Showing posts with label 1970. Show all posts
Showing posts with label 1970. Show all posts

Friday, March 8, 2024

Friday, March 8, 1974. Exit Brady Bunch

The iconic 1970s television show The Brady Bunch aired for the last time.  It first aired in 1970.

Marcia, Marcia Marcia. . . 

Maureen McCormick, perhaps the most recalled character of the series, as Marcia.

Last prior:

Friday, December 2, 2022

Saturday, December 2, 1922. Kuwait gets axed.


The Uqair Protocol was signed on this day in 1922, setting the boundaries between Iraq, the Sultanate of Nejd, and the Sheikdom of Kuwait.

Basically, the British High Commissioner to Iraq imposed it as a response to Bedouin raiders from Nejd loyal to Ibn Saud being a problem.

Kuwait lost 2/3s of its territory in the deal, setting is modern boundaries.  It had no say in the arrangement, resulting in anti-British feelings in Kuwait.  It did establish a Saudi Kuwait neutral zone of 2,230 square miles which existed until 1970 and a Saudi Iraqi neutral zone that existed until 1982.

Country Gentleman had a winter theme, but the Saturday Evening Post and Judge were already in the Christmas spirit, even though this was still the Thanksgiving holiday weekend in 1922.


Tuesday, January 25, 2022

Wednesday January 25, 1922. Creation of the U.S. Army Band.

W. S. Ross of the U.S. Army band in 1924, wearing the Pershing Grey uniform the band originally was equipped with.

On this day in 1922 "Pershing's Own", the United States Army Band, was formed.

The band in its "Pershing Grey" uniform it wore until World War Two.

It was created by a direct order from Pershing, who had admired European official military bands and who thought it contributed to moral and esprit de corps.

The band in 1970 in Vietnam.

After only 32 days in office, Liang Shiyi resigned as premier of China due to disputes with warlords. China's descent into two decades of civil war was well underway.

U.S. Marines were detailed to protect the U.S. Embassy in Nicaragua.

Friday, September 18, 2020

September 18, 1970. The death of Jimi Hendrix

The greatest guitarist of all time, James Marshall Hendricks, was a Seattle born bluesman, for all practical purposes, who crossed over into rock music just as rock guitarist were struggling with how to deal with amplification and the full range of the instrument.  Unable to read music, Hendrix (he'd changed the spelling of his last name) embraced the problems that other guitarist had been unable to deal with, principally distortion, and took the instrument far beyond the frontiers it had been in.

A fantastic natural musician, Hendrix has never been surpassed.  Unfortunately, he fell prey to the evils that so often afflict the life of musicians on the road, and which were very much in vogue in the 1970s, drugs being paramount among them.  On this day he was taken to a hospital in London suffering from the effects of a drug overdose and drowned in his own vomit, a fact that was contributed to by the fact that English ambulances typically took patients to the hospital sitting up if they could, which is what they did with Hendrix.

Hendrix had spent his early years in the Pacific Northwest of the United States and Canada and grew up in a musical household.  His father played the saxophone, which he sold when he noticed his boy playing the air guitar with a broom.  Learning how to play the instrument without the benefit of formal musical education, Hendrix learned the blues the way thousands of African Americans had, at home and by ear.  Left handed, however, he learned how to play a right handed guitar upside down, something he did for the rest of his life.  He could, however, play right handed and left handed, and in concert sometimes did.  

After a stint in the Army, in which he was a paratrooper, Hendrix played with a lot of rock bands of the 1960s as a backup guitarist before successfully breaking out on his own.  Teamed by English producers with a backup band that was not up to his talent, dubbed the Jim Hendrix Experience, he came to fame with a series of radically advanced rock music releases, most of which were actually blues based pieces.  Purple Haze remains an emblematic piece of music, but nearly every major song released by Hendrix stands alone.  

Dissatisfied with his English back up band, Hendrix later was backed by fellow black musicians that he'd met while in the Army, and who were schooled, like he was, in the blues.  In that makeup Hendrix toured with the "Band of Gypsies".  A power house of a musician, Hendrix's psyche was increasingly impacted by drugs in later years, in which he freely indulged.  On this date, they took him and the world lost the greatest guitar player of all time.

Friday, July 24, 2020

The War Movies of 1970



1970, we've already noted, was the year the United States participated in an invasion of Cambodia with the Republic of Vietnam, while war protests raged across the United States.  In popular recollection, it was also the year that the nation was increasingly anti war and anti military.

Well. . . maybe, but it was one heck of a year for war movies.

Patton, a movie I've never reviewed here (until now), was released that year.  It goes down in cinematic history as a great movie and one of the greatest World War Two pictures ever made.  George C. Scott's portrayal of George S. Patton, for which he was awarded but did not accept an Academy Award, so defined the controversial American cavalry commander turned armored branch general that Scott's movie Patton is better remembered than the real Patton.  

It's interesting to note that Nixon watched the film in a private showing just before ordering the invasion of Cambodia.

