Saturday, January 5, 1924. Ironic?

Sounding like a story line out of an Alanis Morissette song, Eleftherios Venizelos, a Greek hero, was elected as the Speaker of the Hellenic Parliament by his colleagues only to go on and have a heart attack that day during the parliamentary session.  He'd serve in the position for only six days, but would live until 1936.

Walter P. Chrysler introduced his first car, the Chrysler Six Model B-70.

Celia Cooney, age 19, commenced her criminal career with the robbery of the Thomas Ralston Grocery store in Brooklyn.  Her husband, Ed Cooney, drove the getaway car.

Their criminal career ended in April when they were caught.  Ed Cooney lost an arm due to an injury while in prison and recovered $12,000 against the State of New York in 1931 as a result.  The same year they were released.  He died in 1936 of tuberculosis, and she remarried in 1943. She passed away in 1992.

Monday, May 8, 1922. The Spread of Soviet Terroristic Justice.

Monument to the victims of the Soviet confiscation in Shuya on Wikipedia. By Сергей Дорогань - Own work, CC BY-SA 4.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=62975457

In the Russian city of Shuya, eight Russian Orthodox priests, two laymen, and one woman were sentenced to death for resisting the state confiscation of church property.

The episode was part of the cynical 1922 Soviet campaign to confiscate the wealth of the Russian Orthodox Church on the pretext of famine relief, a famine that Soviet policies and ineptitude had itself brought about.  No amount of stored church wealth was going to address what the Soviets had brought about and the effort has been argued simply as an excuse to attempt to break the back of the Russian Orthodox Church.

Lenin demanded the death penalty and Trotsky, who of course would ultimately lose his life as well at the hands of Soviet policy, concurred, but Politburo member Lev Kamenev intervened, saving the lives of the laypersons and three of the priests.  While Lenin was the dictator of the Soviet Union at the time, Soviet power was not yet as fully concentrated as it would become under Stalin, such that Kamenev could intervene.

Lenin was days away from a stroke at the time, and Kamenev would rise to be the acting head of the Soviet Union as a result in 1923 and 1924.  In that role, he sided with Stalin against Trotsky.  In 1936, he was a victim of one of Stalin's purges.

Friday August 1, 1941. New things.

The United States Navy was about to get a brand new, and very advanced, torpedo bomber in the form of the Grumman TBF.

TBF's at the Natrona County International Airport as fire bombers in the 1960s.  These aircraft are an enduring memory of my childhood. According to a commenter on one of our companion blogs, these were removed from firefighting duties, which were a common post-war use of them, as the Forest Service was concerned over single engine aircraft being used in this role.  Ironically, the Air Tractor is a common firefighting aircraft today.

It was the first flight of the TBF.

It's interesting, in part because the U.S. Navy regarded the existing TBD-1 as obsolete, which by American standards it was, but it had only gone into service in 1935.  The TBD-1, obsolete though it may have been, was a more advanced aircraft than the Fairey Swordfish that had recently proven to be instrumental in the sinking of the Bismarck, even though the Sworfish had gone into service the following year, 1936.

Also of interest the Japanese already regarded the Nakajima B5N2, "Kate", which had gone into service in 1937 as obsolete, even though it was a more advanced aircraft than the TBD.  The B5N was slated for replacement by the new Nakajima B6N.  

All of this goes to show the technological race in the Pacific was significantly different from that in Europe.  The Japanese Navy was highly advanced, as was the U.S. Navy, and they were racing against each other for the most advanced aircraft and equipment in anticipation of the upcoming war.

On the same day, the U.S. Navy established a base at Midway Island in the Pacific and on Trinidad.

Midway, November 1941.

Midway isn't really a friendly location for humans and there was no permanent human presence on the tiny atoll until 1903, when it was first a station for a transpacific telegraph cable and then U.S. Marines, starting in 1908, when the cable company complained about an unauthorized Japanese presence on the island. An effort to dredge a path through the atoll for shipping purposes in the 1870s had previously failed.  In 1935, it became a stopover on the way to China for Pan American flying boats.  Pan American opened a hotel on the island as a result of the needed to service its wealthy customers on what was a luxury passage at the time.

The island remained a Naval station after World War Two and reached peak population in the 1960s. Since that time technological developments have rendered it obsolete as a base and there is no other reason for human habitation.  Its population has returned to 0.

You can read about those events here:

Today in World War II History—August 1, 1941

On the same day, the Jeep went into full production.

Grim wartime depiction by combat artist of the dead being transported by Jeep on Guadalcanal.

Jeep became the most famous U.S. military vehicle of all time, although it was not as important, in real terms, as the 6x6 series of military trucks.  Of note, while the Army's artillery branch had been working on 6x6 trucks since well before the war, being unable to find a suitable civilian truck, the famous military series really went into production in 1941 as well.

