Wednesday, December 13, 1944. USS Goshen commissioned.

Today In Wyoming's History: December 13: Today is St. Lucy's Day. She is one of the patrons of writers. 

1944 The USS Goshen, originally named the Sea Hare, commissioned.  She was a fast attack transport.

The USS Goshen was sold in 1947 to American Mail Lines Ltd and renamed Canada Mail. In 1963 her name was changed to California Mail. In 1968, she was sold to Waterman Steamship, re-registered as the La Fayette. She was scrapped in 1973.

The US prevailed in the Battle of Metz.

The First Battle of Kesternich began on the German border with Belgium.

The Battle of Mindoro began in the Philippines

The Myōkō was  damaged beyond repair by the USS Bergall.

The USS Nashville was severely damaged off Negros Island by a kamikaze attack.

The U-365 was sunk in the Artic Ocean by a Fairey Swordfish.

The Great Snowstorm of 1944 ended.

Last edition:

Tuesday, December 12, 1944. Heavy artillery.

Labels: 1940s, 1944, boats and ships, British Army, Dekemvriana (Δεκεμβριανά), Germany, Greek Civil War, Mediterranean and Middle East Theatre, Royal Air Force, World War Two

Notable passing. William J. Calley.

 

William J. Calley, who was convicted for his commanding role in the My Lai Massacre during the Vietnam War, has died at age 80.

Calley only served three years under house arrest at his military apartment for the crime, before being released and cashiered from the Army.  About 500 Vietnamese civilians were killed before a helicopter pilot heroically intervened, with some ground troops assisting him.  Calley was convicted on 22 counts of murder, having been originally charged with about 100, but only served three days behind bars before President Nixon confined him to house arrest.

He kept to himself after release, but maintained the classic "only following orders" defense, which is no defense at all.  He became a successful businessman in Columbus Georgia.  In later years he admitted to friends that he'd committed the acts charged with.  In 2009 he issued a public apology, stating:

There is not a day that goes by that I do not feel remorse for what happened that day in My Lai. I feel remorse for the Vietnamese who were killed, for their families, for the American soldiers involved and their families. I am very sorry.

He was in some ways an interesting example of the officer corps at the time, in that he had gone to, but failed to complete, college. He entered the Army due to poverty in 1966.

Four solders were charged with crimes due to the massacre, but only Calley went forward to conviction.  There was at the time some reason to believe his "following orders" story, but in a general, rather than specific, sense.

Oddly, on this day, I'm drinking Vietnamese coffee.  I have some baseball type "patrol" caps from Australia around here that were made in Vietnam.  Vietnam is courted by the US as an ally against the country's traditional enemy, China, even though it remains a Communist state controlled country and economy.  A vast amount of the shrimp served on American tables comes from Vietnamese waters.  The country has become a tourist destination for Americans, and there is, bizarrely given the build of the Vietnamese, a Victoria's Secret in Hanoi.

Most Americans, and Most Vietnamese, were born after his conviction in 1973.

The world moved on, save for those whose lives ended that day, or were impacted by those events over 50 years ago.  Calley, at 80, was a member, however, of the generation which is only now beginning to lose its grip on power.  Joe Biden is just about the same age.  Donald Trump, who was not impoverished, is two years younger and obtained four student draft deferments while being deemed fit for military service.  In 1968, the year of My Lai, he was classified as eligible to serve but later that same year he was classified 1-Y, a conditional medical deferment, and in 1972, as the draft was winding down, he was reclassified 4-F due to bone spurs.  No combat veteran of the Vietnam War has been elected President and none every will be, as they begin to pass on.  Al Gore, agre 76, who served in the country as a photographer, was a Vietnam Veteran, however, and George Bush II, age 78, was an Air National Guard pilot who did volunteer for service in the country, but who did not receive it.

Calley's generation, which is now rapidly passing, was the most influential in American history, and in many ways which were not good ones, which is not to say that there weren't ways in which they were positive influences.  They'll soon be a memory, like the generation that fought World War One became some twenty or so years ago, and the generation that fought World War Two basically has been.  

Calley's death serves as a reminder and a reflection of a lot of things.

Monday, February 4, 1974. Patty Hearst kidnapped.

Patty Hearst, a grandchild of newspaper magnate William Randolph Hearst, was kidnapped from her apartment in Berkeley, California by the  Symbionese Liberation Army.  She was 19 at the time.

Hearst right during later bank robbery.

The group had first appeared in November when it had murdered Marcus Foster, the black Superintendent of Oakland Public Schools, and wounded his deputy superintendent Robert Blackburn.