The film is justifiably famous for a fairly accurate portrayal of Patton's personality, although it's portrayal of Omar Bradley is more charitable than Bradley deserved, perhaps because Bradley's memoirs of World War Two were used in part for the film, along with  Ladislas Farago's Patton:  Ordeal and Triumph.  Bradley worked as an advisor on the film which also no doubt influenced his portrayal.  Irrespective of that, it's a great film.  Taking the viewer from Patton's elevation after the Battle of Kasserine Pass to just after the war, it is limited, and wisely, to just his biography as an important American commander during the war.

It's not a very materially accurate film, however.  Armor for the film, as well as the numerous soldiers portrayed in it, were provided by the Spanish Army and the film was largely filmed in Spain.  M4 Shermans were Spanish M47s and Spanish M48s filled in for all German armor, giving the impression of more modern armored combat than World War Two actually featured, although the large scale combat scenes in the movie are very will done.  There's a reason that its recalled as a great film to this day.

In contrast to the material inaccuracy of Patton is the accuracy of the peculiar and appealing World War Two sort of drama/comedy, Kelly's Heroes, was released on June 23, 1970.  Filmed in Yugoslavia, the producers were able to make use of American M4 Shermans and other World War Two vintage hardware that remained there.  Not stopping at that, however, three Soviet tanks were carefully converted to be nearly dead ringers for German Tiger Is.  In terms of ground equipment (but not air) the film is the first materially accurate World War Two film made.  The depiction of the fluid nature of France in 1944 is fairly accurate, and the combat scenes are well done.

It isn't accurate, of course, in terms of the portrayal of soldiers and it wasn't met to be.  Donald Sutherland's portrayal of "Oddball", a hippie tank commander, steals the show but he portrays a figure simply impossible for the time.  The film's main star is supposed to be Kelly, portrayed by Clint Eastwood, but its really Sutherland who shines.  The film portrays an armored reconnaissance unit that goes rogue on a mission to loot a bank behind German lines under the leadership of former, and now demoted, officer Kelly.  The cast in the film is really impressive.

Released in 1970, the film anticipates the changing mood of the time, but it remains today a cult classic and its popular with careful students of World War Two for the reasons noted.  It's odd to realize that Sutherland's portrait of Hawkeye Pierce in M*A*S*H was actually from earlier the same year, as his portrayal here was a risky choice.  It's also odd to realize that Carroll O'Connor's portrayal of an Army general in this film was not intended to be a parody of Patton, even though it seems to be.

M*A*S*H was as noted, released earlier this same year, and its an awful film.  Ironically, it's one I've already gone over, so I'm not going really get into it again here.  I would note, as I did originally:

This movie is probably  the most famous movie set during the Korean War, but don't fool yourself, it's really about Vietnam.

Which doesn't make it a good film.

If M*A*S*H was heavily influenced by the country's developing mood, and Sutherland's Oddball at least had a cheerful character more out of 1970 than 1944, the other great war picture of the year was much more like Patton in nature, that being the great film Tora! Tora! Tora!, which portrayed the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor.

Tora! Tora! Tora! is one of the greatest World War Two movies ever made and is far and away the best film about the events of December 7, 1941.  The later effort Pearl Harbor is pathetic in comparison.  Getting the history and the material details correct, and filmed on location, it's a masterpiece which may be free of errors.  It stands as the greatest true depiction, quasi documentary, movie of its era and inspired more than one attempt to follow up in its portrayals of later events that were real failures.  Using a large number of actors and depicting sweeping events, it fits into a series of movies of that time, including The Longest Day and A Bridge Too Far, that took real big picture and small picture looks at singular events in the war.  It's a great film.

So what does it tell us, if anything, that they were made when they were?  It probably tells us at least in part that our recollection of the country's mood in 1970 isn't very accurate.  M*A*S*H was an anti war film using the vehicle of the Korean War to discuss the Vietnam War.  But none of the three movies about World War Two, which had concluded just 25 years earlier, could be regarded as an anti war film.  Even Kelly's Heroes, which has an element of cynicism, had it only lightly.  So even as the country grew increasingly disenchanted with Vietnam, it didn't feel that way about World War Two. For that matter, of course, the youngest of the country's World War Two veterans were only in their early 40s at the time.

Thursday, June 11, 2020

June 11, 1970. Leaving Libya

F100 Super Saber taking off from Wheelus Air Force Base, Libya.

On this day in 1970 the American military presence in Libya came to an end when the U.S. Air Force turned Wheelus Air Force Base over to the North African country.

Few people today would even be aware that the USAF had a base in Libya, but it first started having a presence at Wheelus during World War Two when it took over the former Italian air field in 1943 after it was captured by the British.  It occupied the air field steadily until this date in 1970. During much of that time the US had friendly relations with the country's monarch, King Idris I.

King Idris I of Libya, who reigned from 1951 until 1969. The former king would live out his life in exile in Egypt.

