Early Jeeps: National Museum of Military Vehicles Dubois Wyoming.

There are a lot of Jeeps depicted in this series of posts, with a fair number being World War Two Willys and Ford Jeeps.  This museum, however, has a collection of the very early Jeeps that preceded the Willys MB patter standariation.

The request for a 1/4 ton truck came out just before World War Two and one of the company's that responded was Bantam, a vehicle manufacturer which specialized in small cars.  Their introduction was very much like what the MB would become, except it was lighter.

Bantam always felt cheated by the military for not securing the contact, which they really couldn't fulfill.  The company ceased to exist in 1956.

Willys Overland specialized in in "overland" vehicles to start with, and  came up with what was really the best design for the competition, although it was submitted later than Bantam's.

Ford also competed, putting in an entry that was much like Willy's.

Last edition:

World War Two U.S. Motorcycles: National Museum of Military Vehicles Dubois Wyoming.

Labels: 1940s, Dubois Wyoming, Military, Motorcycles, National Museum of Military Vehicles, Transportation, World War Two, Wyoming (Dubois)

Sunday, September 10, 1944. Reaching Germany, Freeing Luxembourg, Continuation War lost.

The US 3d Armored Division occupied St. Vith and accordingly reached the German border.  St. Vith is in the German speaking border region of Belgium.

Luxembourg was liberated.

Gen. Eisenhower approved what would become Operation Market Garden, Field Marshall Montgomery's concept for an airborne assault in the Netherlands.

The U-20 and U-23 were scuttled in the Black Sea.

The Red Army attacked German forces holding a suburb of Warsaw.

The RAF launched Operation Paravane, an attempt to sink the Tirpitz.

Finland signed a formal armistice with the Soviet Union which restored the 1940 borders and required reparations to be paid by Finland.  Finland had, accordingly, lost the Continuation War, but the Soviet terms were remarkably generous.

"Soldiers from Co. A, 145th Inf., 37th Div., in position on a hillside where they had the Japs surrounded.Bougainville. 10 September, 1944."

Last edition:

Saturday, September 9, 1944. A coup in Bulgaria.

Labels: 1940s, 1944, 1980s, 1986, 1990, 1990s, Aircraft, Armor, Army, Artillery, Belgium, Buchenwald, Bulgaria, Burma Road, Cheyenne, Cheyenne Wyoming, Communism, Nationalist Chinese Army, World War Two, Wyoming (Cheyenne)

Thursday, July 17, 1924. Barracuda.

 

The USS Barracuda, the first of the Navy's V-boats, was launched.  She was decommissioned in 1937, recommissioned in 1940, served throughout World War Two and never fired a shot in anger.

And;

July 17, 1924: Jesse Haines throws the first no-hitter in Cardinals history

Last edition:

Wednesday, July 16, 1924. First news story on Big Foot to go nationwide.

Labels: 1920s, 1924, Army, Cryptozoology, Dawes Plan, First Around The World Flight, It was because of World War One, Newspapers, Oregon, The Press

Thursday, July 3, 1924. Linking electricity.

U.S. Secretary of Commerce Herbert Hoover submitted a paper before the World Power Conference in London urging American power plants to be linked together to save energy.

Hoover was, legitimately, a genius.

Oath taking ceremony, Citizens Military Training Camp, Camp Meade, Md., 7/3/24.

Citizens Military Training Camps were part of a Federal program that offered basic military instruction to civilians who were not part of the Army's reserve system, which principally consisted of the National Guard. First authorized in 1921, they continued through 1940.

Last edition:

Tuesday, July 1, 1924. Airmail.

Labels: 1920s, 1924, Aircraft, Cheyenne Wyoming, Immigration, Japan, Post Office, Rawlins Wyoming, Rock Springs Wyoming, Transportation, Wyoming (Cheyenne), Wyoming (Rawlins), Wyoming (Rock Springs)

Leap Day

Pope Gregory XIII, 1502 – 1585

Which is notable mostly because it simply is. We only get them, and don't notice them much, every four years.  Other than teasing people born on the day and miscalculating their actual age, not much will occur.

The added day, of course, come about due to the calendar adjustment that went into effect with the introduction of the Gregorian Calendar in October 1582. The added day was to keep the calendar from getting increasingly inaccurate.  The entire Christian world didn't adopt the new calendar all at once, in part due to the Great Schism and the start of the Protestant Reformation, but over time, it's taken over nearly completely for the entire globe.  About the only remaining use of the prior Julian Calendar is in some parts of the Eastern Orthodox world for their liturgical calendar, and even that is no longer universally true.

