Monday, October 23, 1911. First airplane airborne reconnaissance flight, Ottomans retake Al Hami, Italians commit atrocities, Churchill becomes First Lord of the Admiralty, Eating food that wasn't fresh.

Cpt. Carlo Piazza flew aerial reconnaissance from an airplane for the first time during war time, piloting a Blériot XI over Libya.

Blériot XI.  103 were bult.

Ottoman forces comprised of Turkish and Arab troops retook Al-Hani.  The Italians sustained 300 combat deaths and reacted by killing 4,000 Arab civilians.

Winston Churchill and Reginald McKenna traded posts.  Churchill became the First Lord of the Admiralty, and McKenna Home Secretary.

Adventurous guests at Chicago’s Hotel Sherman dined on the first meal, or at least first formal restaurant meal, in which none of the food was fresh, but rather all of it had come out of cold storage.

Last edition:

Sunday, October 22, 1911. Chinese Assembly opens in the midst of revolution.

Labels: 1910s, 1911, China, Chinese 1911 Revolution, hunting, Qing Dynasty, Roosevelt, technology, Wyoming (Cheyenne)

Wednesday, October 23, 1901. A howling wilderness. Ordering atrocity.

Brigadier General Jacob H. Smith directed Major Littleton Waller of the U.S. Marines to lead a battalion of 300 men to take control of Samar Island, and, further, to turn Samar into "a howling wilderness" and "to kill everyone over ten" .

Smith in 1901.

"I wish you to kill and burn, and the more you kill and burn the better you will please me. I want all persons killed who are capable of bearing arms in actual hostilities against the United States."

Waller would be court martialed for the death of eleven Filipinos in 1902, at which time Smith's order was revealed.  He was subsequently court martialed as well, but ultimately allowed to retire.

Smith was an old soldier at this time, being 61 years of age.  He volunteered to serve again in 1918 but was rejected due to this event.  He died in 1918.  He was twice wounded during the Civil War.

Waller

Waller was acquitted in his court martial.  He retired in 1920 and a U.S. Navy vessel was named for him in the 1940s.

Member of Parliament Winston Churchill denounced the British involvement in the Boer War.

Yale conferred an honorary Doctor of Law degree upon Theodore Roosevelt, who had in fact studied law but who had not completed his studies.

Last edition:

Tuesday, October 22, 1901. Handcock and Morant arrested.

Labels: 1900s, 1901, Australian Army, Boer War, British Army, Crime, Second International Conference of American States

Wednesday, October 16, 1946. Nuremberg sentences carried out.

Joachim von Ribbentrop (Minister of Foreign Affairs), Wilhelm Keitel (Head of the German High Command), Ernst Kaltenbrunner (Head of the Reich Main Security Office), Alfred Rosenberg (Primary Nazi ideologist and racial theorist), Hans Frank (Governor-General of occupied Poland), Wilhelm Frick (Minister of the Interior),  Julius Streicher (Publisher of Der Stürmer), Fritz Sauckel (Plenipotentiary for Labor Deployment), Alfred Jodl (Chief of the Operations Staff of the Armed Forces High Command) and Arthur Seyss-Inquart (Reich Commissioner for the Netherlands) were executed.

Their last meal consisted of sausage and cold cuts, along with potato salad, black bread, and tea.

Sgt. John Woods was the executioner.

Executions started at 1:30 a.m.

Von Ribbentrop was executed first.  His final words were:

God protect Germany. God have mercy on my soul. My final wish is that Germany should recover her unity and that, for the sake of peace, there should be an understanding between East and West. I wish peace to the world.

Von Ribbentrop apparently told the Lutheran pastor who was present that he would see him again. The execution was not done well and it took fourteen minutes for him to die.

Wilhelm Keitel.

I call on God Almighty to have mercy on the German people. More than two million German soldiers went to their death for the fatherland before me. I follow now my sons—all for Germany.

Keitel was a cousin once-removed of Katherine "Kitty" Oppenheimer.

Ernst Kaltenbrunner "

I have loved my German people and my fatherland with a warm heart. I have done my duty by the laws of my people and I am sorry my people were led this time by men who were not soldiers and that crimes were committed of which I had no knowledge. Germany, good luck.

Alfred Rosenberg, nothing.

Hans Frank

I am thankful for the kind treatment during my captivity and I ask God to accept me with mercy.

Wilhelm Frick

Long live eternal Germany.

Julius Streicher

Adele, my dear wife.

Fritz Sauckel

I am dying innocent. The sentence is wrong. God protect Germany and make Germany great again. Long live Germany! God protect my family.

Alfred Jodl

My greetings to you, my Germany.

