Saturday, May 15, 1943. Changes in Tunisian leadership, Flaming bats.

From Sarah Sundin's blog:'

Today in World War II History—May 15, 1943: 80 Years Ago—May 15, 1943: US Army ends experiment in using “bat bombs” as bats burn down newly constructed, unoccupied Carlsbad Army Air Base, NM.

Oops.

She also noted that the Germans launched an offensive in Yugoslavia against Communist partisans, and ABC was founded to enable the newly formed company to purchase the NBC Blue Network.

The Free French deposed Sidi Muhammad VII al-Munsif (Moncef Bey) from Tunis, and would ultimately, that following July, send him packing to Madagascar.  The Bey had collaborated with the Germans, who had in turn made him the King of Tunisia.  To his credit, however, he'd protected the Jewish population of the country as well as the Muslim population.  In context, his actions may have made some sense, from a Tunisian prospective.

When he went into exile, his 25 wives went with him, so at least he wasn't lonely.

His cousin, Muhammad VIII al-Amin (Lamine Bey), became the new Bey.

Moncef Bey retained fairly strong support from Tunisian nationalist, who in turn had an uneasy relationship with the same.  This began to change upon Moncef Bey's death in exile in 1948.  Lamine Bey became king in 1956 with the departure of the French, but he was deposed in 1957.  He died at age 81 in 1962.

He was married to a commoner, with whom he had ten children.

The SS Irish Oak, an Irish flagged vessel with Irish tricolors and Eire painted on the side of it was torpedoed by the U-607.  The crew was able to abandon the vessel and the U-607 waited to fire a final shot until they had departed it.

Operation Checkmate came to an end.

Sunday, May 6, 1923. Familiar places.

The big news was the terrible mine explosion in Colorado, but I linked this in due to the news about a Boy Scout injured on Garden Creek, above Rotary Park.

Rotary Park is still there, and a very popular spot locally.

The mine explosion killed ten miners.

Apparently it was the start of Baby Week.

First annual rodeo.  I didn't realize that the rodeo got started this late, which means this year may be the 100th Anniversary of the Central Wyoming Fair & Rodeo.

Or not.  Last year, the rodeo advertised itself as having its 75th anniversary, which would place the first one in 1948.

Seems unlikely it was that late, but there's probably a reason they calculate it that way.

Over 300 passengers were taken hostage by bandits on the Tianjin-Pukou Railway's Blue Express train as it passed through Lincheng in Shandong Province.

The first World Congress of Jewish Women opened in Vienna.

The British Fascisti, the UK's first fascist party, was formed by Rotha Lintorn-Orman.

A youthful figure in the formation of the Girl Guides, Lintorn-Orman was from a military family. She served as a member of the Women's Volunteer Reserve, and the Scottish Women's Hospital Corps in World War One.  Her conversion to fascism was motivated by a strong sense of anti-communism combined with an admiration for Mussolini. She'd die in 1935 at age 40, at which time she was heavily dependent on drugs and alcohol, and rumors existed regarding alleged sapphic escapades.  By that time, her party had all but ceased to exist, yielding to more and less radical parties.

The fact that the UK had a fascist party at all demonstrated the drift of the times.  Ireland would soon also have one.  In both instances, they never rally amounted to more than an annoyance.

Blog Mirror: 1948 Driving Safety Hints

 

1948 Driving Safety Hints

Tuesday, September 22, 1942. Top elevated

The basic insignia for the rank of First Sergeant at the E-8 grade, shown with the unofficial summer colors of khaki on OD. This color scheme was common for the summertime khaki uniform, but never approved.  The proper colors were OD stripes on a black background.

Today in World War II History—September 22, 1942: Germans split Soviet 62nd Army in Stalingrad and occupy the southern half of the city. US Army raises grade of first sergeant to that of master sergeant.

From Sarah Sundin's blog

Clearly, the item about the Battle of Stalingrad is the important item, but I've linked this in here due to the item on U.S. Army ranks.  On this day in 1942 the grade of the rank of First Sergeant was made equal to that of Master Sergeant.

We've discussed enlisted Army ranks here before, indeed more than once, I think.

First Sergeant are the senior enlisted NCO's in a company, battery or troop.  It's an important rank, and it's been around for an extremely long time.  He is, literally, the "first" sergeant and for enlisted soldiers often the most senior soldier they typically engage with, commonly nicknamed "top".

When the Army was reorganized in 1920, 1st Sergeants were given the grade of E-6.  That would surprise modern soldiers, as that's the grade now held by Staff Sergeants, who at that time held the grade E-5.  E-5 today is held by the rank of Sergeant, but at that time, Sergeants were E-4s, as they still are in the Air Force.

Master Sergeants, that title indicating a senior status to that sometimes indicated for master tradesmen, were E-7s. Today, that grade is held by the rank of Sergeant First Class.  That rank didn't exist in 1920.

On this day in 1942 the Army adopted a new enlisted structure, changing some of the enlisted ranks.  Technician grades, which we've earlier discussed, were adopted, foreshadowing the later introduction of Specialists.  Enlisted ranks remained the same up through Staff Sergeant.  First Sergeants were moved from E-6 to E-7, making them the equivalent of Master Sergeants, and an additional rocker was added to their insignia to indicate their equivalency.  In the E-6 position the rank of Technical Sergeant, which had already coexisted with First Sergeant, remained.

This basic structure remained until 1948 when technicians were eliminated, but new rank insignia were introduced for non combatant NCO's, only barely distinguishable from those of combatants.  Technical Sergeant, at that time, was renamed to Sergeant First Class.  Moreover, the rank of "Recruit" was introduced for what had been "buck privates", and introduced at the E-1 level, making there three grades of privates.  The rank of Staff Sergeant was eliminated, and buck Sergeants took their insignia.

Specialists were added in 1955.

n 1959 a jump in grades happened in enlisted ranks overall. Staff Sergeants were reintroduced as E-6s, acquiring their prior insignia, and Sergeants became E-5s and reacquired their three chevron and no rocker insignia., Sergeants First Class took the E-7 grade and First Sergeants (and Master Sergeants) E-8s.  The rank of "Recruit" was renamed Private E-1.  Privates at the E-3 level worse the single chevron, as they had since 1948.  This is basically the structure we've had since then, except that PFC's obtain a rocker in 1968, and Private E-2 reclaimed the single stripe insignia that they hadn't had since 1948.  
The upper Specialists insignia over E-4 have also largely disappeared.