Idris was overthrown in a military coup led by Muammar Gaddafi, who subsequently ruled the "republic" from that point until is his violent death at the hands of a revolutionary crowd in 2011.  During Idris' reign the nation went from being one of the poorest in the world to being one of the richest, due to the discovery of oil, and at the same time the purpose of the USAF presence in the country declined to the point of irrelevance.  Gaddafi wanted the US out and the US, for its part, was glad to leave.

Wheelus was soon used by the Soviet Air Forces as a base and as a Libyan air force base.  It was hit  in 1986 by the U.S. during it raid on Libya during the Reagan administration.

USAF FB-111 landing after air strike in Libya in 1986.

The air strip is an airport today.

On the same day William Bentvena was shot by Tommy DeSimone, an event, mostly recalled from the movie Goodfellas.  Bentvena was a "made man" of the Gambino crime family and DeSimone would disappear in 1979.

Saturday, May 9, 2020

May 9, 1970. Strange Days.

President Nixon visited the Lincoln Memorial and chatted with protestors who were sleeping there in anticipation of a protest organized in reaction to the American and South Vietnamese invasion of Cambodia. The President encountered about nine protestors and chatted with then in the early morning hours.

Protests were occuring all across the country on this day in reaction to the Cambodian invasion and in reaction to the shooting at Kent State.

On this day, about 450 Canadian peace activist crossed into the United States at Blaine Washington, location of the Peace Arch, and committed acts of vandalism in the town.  The presence of Canadian peace activist was completely nonsensical and their act of vandalism contrary to the claimed spirit of their actions.  It reflected more on events in Canada than it did in the United States in which the formerly highly conservative country was rocketing into a state of liberalism in which it remains, although it is contested, that started under the leadership of Pierre Trudeau.  Canada, in the less than one hundred years prior to 1970, had fought in the Boer War, World War One, World War Two and the Korean War.  It opposed the Vietnam War in a way, although it's often forgotten that it contributed a hospital ship to the allied forces there at one time and its contribution in terms of military volunteers approximated the number of American draft evaders who sought refuge there.

Another Canadian protest occurred on the same day on Parliament Hill when Canadian pro abortion activist protested a recently passed Canadian law addressing abortion.  This occurred three years prior to Roe v. Wade in the United States. At the time, just ten years following the advent of birth control pharmaceuticals, the direction things were going in seemed obvious.  Canada would repeal its law eighteen years later and no Canadian federal law has passed since.  Since that time, however, support for abortion in the United States has reversed to the point that the majority of Americans oppose it and its only a matter of time until the weakly reasoned case of Roe is repealed and the matter is returned to the states.  Canada, which is highly liberalized, has been slower to follow but has started to, with there being a small resurgent conservative movement that has come about over issues such as this, but also due to really extreme social speech provisions enacted in Canadian law.

Showing how odd the times were, retrospectively, Vice President Spiro Agnew spoke to a disappointing crowd of 10,000. . . 100,000 had been expected, at Georgia's Stone Mountain Park.  The Park is the location of a giant carving into natural stone depicting Confederate President Jefferson Davis, Gen. Robert E. Lee and Gen. Stonewall Jackson, all mounted.  It's impossible to imagine an American politician speaking there today.

The memorial had first been proposed in 1914, which was in the midst of the boom in Confederate memorial building across the south. As we've discussed elsewhere, most of the now controversial monuments to Southern rebel figures and to the Southern Civil War cause in general date from this period.  The monument itself does not, however, as its construction had an exceedingly odd history.  

Land for the monument was purchased in 1916 but a sculptor was not hired until the early 1920s, with that sculptor being Borglum, of Mount Rushmore fame.  He was fired over a financial conflict in 1925, however.  Congress got into the act in 1926 with the approval of the sale of commeorative coins for the effort thereafter.

After Borlum departed he destroyed his models which lead to the Association dedicated to the effort seeking to have him arrested.  In a sort of retaliation, the Association had the face of Lee that Borglum had partially completed blasted off of the mountain.  Subsequent sculptors took up the work but it lingered until 1958 when the State of Georgia purchased the area in order to complete it in a reaction to Brown v. Board of Education.  The state park was dedicated on April 14, 1965, 100 years plus one day after Lincoln's assassination in 1865.  The dedication of the monument occured in 1970, with Vice President Agnew appearing for the event, but it wasn't actually completed until March 3, 1972.  It's now the biggest tourist site in Georgia.

Now, of course, a lot of the smaller Confederate monuments have come down, but many more remain.  It's amazing to realize that as late as the 1970s there were still Southern public efforts to put them up, and that they were very associated with protest over desegregation.  The degree to which the support for the war had been lost was demonstrated by Agnew's failure to draw a crowed in the highly conservative south where opposition to the war had not been strong.

On the same day, Jimi Hendrix played in Ft. Worth and the Doors played in Columbus, Ohio.

Tuesday, May 5, 2020

The Tragedy At Kent State

Yesterday, as we noted below, was the 50th anniversary of the Kent State, Ohio, incident.

The incident, to put it briefly, occured when students at Kent State University staged a protest over the invasion of Cambodia which had been announced by President Nixon on April 30 and which for the US commenced on May 1.