Arthur Seyss-Inquart

I hope that this execution marks the final act of the tragedy of the Second World War and that the lesson learned from this war will be that peace and understanding should exist between peoples. I believe in Germany.

The News reported that some women were studying engineering in Colorado.

It was also speculating on the political fortunes of Wyoming's Governor, Lester Hunt.

Hunting season was the subject of a cartoon.

The RMS Queen Elizabeth returned to commercial use.

Gordie Howe made his NHL debut.

Actress Suzanne Somers was born.

Last edition:

Tuesday, October 15, 1946. Death of Hermann Göring

Labels: 1940s, 1946, 1946 World Series, baseball, Cartoons, Daily Living, Food, German Luftwaffe, Harry S. Truman, Hermann Göring, J.R. Williams, Nazi Germany, Nuremberg Trials, Truman Administration, Uncle Mike, War Crimes, World War Two

Tuesday, October 15, 1946. Death of Hermann Göring

On the day of his scheduled execution, Hermann Göring committed suicide with a poison capsule.  He asked for Lutheran last rights beforehand and was refused.  Guards noticed his convulsions and summoned medical help., but he died too quickly.

Göring had asked to be shot, rather than hung, as he thought that more honorable.  That request was refused.  How he obtained the poison has been debated.  A suicide note he left claimed that he had kept it concealed the entire time.  Former U.S. Army guard Herbert Lee Stivers claimed in 2005 that he had brought the pill to him at the request of a woman named Mona, and that he did not know that it was poison.  The suicide lead to suspicion regarding several people, including an Army officer who died eight years following this event, so that his name was never cleared.

A major figure in Nazi Germany, the World War One aviator was responsible for at least two major German defeats, one being the failure to be able to destroy the trapped British Army at Dunkirk, a failure that Hitler sharead as he had halted the German advance.  The second defeat was his promise to be able to defeat the British by airpower which lead to the Battle of Britain. While the popular myth has the British on their back feet the entire time, in reality the Royal Air Force was more than capable of defeating the Luftwaffe over Britain.  Here too, while it was a real defeat, the Germans were in fact completely incapable of invading Britain.  

The Luftwaffe would, of course, prove to be incapable of defending German airspace as well.

Göring's suicide postponed the other executions planned for this day.

The May company was selling a brand of kids jeans I've never heard of.

Surplus was available at Cooks.

The Out Our Way cartoon featured something that must have been familiar to the readers, but I've never heard of, renting a garage.

The St. Louis Cardinals took the World Series.

October 15, 1946: Enos Slaughter's Mad Dash

Last edition:

Monday, October 14, 1946. Price controls on meat removed.

Labels: 1940s, 1946, Dutch East Indies, Food, Harry S. Truman, Indonesia, Indonesian National Revolution, inflation, Netherlands

Friday, October 4, 1946. Truman's announcement on the eve of Yom Kippur.

President Truman announced that he had telegraphed Prime Minister Clement Attlee to endorse the immigration of 100,000 Jewish refugees to Palestine.  Attlee was furious at the public disclosure which made an already difficult situation worse.

Speculation was that Truman may have done this to court Jewish votes in the election.

The Gnostic Nag Hammadi library, discovered in 1945, was accepted into the Coptic Museum in Cairo.

Robert A. Taft publicly criticized the results of the Nuremberg trials as unjust, citing the impossibility of the victor trying the vanquished fairly.

Last edition:

Thursday, October 3, 1946. Game two of the 1946 National League Playoffs.

Labels: 1940s, 1946, 1946 World Series, Aircraft, baseball, Disaster, Labrador, Sports, Transportation

Tuesday, October 1, 1946. Crime, Punishment, and World War Two.

Sentences were handed down from the major Nuremberg Trial with verdicts having been rendered the previous day.  Twelve convicted were sentenced to death, those being Hermann Göring, Martin Bormann, who was sentenced in absentia and in fact already dead, Joachim von Ribbentrop, Wilhelm Keitel, Ernst Kaltenbrunner,  Alfred Rosenberg, Hans Frank,Wilhelm Frick, Julius Streicher, Fritz Sauckel, Alfred Jodl, Arthur Seyss-Inquart

All told, 19 people were convicted. Three were found innocent, those being Hjalmar Schacht, Franz von Papen, and Hans Fritzsche.

Mensa was founded.

Kim II Sung University was founded, named in accordance with the despicable strong man trait of naming things after yourself while you are alive. . . kind of like somebody else we could name.

Violence in downtown Denver.

Last edition:

Saturday, September 28, 1946. "I believe the outlawing of the atom bomb is the outlawing of wars... I think the time has come when humanity is intelligent enough to do away with war."

