Newly appointed Assistant Secretary of the Navy, Theodore Roosevelt, Jr. on this day in 1921.
Theodore Roosevelt Jr., whom friend called "Ted", was appointed Assistant Secretary of the Navy, the same position that his father had held in the first McKinley administration and his cousin Franklin had held in the Wilson administration.
Like his father, his personal connection with the military was in the army. His father was an officer in the New York National Guard prior to his appointment, and of course went on to become a cavalry colonel in the Spanish American War, winning a Congressional Medal of Honor, conferred very much posthumously, for his leadership of the assault on Kettle Hill. Ted Roosevelt had served as an officer during the Great War and would go on to be a Brigadier General during World War Two, also winning a Congressional Medal of Honor, in his case for his role in Operation Overlord on June 6, 1944.
Ted Roosevelt was a rising figure in politics at the time, but after the election of his cousin Franklin, which he opposed, he retired from that pursuit seemingly with all of the remaining descendants of his famous father.
Helen of Greece and Denmark.
Princess Helen of Greece and Denmark, daughter of the deposed King of Greece, married the louse Crown Prince Carol II of Romania. He'd ultimately abandon her some years later, renounce his thrown (he was then the king) and take up permanently with a mistress.
She went on to be the Queen Mother of Romania as her son Michael grew up. Michael would go on to be the last King of Romania, occupying that position during World War Two and, fairly amazingly, for a time after it even as the country had Communism foisted upon it. Helen and her son would be tragic figures, but Helen is notable for her efforts to save Romanian Jews during the Holocaust, for which she was later counted as one of the Righteous Among the Nations.
This man was photographed on this day 100 years ago with puppies. Why? Who knows. The puppy on the left certainly is cute however.
This assembly was also photographed on this day. Who are they? Also unknown. I'd guess it a group of school students and some teachers, however. The day apparently was cold and wet. Most of the boys must have walked out wearing newsboy caps, as they're holding them in their hands. The windows of the building are open, surprsingly.
Italy launched its Spring Offensive against Greece in Albania. The offensive was was commanded personally by Mussolini and would run for a week, ending in complete failure although it severely depleted Greek resources.
Muhammed Ali was defeated on this day by Joe Frazier in what was billed The Fight Of The Century.
Boxing was still a really big deal in 1971 when, on this day, Muhammed Ali was defeated in the ring by Joe Frazier. The heavily promoted match in Madison Square Garden was heavily anticipated and went the full fifteen rounds, giving Frazier the heavyweight title by unanimous decision.
The self styled Citizens Commission to Investigate the FBI broke into the FBI's offices in Media, Pennsylvania and stole over 1,000 documents. The break in was timed to coincide with the boxing match, as the participants knew that it was likely to distract anyone who would otherwise hear them break in. The stolen documents demonstrated that the FBI was engaged on spying on political entities, with most of them being left wing political entities. They immediately offered the information to the press but it wasn't until the Washington Post started publishing from the materials that other papers followed suit.
This FBI was unable to determine the identity of the thieves and a five year statute of limitations ran out, upon which they closed their investigation. In the 2010s five of the eight members of the Commission agreed to be interviewed and identified for a book. Two chose to remain identified only by pseudonyms. Only one of the members actually had taken flight following the theft. It was the only action the Commission took during its existence, although two members were part of the Camden 28, a left wing Catholic youth organization that broke into the draft board in Camden, New Jersey, several months later, a fairly pointless act when its realized that the United States was drawing down from the Vietnam War at the time. Those two were tried along with the rest of the 28 and found not guilty in 1973 in an act of jury nullification.
The event presents some interesting moral questions. The self styled commission had no authority other than its own, and it engaged in theft. However, it did expose the FBI to having been engaged in illegal activity.
The Senate passed the Lend Lease Act by a comfortable majority.
Studebaker 6x6, a truck that was heavily supplied to the Soviet Union via Lend Lease.
We dealt with this before, but when we did it was in the context of the House of Representatives passing the bill. Now it had passed Congress and would go on to be enacted into law on March 11, 1941.
The passage reflected a major shift in American official policy at this point in the war. At first the US had been officially neutral and now, while not a belligerent, the US was far from neutral. The Lend Lease Act put U.S. industry into the war as part of the Allied logistical chain, and one that was free from direct Axis attack at the production end.
Common recollection would hold, as we know, that the Allied cause was at its darkest hour at this point in the war, and there were those who viewed it that way. But in reality, at this point the British were holding their own as were the Greeks. The British, as of the day prior, were back on continental Europe with a military expedition force in Greece, suggesting that at least they viewed their chances as sufficiently good to commit forces there in spite of already being fully engaged in Africa.