This blog isn't a day by day anything, but we do commemorate certain events, most frequently those of 100 years past, when they occur.  Starting in 2018 we started picking up some fifty years past events mostly to mark the epicoal year of 1968.  We've continued with that a bit, as that is in some ways the continuation of the original story.

I marked the 1970 invasion of Cambodia, an event that I can personally recall as I noted in a post about that, but I managed to almost miss the 50th anniversary of the Kent State Shootings. I marked it, but only with a post nothing it:

May 4, 1970. Kent State


I nearly missed this somehow.

The point at which the Vietnam War took on a new, tragic, aspect, as a protest resulted in a unforeseen bloodshed.

This deserves a much better post than this, but unfortunately, it'll have to wait a bit.

The event was a huge one in the story of the war as it was the point where protests over the war resulted in bloodshed, something they had not up until then.  As the anti war movement had developed some real radicals, it would have some violent incidents after Kent State, but the protest at Kent State itself was never intended to be that sort of confrontation.

It's easy to over explain what happened there, but the real oddity of it is that National Guardsmen, who were drawn from the local area and largely not reflected in the student body of Kent State, were deployed as a riot detail to the protest. That's not surprising but frankly, as a former National Guardsmen, that sort of duty is always dangerous for Guardsmen and the public, to a degree.  Guardsmen are trained as soldiers, not as riot police, and the instinct of soldiers is to fire when confronted, no matter how well trained they may be. There are plenty of such incidents all around the globe that have occured when soldiers, even very well trained soldiers, fall back on their training in that fashion.

With that being the case, the shocking thing is that the Guardsmen had been issued ammunition.  Normally this wouldn't be the case and I heavily doubt that even regular active duty soldiers who were deployed in similar roles in the 1950s and 1960s were issued ammunition.  Likely even those men deployed to disperse the bonus marchers carried nothing more dangerous than than their sabers (they were cavalrymen) in that effort, with sabers making a pretty effective non lethal crowd control weapon in the hands of somebody who knows how to use their flats.

But at Kent State the Guardsmen were issued ammunition for their M1 Garands and at some point, they used it.

What happened remains extremely unclear.  The protests had been running for several days as it was so it had grown tense.  An effort was made to disperse the crowed and as part of that the Guardsmen advanced with bayonets fixed to their M1 Garands.  Some students began throwing rocks and return throwing tear gas canisters.  At some point the Guardsmen fired a 13 second volley, which is a long sustained volley.  Sixtyseven shots were fired by the 77 Guardsmen, but slightly less than half fired at all.

That seems clear enough, but from there things deteriorate.  Forensic examination of audiotape suggests that three shots were fired shortly before any others.  Some witnesses claimed a sergeant opened fire with a sidearm first, but the FBI's expert stated that the first three shots were from a M1 Garand.  An FBI informant inside the student body was revealed to be later armed and some have claimed that he fired the first shots, but this now seems discounted.

In the end, nine students were wounded and four killed. None of the killed was any older than 20 years old.  Given the volume of shots, and the weapons used, it's amazing that only 13 people were hit, which has to lead to some speculation on whether the 29 Guardsmen who all fired actually aimed at anything or even attempted to, or even intentionally did not.

The entire matter was a national tragedy, to say the least.  It put protests on the war on a new footing, even though the United States was already withdrawing from South Vietnam at the time, something not entirely evident to Americans given the recent news.  It was also a local tragedy, however, which is rarely noted as like a lot of university towns, the residents of Kent Ohio, whose families had contributed those who were in the National Guard, never saw the incident in the same light.

Monday, May 4, 2020

May 4, 1970. Kent State


I nearly missed this somehow.

The point at which the Vietnam War took on a new, tragic, aspect, as a protest resulted in a unforeseen bloodshed.

This deserves a much better post than this, but unfortunately, it'll have to wait a bit.

Friday, May 1, 2020

I remember it.

The event referred to here, that is:
Lex Anteinternet: April 30, 1970. The Incursion into Cambodia: Well remembered, but not well remembered accurately, on this day in 1970 President Richard Nixon announced that Republic of Vietnam and the ...
On May 1, 1970, US troops entered Cambodia in Operation Rock Crusher.  The operation sent the 1st Cavalry Division, which was famously air mobile in Vietnam, i.e., "air cavalry", the 11th Armored Cavalry REgiment, the ARVN 1st Armored Cavalry Regiment and the ARVN 3d Airborne Brigade into Cambodia following a massive B-52 air strike.

Engineers of the 11th ACR sweeping for mines ahead of a M551 Sheridan.

And that's what I remember.

It surprises me to realize that at the time I was six years old and in 2nd Grade.  Indeed, that simply amazes me in recollection.  I've long known that I recalled this event, in a certain way, but I'd associated it with being older.  Not six and almost seven, and not as a 2nd Grader.