Pope Gregory actually met with a lot of opposition to the new calendar, FWIW.  Members of the general public were really upset at first.  Spain, Portugal, Poland-Lithuania and the Italian states nonetheless adopted it nearly immediately.  France, some of the Dutch Republic, and the Catholic states of the Holy Roman Empire and Swiss Confederation did in 1587.

Denmark and Norway, then one state, and the rest of the Dutch Republic didn't fall into line until 1700-1701, by which time the Julian Calendar was seriously out of whack.  The UK didn't adopt it until 1752.  Sweden came around in 1753.

You would think a day as odd as Leap Day would be associated with some interesting customs, and it actually is, or more accurately was.  In Wyoming, there once was a custom of appointing a teenager to be Governor for the day, honorific of course.  I don't think that occurs anymore, but I guess we'll see today.  If this does occur, I have not taken note of it recently.   Wyoming Public Media reported it has having occured as recently as 1940, FWIW.

One political thing that does happen is the U.S. Presidential Election.  It's always in a Leap Year. . . so we get to enjoy one more extra day of campaigning.

A tradition in the English-speaking world is that women can propose to men on this day, which, in some versions of the custom, extends to the whole year. This tradition was surprisingly wide spread in societies speaking English, and is attributed by some to the Irish Saint, St. Brigid, who predates the Gregorian Calendar by quite some measure.   She died in 525.

Anyhow, supposedly she licensed women to propose to men every four years, which is likely just a story.

"Taking" a person, then, was a much more serious matter, even though it should be equally serious now.

Even when I was a kid, however, there remained the odd custom, apparently limited to English-speaking countries as noted, that in Leap Years girls could "ask out" a boy, it being implicit that otherwise that was a right/burden that fell to males.  It still, in fact, largely does.  This appears to have been the remnant of a custom in English-speaking countries, no doubt only lightly observed, that on Leap Day, this day, women could propose marriage to men, that also being a prerogative which then, and largely now, was reserved to men by custom.

Frankly, this is vaguely threatening.

How much of a deal this really was, I don't know, but it was enough of one that late in the 19th Century and early in the 20th Century it generated cartoons, not all of which were kind, and it generated cards, most of which were, although more than a few of them were somewhat aggressive. The cards suggest that women were using them, so in fact some women did avail themselves of the licensed role reversal and propose.

Less threatening.

As odd as this may seem now, it may have made some sense at the time.  Another thread we have in draft deals with the economics, in part, of marriage in the age, but things were, quite frankly, tighter.  As that thread reveals, a lot more men went through life unmarried than do now, and far more than we might suspect.  More than a little of that was probably economic hesitation.  For women, however, unlike men, being unmarried was a societal strike against them and often a personal lifelong disaster.  If they were waiting for a proposal, this was a societally licensed way to deliver it.

Whatever was going on with this, it seems to have flat out ended in its original form right about the era of the cards we see here.  What happened?

I don't know, but what I suspect is that World War One dramatically altered the marriage landscape.  Indeed, we dealt with this briefly in regard to Catherinettes;

In France, for St. Catherine's saint's day, the Catherinettes were out on the streets:

From John Blackwell's Twitter feed on the topic.

We noted this custom in 2020:

The day is also St. Catherine's Day,, the feast day for that saint, which at the time was still celebrated in France as a day for unmarried women who had obtained twenty-five years of age.  Such women were known as Catherinettes. Women in general were committed since the Middle Ages to the protection of St. Catherine and on this day large crowds of unmarried 25 year old women wearing hats to mark their 25th year would gather for a celebration of sorts, where well wishers would wish them a speedy end to their single status. The custom remained strong at least until the 1930s but has since died out.

We should also note that the plight of unmarried French women, and British ones as well (and probably German ones) had grown worse since 1914.  Due to the combat losses of young men in the Great War, their marriage prospects in an era when being an unmarried woman was somewhat grim, had greatly declined.  The youngest of these women had been 21 when the war ended, meaning that they were of marriageable age when most young men were fighting in the war.  As the war killed men in that demographic, it meant that some would never marry.  The war also meant that the surviving men had disproportionate options.

I'm sure there's a study of this somewhere, but it can't help be noted that it must have had long-lasting social impacts, and it probably also explains the significant number of "war brides" brought home from France by US servicemen after the war and occupation, as well as the same population brining home some German brides, and Russian brides.

This of course is from a different culture yet, the French, but it addresses the same topic, with the French taking it up annually, and more cheerfully it looks like.