Labels: 1940s, 1946, Bluegrass, Country & Western Music, Dwight Eisenhower, Greece, Monarchy, Nuclear power, Radio, War, Weapons

Saturday, August 31, 1946. "Hiroshima".

 Hiroshima by John Hershey, latter a bestselling book, appeared in The New Yorker.

Hersey is a legendary writer and was one of the first practitioners of "New Journalism" in which writing techniques from novels were adopted for non fiction.  Hiroshima is regarded by some as the finest work of journalism of the 20th Century.

Coming out so soon after the dropping of the bomb, the work demonstrates the extent to which people were already questioning the immorality of its use.

Hershey was a friend of Ralph Ellison.  There were some truly excellent writers of this era.  His works include A Bell for Adano, The War Lover, and Blues.  He died in 1993 at age 78.  Hiroshima is his best known work.

The monstrosity of the use of the atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki can hardly be overstated.

The last French troops left Lebanon.

Last edition:

Friday, August 30, 1946. Aircraft to Nationalist China.

Labels: 1940s, 1946, 1946 at the movies, China, Chinese Civil War, Germany, Nationalist Chinese Army, Post WWII Occupation of Germany, Republic of China, United States

Friday, August 16, 1946. Direct Action Day and the founding of the KDP (ارتی دیموکراتی کوردستان).

Direct Action Day in British India, intended to be a peaceful demonstration in favor of carving out Muslim Pakistan, turned violent resulting in more than 10,000 people being killed around Calcutta.

The Muslim minority of India was adamantly opposed to being if a federation with India's Hindu majority, something that's understandable if we consider that Indian itself is a country, but not a nation.  The hope of the Muslims, at the time, was to carve out what is today Pakistan and Bangladesh into one country.

Bangladesh became independent of Pakistan, from which it differs ethnically, in 1971.  I can recall it very dimly occuring.

On the same day, in the same country, the All Hyderabad Trade Union Congress (AHTUC) was formed.  It was a trade union center in the Hyderabad State which was affiliated to the All India Trade Union Congress and which was aligned with the Communist Party of India.

It's easy for us to forget how strong Communism was in unions, even in some in the United States. The real kind, I might add, not the Mike Johnson, "oh my, . . .they'd rather have national health care than die in the gutter so I'm pissing my pants" sort of stuff the GOP comes up with.

Anyhow, it was very strong in Australian trade unions, where it was opposed by the Catholic Church, which is one of the reasons the Australian political left still hates the Church to this day.

The Kurdistan Democratic Party was founded in Iraq by Mustafa Barzani.

Today the party is the ruling party in Iraqi Kurdistan and the senior partner in the Kurdistan Regional Government. The ideology of the party is based on conservatism, secularism, and Kurdish nationalism.

Kurdistan really should be an independent country.

The deposed former and last emperor of China, Puyi, later emperor of Manchukuo, testifies at the Tokyo Military Tribunal

Truman went on vacation:

"A Journey into Nowhere"

Last edition:

Thursday, August 15, 1946. The Truman Doctrine.

Labels: 1940s, 1946, 1946 at the movies, Dardanelles, Harry S. Truman, Truman Doctrine, Turkey, USSR

Monday, July 29, 1946. Anping Incident.

Chinese Communists and U.S. Marines engaged in hostilities in Anping, China.  Four Marines and 15 Chinese Communists were killed.

Tensions between the American military mission to China, which had very unclear directives, and the Communist Chinese were increasing.

First group picture of the International Justices of the International Military Tribunal for the Far East since Major General Myron Cramer took the place of Justice Higgins on the bench. Seated, left to right, Justice Patrick, Great Britain; Justice Cramer, United States; Chief Justice Webb, Australia; Justice Mei, China; Justice Zaryanov, Russia. Standing, left to right: Justice Pal, India; Justice Roling, Netherlands; Justice McDougall, Canada; Justice Bernard, France; Justice Northcroft, New Zealand; Justice Jaranilla, Philippine Islands.

Last edition:

Sunday, July 28, 1946. Wells exposes the assault of Sgt. Isaac Woodard, War Crimes in the Philippines, the passing of St. Alphonsa of the Immaculate Conception.

Labels: 1940s, 1946, actors and actresses, Apostolic Christianity, Catholic, Christianity, India, Philippines, Racism, Radio, religion, Syro-Malabar Catholic Church, War Crimes

Sunday, July 28, 1946. Wells exposes the assault of Sgt. Isaac Woodard, War Crimes in the Philippines, the passing of St. Alphonsa of the Immaculate Conception.

Howard C. Petersen, Assistant Secretary of War, announced that 131,028 American and Filipino citizens, mostly civilians, had died "as a result of war crimes" from December 7, 1941 until the end of World War II.  All but 595 of that figure were Filipino.

