June 4, 1974: Ten-Cent Beer Night In Cleveland
Last prior edition:
Wednesday, June 5, 2024
Tuesday, June 4, 2024
Sunday, June 4, 1944. The Fall of Rome, Overlord postponed, the capture of the U-505.
Rome fell to the Allies, with the first elements of the 5th Army from the 88th Infantry Division entering the city in the evening. It was the first of the (former) Axis capitals to fall to the Allies.
Injured U.S. solder outside of Rome, June 4, 1944. The soldier is wearing paratrooper boots, although he's not a paratrooper, but rather a tanker.
The historic city center remained intact, as the Germans had ignored Hitler's order to blow up the bridges over the Tiber.
While there wasn't much fighting on the way into Rome, there was some. Here, US troops rush past a burning Tiger tank.
RAF Group Captain James Stagg, a meteorologist, recommended postponing Operation Overlord by one day due to predicted bad weather, which Gen. Eisenhower agreed to, resulting in ships which had left port being recalled.
The weather itself was actually very nice on the morning of June 4 and Stagg's prediction, which also predicted a break in the weather on June 6, was based on barometric pressure readings from a single ship stationed 600 miles west of Ireland. His prediction would prove to be absolutely correct.
Weather conditions for the massive operation had to be optimal, something difficult for the English Channel, given the huge number of vessels the operation involved as well as the planned nighttime drops. Postponing the mission was risky, given the massive assembly of men in ships, some of which had departed, and Field Marshall Montgomery urged the mission to go ahead in spite of the weather report. But Eisenhower deemed proceeding in bad weather a higher risk, which given the deterioration throughout the day, was correct.
The bad weather ultimately caused Rommel to feel secure in returning to Germany for his wife's birthday. Remaining German commanders in Brittany went to a training exercise on June 5, the feeling generally being that weather conditions had become so horrible that an invasion was impossible.
In Medieval times, victory in battle that was suddenly favored by the weather was attributed to God. In modern times, such things are often scoffed at, but it's worth noting that this news and the decision came on a Sunday, putting the invasion fleet to rest, sort of, on that day, and preventing going forwarded into a weather disaster which would have kept the airborne from departing for targets on this night.
US troops that were not part of the invasion force continued training in the United Kingdom.
Men of the 2nd Infantry Division, training at St. Donat's Castle in Wales.
The U-505 was captured by the U.S. Navy, further aiding the Allied codebreaking effort which was already well advanced, as the boat was captured with its Enigma machine and code material entact.
Last prior edition:
Saturday, June 3, 1944. Rome declared an open city.
Labels: 1940s, 1944, German SS, German Wehrmacht, Horse Racing, Medicine, Operation Overlord, Personalities, Rome, World War Two
Monday, June 3, 2024
Monday, June 3, 1974. Leaving Laos.
The last U.S. military advisors in Laos, only three in number, left the country.
.svg.png)
Last prior edition:
Sunday, June 2, 1974. The Forest Brothers.
Saturday, June 3, 1944. Rome declared an open city.
German commander Albert Kesselring declared Rome to be an open city and withdraw from the city under a truce with Italian partisans.
Under international law and the rules of war, an open city is one that will not be defended, and therefore is open for the taking. The declaration spared Rome major destruction.
US troops took Albano and Frascati on Rome's outskirts. Canadian troops too Anagni.
The Provisional Government of the French Republic was officially created.
The Japanese attempt to reinforce Biak by sea but fail. Fighting on the island was intense.
Troops of the 4th Infantry Division on their way to load for D-Day, June 3, 1944.
Gretl Braun, Eva Braun's sister, married SS-Gruppenführer Hermann Fegelein, who was a really bad guy. He was not faithful to her, or in the very last moments of its existence, Hitler. He was executed in its closing days. She would remarry in 1954 and died in 1987 at age 72.
Bounding Home won the Belmont.
Asperger Syndrome was identified for the first time in a paper by Dr. Hans Asperger, an Austrian.
Last prior example:
Friday, June 2, 1944. Eisenhower moves, Operation Frantic commences, Romania and the Soviet Union talk.
Labels: Commandos, Diplomacy, Free French, Italy, Operation Frantic, Romania, Rome, U.S. Air Force, Ukraine, USSR, World War Two
Tuesday, June 3, 1924. Gila Wilderness
The Gila Wilderness, New Mexico, became the first designated wilderness area in the world thanks to the lobbying efforts of Aldo Leopold, then the United States Forest Service's supervisor of the Carson National Forest.
Fighting broke out in Albania.
Last prior edition:
Monday, June 2, 1924. All Native Americans granted citizenship.
Saturday, June 3, 1899. Death of Strauss.
Johann Baptist Strauss II, popular Austrian composer, died at age 73.
Pel & Ploma commenced publication.
I know nothing about it whatsoever, but the illustration is really cool.