The Luftwaffe hit the UK hard on this day, and baseball was hit by conscription. You can read more about that here:
French, Belgian and British troops occupied Düsseldorf, Duisburg, and Ruhrort due to German reparation payment failures. The U.S., meanwhile, announced that it would continue to occupy the Rhineland.
It's well know that the French "occupied the Ruhr" in 1923, but it rarely seems to be understood that this started as an overall Allied action in 1921. The initiation of the occupation was limited, but none the less the event didn't start in 1923, but 1921.
Lex Anteinternet: Food and diet: It's really easy to romanticize the past, including the kitchen table of the past, but a recent Freakanomics podcast I listened to sugg...
Whoopie Ti Yi Yo is a classic genuine Cowboy song. The song is an old one and like a lot of genuine Western music, it is a European folk ballad that was reset in a Western location. The original song was an Irish ballad about an old man being rocked in a rocking chair.
The first reference to this song of any kind was in Owen Wister's The Virginian. He'd no doubt heard it in Wyoming when he'd toured it prior to writing his novel which was published in 1893. The song was referenced by musicologist John Lomax in his 1910 work Cowboy Song and Other Frontier Ballads. It was first recorded in 1929.
In putting this up here, I had a variety of recordings I could have chosen, but I yielded to popular pressure and put up the Chris Ledoux variant as Ledoux remains very popular with Wyomingites. I'm the odd man out on that as I find Ledoux's voice rough and I'm generally not a fan.
There's been a lot of debate about where the GOP is headed, post Trump, and it appears we don't know, as the post Trump era has not arrived. By all signs, he remains firmly in control of his party.
The former President delivered a speech at CPAC. It was really long.
Trump predictably insisted that he won the election, but in terms of the popular vote he's lost every election. Indeed, it'd be well worth remembering for conservatives that he lost the popular vote in 2016. That year he entered his Administration with the House and the Senate in GOP hands. He lost the House in 2018, and while the House made gains in 2020, the Republicans didn't take it back and directly lost the Senate due to his actions.
Given all of this, the GOP appears set to ride the Trump horse into 2022. We'll see how that works, but this week's past Senate vote on the COVID 19 relief bill suggests that the Democratic era of cooperation with the GOP, more hoped for among moderate Democrats than real, may have more or less come to an end. This may give the GOP a chance to really assert its conservative and populist issues, but the overall problem right now is that a party with Trump at the head, even though he's firmly in control inside the GOP, appears weaker and weaker nationally. If the GOP doesn't pick up seats in 2022, it'll be due to Trump. Right now, conservative columnists that stuck with him, and the columnists are normally the sounding boards for political ideas, are almost completely without credit, leaving only those who opposed him, who are now outside the GOP folds, with any credit at all, but no audiences.
On audiences, for much of Trump's presidency I'd hear from his supports, "he speaks just like us". This struck me as a couple of times I started, and then abandoned threads on the bizarre nature of New York political speech. Trump is a New Yorker. So is Mario Cuomo. It's odd to think that they're from the same state as Franklin Roosevelt, Theodore Roosevelt and Nelson Rockefeller. It's almost as if at some point all New York politicians determined that they had to watch Goodfellas for speech cues.
Mario Cuomo is in big trouble right now, of course, as well.
Cuomo is in the class of New York politicians that the New York based press loved, but outside of New York, he was really hard to take. Of course, in the American fashion, the same forces that adored him have now turned on him like a pack of wolves.
I haven't followed his decline but it all has to do with "inappropriateness" and women. I don't know if he's guilty or not, and I'm not going to investigate the whole thing as its not worth my time to do so, but its interesting how he went from hero to goat overnight.
Prince Harry, wuss
Prince Harry. . . oh wait, King Edward VIII, and earlier royal wuss.
This will be inappropriate Prince Harry and his wife Meaghan are in the news once again as they were interviewed by Oprah.
I can't stand Oprah in the first place as she's too emblematic of false pop culture. It'd figure that she'd interview the royal whiners.
I figure that every family has its problems, and the British Royals are no different. Maybe their existentially set up for this due to a long history of narrowed genetic lines and a whacky institutional role that leaves them with less and less of a role very year. Their last period of real relevance was during World War Two and now its really hard to figure out what they do, and why they need to do it, if they do.
Be that as it may, Prince Harry had some merit until he married Meaghan, but now he just seems to be a full time drama queen. Enough already.
Getting the Amy Coney Barrett treatment?
Representative Haaland, who got yelled at by Sen. Barrasso.