As this recitation also notes, the Technician grades were introduced during the same year as Top got a promotion and pay raise. They'd existed since January.

In a manner that only made sense to the Army, two stripe technicians were introduced at the grade of E-3, but with the title of Technician 5th grade.  If that doesn't quite made sense, its because the "E" structure that I've been using here wasn't introduced until 1949.  Prior to that, while the E grades noted here offer equivalency, so that it's easy to tell the actual changes over time, pay grades went by a simple number.  Pay grade 7 was the lowest, and it was the one that applied to buck privates, or what we'd later refer to, most of the time, to Private E-1s. Pay grade 1 was the highest, which was equivalent to the post 1949 E-7.

That right there helps explain some of this evolution, by the way.  There was nothing higher than pay grade 1, in enlisted ranks, and that was equivalent to E-7.  Now, the highest enlisted grade normally encountered is E-8, which Master Sergeants and First Sergeants occupy, as of 1959.  In that same year, 1959, the rank of Sergeant Major was introduced at E-9, as was Specialist E-9.  E-9 remains the highest enlisted grade today, although there are several different types of Sergeant Majors that occupy it, some being exceedingly rare.

Anyhow, back to technicians.  Introduced in January, right after the war started, their existence reflected the much more technical Army of 1940 as compared to earlier.  The creation of the rank was an attempt to create a rank and pay scheme for men who were not combatants.  Something had to be done, but the experiment wasn't really successful, leading to the change to combatant and non-combatant ratings in 1948, and ultimately to the not hugely successful creation of specialists ranks in 1959.  On that latter creation, the number of specialist ranks was already being reduced by 1967 and was further cut back in 1978. When I joined the National Guard in 1981, there were still Specialist E-6s, but in 1985 that was changed so that only Specialist E-4 remained.  At the same time, however, the increasingly professional nature of the Army after the elimination of the draft meant that the number of men occupying lower enlisted ranks increased, and therefore the Army reduced the number of Corporal E-4s in favor of Specialist E-4s, the distinction being that Corporals are NCOs and Specialists are not.

Prior Related Threads:

Timeline of U.S. Army Enlisted Ranks, 1920 to Present

The Infantry Company over a Century. Part 1. The Old Army becomes the Great War Army.

Pinks and Greens

Tuesday, September 1, 1942. Miscarriages of Justice.

On this 1st day of September 1942, the United States District Court in Sacramento, California ruled wartime detention of Japanese Americans to be legal.

Japanese Foreign Minister Shigenori Tōgō (東郷 茂徳) who had opposed war with the United States on the basis that it was unwinnable, resigned and went into retirement.  The cause of his resignation was his opposition to the creation of a special ministry for occupied territories.  He was appointed thereafter to the upper house of the Japanese Diet, but did not take an active role in it.

He returned to his former position in April 1945 and worked towards acceptance of the Potsdam Declaration.  He advocated Japanese surrender after the atomic strikes of August of that year.  

In spite of his opposition to the war, he was tried as a war criminal in 1948 and sentenced to twenty years imprisonment.  He died as a prisoner two years later at age 67.

He was an unusual man in multiple ways.  He'd studied in Germany when young and then entered the foreign ministry.  He served as ambassador to Germany in 1937 and then later was assigned to the Soviet Union, where he'd negotiated a peace settlement between the USSR and Japan following Khalkhin Gol.  He married German Carla Victoria Editha Albertina Anna de Lalande, who was a wide of was well known German architect, with Japanese marriages to Westerners being uncommon then, which remains the case today.  She survived him and died in 1967.

Tōgō's family, including his wife's daughter by her first marriage and the couple's daughter.  His descendants have continued to have diplomatic careers.

Both of the examples above provide interesting examples of the miscarriage of official justice.  Internment should have been deemed illegal, particularly as to U.S. citizens who were truly being deprived of their liberty without due process.  And while there were Japanese war criminals, Tōgō''s conviction seems to have been for simply being on the losing side of the war.

Royal Air Force Wellingtons bombed Afrika Korps supply lines at night, destroying fuel supplies, which halted Panzerarmee Afrika for most of the day.  

Wellingtons over Europe.

We don't think of Wellington bombers much in the story of the war, but they did in fact see combat service.

The Germans took the Black Sea port of Anapa.

According to the Wyoming State Historical Association, on this day in 1942 official approval was given to commence use of the Casper Air Base, which had been constructed in an incredibly small amount of time.  The existing county airport was Wardwell Field, the Casper area's second airport (the first was in what is now Evansville).  Today, what was Casper Air Base is the Natrona County International Airport, which actually uses at least one fewer runway than was constructed by the Army in 1942.  Wardwell Field's runways, in contrast, are city streets in the Town of Bar Nunn.

Wednesday, February 4, 1942. Men of miscalculation.

In North Africa, an odd event known as the Abdeen Palace Incident occurred, as was reported by Sarah Sundin in her blog:

February 4, 1942: In North Africa, British retreat ends at Gazala, Libya. Japanese take Ambon, Netherlands East Indies, from a small Australian garrison. British troops surround Egyptian palace in Cairo to force King Farouk to abdicate.

I'd note, FWIW, that I disagree with that date for the Japanese taking Ambon, I think it was February 3.  But the date for the British coup in regard to King Farouk is quite correct, although he did not abdicate.  Rather, he was forced to accede to a new government.  He remained the king for another decade.

King Farouk in 1946.  He as a member of the Turco-Circassian elite in the country, which owned 3/4s of the land at the time.

Farouk was, suffice it to say, an interesting figure who was the king over an interesting country.  He was of Circassian, Turkish, French, Albanian and Greek descent, meaning he lacked Arab or Egyptian genetic heritage.  His bodyguards were Albanians, the only people he trusted in that role.  His actual heritage was more Circassian than anything else, due to the presence of various Circassian slave girls in his heritage.  He became king at age 16 and never got along with the country's British representative, Miles Lampson.  He strongly favored Italians over the British.

Egypt had technically been an Ottoman possession until World War One, and after that was technically independent but was in fact a quasi British satellite with various treaty obligations to the British.  It was not a declared combatant in the war, but treaty rights in which the British had the right to station troops there to defend it meant that it was in fact a combat theater.  Beset by a complicated domestic travails, including the lack of a male heir, he lived a lavish lifestyle which, early in the war, caused him to lose favor with the Egyptian people who were aware that the British royals were sacrificing during the war.  His palace did not adhere to blackout provisions in Cairo.