You would have thought the Wild Bunch heist north of Rock River would have been front page news, but nope.
Renegade Indians in Jackson Hole. . . .
Last prior edition:
Friday, June 2, 1899. The Wild Bunch Robs the Overland Flyer at Wilcox and the Philippine Republic declares war on the United States.
Courthouses of the West: The Jury.
Courthouses of the West: The Jury.:
The Jury.
The entire time I've been a lawyer. . . well, no, well before that, I've been told that one of the "greatest" things about "the world's greatest judicial system" is that it uses juries.
Most legal systems do not, and those that do, have tended to pick it up from the English Common Law system, often through American influence. Save for Louisiana, we use the English system, and the English system has long used juries.
The system has evolved over time. Originally it was an effort to gather those from the area where an event occured, and was truly a jury of peers. The danger was that they actually knew you, and therefore may be inclined to judge your guilt or innocence based on that, which was part of why it was conceived of as a good system. Over time, while it was still supposed to be a jury of your peers, they were picked, through the voir dire process, for their fairness.
I'm not about to say that juries always get everything right. They don't. But lawyers are taught to respect the process and the juries, and for good reason. Frankly, more often than not, juries are right. Not always, but holding them in contempt is wrong.
The jury that found Donald Trump guilty of 34 felonies this past week in Manhattan was made up seven men and five women, and included two attorneys, a software engineer, an e-commerce sales professional, a security engineer, a teacher, a speech therapist, an investment banker and a retired wealth manager. That is a highly educated jury, and frankly that probably truly is a jury of Trump's peers. Leaving two lawyers on the jury is bizarre, as lawyers only rarely make a jury panel, although I've known one who did. I've been called for jury duty once and did not get picked, as I didn't expect to be. Having two lawyers on the panel is phenomenal.
It'd be interesting to know how that occured. Trump's defense team may have thought that the lawyers would regard the charges as strained in regard to election interference, which a lot of legal analysts did. They may have, instead, helped the jury wade through the piles of stuff they had and arrive at the conclusion which they did.
Anyway you look at it, they arrived at the opinion they arrived at, and that needs to be respected.
Which Wyoming's elected officials are not.
The jury has been slammed by all of our Congressional delegation, two of whom are lawyers, the Governor and the Secretary of State.
It's tragic.
Wyoming makes frequent recourse to the courts as a state, and now it's attacking the judicial system. There's utterly nothing whatsoever to question the nature of this jury on. It appears to have been well qualified for its role. There's no reason to suspect that New York's legal system is deficient in any way.
It's inexcusable to attack the jury.
Sunday, June 2, 2024
Boy Scouts no more.
The Boy Scouts of America is changing its name to Scouting America
Boy Scouts of America has announced it will rebrand as Scouting America, which, if media impressions are any measure, is a very big deal. Within days of the announcement, the collective online impressions of the news surpassed 14 million, according to the organization — a staggering figure that underscores the institution’s widespread influence.
Article in the Tribune.
Does it really suggest the "institution's widespread influence", or its tragic decline from what had been that influence?
I teed this up quite a while back and since that time the Southern Rockies Nature Blog, which is linked in here, has a really nice and personal blog entries on this item, entitled Bye Bye Boy Scouts. I can't really say goodbye to the Scouts that way, as I never was much of a Scout.
Usually I say I was never a Boy Scout, but that's not true. I was briefly. Probably around when I was in 6th Grade, or at whatever point it is when a person goes from Cub Scout to Boy Scout, when there were Boy Scouts. I didn't really last long in it, and it's hard to say exactly why. Part of it was, I think, as they group I was in, while they did do things, was slow to get around to doing them. The several merit badges I earned while I was in, I just picked out and did by myself. That "by myself" thing probably had a lot to do with it also, as by this time my lifelong introvert nature was firmly set in, and unless compelled by external forces or acclimated by long exposure to a group, you'll feel uncomfortable in a group. Usually I say that I'm "not much of a joiner", with this being, I think, part of it.
Another part may simply be that I'm highly rural and was then.
We don't tend to think of it this way, but Scouting was an urban movement.1 Aware of the inadequacy of young British men in the Boer War, Lord Baden-Powell, who after the war became the British Army's Chief of Cavalry, founded the Boy Scouts. The idea was twofold, those being 1) British boys had become a bunch of anemic unskilled wimps who needed some manning up from nature, and 2) British boys had become a bunch of anemic unskilled reprobates who needed some Muscular Christianity.
The original organization had no place for girls. Girls wanted to participate in things, and soon had their own organizations. The two didn't mix.
And frankly it didn't mix for good reason There are such things as manly, and womanly virtues. Much of what the original Boy Scouts sought to address was spot on in its observations, and Scouting did a really good job of addressing them. Often affiliated with churches, Scouting groups were successful in teaching boys a lot of valuable outdoor skills that often stuck with them for life, and they were benefitted in that goal by the absence of girls, who at a bare minimum are extremely distracting to boys and young men. Given their natures, young women are usually, although not always, much less distracted by young men.