Senator John Barrasso was front and center in the news concerning Deb Haaland's confirmation as Secretary of the Interior, and not in a good way. Various Native American spokesmen felt that she'd received the Amy Coney Barrett treatment, so to speak, in being singled out due to her ethnicity for abusive treatment. Sen. Barrasso interrupted her at one point and yelled "I'm talking about the law", which was apparently a reaction to what he thought were efforts to dodge questions he posed.
This wasn't as bad, however, as the statement by Louisiana Senator Joe Kennedy who called her a "neo socialist, left of Lenin, whack job".
Haaland is the first Native American nominated to the post. In reaction to her getting rough treatment Native Americans in Montana purchased a billboard advertisement supporting her. Senator Barrasso really can't stop her appointment and probably ought to back off a bit unless he's absolutely certain that the GOP is taking back Congress in 2022, which he can't be certain of.
Rebranding a Jeep Brand?
A Jeep before they were called that. The short lived Bantam 1/4 ton Army truck, the very first, and extremely tiny, Jeep.
The Cherokee nation wants Jeep to quit calling the Jeep Cherokee the "Cherokee" and it will probably do so.
There are and were a lot of automobiles named after Indian tribes and it was meant as an honorific, not an insult. Jeep probably has no choice but to do this, but the fact of the matter is that it's better to be remembered as a Jeep name than forgotten, which is what is generally the case for Indian tribes. I can't say having your name on the side of an automobile leads to a lot of deep thought about your culture, but it might lead to at least some.
The term "cancel culture" is big in the zeitgeist right now, and this does indeed seem to be a legitimate example of it. At least it isn't a "woke" example, like the flap over UW's "The world needs more Cowboys" campaign of a couple of years ago.
Banning the pumps.
Gas station obviously built in the day before they were a topic of controversy.
Petulma California banned the construction of new gasoline stations in an effort to address climate change.
I don't know that this does anything It sounds more like a city zoning matter ("we think gasoline stations are ugly") than a legitimate ecological effort. It's not like people won't be able to buy gas. Indeed, present owners of gas stations in Petulma are probably jumping for joy. . . as are lawyers who will soon be suing arguing that this is an unfair and unconstitutional restraint of trade.
But those why might be engaging in a little Schadenfreude right now would be well advised not to. I'm constantly hearing that electric vehicles "won't work here" as if cars are built for Wyoming, or that "Americans love to travel too much . . . " Auto makers are now making it plain that in 2030. . . and that's just nine years, the day of the petroleum fired vehicles is going to rapidly end. In that way, Petulma may be on to something, but not in the right fashion, as charging stations are going to be going up all over California, not gasoline stations.
Navy requiring sailors to re take their enlistment oaths
One of the things the recent insurrection brought to light is that there are a disturbing number of servicemen who have have brought radical politics into the military.
This has actually been known for sometime and was a pretty big story in military backchannels the past few years, but the general public seems to have been unaware of it. Now its getting some daylight and the services are openly taking steps to do something about it.
You can trace a lot of this back to at least 1973, and maybe a full history of it would have to go back to 1940. Traditionally, the US has had next to no standing military at all, with the Navy being the exception. Indeed, American culture prior to World War Two had a strong anti military sentiment to it. Career soldiers were usually looked down upon by civilians, including the officers. You'd not guess it now, but the Frontier Army was completely disdained by most Americans, including those who lived in the West, except times of real conflict. Cowboys, for example, had no use for soldiers at all.
This view carried on right up to 1940. Dwight Eisenhower's father in law, John Doud, tried to get him to leave the military at the time of his marriage to Mamie, as he regarded it, like most executives did, as a dead end career for the lazy.
I'm not endorsing that view, but I'm noting that it was a fact. Indeed, it was so much a fact that heroes of some big wars, prior to World War Two, had spent part of their careers out of uniform prior to them, even if they were professional soldiers. U.S. Grant and William Sherman provide such examples.
By and large, the nation relied upon the state militias, later the National Guard, for national defense if a bit war broke out. The two big World Wars of the 20th Century changed that view and we went into the Cold War with a large military made up of conscripts. When that became unpopular due to the Vietnam War, we went all volunteer once again.
There's a lot of merit to an all volunteer force. . . if its small, but we've never really achieved that. The current size of the U.S. Army is 475,000, which is actually a very large force. The Navy and the Air Force each have about 330,000 personnel. The Marines number 182,000. In contrast, for example, the Marine Corps in 1939 amounted to just about 20,000 personnel.
The population of the country is bigger, the pay for servicemen is better, and its much harder to get in than it used to be, of course. But the country has also gone into a period of real hero worship regarding servicemen which is unwarranted. People act as if every soldier is a saint and thank everyone whoever was in, including myself, "for your service".