The name of the entity, it might be noted, came from this, according to the organization:

The name 'symbionese' is taken from the word symbiosis and we define its meaning as a body of dissimilar bodies and organisms living in deep and loving harmony and partnership in the best interest of all within the body.

It's hard to seem how murdering public school superintendents fits that supposed goal.  Robert Blackburn, who survived his wounds, noted:

These were not political radicals, They were uniquely mediocre and stunningly off-base. The people in the SLA had no grounding in history. They swung from the world of being thumb-in-the-mouth cheerleaders to self-described revolutionaries with nothing but rhetoric to support them.

Emblematic of the times, the goof ball entity was a kind of sort of Communist terrorist cell that rapidly became disenchanted with "the people" after distributions of food, which it had demanded as a ransom in Berkeley, didn't go well.

In April, the group raided a bank in San Francisco, in which Hearst seemed to take part, although she denied doing so willingly. She nonetheless was convicted due to the actions and served two years out of a seven-year sentence before Jimmy Carter, ever the kind man, had her released.  Bill Clinton pardoned her.

In May the organization moved from the Bay Area to Los Angeles, where they got into a shootout at a sporting goods store where Hearst, on guard duty, fired shots.  A shootout a couple of days later at a supposed safe house killed six of them.

Hearst was arrested in September 1975, back at a San Francisco safe house.

Hearst, as noted, was convicted, but she claimed she had never participated willingly, and had been raped and threatened while a captive.  Given the nature of the SLA, that's certainly possible. Early on, however, after her arrest she had said that she comported her thoughts to theirs and was given a choice of being freed or fighting with them, and she elected to fight.

After her release, Hearst married Bernard Lee Shaw, a policeman who was part of her security detail during her time on bail.  They had two children.  He died in 2013.

The Provisional IRA bombed a bus on the M62 Motorway in England, killing nine solders and three civilians, including two children.

The Yom Kippur War resumed, but only as between Syria and Israel, with 500 Cuban soldiers joining a Syrian tank unit.  Fighting resumed in the Golan Heights.

Time Magazine featured Speaker of the House Tip O'Neil on the cover, with the caption "The Impeachment Congress.

The moment the fatal wounds were afflicted.

How did we end up with two ancient, disliked men being advanced by their parties?

Well, we ended up here as the Democrats quit believing in democracy, favoring rule by the courts, until the courts decided they believed in democracy, and because both parties lied to their rank and file, working class, constituents for a period of fifty years.

We've dealt with this before.

However, it can nearly be determined with precision.

The date of the wounds were:

• January 22, 1973

That's the date the United States Supreme Court issued the Roe v. Wade decision, replacing its judgment for that of state legislatures. As the dissent noted:

I find nothing in the language or history of the Constitution to support the Court's judgment. The Court simply fashions and announces a new constitutional right for pregnant women and, with scarcely any reason or authority for its action, invests that right with sufficient substance to override most existing state abortion statutes. The upshot is that the people and the legislatures of the 50 States are constitutionally disentitled to weigh the relative importance of the continued existence and development of the fetus, on the one hand, against a spectrum of possible impacts on the woman, on the other hand. As an exercise of raw judicial power, the Court perhaps has authority to do what it does today; but, in my view, its judgment is an improvident and extravagant exercise of the power of judicial review that the Constitution extends to this Court.

And Democrats concluded they didn't really need to persuade voters anymore, the Courts would impose a new liberal regime on the besotted and benighted public without their participation.

And:

• July 17, 1980.

That's the date that the GOP nominated Ronald Reagan for President. Reagan would go on to use the Southern Strategy to draw in Southern (and Rust Belt) Democrats who had lied to as the post World War Two economic prosperity collapsed. Thing is, the GOP didn't really listen to their concerns, just as the Democrats had quit doing. 

Seven years in which we went from two functioning political parties and put them on the path to being pure machines, breaking what they claimed to serve.

Friday, December 28, 1973. The Endangered Species Act.

On this day in 1973, the Endangered Species Act, having passed by the House of Representatives, 355 to 4, with the only opposing votes coming from Congressmen Earl Landgrebe of Indiana, H. R. Gross of Iowa, Robin Beard of Tennessee and Bob Price of Texas, was signed into law.

The Nixon Administration, now mostly remembered for Watergate, and the duplicitous end to the Vietnam War, had a remarkable record of passing environmental legislation, including this landmark example.  Perhaps more remarkable, at this point in time, Wyoming's Congressman, Teno Roncolio, voted for it.

