists saw this as an effort to buy popular support for taxes already in force, and refused the cargo. In Philadelphia and New York, tea ships were turned away and sent back to Britain while in Charleston, the cargo was left to rot on the docks.

British law required a tea ship to offload and pay customs duty within 20 days, or the cargo was forfeit. The Dartmouth arrived in Boston at the end of November with a cargo of tea, followed by the tea ships Eleanor and Beaver. Sam Adams called for a meeting at Faneuil Hall on the 29^th, which then moved to Old South Meeting House to accommodate the crowd. 25 men were assigned to watch Dartmouth, making sure it didn’t unload.

7,000 gathered at Old South Meeting House on December 16^th, 1773, the last day of Dartmouth’s deadline. Royal Governor Hutchinson held his ground, refusing Dartmouth permission to leave. Adams concluded that “This meeting can do nothing further to save the country.”

That night, somewhere between 30 and 130 Sons of Liberty, some dressed as Mohawk Indians, boarded the three ships in Boston Harbor. There they threw 342 chests of tea, 90,000 pounds in all, into Boston Harbor. £9,000 worth of tea was destroyed, worth about $1.5 million in today’s dollars.

In the following months, other protesters staged their own “Tea Parties”, destroying imported British tea in New York, Philadelphia, Charleston, and Greenwich, NJ. There was even a second Boston Tea Party on March 7, 1774, when 60 Sons of Liberty, again dressed as Mohawks, boarded the “Fortune”. This time they dumped 3,000 pounds of the stuff into the harbor. That October in Annapolis Maryland, the owner of the Peggy Stewart was compelled to burn his own vessel to the water line. It was better than facing the angry mob.

For decades to come, the December 16 incident in Boston Harbor was blithely referred to as “the destruction of the tea.” The earliest newspaper reference to “tea party” wouldn’t come around until 1826.

John Crane of Braintree is one of the few original tea partiers ever identified, and the only man injured in the event. An original member of the Massachusetts Society of the Cincinnati and early member of the Sons of Liberty, Crane was struck on the head by a tea crate and thought to be dead. His body was carried away and hidden under a pile of shavings at a Boston cabinet maker’s shop. It must have been some sight to see when John Crane “rose from the dead”, the morning after.

Great Britain responded with the “Intolerable Acts” of 1774, including the occupation of Boston by British troops. Minutemen clashed with “Lobster backs” just a few months later – on April 19, 1775. No one alive today knows who fired that first shot at Lexington Green. History would record that sound as “The shot heard ’round the world”.

April 18, 1906 American Plague

The disease process unfolded with horrifying rapidity. The Italian writer Boccaccio wrote that plague victims often “ate lunch with their friends and dinner with their ancestors in paradise.”

In the early 1330s, a deadly plague broke out on the steppes of Mongolia. The gram-negative bacterium Yersinia Pestis preyed heavily on rodents, the fleas from which would transmit the disease to people, the infection then rapidly spreading to others.

High fever would precede the appearance of “buboes”, a painful swelling of the lymph glands, especially in the armpit, neck and groin. Spots appeared on the skin turning from red to black, often accompanied by necrosis and gangrene in the nose, lips, fingers and toes.

In some cases, Bubonic plague will progress from the lymphatic system to the lungs, resulting in Pneumonic plague. Y. Pestis can progress to the blood stream as well, a condition known as septicemic plague. In medieval times, septicemic mortality rates ran from 98% to 100%.

The disease process unfolded with horrifying rapidity. The Italian writer Giovanni Boccaccio wrote that plague victims often “ate lunch with their friends and dinner with their ancestors in paradise.”

Plague broke out among a besieging force of Mongols on the Black Sea city of Caffa, in 1346. Italian merchants fled with their ships in the Spring of 1347, carrying in their holds an untold number of rats and the fleas that came with them. One-third of the world’s population died in the five-year period which followed, equivalent to over two Billion today.