It's not the case, of course, that the military is a reservoir of the far, far right, like the Reichsheer was or something. But there are a lot of things going on with the modern military that really need to be addressed. This is one of them. Social experimentation is another one. It may be that the military is recruiting some of the wrong people, for the wrong reasons, and creating the wrong situation.
Before this seems too extreme, one of the insurrectionist who is most commented on right now is the dopey women who was an Army veteran. There are so many things wrong with this that it requires another thread. Less noticed is that one of the figures was a female Army captain, serving out a period in which she's anticipated to be released, who has a psyops assignment. That's really bad.
Dopey Virginia
So Virginia jumped on the dope bus and also legalized marijuana.
Are we not suffering from enough mental checking out already?
This trend is obviously going to keep on keeping on right up until lawyers file suit for health problems associated with weed, which will be coming. At that time, some Schadenfreude will be pretty justified.
Boy Scouts file bankruptcy plan
It would pay the survivors of abuse $6,000 each. The Scouts are selling some of their art collection to fund this.
We've discussed the Scouts here recently, but there seems to be so much institutionally wrong with the organization right now that a person can really wonder what of it will survive. Much of what happened to it can't be discussed in the current political climate as no matter what a person says, it's going to be taken the wrong way. Given that, the organization keeps headed off in a direction which appears to be the wrong way itself.
More voting restrictions bills.
Voting, the way that Victor David Hanson imagines it happed up until November 2020.
Most recently in Georgia.
These are suddenly a hot topic in GOP circles even though there's no evidence of any voting fraud. To a certain extent there's at least a little bit of a resentful backchannel feeling that making it easy to vote mostly makes it easy for Democrats to vote, a feeling not wholly without merit in the past. Republicans, for whatever reason, tended to go to the polls. The more numerous Democrats did not.
The irony is, however, that as the Republican Party has aged, it now tends to be the party that doesn't show up in person. These efforts therefore probably hurt the Republicans more than they help them.
Trumps take the vaccine. . .
but say nothing about it, back in January.
There's a really anti vax sentiment in certain sections of the GOP. President Trump questioned the vaccines early on while also boosting dubious or even dangerous COVID 19 treatments. He himself received the best of care when he was infected and there's reason to believe that he would have died if he hadn't received them. He urged people to get vaccinated later, in complete fairness, but he didn't get them publicly. The reason probably has to do with not wanting to offend part of his base.
There are no medical or scientific based reasons not to be vaccinated. The lingering suspicion on the vaccines is wholly unwarranted. This goes back to an unfortunate, and lethal, movement that got started some years ago based on non science and boosted by people who didn't know what they were talking about. Now its hard to overcome.
The only legitimate reasons not to take the vaccine are medical and moral. There are those who would need to avoid the vaccines for medical reasons, although they'll be few in number. Some people hold religious objections to all vaccinations, and while I find that poorly grounded in sound theology, those who hold those views hold them and that must be respected. Often those same people eschew medial treatments of all kind.
Early on there were some Catholic Bishops who objected to the vaccines based on their stem cell lines, given the connection with abortion, but that was rapidly put down as an objection by the Vatican. Now there are some who are objecting to the Johnson & Johnson line for the same reason. That has yet to be fully resolved but that vaccine has just come out and, if a person has that objection, they can get one of the other ones.
People have generally been pretty good sports about this, but at some point people who are refusing on grounds lacking a solid base are going to be faced with the question of whether they pose an unfair risk to everyone else and society in general. That may sound heavy handed, but having lived through earlier really strong public vaccination efforts, no matter what a person might think about it now, there will likely be little sympathy as more and more people are vaccinated. I suspect that back when I was a kid plenty of children were vaccinated at school without any real involvement by their parents, and parents in the era would have disdained any parent who didn't have their kids line up for shots. People had lived through horrible diseases and they'd had enough. The Army didn't ask your permission to vaccinate back in the day either, as the ironically kinder and gentler Army of today does, which leads to this. . .
You may have freedom on conscience but businesses have the freedom of the marketplace
You used to see the "No shirt, no shoes, no service" signs up at restaurants all the time. Soon you are going to be asked for your proof of vaccination to get on an airplane, or a ride at Disneyland. Freedom of conscience on this issue will mean that you have the freedom to stay home and watch television.
I've frankly been amazed that more employers haven't required vaccinations. Universities require vaccinations for a host of diseases and they will on this one as well. Public schools are going to soon, almost certainly. Which brings me to this. . .
HPV? Oh, that's okay, as it involves sex.