In 1970, the year I was in 2nd Grade, I was in my second year of attendance of a grade school that was later sold by the school district in a sale that I still question, even though I have no real reason to.  I'll forgo commenting on that, at that time grade schools here worked the way that they do most places. They had a territory.  Later, in a controversial move that I still very much question, that practice was altered so that there were no home schools, leaving parents to struggle to place their children in a district housing over 60,000 people, as they also juggled their daily lives. But that's another story.

Looking back, I realize that I entered public school in the Fall of 1968, completing the year as a newly turned 5 year old.  So by extension I completed first grade having just turned 6 in 1969 and I would turn 7 just before school was let out in 1970.  In April and the first of May, 1970, I was still 6.

We 6 and 7 year olds didn't think much about the Vietnam War.

Our house in about 1958. This was before my birth.  My mother is to the left of the house, the only ones my parents ever owned.

That's interesting in a way as over time there's come to be a genera of literature that reflects childhood memories of war, and mostly of World War Two.  And when I say that, I mean American memories.  Europeans and Asians who were 6 or 7 definately have memories of World War Two as there wasn't a square inch of Europe that wasn't impacted by the war.  Even lands where a German jackboot never set foot, or where Japanese infantry never trod, were heavily impacted directly by the war.  The British were bombed and sent their children, if they could, to the countryside.  Swedes lived on short rations, pinned into between the Germans in occupying Norway and the war raging on the Finnish/Soviet border.  Swiss rations in the neutral nation became so short that serious worries over starvation set in and commons gardening became common.  And of course if you were in an area where ground forces contested for ground or even occupied it the events were unforgettable.

But in the United States none of that occured and so the memories are of other things.  But they are there.  Films like Radio Days and the like by some really well known actors depict the era and what it was like to be in the various stages of being young.  Even Gene Shepherd's A Christmas Story touches on it a bit, with Shepherd setting his Yuletide recollections forward in time, as he was actually that age several years prior himself, during the Depression. Shepherd served in World War Two.

Of course, Shepherd's A Christmas Story might in fact be the most accurate depiction for a young person, the way they perceive remote events.  Set in 1940, the kids worry about Christmas gifts and school yard bullies, not the Germans having just invaded France.  Likewise, in 1968, 69 and 70, when I was first in school, we didn't worry about the Republic of Vietnam.  We didn't even discuss it in school.

When I entered grade school, and through the early years of it, the day had a pretty set routine.

My father left for work really early, often before I was up.  Back then he got up around 5:00, which seemed really early, but now I get up no later that, and often a lot earlier than that, myself.  In my very early grade school years my mother sometimes made me breakfast but a lot of times I just ate cereal and drank milk.  I still eat cereal for breakfast quite a bit, but I never drink milk anymore and really haven't since my grade school years.

We had a Zenith television at home.  It was in the kitchen, which is also where we always ate.  It'd been placed in a spot that was just below a window by the stove, kind of an awkward place to put it, and I know that it had been relocated from the living room to there. That was likely because my father often worked in the evenings using the kitchen table for a work table.  Indeed, that some table was used for absolutely everything.

Television was new to my parents at the time and the TV, looking back, I now realize had only made its appearance a couple of years prior.  Up until then they didn't have one so this television was their first TV.  As first generation television owners their habits didn't really match later generations in regard to it, although in my father's case it came to somewhat resemble the modern a bit at one time, before ceasing to once again.  Anyhow, neither of my parents turned the television on in the morning.

But I did, and my mother let me do that.

At that time there was no such thing as cable television, at least in our town, and so broadcast TV was it.  Very early on there was only one channel, but because of my specific memory recollected here, I know that we had at least two, and maybe three, channels.  One of the channels, even though it was local, rebroadcast material from Denver's KOA television and other channels.  In the morning that one played kids shows.  One was the legendary Captain Kangaroo, which I would watch before going to school, and the other was a local Denver product which featured a young female host and a sock puppet character of some sort.  That one took submissions form the viewing audience and I once had a drawing I sent in shown in that part of the show.

School started at 8:00 and some time prior to that I went out the door, rain, shine or snow, and walked to school. The hike was about a mile, which isn't far.  Nobody ever drove me or my associates to school. . . ever.  Indeed, while my mother could drive and my father had purchased what I now know was a 1963 Mercury Meteor for her to have something to drive, but she was an awful driver and it was undoubtedly best she didn't drive me to school, but then nobody's parents did. The few kids who were hauled to school by motor vehicle were hauled by school bus, if they lived in the boundaries.  At the end of the school day, which I think was around 3:30, we walked back home.

If we had homework to do we did it then, and I know that homework actually did start to become a feature of our routine in 2nd Grade.  Our parents were expected to help us with penmanship, which my mother did.  Both of my parents had beautiful handwriting.  I never have.  They also helped us with math, which at that time my mother did as well. Both of my parents were really good with math, which I also have never been.  I recall at the time that we all had to struggle with "New Math", which was as short lived ill fated experiment at teaching something that is both natural and in academics dating back to antiquity in a new way.  It was a bad experiment and its taken people like me, upon whom it was afflicted, decades to recover from it.  It also meant that both of my parents, my mother first and my father later, were subject to endless frustration as they tried to teach me math effectively, having learned real math rather than new math.