The British exerted heavy pressure over who would hold office in the Egyptian government and Farouk generally yielded to them, but on this day their displeasure over the makeup of the government boiled over.  Farouk asked his military leaders how long they could hold out against the British if they refused British demands, and were informed that they could only do so for two hours.  On this night, the British presented Farouk with an ultimatum and troops surrounded his place.  Ultimately, they stormed it.  Farouk capitulated and a new Egyptian government was formed.  The British representative, unbeknownst to him, was lucky to leave with his life, as Farouk's body guards were hidden in the room, ready to open fire if he was touched.

Ironically, the event caused the Egyptian people to rally behind Farouk, who resented the obvious British termination of their chosen government in favor of one that would do the British bidding. Farouk did not rise to the occasion, however, and the event marked part of his slide into increased gross personal excess in every imaginable fashion.  It also marked a turning point in Egyptian politics as Egyptian military leaders became opponents of ongoing British presence, something that would ultimately lead them to depose Farouk and take over the country, with their rule effectively continuing on to the present day.

Farouk's popularity with Egyptians did not last, and he was deposed in 1952 as noted, spending the rest of his life in Italy.  The entire matter ultimately proved to be a British disaster.

As an aside, his sister, Princess Fawzia Faud, would be Queen of Iran in an arranged political marriage with the Shah of Iran from 1941 to 1948. The marriage brought Iran added status, not Egypt, as the latter was the more important state. That marriage ended in divorce.  She remarried an Egyptian army officer/diplomat and lived the rest of her life in Egypt, dying in 2013.

Also on this Wednesday, February 4, 1942, Hermann Goering met with Benito Mussolini regarding the invasion of Malta.  Mussolini wasn't impressed.

Suffice it to say, the day for German invasions had really passed.  The Germans had essentially concluded that it was incapable of invading Great Britain and had turned its eyes East, oddly partially, at least, for that reasons.  That of course brought about the invasion of the Soviet Union, which was not going well.  

The Germans and Italians were not going to invade Malta.

In North Africa, however, the Germans and Italians were doing fairly well, which perhaps gave rise to the delusion that they'd be in the position for a Maltese offensive.  On this day they took Dema, Libya.  British lines, however, were forming.

Lord Beaverbrook was appointed head of the Ministry of War Production, which had been created on this day.  He resigned after occupying the office for two weeks.  The Ontario native clashed with another figure in the administration and determined to depart the agency.

Harry Dexter White and Pearl Harbor. Soviet Plot?

Harry Dexter White with John Maynard Keynes.

DATE: October 16, 1950

TO: The Director

FROM: Mr. Ladd

SUBJECT: ESPIONAGE - R

PURPOSE: To advise you of the positive identification of agent Jurist (the cover name of a Soviet agent operating in 1944 and named by [Venona project]) as Harry Dexter White, deceased. White was formerly the Administrative Assistant to former Secretary of the Treasury Morgenthau.

DETAILS: You have previously been advised of information obtained from [Venona project] regarding Jurist who was active during 1944. According to the previous information received from [Venona project] regarding Jurist, during April, 1944, he had reported on conversations between the then Secretary of State Hull and Vice President Wallace. He also reported on Wallace's proposed trip to China. On August 5, 1944, he reported to the Soviets that he was confident of President Roosevelt's victory in the coming elections unless there was a huge military failure. He also reported that Truman's nomination as Vice President was calculated to secure the vote of the conservative wing of the Democratic Party. It was also reported that Jurist was willing for any self-sacrifice in behalf of the MGB but was afraid that his activities, if exposed, might lead to a political scandal and have an effect on the elections. It was also mentioned that he would be returning to Washington, D. C., on August 17, 1944. The new information from [Venona project] indicates that Jurist and Morgenthau were to make a trip to London and Normandy and leaving the United States on August 5, 1944.

On the basis of the foregoing, the tentative identification of Harry Dexter White as Jurist appears to be conclusively established inasmuch as Morgenthau and White left the United States on a confidential trip to the Normandy beachhead on August 5, 1944, and they returned to the United States on August 17, 1944.

You may recall that Harry Dexter White was named by Whittaker Chambers in his statements as having been a source of information for Chambers in his work in Soviet espionage until Chambers broke with the Soviets in 1938. Chambers produced a handwritten memorandum that White had given him and our Laboratory established this memorandum as being in White's handwriting. The Treasury Department advised that parts of the material were highly confidential, coming to the Treasury Department from the Department of State.

In addition to the foregoing, Elizabeth T. Bentley in November, 1945, advised that she had learned through Nathan Gregory Silvermaster that White was supplying Silvermaster with information which was obtained by White in the course of his duties as Assistant to the Secretary of the of the Treasury.

RECOMMENDATION:

There is attached hereto a blind memorandum which has been prepared for the information and assistance of   setting forth this identification. There is also attached a memorandum to the Field giving them the new information from [Venona project] which establishes conclusively the identity of White as Jurist.

Attachment

I really like the Jimmy Akin's Mysterious World podcast.  I want to note that upfront, as I think these next two episodes, while really entertaining and interesting. . . well, they sort of lay an egg.

At least sort of.

Not completely.

Countdown to Pearl Harbor? (FDR, Advance Knowledge)

Pearl Harbor Conspiracy? (FDR, Advance Knowledge, Soviet Spy)

Now, before a person assumes too much based on the title, Akin isn't suggesting, as some have, even occasionally some serious historians, that Roosevelt knew about Japanese designs on Pearl Harbor and let the attack happen.  Indeed, the conclusion to the second one pretty much definitively smashes that concept in a very general way.

Rather, what this two part episode suggests, but never flatly states, is that Treasury employee Harry Dexter White used his position to bring about an American diplomatic stance that made the war with Japan inevitable, as that's what the Soviets wanted.

The evidence, however, just doesn't support that.

Well, at least not completely.

This isn't a new theory, by the way.  It's been around since at least the 1990s.

White was a Soviet agent.  That's perfectly clear.  There are those who will dispute that even now, but we can set that aside.  He might not have been a Communist, but he was a Soviet mole without a doubt.

Harry Dexter White was a brilliant economist who came to that profession somewhat late, entering university at age 30, by which time he had already served as an Army officer in World War One.  He ultimately obtained a PhD in economics at age 38, and then taught at Harvard.  Later, he came into the Treasury Department at a time at which, for PhD's in economics, you either taught or worked for the government.  He was a very valued employee there.