The Black Death of the 14th century is far and away the most famous, but it’s not the first. The Plague of Justinian, 541-542AD, centered mostly around the Eastern Roman (Byzantine) and Sassanid Empires, the disease resulting in the death of 25 million individuals. Roughly 13% of the world’s population, at that time.

The Black death of 1346-’53 was a catastrophe unparalleled in human history, but it was by no means the last such outbreak. The Third Pandemic began in China in 1855, spreading to Hong Kong and on to British India. In China and India alone the disease killed 12 million people. It then spread to parts of Africa, Europe, Australia, and South America.

In the newly formed Territory of Hawaii, the first signs of the plague began to appear in Honolulu in December, 1899. Not sure how to control the outbreak, city health officials decided to burn infected houses. Changing winds soon fanned the flames out of control. On January 20, 1900, an inferno consumed nearly all of Chinatown, 38 acres, leaving 6,000 homeless.

Honolulu_Chinatown_fire_of_1900 — In January 1900, Honolulu’s Chinatown burned down in an effort to control bubonic plague.

In 1900, The ship Australia brought Yersinia Pestis with it from Hong Kong into San Francisco. The ship was immediately quarantined and, despite the escape of two stowaways confirmed to have the bacilli, there was no immediate outbreak. The quarantine seemed to work for a time, but there was no way to contain the rats on board. They are probably the reason that plague spread to the city.

The body of an elderly Chinese man was discovered in a Chinatown basement. An autopsy found the man to have died of plague. There were more than 18,000 Chinese and another 2,000 Japanese living in the 14-block Chinatown section of the city. Many called for a quarantine of Chinatown, but Chinese citizens objected, as did then-Governor Henry Gage, who tried to sweep the whole outbreak under the carpet. Business interests likewise objected to the quarantine. Except for the Hearst Newspapers, not much was heard about it.

100 confirmed cases of plague were discovered by the end of 1902, but Governor Gage was still denying its existence. There were a total of 121 cases with 113 deaths by 1904, but the outbreak seemed to be contained.

San Francisco was hit by a massive earthquake on April 18, 1906, followed by a great fire. Thousands of San Franciscans were crowded into refugee camps with an even higher number of rats. For the first time, the disease now jumped the boundaries of Chinatown.

On May 27, 1907, a San Francisco sailor was diagnosed with bubonic plague. The epidemic spread aggressively over that summer, the New York Times reporting in November that “the disease increased with such virulence that it looked for a time as if the city were to be decimated as were medieval Europe”.

The plague popped up one last time, but local, state, and federal health officials combined to all-but eradicate the rat population, and with it the disease. It was all over by 1909.

150623163604-03-plague-explainer-0623-super-169 — Reported cases of human plague in the United States, 1970 – 2012

Or was it. Nothing could stop the fleas from infected rats from transferring to wild rodents, squirrels, and prairie dogs, and permanently establishing plague bacilli in the western United States.

In 2015, the CDC reported 15 cases of Bubonic plague in the United States, as of October. Four of them were fatal. The bacterium is treatable with modern antibiotics, but I can’t help thinking about the massive quantity of anti-microbials used in livestock production. Given the apparent increase in multiple-drug resistant “superbugs”, I hope that people far smarter than I am, are thinking about it too.

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June 8, 793 The Viking Age

The Viking age lasted for almost 500 years, beginning in the late 8th century and ending only with the advent of the “Little Ice Age” in 1250. In the end, the Vikings left their mark from Newfoundland, to Baghdad.

Two miles off the Northeast coast of Great Britain is the island of Lindisfarne, just south of the Scottish border. Once, there was a monastery there.

The island’s monastic cathedral was founded a 150 years earlier by the Irish monk, Aidan of Lindisfarne. Known as the Apostle of Northumbria and spreading the gospel to Anglo-Saxon nobility and slaves alike, the monk was later canonized to become Saint Aidan.