It really says something about how messed up American society is right now that lots of people who won't get vaccinated for a disease that you pick up simply by being around somebody else who has it, and who even believe that the vaccination is part of some big plot, but they don't think twice about lining their teenage daughters up for the HPV vaccine.
HPV is a sexually transmitted disease, so yo have to be having sex to get it. If you subscribe to what was once conventional morality, prior to the days of Playboy, Friends and The Big Bang Theory, your chances of getting it would be next to nil. Now, of course, thanks to Hugh Hefner, Playboy and Cosmopolitan's charge against morality and ultimately biology, the disease is out there and lot of people basically forced into destructive sex are exposed to it.
I've only known one person who has refused to have a child vaccinated for it and I don't have an objection myself to anyone receiving it. I find it interesting, however, that people wills hove a kid as young as 9 to get a vaccination for disease that's perfectly possible to avoid based on the assumption that they can't control themselves from engaging in an act which at least takes some effort of the will, mentally, to engage in, as well as an exchange of bodily fluids in a sexual act, but they'll not get vaccinated for something you can get just walking down the street.
What's that Tat mean?
A Wyoming legislator has been explaining his tattoo. It turns out to be a "Three Percenter" tattoo.
He's a Libertarian and says that he had no idea of the meaning of the tattoo, which I wouldn't have known either. Apparently it has "1776" and the Roman numeral "III" and is supposed to mean that only 3% of Americans at the time of the Revolution supported it.
In actuality, 1/3d, that would be 33% of the Americans at the time supported the Revolution, 33% opposed it, and the remainder waited to see which way it went or had no strong opinion. Unusual for revolutions, prominent figures in commerce strongly supported it. Frankly, if only 3% had supported it, that would be nothing to celebrate as that would mean that it was a completely illegitimate revolution. Even the fact that only 33% supported it is more than a little problematic in that regard, frankly.
I'll be frank that I'm not a fan of tattoos at all. It's not like I'm going to argue for banning them or something, but the more people that get them, the less they mean. And I suspect that this phenomenon of people not knowing what a tattoo means is probably incredibly common. People put Chinese or Japanese characters on their body being told they mean one thing, and not gasping at all how the writing in those languages work. I suspect that more than one message of that type is a joke by somebody who does speak those languages. People tattoo phrases and symbols from religions as well not knowing that those symbols carry a lot more meaning, and indeed obligation, than a person might suppose.
Tattoos have now become a massively common part of our society. It's curious. As we have come to stand for less and less, people obviously reach out to try to grasp something. But people don't grasp onto those things that really have meaning, as then you have to comport your life accordingly.
The British Army landed troops in Greece in support of the Greek war against the Italians in what was termed Operation Lustre.
It might be understated to state that the operation would prove to be ill fated.
As we've looked at recently, the Axis powers really weren't doing that well in the war, contrary to the way it tends to be recalled, at this point in it. Nonetheless, the British didn't have the sort of resources available to take the Germans on, on an additional front. Due to their intervention in North Africa on behalf of the Italians they were already contending with the Germans there. The Wehrmacht was massing on the Bulgarian border with Greece in anticipating invading it, after offering to attempt to mediate the dispute between Greece and Italy, and there was no realistic way that the British would have ample forces to contend an oncoming German invasion of Greece.
Actor Jimmy Stewart joined the U.S. Army in which he would serve as a pilot.
Stewart would serve in combat in Europe and go on to a long Air Force Reserve career, retiring as a General.
A pile of British shipping was sunk by U-boots on this day, including the Terje Viken, a ship was at the time the largest whaling vessel in the world. The Germans lost the U70 and the U47. The U47 had been one of its most successful raiders. It's commander, Gunter Prien, remains a legend in the U-boot community even though he was a strict disciplinarian and his enlisted crews disliked him. At one point the modern West German Navy considered naming a ship after him, but ultimately declined to do so. A street, however, does bear his name in a Schoenberg Ploen.
This is the Community of Christ Church in Hulett, Wyoming. The Community of Christ was formerly known as the Reorganized Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints and, as the name would indicate, its an offshoot of the Mormon religion, having separated from the LDS quite early.
This church is immediately adjacent to the Catholic St. Matthew's church. It's not unusual to see churches built side by side, but in this instance the appearance is a bit unique as both churches were built from house like structures.
A note about this entry. Like most of the items posted on this blog that pertain to the 1890-1920 time frame, this information was gathered and posted here as part of a research project for a novel. As such, it's a post that invites comment. I.e., the comments are research in and of themselves and its more than a little possible that there's material here that might be in need of correction.