The administration of Franklin Roosevelt was the most left leaning administration that the United States has ever seen, and the administration was full, at the office level, of many hard left thinkers. While the Wilson Administration had suppressed the then growing radical Socialists movements after World War One, FDR's administration was not interested in this and his coming into power in 1932 proved to be a respite for those with really radical views.  By and large, the government didn't care that much whether lower functionaries were hard line leftists.  

And the country had quite a few of them. Socialism, and other radical left wing philosophies, had been growing in the US since the mid 19th Century and by the 1910s it was coming into its own.  It was very much in vogue in some circles in the 1920s, in spite of efforts of the government to suppress it, and it drew encouragement from the example of Soviet Russia, which was in actuality very poorly understood.  Its base was in the working class, of course, but it was also heavily represented by Eastern European and Southern European immigrants, and oddly enough young academics.  

White wasn't young, but he'd come to academia late. And, additionally, he was a first generation American of Jewish Lithuanian extraction, so he had a foot in both the academic community and the immigrant one.  His Eastern European parents had only been in the US for twelve years at the time of his birth, and they were a working class family.  As noted, he was undoubtedly a brilliant man.

While even to this day he has his defenders, its clear that he was recruited as a Soviet mole by Jacob Golos, who was successful in recruiting numerous other Americans to the same role.  White became associated in that role with Whitaker Chambers, whom he reported to. And whatever it was he personally believed, it is clear that he was highly sympathetic to the USSR, so sympathetic that on rare occasions he was willing to voice that sympathy, as when he once engaged in a restaurant argument with a colleague to whom he maintained that Soviets had successfully worked out a system that would replace capitalism and Christianity.  And he was willing to carrying his admiration of the USSR as far as espionage and theft.  If he wasn't a Communist, he obviously had deep sympathies for the Communists.

When Chambers came out of the cold, he reported White among those who were Soviet agents, which he did as early as 1938.  Chambers didn't think that White was a Communist and further thought that while he was a Soviet agent, he thought White thought he was manipulating the Soviets to his ends, rather than the other way around, a rather naive thing to believe, if he believed it, but one which may be very well correct.   

Chambers' 1938 accusations were wholly dismissed by the Government.  He'd repeat them in March 1945 at which time the State Department was reaching out to Chambers.  Chambers at that point indicated that White had brought Communists into the government, but that White himself was timid.

In November 1945 the news on White was corroborated by defecting American Communist courier Elizabeth Benchley.  The Truman Administration basically ignored this, however, and even at this late date White's career in the government continued on, although he was less influential than before, and his boss Morgenthau was replaced by Truman.  Real problems for White didn't develop until 1948, however, when he was called before the House Committee on Un-American Affairs. Following his testimony, he had a heart attack. Shortly after going to a farm he had bought to recuperate, he had a second one and died due to an overdose of a drug he administered to treat it.  His death came a mere two days after he testified and it might have been suicide.  He was one of two figures caught up by the HCUA at the time who died from mysterious deaths during the investigations.His untimely death, and the fact that the Army closely guarded the Venona secretes, not really trusting anyone, meant that here was room for years to portray him as an innocent victim of a false accusation, rather than what he was, an exposed spy for the Soviet Union.

Okay, why does all of this matter?

Well, White's role as a Communist agent. . . again he might not have been a Communist himself, certainly are critical in regard to his wartime role in the Treasury Department.  More than that, however, he was the principal architect of the Bretton Woods Agreement which governed the world's post-war economy up until the early 1970s.  He was also the principal architect of the Morgenthau Plan, which saw the future of Germany as split into regions, deindustrialized, and made agrarian.

It can't be said that White's recommendations on the Morgenthau Plan and the Bretton Woods agreement were Communistic, so if he was himself heavily sympathetic to the Communists, it didn't fully show in that work, at least not in an openly obvious way.  It's known that he was passing information to the Soviets, but based on his actual work, he didn't seem to be really openly aiding them much in his work product during the war.

Well, what about accusations that he did before the war?

I'm not really seeing it there in an effective way either, although he may have tried a bit.

This is based on the claim that the Soviets developed an Operation Snow which was to attempt to get the United States and Japan into a war against each other.  The thought is that this would alleviate the Soviet fear of fighting a two front war, should Japan come in against the USSR. And, in spite of those who nay say that, the Japanese Army in fact wanted to do that, even though the wisdom of taking on the USSR at the same time that the Japanese were unable to defeat China was obviously pretty questionable.

Anyhow, Stalin did worry about this, to be sure.  And the NKVD could have hatched a plot to try to get figures in the American government to aid them in some fashion here, but the evidence is pretty sketchy, even if such journals as Time and The Wall Street Journal have published articles acknowledging the effort and, in the case of Time, even crediting the Japanese attack on Pearl Habor to White.

Claims about Operation Snow come from one source, a figure formerly in the KGB, who claimed to be part of it.  It's possible that he had the knowledge on it, but based on what we otherwise have come to learn about White's role as a mole, this claim is on a narrow strand.  What that source claimed is that in 1941, prior to the commencement of Operation Barbarossa, the Soviets were working to reestablish their spy contacts with American agents. Those contacts had been disrupted by Stalin murdering everyone.  Anyhow, the claim is that a new contact reached out to White and vaguely suggested that it would be in the best interest of the US and the USSR if Japan was aggressively isolated.  White, this claim asserts, stated that his own thinking aligned with this.  You have to do a lot of reading between the lines here from there.

White did issue a memo on his views on what to do regarding Japan prior to Operation Barbarossa.  It came, however, in the context of the Roosevelt Administration becoming increasingly aggressive with Japan in any event.  That memo was, moreover, oddly anti-British, a peculiar position to take in regard to a country that was, at the time the supposed meeting occurred, the only major power fighting the Germans.  A person could rationalize that a Japanese attack on the US would mean that the Soviets would only have to fight the Germans, but what would the point of alienating the British be?  While a person might claim that this would refocus American eyes from the Atlantic to the Pacific, there was never going to be a war in which the Soviets weren't going to be glad to have the British fighting the same enemy.

Indeed, it would be frankly more likely that, if the Soviets had a plot, the point was to distract the Japanese, rather than to actually provoke them into a war.

At any rate, White's first note was rejected and therefore not influential.  A second one some months later, however, is more problematic.

Some weeks prior to Pearl Harbor the Japanese signaled that they'd be willing to evacuate China and northern Indochina under an agreement with the United States, if they were allowed to retain control of Manchuria.  Roosevelt in fact leaned away from this, and that did result in a White memo to Morgenthau which in turn issued to Roosevelt under Morgenthau's signature. That resulted in an ultimatum to Japan to withdraw from China.