St. Alphonsa of the Immaculate Conception, an Indian native, died at age 35.  She is the first woman of Indian origin to be canonized as a saint by the Catholic Church, and the first canonized saint of the Syro-Malabar Catholic Church.

Orson Welles read the affidavit of Sergeant Isaac Woodard on his radio show.  Woodard had been blinded in a race based assault.

Last edition:

Saturday, July 27, 1946. No to a united India.

Labels: 1940s, 1946, Bangladesh, British Empire, Ethnicities, Georgia, India, Pakistan, Racism

Friday, July 26, 1946. OPA back in business.

A restored Office of Price Administration issued orders restoring price controls but with less restrictions on raising prices.

Trans Pacific Airlines, laster Aloha Airlines, came into existence.  It continued operations until 2008.

Robert H. Jackson delivered his closing argument at the Nuremberg Trials.

Last edition:

Thursday, July 25, 1946. Crossroads Baker.

Labels: 1940s, 1946, Bikini Atoll, Comedians, entertainment, Ethnicities, Georgia, Operation Crossroads, Racism, U.S. Navy, Weapons

Thursday, July 4, 1946. Philippine Independence.

The US recognized the independence of the Republic of the Philippines.

An armed uprising sparked by rent issues occured in Kadavendi, India.

The Kielce pogrom took place in Poland in which 40 Jews were murdered by a mob in Kielce, Poland.  The police did not intervene.  The event, in which soldiers and police participated, was sparked by a false accusation of kidnapping.

Female Stutthof Concentration Camp Guards Elisabeth Becker, Wanda Klaff was hung for war crimes.

Stutthhof is unusual in that the majority of the inmates there were Catholic Poles, many of whom were ethnic Germans.

Last edition:

Wednesday, July 3, 1946. Breaking the meat famine in Denver.

Labels: 1940s, 1946, Canadian Army, Food, Immigration, Office of Price Administration, Post War United States (and Canada), Rationing

Saturday, June 1, 1946. Cochin China.

French High Commissioner Georges Thierry d'Argenlieud recognized a French controlled "Autonomous Republic of Cochin-China" in French Indochina in violation of the Ho-Sainteny agreement.  The proto state, which had been a pre World War Two administrative unit, would later become South Vietnam and would lead directly to the French Indochinese War.

Ho Chi Minh was in France negotiating under presumptions raised by the Ho-Sainteny agreement at the time.

Georges Thierry d'Argenlieu is an unusual figure as he was a French diplomat, Admiral, and a Catholic Priest.  From a family of naval officers, he started off in life in that path before becoming a Priest in the 1920s.  During World War Two he was recalled to naval service and would serve the Free French.  He was an ardent Gaullist and it was that, rather than an opposition to Communism, that pushed him towards the creation of Cochin China.

Seriously devout, upon retiring from naval service in 1947, he entered a monastery, where he died in 1964 at age 75.

The Senate granted Truman emergency powers to end strikes. The House had done so the prior week.

Second World War Romanian dictator Ion Antonescu was executed.

Romania tends not to get that much attention in the West and therefore Antonescu, who remains a large and controversial figure in Romania, does not.  His reign was abhorrent and attendant with all the crimes that the Nazis afflicted during World War Two.  He none the less retains a small following.

Last edition:

Thursday, May 30, 1946. First post war Indianapolis 500.

Labels: 1940s, 1946, Aircraft, Automobile racing, Automobiles, China, Conscription, Disaster, Harry S. Truman, Personalities, Post War United States (and Canada), Railroads, Strike Wave of 1945-1946, Transportation

Friday, May 3, 1946. War Crime Trials in Tokyo and the Battle of Alcatraz

1946         Military Tribunal in Tokyo begins war crimes trials.  One of the principal Japanese defendants was defended by Cheyenne lawyer George Guy.

A prison riot was ongoing at Alcatraz.

Our Our Way took a look at the changing workplace.

Last edition:

Monday, April 29, 1946. Indictment of Japanese leaders.

Labels: 1940s, 1946, Carlsbad Caverns National Park, Japan, Personalities, War Crimes, World War Two

Monday, April 29, 1946. Indictment of Japanese leaders.

Former Japanese Prime Ministers Hideki Tojo, Hiranuma Kiichirō, Kōki Hirota, Kuniaki Koiso, and 24 co-defendants were indicted in Tokyo for war crimes.

James White, the discoverer of Carlsbad Canyon, died at age 63.

Last edition:

Wednesday, April 24 1946. Firsts.

Labels: 1940s, 1946, Aircraft, Blog Mirror, France, Insurance, Socialism, Soviet Air Forces, U.S. Navy