My, how things have changed.

And more amazing yet, Teno Roncalio, was a Democrat, the last Wyoming Democrat to hold that position.  For that matter, one of the two Senators from Wyoming, Gale McGee, was as well.  McGee is the last member of the Democratic Party to hold that office in Wyoming.

Presently to admit that the ESA is a great piece of litigation is to invite castigation in Wyoming, and the world "Democrat" is nearly slanderous in nature.

On the same day, Nixon signed the Comprehensive Employment and Training Act (CETA) which provided to train workers for jobs in public service.

Whatever else may be the case about him, the country owes a debt to Nixon for legislation passed during his administration.

Solzhenitsyn's tome The Gulag Archipelago was published. The very first published edition on the horrors of the Soviet penal system were in French.

Bobby Darin (Walden Robert Cassotto) died at age 37 following a surgery to repair artificial heart valves he had received three years prior.

Darin had been a major Ameican entertainer of the 50s and 60s.  Of Sicilian descent, his early life was complicated, having had a grandfather that was a member of the mafia.  He was raised believing that his mother, who had borne him out of wedlock at age 17, was his sister, something she did not reveal to him until he was 32.

Friday, December 23, 1973. The Geneva Conference opens.

Today In Wyoming's History: December 23: 1973  1973  Larry Larom, founding president of the Dude Ranchers Association, died in Cody.

The Geneva Conference opened in order to try to negotiate a solution to the Israeli Arab conflict.  Ultimately disengagement agreements would be worked out, the following year, between Israel, Egypt and Syrian. An agreement on the Sinai Peninsula was worked out in 1975.

Tuesday, December 18, 1973. Fate unknown.

The Palestinian terrorists in Rome ordered a Lufthansa plane to fly to Kuwait, where the remaining hostages were freed.  A year later, Kuwait turned them over to the PLO, which promised to put them on trial. Their fate is unknown.

Monday, December 17, 1973. Terrorism at the Leonardo da Vinci Airport.

Palestinian terrorists killed 32 people at the Leonardo da Vinci Airport near Rome by seizing a terminal and then throwing grenades in the open doors of a Boeing 707.

Because killing innocent people is a mature and rational way to get what you want . . . 

Canada and Denmark signed a treating delineating their territorial waters.

Tuesday, December 7, 1973. Women join the Coast Guard on a regular basis.

The United States Coast Guard accepted its first regular female members, Chief Warrant Officer Alice T. Jefferson, Yeoman First Class Wanda May Parr and Yeoman Second Class Margaret A. Blackman.

This came about due to the elimination of the Coast Guard's Women's Reserve.

Jefferson had jointed the SPARS in 1943 and remained in the Coast Guard until 1984, when she retired.  She passed away in 2019 at age 96.

The world's most dangerous airline, Aeroflot, crashed is Flight 964 at Moscow's airport, killing 16 out of 75 people on board.

Convicted child murderer Lester Eubanks was released for unsupervised Christmas shopping in Ohio and disappeared.  He remains a fugtive.

Blog Mirror: Henry Kissinger, 1923-2023. War criminal

I was surprised to see this article by Reich, and I thought it would be on the late stages of the Vietnam War, but I'll note that I too am not a Kissinger fan.

Henry Kissinger, 1923-2023. War criminal

Tuesday, November 27, 1973. Gerald Ford sworn in as Vice President.

Vice President Gerald Ford was sworn into that office.  Only three votes were cast against his appointment.

The Emergency Petroleum Allocation Act was signed into law in order to allocate petroleum distribution and control prices. This came about, of course, due to the Arab Oil Embargo.

The effort at price control and allocation would prove to be a failure, as generally such measures prove to be.

The House of Representatives passed a bill to put the US on Daylight Savings Time year around.  A similar bill recently passed the Senate, and then went nowhere.

This act passed and went into effect in 1974, and very rapidly it went from being popular to unpopular.  I can remember the reason why.  As a kid, we now went to school in darkness.

It escapes me why these bills always choose Daylight Savings Time over natural time.  

Monday, November 26, 1973. Oops.

Mary Woods testified in Federal Court that she's accidentally caused part of the 18-1/2-minute gap in a White House tape.

Thursday, November 22, 1973. Oily shifting sands and tides.

Japan, which had not yet come under the Arab oil embargo, dropped its support for Israel and joined the United Nations in calling for a separate Palestinian state.  In doing so, it was seeking to avoid the oil sanction.

Saudi Arabia warned the US that it would reduce oil production by 80% if the US did not stop supporting Israel, and that the country would destroy its oil wells if attacked.