Having said that, there's also evidence that the Japanese offer wasn't understood in the context of what was being offered in regard to northern Indochina.  Moreover, by that time the US had already taken a really hard line on Japan in China. A compromise regarding Manchuria in fact would have been problematic, even if Roosevelt was considering it.

And of course White was one man, with apparently mixed motives.  His suggestion may have been influential, but he wasn't the one conveying it.  Did he have such influence over Morgenthau by that point that Morgenthau would do what he wanted?  Moreover, did they both have influence over Cordell Hull?  That's pretty problematic.

And that one man aspect of it, at the end of the day, is the significant thing.  White was a lieutenant of Morgenthau's, and Morgenthau wasn't a Communist and didn't know that White was.  And neither of them set foreign policy, Cordell Hull had a bigger role in that, and the President the ultimate role.

So, did White "cause" Pearl Harbor.  No.

Did he influence the road to war at all?

That's really hard to say.  

White isn't an innocent figure in the Cold War story.  He was highly influential on the Morgenthau Plan and he did have a major role in it.  Somebody at the Treasury Department didn't like it, and it was leaked. Was it a Communist document?  Well no.  But it did propose, basically, to disestablish Germany as a state, and split into regions, something that was to the Soviet Union's advantage, but something that was also not outside of the desires of many others.

He did have a role in holding up wartime financing to the Nationalist Chinese, even at the time they were fighting our common enemy, the Japanese. That's more problematic to say the least.   The only reason to have done that was likely due to his Communist sympathies.  So he could indeed act with Moscow in mind.

And he definitely acted with Moscow in mind in supplying currency plates to the Soviet Union. That has been described as "outright larceny" and it definitely operated against American interest in all sorts of ways.

So in the end, the most we can probably say is that he was part of a group of Communist or Communist sympathizers, within the Treasury Department who pushed it in a certain direction, but there were lots also pushing.

Leaving us back where we started.  The war with Japan was brought about as the US was drifting towards war anyway, and wanted to get Japan out of China.  That goal was shared by a lot of people, and White's role in pushing in that direction, even if done at secret Soviet urging, was hardly the final factor.

A final Republic of China/People's Republic of China Showdown? Weighing the costs and benefits from a Red Chinese prospective. Part II

Flag of the Republic of Formosa, which existed for only a few months in 1895. By Jeff Dahl - Own work, CC BY-SA 4.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=3550776

But why, you may ask, would the Chinese risk such a move?

The answer to that would have to be found in the answer to the question, why do nations start wars?  And the answer to that is much more difficult to answer than we might suppose.

First, let's look at the risk v. the benefits to the People's Republic of China invading Taiwan.

The most obvious part of the answer to that question would be the one a wag would give. Red China would get Taiwan. But Taiwan in and of itself is obviously not the goal.

Nations do invade other nations simply for territorial gain, although that has become increasingly uncommon since World War Two.  Indeed, now it's very rare, and frankly it's been fairly rare since 1945.  When nations invade another country, if we assume that the Chinese view Taiwan as another country (and they don't, really) there's always more to it.  Indeed, the Second World War saw most of the real outright land grabs by aggressor states.  The last one I can really think of since World War Two was the Iraqi invasion of Kuwait in 1990, which had that feature.

Given that, for the most part when nations, post 1945, invade another, they have some claim of some sort to the territory they're seeking to incorporate.  Indeed, this was the case prior to 1945 as well, and a few of the minor aggressor states in the Second World War entered the war on the Axis side with this goal themselves.  Romanian sought, for example, to incorporate Moldova, which it borders and which is ethnically Romanian.  They went further than that, charged up with aggressor greed, but that was their primary goal.  Finland, which went into the "Continuation War" without greed, provides another example, and they actually stopped once they had reoccupied what they'd lost the prior year, not even going further and taking all the ethnically Finnish lands that they could have.  

That provides clue here really.  What the Chinese would really get is the Chinese population of Taiwan combined with the island and its strategic value, and the Republic of China's industrial base.

Okay, what of those.

Well, that may all be fairly illusory.

We'll start with the islands strategic position.  It's real. . . but not as real as it once was.

Taiwan, or Formosa if you prefer, is a major Western Pacific island and all the really big Western Pacific Islands have traditionally been island bastions.  Japan was an island bastion nation in and of itself, and it really still is.  The Philippines were an American bastion, although one that fell fairly rapid.  Taiwan was a  Chinese bastion, then a Japanese bastion, then a Nationalist Chinese bastion.

Or was it.

We noted the other day that Japan secured Taiwan as a result of the First Sino-Japanese War. At that time, Taiwan really made sense as a Japanese possession, even if that result was not just.  It provided a large island landmass off of China which gave it a base to protect its interests in China, or to mess with China if it wanted to, and it wanted to.

But, by 1941, its utility had diminished.  The United STates considered invading Taiwan rather than the Philippines in its advance toward the Japanese home islands, but it didn't.  That's partially due to political considerations, but it was partially as we didn't need to. That didn't mean, however, that the Japanese needed to quit defending it. They had to garrison it right until the end of the war.

And the Philippines themselves were abandoned by the US after the Vietnam War.  We just didn't need a base there anymore.  An American military commitment to the Philippines quietly remains, but it serves in a nearly clandestine way in an ongoing war against radical Muslim elements in the country.

The modern aircraft carrier, from the American point of view, made the Philippines unnecessary to us.

China doesn't have modern carriers. . . like ours. . .yet, but it's working on them.  But the real strategic value of the islands to China is that they're in the way.  If China was to get into a war with the United States, Formosa would be an American base against it, or at least we can presume so.  And it would be difficult for Chinese forces in the region to avoid it.  So, oddly enough, it might have what essentially amounts to a negative strategic value to China.  I.e., if they're thinking they're likely to fight the US, they need to grab it.

But that probably doesn't provide the motivation for grabbing the island, as China likely knows that the only way it gets into a war with the US is by providing one itself, such as by attacking Taiwan.

So what about Taiwan's industrial base?

Well, Taiwan does have an advanced economy.  It's more advanced than Red China's in fact.  That might be tempting, but in reality it surely isn't a consideration.  China's vastness and large-scale command economy enterprises really don't need Taiwan's more advanced corporate free market industries, and indeed, there'd be no guaranty that a war to seize Taiwan, or the Taiwanese themselves, might not wreck them.  And frankly, taking in millions of Chinese who have worked in a Western economy into a Communist command economy would be unlikely to go really smoothly.  That actually provides us with a clue as to why the Chinese might invade, actually, which we'll get to in a moment.