The Jeep dates back to a U.S. Army request for a 1/4 ton truck that was only a year old at the time.  The first suitable vehicle was produced by the Bantam company, which had a prewar history of making tiny vehicles and therefore was well suited to design one for the military.  Unfortunately for them, them, Bantam was not a large-scale manufacturer, so even though it came up with an excellent 1/4 truck, they really weren't capable of mass-producing it.

Because of these concerns, the Government provided the Bantam design to Willys and Ford, larger manufacturers.  This was common for defense contracts, with it being often the case that a product designed by one company would be produced by another.

Also common at this time was the technological development of a design once a company had it, and this rapidly occurred. Willys in particular improved on the Bantam truck and produced a new variant that rapidly became the standard one that Ford and Willys manufactured during the war.  Bantam did not produce any significant number of Jeeps, other than the very early ones, as a result.

The Jeep became a ubiquitous American military vehicle and indeed an iconic American 4x4.  Extremely dangerous and unstable in its early variants, it went into multiple roles.  It's sometimes claimed that it "replaced the horse", which at least in officer transportation it did, but the claim is over broad  Indeed, the widespread use of vehicles was sui generis, although there is some slight truth to that claim.

The wartime BRC40, MB and GPW Jeeps yielded to the M38 after the war, which was an extremely similar Jeep. At the same time, Willys introduced the CJ2, a civilian variant of its wartime MB.  The vehicle was a huge success but for some reason Willys itself, which had specialized in rugged vehicles, couldn't make a go of it in the post-war world specializing in them, and ultimately sold the Jeep product line.  The M38 itself yielded to the M38A1, which in civilian use became the familiar CJ5. Today, Chrysler owns the Jeep brand and produces an updated vehicle which is much safer than the prior variants, but which strongly resembles the CJ5.  The last military Jeep was the M151 "Mutt", which was not only highly dangerous, but which was a Ford design that was also manufactured by Kaiser (which also made CJ5s as a successor to Willys) and AMC (which also made CJ5s as a successor to Kaiser).

My first car, the incredibly dangerous M38A1.

As with the first item on this August 1, 1941, thread, I have a personal connection here as well.  I've owned three Jeeps over the years including a CJ2 and a M38A1.  I no longer have either for those first two vehicles, but I still own a 97 TJ.

Jeeps, I'd note, are so associated with the American military of World War Two that even movies made close in time to actual events, such as They Were Expendable, often mistakenly show them in use very early in the war.  In actuality, when World War Two broke out for the United States, the Jeep was so new that there were none of them in the Pacific Theater.

Roosevelt, on this day, restricted export sales of petroleum to the Western Hemisphere and the United Kingdom.  This followed up on recent actions aimed at Japan, but it also had the impact of securing petroleum supplies for the United Kingdom.

The Germans resumed civilian executions on Crete.

Mid Week At Work: Vermont State Trooper, 1936

Some states have state troopers, some have highway patrolmen.  In any event, this week's reflection on work is put up noting the dedication of the first freeway in the United States on this date in 1940, four years after this photo was taken across the country.

July 25, 1920. Saladin, nous voici

Syrian volunteers uniformed and equipped in the fashion of the former Ottoman Army, 1920

On this day in 1920 the French, largely using native troops drawn from North Africa, officially entered Damascus and put an end to the Emir Feisal's independent Syrian government.  The French commander, Mariano Goybet, made the unfortunate reference to the Crusades on the occasion at the Umayyad Mosque when he declared, "Saladin, nous voici", which translates (at bit roughly), to "Saladin, we're back", or "Saladin, we're here."

Probably more fortunately most of the people in Damascus didn't speak French, but nonetheless the sentiment expressed the really aggressive and arrogant position taken by France in regard to Syria, which had only lately been freed from Ottoman rule by the Arab Army and the British Commonwealth during World War One.  The Arab Army's late war goal had been the occupation of Damascus.

Syria was then, as it is now, a multicultural nation which featured a variety of ethnicities and which retained a significant Christian population.  The reference to Saladin recalled the defeat of Christian forces at the hands of Saladin at the end of the Crusader era in the 1170s through 1190s.  France had at that time been heavily invested in the region and, in spite of the passage of centuries, that had not been forgotten by the French who regarded Syria as a special charge even if the Syrians did not want them back.

Feisal would flea to British protection and was given Iraq as a consolation prize, a kingdom that ultimately cost him his life.

Syria would remain a French mandate until 1946, with French rule being unpopular.  A long running revolt broke out in 1926 which ultimately lead to an effort to create an independent state by the French in 1936, but the French government did not ratify it.  The British supported Syrian independence following World War Two and a Syrian government formed during the mandate period took it into independence.   

Following Syrian governments have proven themselves to be unstable since that time, with coups taking place within a few years of independence.  The Ba'ath Party, an Arab nationalist fascist party, has been in power since 1961, but obviously its rule is far from unchallenged.

Syrian soldier in 2012.

What would have occurred had the French simply acquiesced to a Hashamite kingdom in 1920 remains a great historical, "what if".