This custom apparently has largely died, but interestingly milliners are trying to revive it, as it was associated with outlandish hats.  Having said that, French single women over 25 were still out on the streets with wild costumes and hats in honor of the day, whereas the somewhat maudlin English Leap Day cards don't seem to have made it past World War one.  It's hard not to draw that line in the case of the Leap Day cards.  1916 was a Leap Year, and then 1920.  By 1920 there were a lot of single women in English-speaking countries (and in France too) who were going to be single for life, the war having made that a fact.

Before we leave this topic, it's interesting to note that in Medieval Times, after the introduction of the Gregorian Calendar, in some European countries this was Bachelor's Day for the same reason. I.e., Bachelors were subject to proposals.  It actually was a matter of law in some countries.  In some places it became the custom for men of means to be required to buy any suitor whose proposal he turned down twelve pairs of gloves so that she could hide her embarrassment at not having an engagement ring.

While on this, FWIW, as we've noted before, while spinster status was regarded as a disaster earl in the 20th Century, what exactly constituted it is misunderstood. As we have noted in another thread:

The median age for women was 21.6 in 1910. The same year, the median age for men was 25.1.

At the time the author wrote this entry, 2010, the median age for women was 25.0.  The median age for men was 26.7.  Data suggested that it had crept up a little over 1.7 years for women and 1.3 years for men.

Okay, that is a difference, but is that what you were expecting?

I doubt it, unless you are quite familiar with these statistics.

So, over century, the average age for "first marriages" has gone up a little under four years for women, and a little over 1.5 years for men.  Not that much of a climb.

That deals with the averages, of course.  Looking at my own grandparents, I think one set was married in their late 20s or early 30s, while another in their early 20s.  My parents were in their 30s.

Related Threads:

Of interest, I note that some other blogs we link into this site also noted Leap Day or Leap Year, with some noting the same items we noted above.

Leap Year

Leap Year Once Viewed as Opportunity for Women

Shockingly young! Surprisingly old! Too young, too old! Well, nothing much actually changing at all. . . Marriage ages then. . . and now. . and what does it all mean?

Saturday, April 28, 1923. Measuring

The Saturday magazines were out.

The SS Deutschland was launched. The passenger ship of the Hamburg American line would go into Kreigsmarine service in 1940 as an accommodation ship.  In 1945 she was converted to a hospital ship but insufficient paint existed in order to paint her entirely white.  She was sunk in May 1945.

Wembley Stadium hosted its first event.

McGreen & Harris, 4/28/23

Williams ran a wordless classic.

Saturday, March 6, 1943. Fredendall out, Patton in. Rommel's swan song in North Africa. Freedom from Want. Stalin promotes himself while his Party praises him with B.S.

Wyomingite Maj. Gen. Lloyd Fredendall was relieved of his command of II Corps and replaced by Maj. Gen. George S. Patton.

Patton as a Lieutenant General

Patton, widely regarded as the premier American expert on armored warfare, was very quickly promoted to Lt. General.  Fredendall was assigned stateside duty.  His reputation never recovered after Kasserine Pass, and he did not return to Cheyenne in later years.  He died in 1963 in California, having retired from the Army in 1946.

Fredendall was twice appointed to West Point and twice dropped out.  Senator F. E. Warren was willing to appoint him a third time, but the Academy was unwilling to accept him.  He instead attended the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, and thereafter entered the Army in 1907.  His trouble at West Point was with math, which ironically was also very problematic for the home educated George S. Patton.  His performance in World War One was excellent.

His home state has forgotten him.

The Battle of Medenine was fought in Tunisia.  It was a spoiling attack by the Afrika Korps which resulted in a costly defeat.  It was also Rommel's last command action in North Africa.

Things were going downhill for the Axis in North Africa quickly.

Freedom from Want appeared in the Saturday Evening Post.  It proved to be the most popular of the four freedom's illustrations, and is regarded as one of Rockwell's best.  The accompanying essay was by Phlipinno, immigrant Carlos Sampayan Bulosan.

I wonder to what extent we've forgotten this freedom?

Joseph Stalin, who put many into the want of starvation, promoted himself to the rank of Marshal of the Soviet Union.  Contemporaneously, the Soviet Communist Party proclaimed him "the greatest strategist of all times and all peoples".

M'eh.

Unfortunately, his adopted home has not forgotten him and has drawn the wrong conclusions about his leadership.  First siding with the Germans during World War Two, his miscalculation about what he could extract from them in order to join the war against the British Empire led to the Germans charging ahead with a war against the Soviet Union for which it was not prepared.  It took two years for the USSR to form a sufficient armed mob in order to counter to begin to throw the Germans back, which relied on, in spite of wanting to ignore it, massive Western Allied support.