China would get the Taiwanese Chinese, many of whom had ancestors who left mainland China in 1948, together with those Chinese who left in 1948, or since. That's what they want, combined with lands that have been historically governed by China.

That may seem odd.  China doesn't have a deficit of people. But ethnic reunification has been a driving factor of wars over history and it's been particularly strong since 1918.  A lengthy post World War One period saw multiple border wars and invasions that were over nothing other than ethnicity.  Nations that had been imperial possessions fought to be independent single ethnicity nation states.  Nations with messy ethnic boundaries slugged it out in the 1920s over who got to rule those areas.  The first moves of Nazi Germany in 1938 and 1939 were excused by the Germans on this basis, although outright colonial and genocidal invasions followed, which were on a completely different basis.  

Since World War Two China has grabbed territory that what not Chinese, ethnically.  But here, its primary motivations are to accomplish that goal, reunification, and to assuage Chinese pride.  Taiwan is Chinese, in the PRC's mind, and they have a right to it.  That's the justification.

But is a justification upon which they're likely to act?

It certainly wouldn't be cost free.

Besides being involved in a war with the Republic of China, invading Taiwan obviously will provoke some sort of international reaction, and China knows that.

In recent years China has abandoned the Stalinist command economy model that it had for decades following 1948, complete with murder on a mass scale, and gone towards more of a command economy NEP model  It may have done that in part as it was a witness to the Stalinist model crashing in the late 1980s when the USSR found that it had run its course, and it was too late to adapt.  Chances are high that the NEP model will do the same, but the NEP model of Communism, being gentler and allowing for more liberty, if still falling far short of the Capitalist model, will forestall that for a while and probably has convinced the leaders of the Chinese Communist Party that they have a chance of avoiding its fall altogether.

If China invades Taiwan, however, they'll face an economic disruption at a bare minimum.

However, based on their observations of the West and how little it really does in this area, they may simply not really believe it.  Russia has managed to survive sanctions, for example. And the Chinese know that they're such a big part of the world's economy that they may feel that, for the most part, sanctions will simply be lip service.

And frankly, they'd have reason to believe that.

If they were wrong, however, it would be economically devastating.  And economics being what they are, China might not recover for decades, if ever.  Manufacturing might simply shift to the south and leave China with a massively failing market.  If so, it'd revert to Stalinism by default, if it could.

And it might not be cost free militarily.  

China certainly is building up its military, to be sure, but any invasion of the island would be bloody.  It might be really bloody if the United States intervened on Taiwan's behalf, which it very well would likely do.  Indeed, even with a limited strategic goal, it might be a rampaging naval failure which would send thousands of Chinese soldiers and sailors to a watery grave, and leave many more stranded on Taiwan in one way or another while the Republic of China cut them apart.  And a military failure on China's part would have long reaching implications of all sorts, including diplomatic, military and economic.

And even if it was successful, the primary achievement would be to take in 24,000,000 Chinese who have grown up and participated in a free market democratic state and who would be massively disgruntled in a Red Chinese one.  The Red Chinese have't seen the Chinese of Hong Kong, 7,000,000 in number, go quietly into the night even though there's nearly nothing they can do about the government in Beijing.

All that would be problematic enough, but there's already discontent in China itself.  The events of 1989 in Tiananmen Square showed that the young Chinese middle class isn't thrilled with their country's autocratic Communist government, and it also showed that elements of sympathy with students had crept into the Chinese Army.  Indeed, as the Chinese Army's makeup is regional in character, the Chinese had to bring in army units from outside the region to suppress the demonstrations. This ended up creating a sort of odd resistance movement in the form of the Fulun Gong, which is ongoing and which operates now partially out of the US, publishing the right wing propaganda newspaper for an American audience, The Epic Times (which absurdly claims that everything was nifty prior to 1948).

So the net result would be, best case scenario, to take in 25,000,000 new people who would be opposed to your reign in every fashion in exchange for an island that you only really need if you intend to be aggressive somewhere else, in a pre aircraft carrier naval fashion.  The worst result would be a bloody defeat that leaves the nation embarrassed and an international pariah.

So why do it?

Well, for a reason that has nothing to do with much of the above.

Lots of wars were fought after World War One solely on the question of whose nation a scrap of territory would be in.  The Poles fought to unite to newly established Poland territories that were Polish, or which had been at one time.  The Turks briefly tried to expand the border of Turkey into ancestral Turkish homelands.  Many other examples exist.  All of these are the flipside of national independence movements.  We're used to the concept of, for example, the Irish wanting to be free of the United Kingdom, but we don't often stop to think that this impulse isn't also what drives desires to do something like unite Ulster to the Irish state, even though it has a large non Irish population.  It's comparable to the Polish independence movements that existed during World War One which spilled out into wars and proxy wars after independence to secure territory that was Polish or had been.  Nations risk all to engage in that impulse.

And the Chinese government in Beijing is proud, wounded, and arrogant.

It's pride and history leave it convinced that it must take back all that was once Chinese, and that may be enough to cause it to act.

And its arrogance may be sufficient to override any concerns that the West would act. Recent history suggest that belief would not be irrational, although history also suggests that at some point, the reaction sets in.  Nobody helped the Czechs keep the Sudetenland in 1938. . . but when it came to Poland. . .

And history suggest that this impulse has a time element to it as well, which may motivate the Chinese to act.  People retain long memories, stretching back centuries, of their ethnicity. . . until suddenly they don't.

Lots of example of this abound.  All the Scandinavian people were at one time one people, but by the Renaissance they were no longer thinking of themselves that way and fought wars against each other in order to be ruled by one another.  At some point the Norwegians and Swedes simply weren't one people, even though they retain a mutually intelligible language now.  The Estonians and Finns were once one people as well, and then weren't. The connection is sufficiently close that Finnish volunteers came to fight for Estonia in its war of independence against Soviet Russia, but they didn't become one state.  The Scots were Irish early in their history, but don't conceive of themselves in that fashion at all now.  The Dutch were a Germanic people from the "far lands", but they've long had their own identity and don't think of themselves as German.  The Portuguese were Spanish at one time, but don't want to be part of Spain, and the Catalonians are Spanish, but don't want to think of themselves that way.