If I didn't have home work or if I had finished it, I was allowed to turn on the television once again.  Gilligan's Island, the moronic 1960s sit com, was already in syndication and one of the local channels picked it up in a rebroadcast from Denver and played it at 4:30. At 5:00 the same channel played McHale's Navy.

My father normally left work around 5:00 p.m. and was home very shortly thereafter.  At this point in time he had to travel further across town so that usually meant that he was home no earlier than 5:15 but on some occasions it was later, around 5:30.  Usually he got home prior to 5:30 however, and when he did, he switched the channel to the news over my protests.

The network nightly news came on at 5:00 and ran to 5:30. At 5:30 the local news was shown on one of the local channels.  My father watched both and the custom became to leave the television on during dinner, something that I haven't liked as an adult.  From around this time until his later years he kept the television on until he want to bed, often simply as something on in the background as he worked.  Interestingly, he'd counsel me not to attempt to do homework in front of the television as he regarded it as impossible. I didn't at the time, but he was quite correct.

I don't recall what he watched on TV as a rule.  My mother never picked up the evening television habit and just didn't watch it.  Indeed, her intentional television watching was limited to a very few number of shows including Days Of Our Lives during one hour of the daily afternoon, and things such as The Carol Burnett Show or Lawrence Welk.    Having said that, just looking through the shows that were on in 1970, it seems to me back then they both watched some series that were brand new to television at the time.  The Mary Tyler Moore Show was one they both liked and it debuted in 1970. The Odd Couple was as well..  The Flip Wilson Show they also liked and was new. The short run Tim Conway Show they also liked.  Some others that were still on that they never watched were shows like Hogan's Hero's, which was nearing  the end of its run.

One thing that networks did at that time, as well as local channels, was to run movies.  When they did, it tended to be a big deal.  I can recall Lawrence of Arabia running when I was in my early grade school years, being broadcast over two nights.  My mother, who admired T. E. Lawrence, watched both nights, which was unusual.  I also recall The Longest Day running, again over two nights, when I was in 1st Grade.

So what's that have to do with Cambodia?

11th ACR in Cambodia.

Well, a lot in terms of my recollection of this day.

We grade school boys were familiar with war, as in "the war", and that war was World War Two.  Some of us had fathers who had been in World War Two, although they were older fathers, keeping in mind that in that era people had larger families and children stretched out over their parent's lifespans often differently than they do now.  It wasn't unusual for a grade school kid to have a father who had been in World War Two, and indeed my closest friend's father had been in the ETO during the war.  The dominance of World War Two in the culture, however, may be shown by the fact that I had a father who had been in the Korean War and I still thought of World War Two as "the war" and my father more or less did as well, which is odd to realize in that it wasn't just him, but others of his age and equivalent experience who took that view.  Indeed, it seems to me that it wasn't until right about this time, 1970, that the started to talk about their own war at all, and indeed also about this time it began to creep into the culture as background elements in popular stories.

Adding to this was the impact of popular culture.  As noted, the movie The Longest Day was such a big deal that it sticks out in my mind as something shown on television around 1969, probably in a network premier.  The movie Patton, one of the most celebrated American military movies of all time, was released in April 1970, and indeed its sometimes noted that President Nixon and Secretary of State Kissinger watched a private screening of it just shortly before U.S. armor went into Cambodia, although the suggestion that this influenced Nixon seems specious to me, the invasion having been something that events were working up to since the mid 60s and which had been ongoing for weeks prior to the US putting its forces in.  In other media, kids who liked cartoon books, which I never have, circulated such works as Sergeant Rock or GI Combat, both of which were set in World War Two.

So, for a 6 and 7 year old boy, we knew about wars, in the childish youthful glorification of war sense that has been a common feature of the play of boys since the dawn of man, but the war we knew about was a movie and cartoonish version of World War Two.

On May 1, 1970 I watched Gilligan's Island.  Following that McHale's Navy came on and I started watching that.  My father got home almost immediately after McHale's Navy started and switched the channel to the news, over my protest.  To my shock, the news featured M113 Armored Personnel Carriers crossing a river.  

I was stunned and asked my father "what's that?".  It looked like something out of The Longest Day.  I can't recall his exact words but he told me that the scene depicted US troops in action in Cambodia.

The fact that it had an impact is best demonstrated that fifty years later, I still recall it.  It was unsettling.  Even at 6 it was obvious that the school yard games we played in which the Allies and the Axis duked it out in Europe and Asia 30 years prior were being overshadowed by a real war in our own era.  People were fighting and it wasn't a game.

It was a type of epiphany, to be sure.  But a person needs to be careful about claiming too much.  It isn't as if at nearly age 7 I suddenly became keenly aware of everything going on in Indochina.  But suddenly I was much more aware of something that had actually been playing in the background my entire life.  Indeed, as it was in the background, but subtle, and often limited at that age to a short snipped on the nightly news that was often devoid of any real engaging footage, it was just something, up until then, that was.