Company C, Wyoming National Guard (Powell Wyoming), 1916. Note that seemingly nearly everyone in this photograph is a rifleman. Also of note is that these Wyoming National Guardsmen, all of whom would have come from the Park County area (and therefore were probably of a fairly uniform background and ethnicity) are using bedrolls like Frontier infantrymen, rather than the M1910 haversack that was official issue at the time.
Infantry, we’re often told, is the most basic of
all Army roles. Every soldiers starts off, to some extent, as a rifleman. But save for those who
have been in the infantry, which granted is a fair number of people over time,
we may very well have an wholly inaccurate concept of how an infantry company,
the basic maneuver element, is made up, and what individual infantrymen
do today.
And if that's true, we certainly don't have very good idea of how that came to be.
And we’re also unlikely to appreciate how it’s
changed, and changed substantially, over time.
So, we’re going to go back to our period of focus
and come forward to take a look at that in a series of posts that are relevant to military history, as well as the specific focus of this blog.
Prior to the Great War, the Old Army.
U.S. Infantry in Texas early in the 20th Century. I'm not sure of the date, but its a 20th Century photograph dating after 1903 as all of the infantrymen are carrying M1903 rifles. It's prior to 1915, however, in that they're all wearing late 19th Century pattern campaign hats of the type that came into service in the 1880s and remained until 1911.
Much of this blog has focused on the Punitive Expedition/Border War which ran up to and continued on into World War One. As we've noted before, that event, the Punitive Expedition, was one in which the Army began to see the introduction of a lot of new weaponry. While that expanded the Army's capabilities, it also, at the same time, presented problems on how exactly to handle the new equipment and how its use should be organized.
Historians are fond of saying that the Punitive Expedition served the purpose of mobilizing and organizing an Army that was in now way ready to engage in a giant European war, and that is certainly true. But the fact of the matter remains the infantry that served along the Mexican border in 1916 (the troops who went into Mexico were largely cavalry) did not serve in an Army that was organizationally similar at all to the one that went to France in 1917.
American infantrymen became riflemen with the introduction of M1855 Rifle Musket. Prior to that, the normal long arm for a U.S. infantryman was a musket, that being a smoothbore, and accordingly short range, weapon. Rifles had been issued before but they were normally the weapon of specialists. Starting in 1841, however, the Army began to make use of rifle muskets which had large bores and shallow rifling, combining the best features of the rifle and the musket and addressing the shortcomings of both. The advantages were clear and the rifle musket rapidly supplanted the musket
Civil War era drawling showing a rifleman in a pose familiar to generations of combat riflemen up to the present day.
For a long time, prior to the Great War, infantry companies were comprised entirely or nearly entirely of riflemen, with their officers and NCO's often being issued sidearms rather than longarms, depending upon their position in the company. As with the period following 1917, companies were made up of platoons, and platoons were made up of squads, so that part of it is completely familiar. Much of the rest of it would strike a modern soldier, indeed any soldier after 1917 as odd, although it wouldn't a civilian, given as civilians have been schooled by movies to continue to think of infantry this way. Even in movies showing modern combat, most infantrymen are shown to be riflemen.
Squads at the time, that is prior to 1917, were formed by lining men in a company up and counting them out into groups of eight men per squad. Each squad would have a corporal in charge of it and consist of eight men, including the commanding corporal. The corporal, in terms of authority, and in reality, was equivalent to a sergeant in the Army post 1921. I.e., the corporal was equivalent to a modern sergeant in the Army. He was, we'd note, a true Non Commissioned Officer.
There were usually six squads per platoon. The squads were organized into two sections, with each section being commanded by a sergeant. The sergeant, in that instance, held a rank that would be equivalent to the modern Staff Sergeant, although his authority may be more comparable to that of a Sergeant First Class.
The platoon was commanded by a lieutenant. One of the company's two platoons was commanded by a 1st lieutenant, who was second in command of the company, and the other by a 2nd lieutenant. The company was commanded by a Captain, who was aided by the company Field Sergeant, who was like a First Sergeant in terms of duties and authority. The company staff consisted of the Field Sergeant, a Staff Sergeant and a private. The Staff Sergeant's rank is only semi comparable to that of the current Staff Sergeant, but he did outrank "buck" Sergeants.
Sergeants were, rather obviously, a really big deal.
Spanish American War volunteers carrying .45-70 trapdoor Springfield single shot rifles and wearing blue wool uniforms.