Going into perhaps more analogous examples, when Germany reunited following the collapse of the Communism in the West, the process was not only rocky, but some East Germans have never really accommodated themselves to it and some West Germans continue to look down on them.  Ethnic Germans from elsewhere, still eligible to enter the country under its law of return, have been completely foreign to Germans from Germany who have been shocked by them.

And up close and personal, young South Koreans are very quickly reaching the point that they don't want to reunite with the North, long a dream of the government in Seoul, as North Koreans now are more or less an alien Korean-speaking people.

At some point the Chinese in Beijing may start worrying about that.  It's already the case that the government in Taipei no longer claim the right to rule on the mainland.  Have they started thinking of themselves as a Chinese other? After all, there's more than one Chinese culture. . .why not add one more. . . one with its own state?

Keeping that from happening may be a Communist Chinese priority, and not for economic or even territorial reasons.

A final Republic of China/People's Republic of China Showdown? Part I.

Are 77 Year Old WW2 Boots BETTER Than Modern Boots? - (CUT IN HALF)

An interesting look at M1943 boots.

I actually have an analogous pair of boots made for the French army after World War Two, which I bought surplus some years ago. As they were slightly large, I took up only wearing them in muddy weather as I could wear heavy wool socks with them and also, occasionally, buckle my trousers in to keep them from getting too muddy.

As it happens, I've worn them a lot more than I ever anticipated and really like them.

Anyhow, this video is interesting in regard to their quality, and the reasons for their quality.  I wouldn't have guessed that they were overall of this rather high quality.

The M1943 boots was very much welcomed when first introduced, but went on to be sort of disliked over time.  The video may contain an inaccuracy as the boots were actually slated for replacement after World War Two after the introduction of the M1948 boot, which was based on the World War Two jump boot, which was actually reintroduced into service after World War Two. The Corcoran jump boots was used throughout the war, and was heavily admired, but the original intent had been to replace it with M1943 boots.

Anyhow, in my general view, U.S. combat boots have been lacking in various ways ever since the M1948 boot was replaced. They've improved in some ways in recent years, but they are still not what they should be.  The construction comparisons brought up by this video are, accordingly, quite interesting.

October 22, 1920. The formation of the Arab Legion (أل جيش أل عربي).

 Cap device of the Arab Legion

On this day in 1920 the British in Transjordan formed the Al Jeish al Arabi (أل جيش أل عربي), the Arab Army.  In English it was much more commonly called the Arab Legion, although the unit was never officially called that.

Glubb in 1940, the year after his appointment as the commander of the Arab Legion.

The unit combined the policing and military functions for the Transjordan.  It featured, at first, British officers and Arab enlisted men and was commanded from 1939 until March 1, 1956, by British career soldier and World War One veteran John Bagot Glubb, popularly known as Glubb Pasha.  Up until 1956 the unit continued to have a significant contingent of British officers, although by that time it had Jordanian officers as well.

Arab Legion 25 Pounder in action during the 1948 Arab Israeli War.

This created the bizarre situation in the later years of the organization under that name as Jordanian forces fought in the 1948 Arab-Israeli War under British command at its senior levels, even though the UK was not a combatant in the war and British officers were not supposed to play an active role in the war in disputed territory, something that proved impossible to adhere to in reality.  On March 1, 1956, cognizant of the problems this was creating, as well as the odd image it fostered, the Jordanians dismissed its British officers and renamed the unit into another variant of the term "Arab Army".  Today it is termed the Jordanian Armed Forces.

The British influence formed the unit into one of the best armies in the Arab world, a distinction it retains to this day.

Seattle street, October 22, 1920.

On the same day, candidate Warren G. Harding was posing for a sculptor.

December 1, 1969. The United States resumes a lottery system for conscription.

This is, frankly, a bit confusing.

The United States had resumed conscription following World War Two in March 1948.  It had only actually expired in January 1947, showing how a need for manpower in the wake of World War Two caused it to actually continue to exist in spite of a large reduction in force following the end of the war.

After coming back into effect in March 1948 it stayed in existence until 1973, but was then done away with following the end of the Vietnam War. By that time conscription was massively unpopular.  It can't be said to have ever really been "popular", per se, but it didn't meet with real resistance until the Vietnam War.

The resumption of a lottery system for the draft, in which each registrant was assigned a number and the number then drawn at random, was designed to attempt to reduce the unpopularity of conscription at that point in the Vietnam War.  Numerous changes were made to the system during the war including ending a marriage exemption and ultimately curtaining an exemption for graduate students. With the adoption of the lottery system also came a change in age focus so that rather than top of those in the age range being drafted it then focused on those who were 19 years old. The reason for this was that if a person's number wasn't chosen in the lottery as a 19 year old, they were not going to be drafted and could accordingly plan around that.

Because of the way that the draft worked prior to 1969, and even after that date, many men joined the service when faced with the near certainty of being conscripted. As a result, oddly, far more men volunteered for service than who were actually conscripted.  Additionally, the number of men who were volunteers for the service who served in Vietnam outnumbered those who were drafted, with a surprisingly large number of troops who served in the war itself volunteering for service in Vietnam.

Mid Week At Work: Job Rated. From when all trucks were work trucks.

Pickup trucks are still used for work, of course, but they've actually become the most popular single line of vehicle in the U.S.. . . at least for the time being.

As that has occurred, they've become lighter duty.  Not that there still aren't fine trucks being made, there are. But rather, there's some really light trucks out there as well.

In 1948, when Dodge declared that its trucks were "job rated", they were all stout.  Even their "Station Wagon", intended for urban use, was pretty stout compared to any other similar two wheel drive vehicle offered today.

Sunday Morning Scene: Churches of the West: Holy Family Catholic Cathedral, Anchorage Alaska

Churches of the West: Holy Family Catholic Cathedral, Anchorage Alaska:

Holy Family Catholic Cathedral, Anchorage Alaska

This is Holy Family Cathedral in Anchorage Alaska, although as of 2013 a co-cathedral in Anchorage serves the archdiocese for many functions, this downtown location having been determined to be impractical for some of them.. The Cathedral was built in 1948 as a parish church, and became a cathedral in 1966 when the archdiocese was established.

Speed Goat: Local beer makes good. . . really good.

Casper Brewery Advertisement from 1914, the year the brewery commenced operations.

When I was a kid, it was sort of a matter of local trivia to know that there had once been a local brewery.  Hillcrest Brewery, to be precise.