Lindisfarne island had gifts of silver and gold, given to the monastery in hopes that such gifts would find peace for the immortal soul of the giver. There were golden crucifixes and coiled shepherd’s staves, silver plates for Mass, and ivory chests containing the relics of saints. Shimmering tapestries hung from the walls. The writing room contained some of the most beautiful illuminated manuscripts ever made.

Lindisfarne Castle Holy Island — Lindisfarne

1,224 years ago today, you could have looked to sea. You would have seen a strange sight that morning. Long ships with high prow and stern were lowering square sail as oarsmen rowed these ships directly onto the beach.

Any question you had as to their purpose would have been immediately answered, as these strangers sprinted up the beach and chased down everyone in sight. These they murdered with axe or spear, or dragged them down to the ocean and drowned them. Most of the island’s inhabitants were dead when it was over, or taken off to the ships to be sold into slavery. All of those precious objects were bagged, and tossed into the boats.

The raid on Lindisfarne abbey gave rise to what would become a traditional prayer: A furore Normannorum libera nos, Domine, “From the fury of the Northmen deliver us, Lord”. The Viking Age had arrived.

These Viking invasions were repeated for over a century, until England was eventually bled of its wealth, and the Vikings began to take the land, as well.

It wasn’t just England either. The King of Francia was tormented by Viking raids in what would one day become western France. King Charles “the Simple”, so-called due to his plain, straightforward ways, offered choice lands along the western coast to these men of the north, if they would leave him alone. In 911 the Viking chieftan Rollo accepted Charles’ offer, and so created the kingdom of Normandy. They called him “Rollo the Walker”, so-called because he was so huge that no horse to carry him, but that’s a story for another day. (Like, August)

A period of Global Warming (yes, they had it then too), during the 10th and 11th centuries created ideal conditions for the Norse raiders, with a prevailing westerly wind direction in the spring reversing direction in the fall to become west to east.

Viking travel was not all done with murderous intent; they are well known for colonizing westward as they farmed Iceland and possibly North America.

Many of their eastward excursions were more about trade than plunder. Middle Eastern sources mention Vikings as mercenary soldiers and caravan guards.

Viking warriors called “Varangian Guard” hired on as elite mercenary bodyguard/warriors with the eastern Roman Empire. Farther east, the “Rus” tribe lent their name to what would later be called Russia and Belarus.

The 10th-century Arab traveler Ibn Fadlan described the Rus as “perfect physical specimens”, writing at the same time that “They are the filthiest of all Allah’s creatures”. Tattooed from neck to fingernails, the men were never without an axe, a sword and a long knife. The Viking woman “wears on either breast a box of iron, silver, copper, or gold; the value of the box indicates the wealth of the husband. Each box has a ring from which depends a knife”.

The classical Viking age ended gradually, and for a number of reasons. Christianity took hold, as the first archbishopric was founded in Scandinavia in 1103.

Political considerations were becoming national in scope in the newly formed countries of Sweden, Norway and Denmark.

King Cnut “The Great”, the last King of the North Sea Empire of Denmark, Norway and England, together also described as the Anglo-Scandinavian Empire, died in 1035, to be replaced in England by Edward the Confessor. Edward’s successor Harold would fend off the Viking challenge of Harald Hardrada in September 1066 at a place called Stamford Bridge, only to be toppled in the Norman invasion, two weeks later.

June 7, 1866 Fenian Raids on Canada

They were a state within a state. To this day, the Fenian Brotherhood remains the only organization to have publicly armed and drilled, on this scale, in United States history.

The Fenian Brotherhood was founded in the US in 1858, based on the idea that Ireland should be free of English rule to become an independent, self-governing Republic. The Brotherhood traced its lineage back to 1758. By 1866, much if not most of the membership were battle hardened veterans of the Civil War, ended only a year earlier.

Fenians invaded Canada no fewer than five times between 1866 and 1871. The idea was to bring pressure on Britain to withdraw from Ireland, so these attacks were directed toward British army forts, customs posts and other targets in Canada.