The Battle of Blackett Strait was fought between the U.S. Navy and the Japanese Imperial Navy.

A small engagement, the Japanese lost 100% of their two destroyer force.

Mid Week at Work. Plastering a house.

"Mixing plaster for house, Chamisal, New Mexico. Occasionally a man helps with the hard work of mixing plaster but the women never allow the men to help with the actual plastering of the house."  1940.

Mid Week At Work. Judges of horses checking the entries at the San Angelo Fat Stock Show, San Angelo, Texas. March, 1940.

 

Saturday January 10, 1942. Joe Louis joins the Army. Mickey Rooney gets married. . . for the first time. Ford starts building Jeeps.

 Boxer Joe Louis, who regained his heavyweight title the day prior, joined the U.S. Army.

Joe Louis sewing on Sergeant First Class stripes.

Louis was initially assigned to the cavalry, which came about due to a love of horsemanship.

As a slight aside, this really shows wartime conditions in that the recruiting station was open on a Saturday.

Mickey Rooney, age 21, married Ava Gardner, age 19.  It was the first of eight marriages for Rooney, three for Gardner, and would last only a year, mostly broken up due to Rooney's behavior, which included womanizing.  It's interesting, I suppose, in the context of Rooney, at that time, having a very youthful and childlike appearance, and having played rather innocent roles.  Gardner, at that time, was practically unknown.

Rooney, FWIW, would not enter the service until 1944.

Even while things were getting increasingly desperate in the Philippines, the Japanese presented their first surrender demand to the forces at Bataan on this day, the first US troop convoy departed Halifax, Nova Scotia, for Londonderry, Northern Ireland.

Northern Ireland would be a major staging area and training area for US forces in the British Isles early in the American participation in the war.

German forces in the Soviet Union began to suffer general reversals in the face of the Soviet Winter Offensive and the weather.

The Ford Motor Company received a contract to manufacture Jeeps.

The history of Ford Jeeps is slightly complicated.  Willys had secured the contract to make 1/4 ton trucks for the services but production needs were obviously going to exceed what Willys Overland could produce.  Accordingly, a contract to produce the standardized Willlys pattern of Jeep issued to Ford. Ford would build 300,000 Jeeps during the war, whereas Willys made 363,000.

Willys, Ford and Bantam had all competed for the contract for the 1/4 ton truck prior to the war, with Ford having introduced a very light vehicle, just as Bantam had.

Ford "Pygmy" competition vehicle for the 1/4 ton truck.

Pre-production numbers were actually produced in some volume, although almost all of them were supplied to the British and the Soviets via lend lease.  Production of  the standardized Jeep has started the prior summer, but the vehicle was still brand new and no examples of it were overseas in spite of it being shown in movies in that role quite frequently.

Tuesday, December 23, 1941. The Fall of Wake Island.

An American defeat, but an oddly inspiring one, occured today, as we earlier reported at Today In Wyoming's History: December 23: 

1941 American forces on Wake Island surrendered to the Japanese. 

The Battle of Wake Island would turn out to be a surprising American point of pride early in the war, in spite of the loss of the atoll.  It took on sort of an Alamo image during the war.

Wake had been a U.S. possession since 1899.  The presence of Polynesian Rats on the island proves that it had very early Micronesian contact, but it had no permanent population until 1935 when Pan American established a hotel station there for its Pacific flying boat route.  The Navy did not establish a permanent base there until 1941, so everything located on it in terms of military installations was new.

The Navy and Marine Corps put up a very determined fight on Wake, and at first the Japanese were unable to successfully land on it. It provided a rare example of shore batteries successfully engaging naval vessels.  Efforts by the Japanese to take the island commenced on December 8, but took until this day in order to be successful.  Efforts to relieve the island from Hawaii failed.

98 American prisoners, all civilians, were held on the island by the Japanese until 1943 when the Japanese murdered them.  Military prisoners were removed to POW camps.  By 1943 the island had been cut off and the Japanese garrison began to starve, actually driving one of the birds species located on the island into extinction.  3/4s of the Japanese garrison died due to starvation.  The island surrendered to a Marine Corps detachment that landed on September 4, 1945, having previously learned of Japan's surrender, and after reburying their murdered victims.  The truth of the murders soon came to light, and several Japanese officers committed suicide over the incident.