Now, admittedly, it wasn't the world's greatest trivia question, but it was surprising to us.  A brewery here in town?  Outlandish.  What made it such an odd trivia question was the mere thought that there had once been a local brewery.  In the age of Budweiser, Coors, Olympia, and Millers, what an wild thought.  Local breweries?  Eee gads.

I really don't know the history of Hillcrest even now and I've seen different stories about that.  At least one beer website claims that it started brewing beer in 1914 and that it stopped operations in 1930. If that's true, it only really brewed beer from 1914 to 1919, as that's the year that the Volstead Act went into effect and brewing, except under some exceptions, would have ceased.  There's still a Hillcrest water company here that bottles water from a spring on Casper Mountain, so maybe there's some connection there.

Of course, if that is correct, it sadly went out of business just two years before brewing could have started up again.  But by then, the Depression was on in force.

But I don't think that is correct and a website with more detail fits more into what I thought was the case.  It claims that The Casper Brewing Company was closed for the entirety of Prohibition, which makes sense, but that it resumed operations in 1934, when beer was once allowed as the repeal of Prohibition allowed for stepped in resumption of the consumption of alcohol.  According to that source, it operated again from 1934 until 1944, and the had to shut down due to wartime shortages, but then started back up after the war only to close back down in 1948.  I suspect that's correct.

 Old Hillcrest beer bottles.  This was last up in 2016 in a thread that noted that a local brewery was going to open up. So far as I know, it still hasn't, so I wonder if something happened to that plan. Be that as it may, a brewpub will open up soon locally in the former of the Gurner Brothers Brewery, to be located in the old Petroleum Club building.  Anyhow, this is a display at the veterans museum at the Natrona County International Airport which, if correct, would place Hillcrest as a beer still being consumed locally in the 1940s, and indeed one of the few sources I can find would have Casper Brewing Company operating from 1914 to 1919, and then from 1934 to 1944, and then again from about 45 or 46 until 1948.

Apparently, at least at one time, the big beer, and maybe the only beer, brewed by the Casper Brewing Company was Wyoming Light Lager.   Indeed, from the very onset in 1914 the company announced that this was to be its intended brew.  I don't know if this ever changed, but I would note that the company's beer bottles from the 1940s, if the photo above is illustrative of anything, was by that time simply calling its beer "Hillcrest Lager Beer".  It was probably the same thing, however.

Prior to Prohibition, Wyoming's liquor laws were much different than they are now.  Indeed, alcohol was nearly unregulated.  Hence, the reason you could call the brewery and order a case.

Now that too is interesting, as if that's correct, and it would seem to be, they anticipated by a long margin a bit of a trend, or rather two trends.

Anyhow, in 1948 Casper Brewing apparently closed. By that time, Hillcrest Water, a company supplying water coolers that's still around today, had been operating for over a decade.  I've sometimes wondered if there was a connection between the two, but I don't know.  Anyhow, local brewing went out.  Locally, the big US brands we all know from the 1950s, 1960s and 1970s became the norm.

Wyoming Light Lager was on tap at The Oil Exchange Bar and popcorn for sale at the Smoke House.  I'm not sure where the Oil Exchange Bar was, but it had advertised in the Casper papers since at least 1911.

And then the microbrewery boom hit.  

But not here at first.

I recall when it actually hit.  Cooper Smiths opened in Ft. Collins, a brew pub, when I was an undergraduate at UW. When we'd go down there, we'd often check it out. The beer and foods was good, and even a college student could afford it. 

A real hint that something was about to happen, however, was when a friend of mine and I were in there, seated at the bar, and a guy came in and asked to see the brewer.  The brewer came up from the basement at his request, and the asker identified himself as another brewer from a brewery that was just getting built and he needed some pointers.

The brewery that was getting built was New Belgium, the brewer of Fat Tire and other now well known brews.

Well, over a long expanse of time some Wyoming breweries opened up.  There was Lander Brewing Company in Lander Wyoming, which purports to be a re-opening of another pre-Prohibition Wyoming brewery, and the related Jackson Hole Brewing Company, as well as Jackson's Snake River Brewing. And there's Black Tooth Brewing in Sheridan and there's also Melvin Brewing in Alpine.

And that's not all.

And among the various breweries is Ten Sleep Brewing, in Ten Sleep Wyoming.

And something interesting has happened with it.

All the Wyoming brew pubs have followers, although as noted Casper has been freakishly unable to get a brewery started (there's been several attempts, none have gone anywhere so far).  That's about to change, however, and soon there will be a real brewery here as well.

What is a big surprise is to see a single beer from a microbrewery, Fat Tire notwithstanding, become a regional success and start to crowd out other beers. And Ten Sleep has accomplished that with Speed Goat. 

They discuss Speed Goat on their website as follows:

Speed Goat Golden Ale

Speed Goat is a golden ale loaded with 2-row and C-15 on the malt side and featuring subtle use of Willamette hops for bittering and aroma. Locally produced Bryant Honey from Worland provides a crisp dryness with a slight honey finish. Easy drinking for folks born and raised on lighter fare, the Speed Goat may go fast, just like its namesake

Sounds sort of like Wyoming Light Lager.

I first heard of Speed Goat a few years back when I bought some for a Christmas Party.  One of my brothers in law, it turned out, was quite a fan and everyone at the party really liked it.  It was a big hit.

Recently I noticed that it has started showing up on tap at local restaurants.  I didn't think that much about it, however, as some of the local restaurants will feature microbrews that are local.  Indeed, quite a few of the newer ones do.

But then we had another family gathering and again went to get some growlers of beer.  While there the person who filled the taps noted that they had Speed Goat which they can't keep around long. Apparently people call in to find out when a shipment is coming in and it clears out nearly immediately.

Now that was a surprise.

And since then I've found that not only is that the case in regard to the example noted, but there's a real local following  And just the other day I saw a sign one one of the real old time local bars, a real  neighborhood bar, which said "Proudly serving Speed Goat".

Now that's a huge surprise.  One of the real, old time, neighborhood bars with a local microbrew on tap.  That I would not have expected at all.

Blog Mirrors. Conscription, 1917 and 1948: Today In Wyoming's History: July 20

Today In Wyoming's History: July 20:

1917 The U.S. World War I draft lottery began.

As can be seen, the papers published the name of the men selected right on the front page.

In some counties, however, the draft proved unnecessary as the counties had already filled their quotas, which were apparently on a county by county basis, through volunteers.

1948 President Harry S. Truman institutes a military draft with a proclamation calling for nearly 10 million men to register for military service within the next two months. My father is one of those to register under the 1948 law.