Wednesday, May 5, 1899. The station at Khilkovo.

William S. Davidson, Sarah E. Smith, Maud Morphew, Eleonora Hansen, Frederick Pray, and David Clarkson at Khilkovo Station (Okeanskaia), north of Vladivostok. 

I enclose a photo I took at the station at Khilkovo-- you will recognize all but Miss Morphew and Mrs. Hansen and you can distinguish them by Mrs. Hansen's fur cape. 

Elanor Pray.

We discussed Mrs. Pray yesterday, but here too there's a warning for us moderns. Russian society of 1899 was blisteringly ignorant.  That ignorance would help fuel two revolutions, the second successful, and the rise of Communism, through its adoption by populists.

A warning on populist extremism to us all.

Last prior edition:

Thursday, May 4, 1899. The Battle of Santo Tomas and the remarkable Elanor Pray.

1890s, 1899, 1930, 1930s, China, Iowa National Guard, Kansas National Guard, Montana National Guard, Nebraska National Guard, Philippine Insurrection, Philippines, Russia, Vladivostok Russia, World War Two

Thursday, April 24, 1924. Protecting the Icons.

Russian Orthodox faithful prevented the police from confiscating icons from St. Andrew's Cathedral in St. Petersburg.

Communist authorities subsequently turned the church over to the Soviet-sponsored Renovationist Church that promoted a pro-Communist Orthodox body which originally been a post Russian Revolution reform movement with in the Russian Orthodox Church, but which was taken over by the Communist infiltration.  It received Communist backing at first, but was ultimately repressed, just as the Russian Orthodox Church was.  It never received the support of the Russian faithful, and it passed away after World War Two.  Almost all of its priests returned to the Orthodox Church after Stalin stopped the strict oppression of it during World War Two.

Last prior edition:

Wednesday, April 23, 1924. Debutants drill team

1920s, 1924, Equine Transportation, Washington DC, Women

Palm Sunday, April 2, 1944. Soviets enter Romania, Rebellion in El Salvador.

Sgt. Walter Holden, Haleyville, Ala., Pfc. Raymond Holler, Route 1, Lenoir, N.C., and Pvt. John Mart, Route 2, Sanford, N.C. of the 3d Infantry Division in an obviously staged photograph at Anzio.  All three men are wearing the new M1943 uniform, which the photo was probably intended to illustrate.  The uniform featured the M1943 field jacket, the M1943 field trousers, and the M1943 combat boot.  It remained the essential Army pattern of uniform for decades, and indeed to the present day, with modifications.  Replacing earlier uniform variants would, however, take months.

Today in World War II History—April 2, 1944: Soviet troops enter Romania. First US B-29 Superfortress bomber arrives at Kharagpur, India, near Calcutta. Armed revolt erupts in El Salvador.

From Sarah Sundin's blog.

The entering of Romania was more proof, if anymore was needed, that the Third Reich was in its final act.  Romania had sought to exit the war, but had been dissuaded from doing so by the Germans.  It would start pondering that once again in earnest. 

Romania, although somewhat forgotten in the West, was not a minor power in some significant ways.  The country had the third-largest army in the Axis in Europe, behind Italy and Japan, until Italy's 1943 surrender, at which time it was the second-largest Axis power.  Its army was in fact the fourth largest in the world.  It was plagued with internal problems, however, with a rank and file that was woefully uneducated and an officer corps that was condescending towards its men.  Generally, Romanians fought better under German officers and NCO's.

It was a monarchy, but a monarchy which was, at the time, led by a military dictator.

Hitler issued his directive 54 with the topic of stopping the Russian advance, which obviously wasn't going to happen.

The rebellion in El Salvador was a pro-democracy one against the country's fascist military dictator Maximiliano Hernández Martínez and included significant military elements.  Martinez admired Mussolini and Hitler, and like Hitler he was a vegetarian.  El Salvador declared war on the Axis in December 1941, but it took no actual part in the fighting and refused US requests to station troops there.