While this structure would more or less exist going far back into the 19th Century, the Army had undergone a reorganization following the Spanish American War which brought to an end some of the remnants of of the Frontier Army in some ways and which pointed to the future, while at the same time much of the Army in 1910 would have remained perfectly recognizable to an old soldier, on the verge of retirement, who had entered it thirty years earlier in 1880.* This was reflected by an overhaul of enlisted ranks in 1902 which brought in new classifications and which did away with old ones, and as part of that insignia which we can recognize today, for enlisted troops, over 100 years later. Gone were the huge inverted stripes of the Frontier era and, replacing them, were much smaller insignia whose stripes pointed skyward. The new insignia, reflecting the arrival of smokeless powder which had caused the Army to start to emphasize concealment in uniforms for the first time, were not only much smaller, but they blended in. . .somewhat, with the uniform itself.
New York National Guardsmen boarding trains for border service during the Punitive Expedition. They are still carrying their equipment in bed rolls rather than the M1910 Haversack.
The basic enlisted pattern of ranks that came into existence in 1902 continued on through 1921, when thing were much reorganized. But the basic structure of the Rifle Company itself was about to change dramatically, in part due to advancements in small arms which were impacting the nearly universal identify of the infantryman as a rifleman.
Colorado National Guardsman with M1895 machinegun in 1914, at Ludlow Colorado.
Automatic weapons were coming into service, but how to use and issue them wasn't clear at first. The U.S. Army first encountered them in the Spanish American War, which coincidentally overlapped with the Boer War which is where the British Army first encountered and used them. The US adopted its first machinegun in 1895. The 1st U.S. Volunteer Cavalry, which fought as dismounted cavalry in Cuba during the Spanish American War, used them in support of their assault of Kettle Hill, although theirs were privately purchased by unit supporters who had donated them to the unit. The Spanish American and and Boer Wars proved their utility however and various models came after that. They were, however, not assigned out at the squad level, but were retained in a separate company and assigned out by higher headquarters as needed. There was, in other words, no organic automatic weapon at the company level, and certainly not at the squad level.
African American infantryman in 1898, carrying the then new Krag M1986 rifle. This soldiers is wearing the blue service uniform which, at that time, was being phased out in favor of a khaki service uniform. Most of the Army had not received the new uniform at this time and, in combat in Cuba, most wore cotton duck stable clothing that was purchased for the war. Some soldiers did deploy, however, with blue wool uniforms. In the field, this soldier would have worn leggings, which he is not in this photograph.
There also weren't a lot of them. Running up to World War One the Army issued new tables of organization for National Guard units, anticipating large formations such as divisions. Even at that point, however, there were no automatic weapons at the company level at all. The infantry regiment table provided for a Machine Gun Company which had a grand total of four automatic rifles.
M1909 "Machine Rifle". It was a variant of the Hotchkiss machinegun of the period and was acquired by the Army in very low quantities.
Just four.
Most men in a Rifle Company were just that, riflemen. Automatic weapons were issued to special sections as noted. Rifle grenadiers didn't exist. Most of the infantry, therefore that served along the border with Mexico was leg infantry, carrying M1903 Springfield rifles, and of generally low rank.**
New York National Guardsmen in Texas during the Punitive Expedition.
That was about to change.
Well, some of it was about to change. Some of it, not so much.
So, in 1916, anyhow, where we we at. A company had about 100 men, commanded by a captain who had a very small staff. The entire company, for that matter, had an economy of staff. Most of the men were privates, almost all of which were riflemen, and most of who's direct authority figure, if you will, was a corporal. There were few sergeants in the company, and those who were there were pretty powerful men, in context. There were some men around with special skills as well, such as buglers, farriers, and cooks. Cooks were a specialty and the cook was an NCO himself, showing how important he was. Even infantry had a small number of horses for officers and potentially for messengers, which is why there were farriers. And automatic weapons had started to show up, but not as weapons assigned to the company itself, and not in large numbers.
A career soldier could expect himself, irrespective of the accuracy of the expectation, to spend his entire career in this sort of organization, and many men in fact had. Some men spent entire careers as privates. Sergeants were men who had really advanced in the Army, even if they retired with only three stripes. Corporals had achieved a measure of success. Most of the men lived in common with each other in barracks. Only NCO's might expect a measure of privacy. Only sergeants might hope to marry.
Machine gun troops of the Punitive Expedition equipped with M1904 Maxim machinegun and carrying M1911 sidearms.
That, of course, was the Regular Army. The National Guard was organized in the same fashion, but there was more variance in it. Guardsmen volunteered for their own reasons and had no hope of retirement, as it wasn't available to them. Some were well heeled, some were not, but they were largely armed and equipped in the same manner, although they received new material only after the Army had received a full measure of it first. Their uniforms and weapons could lag behind those of the Regular Army's. And some units who had sponsors could be surprisingly well equipped, some having automatic weapons that were privately purchased for the unit and which did not fit into any sort of regular TO&E.
And then came the Great War.