While a Japanese victory, it was an early example of what was wrong with Japanese strategic planning.  First of all, the Navy and Marine Corps put up a determined fight over the island, showing that American ground forces in particular were willing to hold ground until the bitter end, a lesson that probably wasn't really being learned at the time due to the next item we'll note.  Secondly, the Japanese took the island, but in the end, it proved to be easy to isolate and the Japanese garrison was essentially taken out of the war and made subject to starvation, something other garrisons on remote islands would also experience.

In really bad news at the time:

 Gen. Douglas MacArthur decides to withdraw to Bataan.

Japanese begin offensive against Rangoon, Burma. 

The 440-foot tanker Montebello was sunk off the California coast near Cambria by a Japanese submarine. The crew of 38 survived, and in 1996 it was found that the 4.1 million gallon cargo of crude oil appeared intact. 

British troops capture Benghazi, Libya.

A conference of industry and labor officials agrees that there would be no strikes or lockouts in war industries while World War II continued.

The first C47 Skytrain entered US military service.

23 December 1941

Lots of the civilian variants, the DC3, were already in military service, but it wasn't until this date that the first example of the dedicated military version was delivered.  The civilian airliner had been introduced in 1935.

Over 10,000 C47s were built, or over 16,000 if the Li-2 Soviet produced version is considered, and amazingly they remain in service with the Columbian, El Salvadorian and South African air forces.  They were preeminently important as an Allied cargo plane during the Second World War, and they were used by every Allied power including the Soviet Union, which built 6,000 of them under license in addition to the ones that were supplied to the USSR via lend lease, making the Soviet Union the second-largest producer of the aircraft.

The role of the C47 in Allied airpower could hardly be understated.  It and the DC3 are one of the greatest aircraft ever produced.  Some DC3s remain in commercial use today (I've seen one in United Airlines colors as late as 2004) and they're actually being remanufactured as the Basler BT-67 for current use.

Tuesday, October 25, 1921. Comings and Goings.

Bat Masterson in 1911.

On this day in 1921, Bartholemew William Barclay "Bat" Masterson, of OK Corral fame, died at age 67.  He'd been working as a columnist there since 1902.

Like a lot of frontier lawmen, Masterson had a few run-ins with the law as well as enforcing it.  He was born in Quebec to an Irish Canadian family and had served in most of the classic frontier roles in the West before becoming well known due to the events in Tombstone.   His family moved to the United States while he was a child, and he grew up on a series of farms before becoming a buffalo hunter and Army scout.  He was at the famous battle of Adobe Walls in 1874.  He became a lawman in 1876 and after his famous career in Arizona he occupied that position in Colorado.  He  moved to Denver in 1882 where he was involved in various scrapes and then to New York in 1902.

Masterson was an acknowledged expert on boxing and became a columnist in New York, a position he occupied for the remainder of his life.

Masterson provides an interesting example of how we tend to compartmentalize figures by their historical period.  He was a classic Frontier figure, but lived well beyond the Frontier's close and, no doubt to himself, seemed to always be living in the present even while depictions of the gunfight would continue to be famous all through his own life.  He was outlived, FWIW, by Wyatt Earp, who died in 1929.

King Michael I of Romania was born.  He was Romania's last king, having became a king as a child due to his father abdicating following his inability to reconcile an illicit relationship with his status as king and renouncing his rights upon his own father's death in 1925.  He lost that title in 1930 when parties dissatisfied with the regency reestablished his father as monarch, but he became king again in  September 1940 when a military coup led by Ion Antonescue returned him to the position of king and removed his father.  He was 18 at the time.

He would be king when Romania declared war on the Soviet Union in 1941, but would lead the coup against the military government in 1944, combining with pro Allied officers who also no doubt saw the handwriting of the results of the war on the wall.  He was removed from power in 1948 and died in 2017, by which time he was once again allowed to live part of the year in Romania.

A terrible Categroy Six hurricane hit Tampa Florida. The storm had previously hit Cuba with minimal damage, but Florida was not so lucky.

The government issued a report on the work of government hunters/trappers.

While I know the current thing is to think, "oh, how awful that the Federal Government did that", if I'd been alive then, the life of a government hunter would have appealed to me.  Having said that, you could still homestead in 1921, and likely that would have appealed to me more.

Mrs. Ed Chambers and Mrs. Sid Hatchfield on this day in 1921.

Hatchfield had been the sheriff of Matewan County, West Viriginia and was murdered on August 1, 1921, along with his friend Chambers.  The killings were probably connected with labor problems in the mining industry.  Mrs. Chambers and Mrs. Hatchfield must have been in Washington on this date in some capacity connected with the murders of their husbands.