The rebellion would be violently put down, but it would nonetheless lead to Martinez' fall a month later.

Martinez was killed in a labor dispute with his taxi driver in 1966 while living in exile in Honduras.

The Japanese 15th Army (Mutaguchi) continued to advance.

The Italian Communist Party declared its support for the Badoglio government.

The 1944 Tour of Flanders bicycle race commenced.

Last prior edition:

Saturday, April 1, 1944. The closing curtain for the Axis.

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Wednesday, April 2, 1924. Selecting Harlan Stone.

Calvin Coolidge, just one day after saying he had decided a new Attorney General, nominated Harlan Fiske Stone to that position.

Stone, who had been the dean of Columbia Law School, would go on from that position to the United States Supreme Court and ultimately Chief Justice.

The Bulgarian Communist Party was outlawed due to its role in attempting to overthrow the government.

A large demonstration broke out at the funeral of German monarchist Wilhelm Dreyer who had died in a French prison following his dynamiting a train in the French occupied Ruhr.

The Cla McIver rescued passengers of the SS Frangestan which had caught on fire. The 1,200 mostly Muslim passengers were on their way to Mecca.

Bobby Ávila, 1954 American League batting champion and Player of the Year, was born in Veracruz.  He'd later be mayor of the city.

Last prior edition:

Tuesday, April 1, 1924. Sentencing coup plotters.

1920s, 1924, Adolf Hitler, Africa, Beer Hall Putsch, British Empire, cavalry, German Weimar Republic, Internet, Medicine, National Guard, Radio, Royal Canadian Air Force, Wyoming National Guard, Zambia

Wednesday, March 19, 1924. Oil and the GOP.

The Mongolian "Department of Women's Development" was formed as Mongolia slipped into Communist repression.

Oil and the GOP was in the headlines.

I can't find anything about the supposed March 1924, US intervention in Honduras.  There was one later that year.

Governor Carey suggested that Natrona County residents ought to use politics to get irrigation projects advanced in the county.

Last prior edition:

Tuesday, March 18, 1924. The high water mark of the Irish Mutiny.

Monday, March 6, 1944. "Black Monday"

The first large scale daylight bombing raid on Berlin occured.  The raid, remembered as Black Monday, involved 814 bombers and 944 fighters from bases in southern England.  69 bombers were lost.

Miss Donna Mae II sustaining damage after the B-17 drifted under another B-17 dropping its bomb load. The plane would go down with all eleven crewmen.

P-51 pilot Donald Blakeslee would fly the first such aircraft over the city.  An early American fighter pilot, he first joined the RCAF in 1941, he served in the USAF until 1965 and passed away in 2008 at age 80.

For those watching Masters of the Air, it is depicted in Episode 7.

The Red Army took Volochysk.

Finland rejected a Soviet peace proposal that included interning German troops that were inside of Finland and restoring the 1940 borders.  The proposal was very similar to what the Finns would accept the following September and represented, effectively, a defeat, which is likely why it was not accepted, in part, at this time, although it was also surprisingly generous on Moscow's part.

Company B, 2nd Chemical Bn. Cassino area, Italy. 6 March, 1944.

The U-744 was sunk in the Atlantic, and the U-973 was sunk in the Arctic.

Orderlies from 25th Field Hospital loading wounded Chinese soldiers into airplane.

Albanian partisan Ramize Gjebrea age 20, was executed by a partisan firing squad for "immoral behavior", that being having intercourse with a male partisan.  She was engaged to another person.  The charge was denied by both parties, but she was convicted and, on this day, shot.

This is interesting partially as Albanian partisans were Communist dominated, but as was often the case with Communist partisan groups, and even Communist societies, traditional morality was strictly observed even though Marx had expressly rejected it and Communist revolutionaries most definitely did not observe them.

Baker City, Oregon, weather station.

Saturday, March 1, 1924. The Nixon Nitration Works Disaster.