Footnotes:
*Thirty years was the Army retirement period at the time.
**We've dealt with the weapons of the period separately, but in the 1900 to 1916 time frame, the Army adopted a new rifle to replace a nearly new rifle, with the M1903 replacing the M1896 Krag-Jorgensen, which was only seven years old at the time. While M1896 rifles remained in service inventories up into World War Two, to some degree, is field replacement was amazingly rapid and by World War One there were no Regular Army or National Guard units carrying them.
In terms of handguns, of which the US used a lot, in 1916 the Army was acquiring a newly adopted automatic pistol, the M1911. Sizable quantities had been acquired but stocks of M1909 double action .45 revolvers remained in use. The M1909, for that matter, had been pushed into service due to the inadequacies of the M1892, which was chambered in .38. The M1892 had proven so inadequate in combat that old stocks of .45 M1873 revolvers were issued for field use until M1909s were adopted and fielded. Given this confusion, and rapid replacement of one revolver by another in 1916, there weren't enough M1911s around, and some soldiers went into Mexico with M1909s.
The Battle for the Atlantic had been going on since 1939, when Germany commenced submarine warfare against the Allies, and principally against the United Kingdom. This period of the war, however, eighty years ago, was the German U-boot "Happy Time". During this period the British were struggling against massive U-boot losses.
On this day, therefore, Winston Churchill issued his Battle of the Atlantic Directive. You can read it here:
The British were actually getting ahead of the problem by this period and the Happy Time was about to end.
The Luftwaffe was expanding its operations against Allied shipping on this day, conducting aerial mining against the Suez Canal, which you can read about here:
Ragtime Cowboy Joe has long been used by the University of Wyoming as its fight song. The use isn't exclusive, as the University of Arizona also does, and many of the commercially recorded variants of the song make reference to Arizona, not Wyoming.
The tune was, of course, a popular song before being adopted by the University, which likely happened soon after it was recorded in 1912.
I don't have a photo of a shot record to post, but I received my first COVID 19 vaccination shot on Monday. I'll be looking forward to the second. Over the years, I've been vaccinated for every virus common and rare known to man (I've been vaccinated for small pox three times, twice after the disease was extinct) and the reaction to the vaccine was mild in comparison to to some prior vaccinations I've had (yellow fever was the worst one). Since the pandemic started one lawyer I've worked with and against died of COVID 19, the father of another one I know, and a court reporter that had reported in court for me before. I'm glad, for more than one reason, to have received the shot.
I know very little about Gates personally, but I don't think he's a bad guy by any means. Quite the contrary. Gates is a quietly religious man who, along with his wife, is a dedicated Catholic.* He donates heavily to very serious causes. He's such a philanthropist and, along with Warren Buffet, on a certain edge of things, that he's feared by certain sections of the alt right, that have cooked up, amongst other things, the wild theory that he's responsible for the Coronavirus pandemic in an effort to inject people with microchips and control them through cell towers, which is frankly an absurdly stupid conspiracy theory.
So I'm not saying Gates is a bad guy.
Actually, he seems to be a pretty good guy, to the extent I know anything about him, which admittedly isn't all that much as I don't really find the lives of the famous to be all that interesting.
Rather, what I am saying is that a nation of over 300,000,000 whose economics are heavily scaled towards the wealthy in some ways deprives opportunities to entry farmers, and to those who would become real farmers, by treating land as a freely obtainable resource for people who don't actually use it for their own personal principal income.
Now, again, I can't blame Gates. He didn't create the system, he's simply living it. And to his credit, his farm land is farmed, not retired.
But a nation where most people can't enter the most basic and fundamental livelihood has something existentially wrong with it. That's happened to many nations in the past, and it's always been a fundamental flaw when it occurs.
*In the idiotic way it so often does in American journalism, this has caused one noted journal to comment that Gates departs from his Catholic faith as he "follows science", apparently unaware that Catholics are big believer in science and that most Christian denomination do not hold positions antithetical to science.
Journalist Helen Johns Kirtland and her husband, also a journalist, Lucian Swift Kirtland standing next to an airplane in Berlin, Germany. March 5, 1921. They apparently went flying.
Cabinet officers were sworn in.
Congressman Champ Clark, who had died two days earlier, had his funeral.
This Johnny Cash song is more debatable. The lyrics reference a "Glen Rock" or Glenrock". It is Glenrock Wyoming? Well, Glenrock Wyoming is the only Glenrock that I know of, but I probably don't know every place that might be called that.
As Cash did reference Cheyenne, Wyoming in the other city song we referenced yesterday, Wanted Man, we'll assume some knowledge of Wyoming's geography and include this one in the list.