Irish Canadian Catholics were divided by the raids, with many feeling torn between loyalty to their new home and sympathy for the Fenians’ objectives. Canadian-Irish Protestants and French Catholics were generally loyal to the crown, and many took up arms against the raiders.

700 Fenians headed north to Campobello Island, New Brunswick in April 1866, intending to seize the island. The war party became discouraged and dispersed after a show of force by the British Navy at Passamaquoddy Bay, but they would be back.

Next, a group of 1,000 to 1,300 Fenians sabotaged the US Navy side-wheeler gunboat USS Michigan, and slipped across the Canadian border at the Niagara River on June 1. A Fenian ambush west of Ft. Erie led to the Battle of Ridgeway, in which 13 Canadian Militia were killed. 94 were wounded or incapacitated by disease.

Further fighting took place the following day, in which the Canadian Militia’s inexperience led to battlefield confusion. A number were taken prisoner. Realizing that they couldn’t hold their position, the Fenians released their prisoners and withdrew to Buffalo on the 3rd, but again they would be back.

This seems to have been the high water mark of the Fenian uprising. President Andrew Johnson began to crack down, dispatching Generals Ulysses Grant and George Meade to Buffalo to assess the situation. Their orders on the 7th of June were to arrest anyone who even looked like a Fenian.

The Fenian “army of liberation” may have had little effect on Irish Independence, but it served to fire up Canadian Nationalism. Canada was more properly called “British North America” in those days. It seems that the Fenian raids tipped many of the more reluctant votes toward the security of nationhood, particularly in the Maritime provinces. Historians will tell you that Ridgeway is “the battle that made Canada.” The Canadian Confederation was formed in 1867, uniting Nova Scotia, New Brunswick, Ontario and Quebec into one Dominion of Canada.

There would be several more Fenians raids in the years that followed, from Pigeon Hill and Mississquoi County in modern day Quebec, to the 1870 Pembina raid in the Dakota territory.

US authorities ultimately arrested the men and confiscated their arms, but many felt that the government had turned a blind eye to the invasions, seeing them as payback for British assistance to the Confederacy during the late Civil War.

The Fenian Brotherhood was a nation within a nation, organized for the purpose of winning Irish independence by force. A member of the British House of Commons rightly called them “a new Irish nation on the other side of the Atlantic, recast in the mould of Democracy, watching for an opportunity to strike a blow at the heart of the British Empire.”

In modern times, scores of self-styled ‘Militia’ have adopted the use of military style drill in this country, from the far-left Los Macheteros and Black Panthers, to Posse Comitatus and the far-right militia units of the nineties. Yet, I believe it is accurate to say, the Fenian Brotherhood remains the only organization in United States history, to have publicly armed and drilled on this scale.

“We are the Fenian Brotherhood, skilled in the arts of war,

And we’re going to fight for Ireland, the land we adore,

Many battles we have won, along with the boys in blue,

And we’ll go and capture Canada, for we’ve nothing else to do”.

Fenian soldier’s song

June 6, 1944 A Great Crusade

The amphibious invasion which began this day on the beaches of Normandy, was the culmination of the largest single endeavor in human history.

3,200 reconnaissance missions were launched leading up to the invasion, to photograph vital locations. Other landing sites were considered, in fact Adolf Hitler expected the invasion to take place at Calais. Normandy was chosen because defenses were lighter, and because advancing troops would have fewer rivers and canals to cross.

“Exercise Tiger”, an earlier practice landing on the beaches of Slapton, killed more Americans than many full-scale battles.

Five landing zones were selected along a 50-mile stretch of beach. Americans would attack at two points code named Utah and Omaha, British troops at Gold and Sword, and Canadian troops at Juno.