The Nixon Nitration Works disaster occured in which an explosion of ammonium nitrate killed at least 18 people, destroyed several miles of New Jersey factories, and demolished Nixon, New Jersey.

While a very famous industrial disaster, the Nixon Nitration Works and Nixon New Jersey are remembered now principally for being mentioned in Band of Brothers as Cpt. Lewis Nixon III, a major character Ambrose's depiction of the 506 Parachute Infantry Regiment, mentions it.  Lewis Nixon was in fact a member of the family that owned the plant, and it was the case that Richard Winters, his close friend and for most of his service in Europe his superior, worked there for a time after the war.

The Nixon's were troubled in general, and Lewis Nixon III was no exception.  His marriage contracted just after the start of the war failed during it, as did a subsequent one.  A third marriage to Grace Umezawa, formerly a Japanese internee, was successful.  She helped him overcome the alcoholism depicted during the series.

The KDP, the Communist Part of Germany, was reinstated.  The KDP, together with the NADSP, the Nazi Party, would figure enormously in the destruction of German democracy as the extremes grew increasingly powerful in the remaining years of the Weimar Republic.

Alice's Day at Sea, the first of 57 Alice comedies produced by Walt Disney, appeared.  They were short films meant to be shown before the feature, something at one time common.

White rats paraded in San Pedro, California.

Hacks, i.e., cabs, were allowed back in Hyde Park for the first time since 1636.

Not a hack, but on this day, an Irish Traveler feeding his pony on this day in 1924.

Locally, a story didn't add up.

A 20-year-old marrying a 15-year-old?  

And she was in 6th Grade?

A note. Communism and Fascism are not the same thing.

I note this, as would be President Donald Trump keeps referring to "Communist and Fascist" as if they are the same thing.

A person who does that should be sent to remedial Kindergarten. 

Seriously, at this stage, if that's the sort of thing a graduate of the Wharton School of Business can get away with saying, they ought to all go to remedial Kindergarten.

Sunday, February 24, 1974. Advent of Fireforce, getting mad at Confucious.

The Fireforce vertical envelopment tactic was used by the 1st Battalion of the Rhodesian Light Infantry in the first example of its use.  The tactic was developed as Rhodesian Aérospatiale Alouette III had a limited carrying capacity in comparison to the very large helicopters used by the US in similar roles.

Rhodesian Alouette III.

The use of aircraft outside of their original intended roles was fairly common in African wars of the 60s, 70s and 80s.

The People's Republic of China began a a nationwide campaign to discredit Confucius and Lin Biao as "reactionaries who tried to turn back the wheel of history" which was certainly cutting a pretty wide swath given that Confucius died in 479 BC, and Lin Biao in 1971.

Last prior:

Wednesday, February 14, 1974. Solzhenitsyn expelled.

Wednesday, February 14, 1974. Solzhenitsyn expelled.

A Soviet court revoked Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn's citizenship and ordered him expelled from the USSR.  He was placed on an Aeroflot flight to West Germany with only the clothes on  is back.

His family was left in the Soviet Union.

The following day, the Soviet Ministry of Culture directed libraries containing One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich to remove them.

The novel is one of my favorites.

Last prior:

Thursday, February 7, 1974: Blog Mirror: "Blazing Saddles" Premieres

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.

Monday, November 12, 1923. The red flag.

The Soviet Union adopted a new flag.

The red represented the seas of blood the Communist were causing to flow in the country and the yellow hiding behind the fortress of the Red Army to avoid being overthrown. . .  well okay actually not.

The flag had always been red, that being the color of socialism every single place on Earth except for the very US, very recently, where some pinhead decided that would now be the symbol of conservatism, because his sense of history was impaired.  During the revolutionary period, the Communists had just used red flags with no symbols.  In 1922 they had adopted this hideous banner:

Starting in July, 1923, they'd strated experimengint with this:

That wasn't great, and even has sort of a Pokémon appearance to it.  They gave up on that, and went with the example above.

