The Trump Administration finds its Ernst Röhm

 

Ernst Röhm, ardent Nazi, founder of the SA, and murdered in a Nazi purse. Bundesarchiv, Bild 102-14393 / CC-BY-SA 3.0, CC BY-SA 3.0 de, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=6591184

Greg Bovino (posted under fair use).  Purged post Pretti killing.

The problem, of course, is that thugs commit their thuggery for regimes that are thuggish, sacrifice of a noted thug or not.

Thursday, November 5, 1925. The Big Parade.

 

Released on this day in 1925, the film is regarded as one of the greatest films about World War One.

The picture also would be associated with a level of tragedy for its stars.  John Gilbert died in 1936 at age 38 due to alcoholism.  He managed to marry four times in his short life, and was not married at the time of his death.  His costar in the film, Renee Adoree made the transition to sound movies, but died in 1933 at age 35 of tuberculosis.  She'd married twice, but was not married at the time of her death.

Born in the Russian Empire, with his true name never definitively learned, Sidney Reilly, a British spy, was executed by the Soviets.

He had a prolific career as a spy, leading to his nickname as The Ace of Spies.  He was reported a model for James Bond.  Early in his life as an emigre he went by the last name of Rosenblum, which would suggest Jewish heritage.  In the late 19th Century he seems to have worked for Scotland Yard as a paid informant on immigrant matters.  He married widow Margaret Thomas at Holborn Registry Office in London in 1898 after her husband had died under conditions that suggested poisoning, something of note as Rosenblum was working as sort of a herbalist at the time.  She was wealthy and that, by extension, made him wealthy.  Soon after that, he began his career as a spy, spying for the British and the Japanese in the lead up to the Russo Japanese War.

While it is difficult to determine the range of his activities, it is claimed that:

• He pretended to be a Russian arms merchant to spy on Dutch weapons shipments to the Boers during the Boer War.
• He obtained intelligence on Russian military defences in Manchuria for the Kempeitai.
• He obtained Persian oil concessions for the British Admiralty in events surrounding the D'Arcy Concession.
• He infiltrated a Krupp armaments plant in prewar Germany and stole weapon plans.
• He seduced the wife of a Russian minister to glean information about German weapons shipments to Russia.
• He attempted to overthrow the Russian Bolshevik government and to rescue the imprisoned Romanov family, actions which lead to his being sentenced to death in absentia.
• He served as a courier to transport the forged Zinoviev letter into the United Kingdom.

He had been lured by into the Soviet Union by the Cheka, posing as anti Soviet agents.

It's difficult to tell the overall truth of his activities.  British intelligence is notoriously able to keep its secrets for one thing.  Reilly was good at keeping them as well, and as he worked for various entities he had a strong reason to.  Like the James Bond character that's supposedly based upon him, he had a strong affinity for women and married up to three or four times, with other alleged affairs in addition.  His last marriage was to actress Pepita Bobadilla.

Last edition:

Wednesday, November 4, 1925. Now or then?

Labels: 1920s, 1925, 1925 Election, Democratic Party, History repeating itself or at least rhyming, New Jersey, New York

Lex Anteinternet: Monday, September 10, 1945. Eh? (Additional Labels)

Lex Anteinternet: Monday, September 10, 1945. Eh?: Post war news items were getting a bit weird. Mike the Headless chicken was ineffectively beheaded, and would go on to become sort of a frea...

Sunday, July 6, 1924 Plutarco Elias Calles elected.

Plutarco Elias Calles of the Partido Laborista Mexicano won Mexico's presidential election with 84.1% of the vote.  Before the emergence of the PRI, which Calles founded, it was the labor party, a democratic socialist party, was the most powerful party in Mexico.

That Mexico, which had just endured a violent attempt at overthrowing the government, was able to successfully stage an election was a triumph of democracy, albeit a temporary one as the PRI would later lock the country up into being a one party state with the PRI as the official party.

Calles was a left wing figure who had come up as a general in the Mexican War.  A controversial figure, he's admired by some for his work on social and institutional changes in Mexico, and an attempt, albeit only partially successful, to reform a military then dominated by revolutionary generals who were a threat to the government itself.  His administration, however, attacked the Church which lead to the January 1, 1927 Catholic rebellion known as the Cristero War, arguably the last chapter of the Mexican Revolution, in which 200,000 Mexicans died and would ultimately bring about the reelection of Alvaro Obregón in 1928.  He was exiled to the United States in 1936 but returned in 1941 when the PRI was firmly in power.  By that time, closer to death, he had become a spiritualist.

The Johnstown Meteor fell to earth in Colorado and interrupted a nearby funeral.  It's only one of eleven such events that have been witnessed.

Johnstown is famous today for the Buc-ee's located there.

Last edition:

Saturday, July 5, 1924. Hitting a concrete wall.

Labels: 1920s, 1924, 1924 Olympics, Art, baseball, Brazil, France, Germany, J. C. Leyendecker

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".

National Guard Armory, Yale Oklahoma

National Guard Armory, Yale Oklahoma

I recently was in Yale, Oklahoma, where I took the following photographs:



This Armory was built in 1936.  Nearby Stillwell apparently has a very similar armory built in 1937.  Stillwell is only about 15 miles away.

Today, in Wyoming, we live in an era in which armories are being closed down.  Since I got out of the National Guard in 1987, Guard armories in Rawlins, Wheatland, Riverton and Thermopolis have been shut down. The Guard is smaller now than it was then, but all these towns had active armories prior to WWII, when the Guard was much smaller.  Indeed, the 115th Cavalry Regiment actually had a small section that drilled in Glenrock, which is a very small town, which never had an armory.

Transportation was, of course, much more difficult prior to WWII, but it hadn't really dawned on me how many small armories there were until I saw this one.  Newcastle in our state has a little tiny one, where today it has no Guard unit.  What a different Guard culture this must have created.  The Guard today drills once a month, for a weekend, and for two to three full weeks a year. Back then, the annual AT was just as long, but they drilled one night per week.  With armories like this being all over, the units themselves must often have been really tiny.

That's both good and bad, I suppose.  I can envision quite a few reasons why this would be less than ideal, and a few why it would have been good. But what a different situation it must have been, compared to today.

Thursday, August 26, 1909. A hostel idea.

The youth hostel movement was born when a group of hikers lead by Richard Schirrmann found shelter in a school in a thunderstorm.

Schirrmann was a teacher as well as an outdoorsman.  During World War One he served in the German Army, participating the 1915 Christmas truce, something that lingered in his area for quite some time after Christmas.  He founded the Youth Hostel Association in 1919 and founded the children's village "Staumühle" on a former military training ground near Paderborn, where my German ancestors hail from.  HE served as the President of the International Youth Hostelling Associating until the Nazis forced him to resign and put the control of the hostels under the Hitler Youth in 1936.  He rebuilt the association after the war.  He married late, in 1942, but had six children with his wife before dying in 1961 at age 87.

The SS Cartago telegraphed a report of a hurricane near the Yucatan, the first radio warning of a tropical storm.

Last edition:

Monday, August 23, 1909. Bill Bergen sets a record.

Labels: 1900s, 1909, 1940s, 1943, baseball, Sports