On the eve of the invasion Eisenhower told his troops: “You are about to embark upon a great crusade, toward which we have striven these many months. The eyes of the world are upon you.” Conscious of his own role in the disastrous landings at Gallipoli of the earlier war, a nervous Winston Churchill said to his wife, Clementine, “Do you realize that by the time you wake up in the morning 20,000 men may have been killed?”

The invasion began in the early morning hours with 1,200 planes delivering gliders and parachute troops of the 82nd and 101st Airborne Infantry. Eight different navies made up the invasion fleet, the sun rising that morning on 6,939 vessels along the coast of France.

160,000 US, UK, Canadian and Free French troops landed on the first day. Later invasion phases included forces from Australia, Greece, New Zealand, Netherlands and Norway, combined with the free forces of Nazi occupied Poland, Belgium and Czechoslovakia.

There were the “Mulberries”, the great steel structures built to form temporary harbors for landing vehicles and equipment, and floated across the 25 miles of the English Channel. By July 4, over a million men, 148,000 vehicles, and 570,000 tons of supplies had passed over them to the beaches.

It was impossible to assemble the pieces of such a massive undertaking in secret, so an elaborate ruse called “Operation Fortitude” was launched to divert attention from the real objective. Fake field armies were assembled in Edinburgh, Scotland and the south coast of England, threatening attack on the coasts of Norway and the Pas de Calais. The real General George S. Patton was put in charge of the fake First US Army Group (FUSAG). The allied “Twenty Committee”, represented by its roman numerals “XX”, controlled a network of double agents, making the deception so complete that Hitler personally withheld critical reinforcements until long after they would have made a difference. It’s where we get the term “Double Cross”.

What had seemed like an inexorable Nazi tide had begun to slow with the reversal of the German armies in Soviet Russia and North Africa. The allies had gained their first European toehold with a successful landing in Italy nine months earlier. It had been 5 years since the beginning of World War II, 4 years almost to the day, since the National Socialist regime of Adolf Hitler had hurled the English and French armies from the beaches of Dunkirk. The Soviet Union had joined the side of the Allies 3 years earlier, and the United States 2½. The entire European subcontinent was either neutral or under Nazi domination. The Allies needed to break down the door to get back in.

Supreme Headquarters Allied Expeditionary Force (SHAEF) commander Dwight D Eisenhower had planned to launch the invasion on the 5th, but the weather was working against it. The invasion couldn’t be held for long, it had to be launched or turned back.

Allied troop convoys were at sea on the 4th, and the full moon which would bring high tides would soon be over. There was finally a break in the forecast, and the invasion began shortly after midnight.

Eisenhower had written two letters. Only one would be delivered to his superior in Washington, DC, Army Chief of Staff, General George C. Marshall. The first announced the success of the invasion, the second taking personal responsibility for its failure. “Our landings in the Cherbourg-Havre area have failed to gain a satisfactory foothold and I have withdrawn the troops. My decision to attack at this time and place was based upon the best information available. The troops, the air and the Navy did all that bravery and devotion to duty could do. If any blame or fault attaches to the attempt it is mine alone.” Eisenhower dated the letter July 5 instead of June 5, a small indication of the enormous pressure the man was under.

eisenhower-in-case-of-failure-letter — Eisenhower labeled this backup letter “In case the Nazis won.”

Over 9,000 Allied soldiers were killed or wounded on that first day. Almost a year of hard fighting remained before VE Day: Victory in Europe. On this day, General Eisenhower would be able to keep that second message, in his pocket.

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“ON THE WHOLE, SIR, I CAN NOT HELP EXPRESSING A WISH THAT EVERY MEMBER OF THE CONVENTION WHO MAY STILL HAVE OBJECTIONS TO IT, WOULD, WITH ME, ON THIS OCCASION, DOUBT A LITTLE OF HIS OWN INFALLIBILITY, AND, TO MAKE MANIFEST OUR UNANIMITY, PUT HIS NAME TO THIS INSTRUMENT”.

A Trivial Matter

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