Of course, while 7 years old isn't old, even at 7 your early early childhood years are waning.  The next five years in Vietnam, only three of which had a large scale American presence, were ones that were hard not to be aware of.  The unrelated but still huge news event of Watergate was impossible not to be aware of.  And by the time the Republic of Vietnam started collapsing in 1975, I was old enough to be very much aware of it.

But that awareness started on this day in 1970.

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Related thread:

Growing up in the 1960s

Thursday, April 30, 2020

April 30, 1970. The Incursion into Cambodia

Well remembered, but not well remembered accurately, on this day in 1970 President Richard Nixon announced that Republic of Vietnam and the United States were sending forces into Cambodia.

South Vietnamese M113 Armored Personnel Carries in Cambodia in 1970.

Recalled now most as the "U.S. entering the Parrot's Beak" region of Cambodia, in fact events had been building in this direction for weeks, months and years.

Cambodia was part of French Indochina, along with Vietnam and Laos, coming into French control due to a long struggle between Thailand and Vietnam for control of the country, which left it in Vietnamese hands at the time that Vietnam was colonized by the French.  Like Loas, it became an independent kingdom with the collapse of the French regime, achieving that status in 1953 prior to the French departure from Vietnam.  The establishment of the independent kingdom demonstrated  to a degree how the French envisioned post colonial Indochina, with it being made up of French aligned independent states with a government of a highly traditional model.  Indeed, the installed regent, Prince Sihanouk, was a French choice and installed much like the last Vietnamese emperor was in neighboring South Vietnam.  In Sihanouk, however, the French had chosen a much stronger personality who soon demonstrated that he could not be controlled.

Indeed King Sihanouk resigned his position in 1955 to become a politician in the newly independent kingdom, which made his father the king.  However, upon his father's 1960 death, he resumed the position of monarch, but limited his title to Prince. 

Right from the onset Cambodia, like the other regions of Indochina, contained left wing radicals who had come up during the colonial period, something that isn't really surprising in light of the fact that France also had left wing radicals itself.  And as with South Vietnam, the established government was not sympathetic to democratic elements.  Differing from Vietnam, however, Cambodia's monarchy survived its early independence and went on to form the government, whereas a similar effort in the Republic of Vietnam had left to a rapid downfall of the monarch.  Sihanouk had no small role in navigating this course.

Things were always accordingly troubled in the country but the ongoing wars in its Indochinese neighbors made things particularly difficult for Cambodia.  Prince Sihanouk attempted to place the country in the nonaligned camp, which was understandable under the circumstances but frankly naive given the enormous nature of the local conflict and the overarching global one.  

U.S. Air Force UH-1 helicopters over Cambodia.

On the other hand, the Prince correctly believed that the Communists would ultimately prevail in the Vietnamese War and believed that he had to be capable of dealing with that reality if Cambodia was to remain an independent state.  Perhaps realistically assessing the strength of his own armed forces as too weak to oppose the North Vietnamese, his government allowed the NVA to establish sanctuaries within the country starting in the mid 1960s, although as early as 1967 he commented to an American reporter that he would not oppose American air strikes in the country as long as they did not hard Cambodians, which of course was an impossible limitation.

In contrast right wing elements in the country increasingly wanted to take it in the opposite direction and found the Vietnamese presence humiliating.  Cambodia had its own culture and ethnicity and had long suffered from Vietnamese incursions into the country.  Indeed, large number of ethnic Cambodians lived in the Mekong are of Vietnam which itself was a sore point to the Cambodians that would continue right on into the Communist Pol Pot era.
  
In 1967 things changed for the worst when a spontaneous Communist rebellion took place in a region of the country which was followed by a more planned one in 1968.  In the same year Sihanouk openly revoked his prior comments about allowing US air strikes in the country, which given the increasing deterioration of his government's situation was probably a logical position for him to take.  By that time, however, the war in Vietnam was now highly developed.

With Richard Nixon's election in 1968 the US began to increasingly look towards action in Cambodia aimed at North Vietnamese enclaves there, something comparable to other frontier battles of other eras in which the US sought to address safe harbors across a border.  Following the Tet Offensive and Nixon's election, moreover, the US began to look for ways to withdraw from Vietnam which ironically meant occasional increases in the level of violence in the war.  In January 1969 Prince Sihanouk indicated to the US that Cambodia would not oppose ARVN and US forces that entered Cambodia in "hot pursuit" of retreating NVA forces provided that no Cambodians were harmed.  The US went one step further however and started targeting B-52 air strikes on NVA enclaves in the country, something the US later claimed that Sihanouk agreed to but which he most likely did not.  The events demonstrated the impossibility of the Cambodian position, however, as an allowance of one thing is practically an allowance of another, in war, and at the same time it was becoming increasingly impossible for the US to abstain from action in Cambodia.