Saturday, November 17, 1973. Richard Nixon - "I'm not a crook"

It's almost charming to think that there was a time when the Republican President had to assure the American people of his morality.

The Athens Polytechnic Uprising, which had started on November 14 as a student protest, was put down by the Greek Army.

Friday, November 16, 1973. Transforming Alaska.

Today In Wyoming's History: November 16: 1973     President Richard M. Nixon signed the Alaska Pipeline measure into law.

The building of the Alaska pipeline was huge news at the time. There were those then who expressed concerns about the environmental costs, but by and large, in the midst of the oil crisis, it was looked at by Americans with a lot of hope and often compared to big prior endeavors, such as the Transcontinental Railroad.

The oil would forever change the economy of Alaska, as it also had already, and was continuing to do, in Wyoming.

Before the Oil. And after it? The economies of Wyoming and Alaska.

Skylab 4 was launched.

Thursday, November 15, 1973. Lowering the speed limit.

Washington state lowered its speed limit to conserve gasoline.  Coincidentally, highway mortality drooped 11%.

Israel and Egypt exchanged POWS taken during the Yom Kippur War.

Wednesday, November 7, 1973. Congress overrides Nixon's veto of the War Powers Act.

 Congress overrode President Nixon's veto of the War Powers Act.

The resolution was a direct byproduct of the Vietnam War, with Congress feeling that it had basically been led into war without a proper chance to vote on troop deployments to the conflict, although it had voted on the murky Gulf of Tonkin Resolution.  The still relatively fresh Korean War was also in mind.

The Constitutionality of the act, which as been questioned, has never been tested by the Supreme Court.  So far, however, Congress and the President have generally complied with it, not wanting to test it, even though early on President's would note that they felt it to be unconstitutional.  This is discussed further with a link here:

November 7, 1973 – Congress Passes the War Powers Act

Nixon addressed the nation on "The Energy Emergency".

It's fair  to ask in a way if the "Energy Crisis" presented a lost opportunity.

Even in 1973, contrary to the way some would like to assert it, there were concerns in the scientific community about climate change.  When the Energy Crisis arose due to the Arab Oil Embargo there was a serious effort to look at alternative energy sources, although nothing like there is today, and it was coupled with a massive effort to increase the production of domestic fossil fuels.  Solar energy was looked at seriously for the first time.  A lot of thought was put into home solar.  Energy saving regulations, in regard to appliances, and fuel efficiency standards were put into place as well.

Had the government gone further, and moved towards home solar in a large-scale way, and undertook efforts then to look towards conversion to non emitting energy sources, we may well have avoided what we're looking at today.

The Cape Krusenstern Archaeological District in Alaska was designated.

About the location, the National Park Service notes:

Cape Krusenstern Archaeological District - Designated November 7, 1973

Cape Krusenstern Archaeological District contains the cultural remains of peoples who have inhabited these beaches for 5,000 or more years. Adjacent to the ridges on unglaciated uplands in the Igichuk Hills are surface deposits that extend the record backward to the time of the end of the Pleistocene. The beach ridges of Cape Krusenstern provide a broad, horizontal stratigraphy which includes virtually all phases of cultural history known in northwest Alaska.

Sunday, November 4, 1973. Driverless Sunday.

 

By Fotograaf Onbekend / Anefo - http://proxy.handle.net/10648/ac3c2404-d0b4-102d-bcf8-003048976d84, CC0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=67727372

The Dutch ban on Sunday driving due to the fuel emergency went into effect.

Tuesday, October 310, 1973. Sunday drivers.

 Netherlands banned private Sunday driving, with a start date of November 4, to conserve fuel.

The Judiciary Committee voted 21 to 17 to consider impeaching Richard Nixon.  The vote was split on party lines.

The Bosphorus Bridge was completed across the Bosphorus connecting Europe and Asia for the first time since Emperor Darius of Persia's pontoon bridge of 512 BC.

The bridge in 1973.

Monday, October 29, 1973. Les électeurs du Québec ont voté pour le Parti libéral du Québec et donc pour rester dans l'union canadienne.

Voters in Quebec voted for the Quebec Liberal Party and therefore for remaining in the Canadian union.

Les électeurs du Québec ont voté pour le Parti libéral du Québec et donc pour rester dans l'union canadienne.

En effet, pourquoi quitteriez-vous le pays que vous avez fondé ?

The Uruguayan military government closed the Universidad de la República Uruguay in Montevideo due to Marxist agitation.