The red flag with the bordered hammer & sickle lasted only until April 18, 1924, when a flag closely approximating the final design was adopted:

The near final version was adopted on December 5, 1936, with the last version coming in as late as 1955.  The 36 variant and the 55 variant weren't really improvements on the 24 variant, in my view.

Interestingly, the flag of Nazi Germany was also mostly red.

The U.S. Supreme Court upheld the right of states to ban aliens from owning or leasing agricultural land.

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.

Saturday, October 27, 1923. Her aus.

The German government demanded that the Saxon government remove its two communist cabinet members.

In a Berlin bank on his day.

Tuesday, October 26, 1943. Extending Conscription.

President Roosevelt extended registration for the draft beyond the 48 states to the territories of Alaska, Hawaii and Puerto Rico.

Residents of those territories had until the end of the year to register.

Today in World War II History—October 26, 1943: US Thirteenth Air Force and US Navy bombers and fighters attack Japanese-occupied Bougainville in the Solomon Islands in advance of the Allied invasion.

From Sarah Sundin's blog.

October 26, 1943 – PoWs Arrive in RMNP

They'd been arriving at various locations in the US this week as well.

The Polish Home Political Representation created Social Anticommunist Committee to combat activities of the Polish Workers (Communist) Party.

Today was the first flight of the Dornier Do 335 of which a mere 37 were built.

The U-420 was sunk by a Canadian B-24.  She was one of 15 ships lost on this day.

The 1943 Hurricane Season came to an end when the last storm dissipated.

Mittwoch, October 24, 1923. Das Ende des Hamburger Aufstandes

Heinrich Vogeler: Hamburger Werftarbeiter

The Hamburg uprising came to an end in arrests of hundreds of Communists. Many more fled the city.  The end was precipitated by news that Hamburg, due to a courier error, was in a working class revolution all by itself.  The Communist Party, realizing what had occured, ordered its red troops to retreat.

Germany was in dire straights at the time, and a nationwide Communist revolution was not an impossibility, although the Moscow ordered uprising would likely have resulted in a civil war which the Red Army could not have joined due to Poland having defeated it earlier in the decade.

The collapse of the Communist uprising may have spared Germany from a thuggish totalitarian regime for almost a decade, as there's no reason to believe that the German Communists would have been any less bloody in victory than the Russian, Chinese, etc., ones were.

Tuesday, October 23, 1923. Turmoil.

The Hamburg Uprising, a Communist uprising in that city, began with seventeen police stations in the city and seven outside of it being attacked before dawn in an effort to arm the participants.

Governor Jack C. Walton of Oklahoma suspended from office after that state's House of Representatives voted to impeach him.

Sunday, October 21, 1923. Trouble in Germany.

The Reichswehr moved heavy weapons into Saxony.

The Rhenish Republic was proclaimed in a part of occupied Rhineland. Aachen was its capital.

German Communist leader Heinrich Brandler called for a general strike as a prelude to revolution, but the call received little support.  A courier for Hamburg sent earlier with a call for the uprising was not in attendance, so he carried the message forward to that city.

Wednesday, October 17, 1923. Germany acts against the Proletarian Hundreds.

The Reichswehr was ordered into Saxony and Thuringia and the Saxon police force federalized.  It's commander,  General Alfred Müller demanded that Saxon Prime Minister Eric Zeigner order his economics minister Paul Böttcher to disavow a statement that called for the arming of the communist paramilitary organization Proletarian Hundreds.

Mrs. Coolidge enjoyed some cookies with the Girl Scouts.

Tuesday, October 16, 1923. Disney formed.

Early Disney character, Oswald the Lucky Rabbit.

Walt and Roy Disney signed a contract with Alice Comedies to produce cartoons and formed Disney Brothers Studios to do the work.

The patent for a dropped ceiling was issued to Eric E. Hall.

Bavaria banned Communist organizations.