In March, 1970 Sihanouk was deposed in a military coup which was supported by most of the educated urban population.  The kingdom was brought to an end and the Khmer Republic established.  A massacre of Vietnamese residents of Cambodia ensued in which thousands lost their lives and which was condemned by both North and South Vietnam.  By that time there were 40, 000 North Vietnamese troops in the country.  The new republican regime demanded that the North Vietnamese and Viet Cong withdraw but instead they commenced attacks on the Cambodian state.  Prince Sihanouk, moreover, would not give up and encouraged his supporters to restore him to power. All of this fueled the native communist insurgency and the situation degraded into a civil war.  During the same period the NVA attacks became a full scale invasion and the NVA began to overrun and defeat Cambodian army positions.  Not really well known into the 1990s, the North Vietnamese in the period sound to completely overrun the country, which likely was regarded by them as a strategic necessity.  They scored significant successes in the early months of 1970 in attempting this but, remarkably, the Khmer government did not completely collapse and in fact its armed opposition to the NVA and the Khmer Rouge continued throughout the period, although they were losing ground.

The South Vietnamese and American incursion of 1970 was designed to defeat the North Vietnamese in their safe harbor.  South Vietnamese preparatory actions commenced on April 14.  Perhaps ironically President Nixon announced the withdrawal of 150,000 U.S. troops from South Vietnam on April 20.  Nonetheless plans for the action continued, and indeed they may be seen as related to some degree.  On April 30 the South Vietnamese invasion began in earnest and President Nixon announced to the nation that U.S. troops would be entering Cambodia on a temporary basis, which they commenced to do the following day, May 1.

U.S. M48s in Cambodia.

The North Vietnamese were surprised by the invasion and proved to be incapable of resisting it. They nonetheless proved adept at avoiding having their forces destroyed.  American leadership regarded the invasion as a success and US and ARVN forces would withdraw from the eastern portions of the country they occupied in July.  The expansion of the war at the very time that the Administration was committed to withdrawing, while not actually strategically inconsistent, appeared to be and it increased opposition to the war in the United States.  The Cambodian government, in contrast, welcomed the incursion and hoped that US forces would remain in the country, an act which they believed would have helped them combat the native Khmer Rouge insurgency and which they also hoped would lead to the permanent expulsion of the North Vietnamese Army from the country.  Indeed, a remaining American presence was practically a necessity for the Khmer Republic's survival.

Newspaper reading American soldier in Cambodia.

To some degree the action is a tribute to the late Vietnam War American Army and the Army of the Republic of Vietnam.  The ARVN were much more fully formed and combat ready by this point in the war than they had been earlier, although they'd also become completely dependant upon American air support, which was enormous in the invasion.  The American Army, in contrast, was severely strained and suffering gigantic moral and discipline problems by this point, so the fact that they were able to effectively rally for a major offensive action is impressive.  It's also impressive, however, that the North Vietnamese were able to react to the invasion and avoid complete destruction.

There are those who want to attribute the ultimate collapse of the Khmer Republic, followed by the horror of Communist Pol Pot's regime, to this series of 1970s events, but the claim is frankly strained.  As noted, the Cambodian government of the time was becoming increasingly right wing and hostile to Communism inside the country and it was actively seeking to destroy it, albeit unsuccessfully.  A more realistic assessment would be that the results in neighboring South Vietnam were always set to dictate what happened in the smaller Indochinese neighbor.  The same political forces that had existed in South Vietnam since 1954 were present in Cambodia since 1953 except, ironically, right wing elements that wished to actively oppose Communism were significantly stronger in Cambodia.

Cambodian civilians dividing captured North Vietnamese Army rice.

At any rate, the Cambodian tragedy, in some ways, has always been strongly linked to being a small country between two larger neighbors.  Vietnam's civil war had spilled into it and now it was raging within its borders.  It's fate would now follow a strongly parallel, but more tragic and bloody course.

Sunday, December 8, 2019

So then what? Lex Anteinternet: December 1, 1969. The United States resumes a lottery system for conscription.

Last week we published this item:

Lex Anteinternet: December 1, 1969. The United States resumes a lott...:

In that, we noted the following:

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.

So, as noted, the concept was that the lottery would reduce resistance to the draft.

So, did it?

In fact, it did remarkably, and not only that, protests of the Vietnam War dropped off on college campuses remarkably in 1970.

Now, not completely.  Indeed, one of the absolute worst events associated with the era of college war protests, the shooting at Kent State, would come in 1970.  But there was a marked reduction.

Indeed, university faculty, which had evolved from a sort of genteel conservatism early in the 20th Century into an increasingly liberal faculty over the years, was both surprised and disappointed as they'd come to believe that the core of the opposition was social concern, rather than personal concern.  It turned out that at least the evidence was the opposite.

So, what generally occurred with the lottery is that a large number of men knew after a lottery call that they were never going to be drafted and they accordingly planned conventionally.  Another group knew for sure it had been drafted and planned for that. A number in the middle felt their chances of being drafted were likely, reviewed the deferments they might be qualified for, with quite a few heading for Reserve component recruiters or the ROTC building.

The opposition to the war certainly didn't end.  But the heat had been taken out of the issue to a surprising degree.