There's been a lot written on the decline of the Boy Scouts, and there are various theories about it. One of the blogs linked in here, The Southern Rockies Nature Blog, has an article about it that's worth checking out. Whatever it was that brought it to its current state, it was still a pretty strong organization in the 1970s, when I had my brief association with it. At that time, even in the rural West, a lot of boys were part of it, and for that matter quite a few of their fathers had a strong association with it. Being in the Boy Scouts (which my father never was), was part of a multi generational thing.
Signs of decline were there even then. Of my good friends, only one was a Boy Scout, which his father had been. Another had a father who had a strong history of Scouting, but my friend wasn't in it. I was in a youth organization in my early teens, but it was the Civil Air Patrol, which with its martial aviation theme was a completely different type of organization. Rural kids, of whom I knew a lot, tended to be in the FFA, which had direct practical application to them.
I wish I could pinpoint what was going on, but I really can't. I've tried to do so here before, and probably haven't been successful. Looking at the topics addressed in this thread, however, I think part of it may have been that in the post World War Two era that went into the 1970s, the retained gaze upon the rural really faded. Even television reflected that as programming went from the rural focused on the 1960s, such as The Andy Griffith Show, The Beverley Hillbillies, and Green Acres, the last two of which anticipated the change, to urban centric dramas such as Newhart, The Mary Tyler Moore Show, WKRP In Cincinnati, etc. Americans had been moving into the cities for a long time, but suddenly they quit looking outside of them. Even a gritty urban environment depicted in something like The French Connection was celebrated in a way. It's notable that a figure like Clint Eastwood, who had come up in westerns, started appearing as Dirty Harry in urban California at the same time, and Dirty Harry, like Popeye Doyle, wasn't portrayed as any sort of Boy Scout.
The atmosphere of the late 60s also brought in destructive forces that we're still dealing with. The resolute male admired and celebrated from the era of The Strenuous Life on to the Ballad of the Green Berets suddenly, in the Strauss Howe fashion, yielded to the feminized and marginalized male, at least in the dominant WASP culture. It's never really recovered, and we can see some of the reactions to that playing out in society now.
In that atmosphere, Scouting attempted to adapt, but that's part of the problem. The campaign hat went out, and the red beret came in.2 Out with the old, and in with the new. The institution already had, however, its close association with Christianity and a sort of "goody two shoes" reputation. It probably should have just doubled down on that and its rural focus, but it tried to adapt instead.
Like other institutions that were heavily male and which had become somewhat soft, it also began to be plagued, apparenlty, with male on male sexual conduct.
People hate to discuss this part, so the realities of this should be noted. One of the byproducts of keeping boys and girls separate in Scouting is that it not only allowed boys to focus, but it kept boys and girls out of close proximity to each other. Scouting involves teenagers. No matter how focused or watched, when male and female teenagers are together, some of them will misbehave in ways that create life changing byproducts. A person only has to look at the expansion of the role of women in the military in order to appreciate this.3
We already know that the largest group of abusers of teenagers in this fashion are teachers. The decline in personal morality brought about by the Sexual Revolution helped unleash this, and I'd wager that a person could easily find a story of a teacher engaging in this conduct with a teenaged charge nearly every month. I ran across one just last week, in which the assailant was a female teacher and the victim something like a mere 13 years old. If this happens in an institution in which being discovered will result in the end of a career and jail time, and in which getting caught is highly likely, it's going to happen in situations in which this is much less discoverable.
Put bluntly, as the Muscular Christianity focus waned, the Sexual Revolution came on, and an overall feminization of society advanced, predatory homosexuality in the Boy Scouts became inevitable to some degree, and it had probably always been there at least to some extent. It's customary at this point to note that not all homosexuals are predatory, and that only a minority are, which is absolutely true, but it happened. That some people would let their behavior go in an all male setting shouldn't be any more surprising than those instances of male coaches preying on young teenage female athletes. It's reprehensible, but without additional external controls, it was going to occur.
This helped cause Scouting's popularity to drop off massively, and not surprisingly. Parents quit encouraging their children to be Scouts. Not really knowing what to do about it in the context of the culture, Scouting opened its doors to girls. This predictably hasn't helped, and it won't. Scouting will, I'd guess, be largely taken over by girls, but it won't be an organization that Boy Scouts prior to the 1970s would recognize.
There's something to all male bonds between conventionally oriented males that is unalterably different from ones with women. Probably our biology has a lot to do with it. The mateship that exists in military units, for example, which are all male, is completely different from an organization that has even one female in it.
The larger tragedy is that the very thing that Scouting was created to address in the first place, in large measure, is probably need as much now as it was then. The source of the problem is large the same, the urbanization of the country and the corrupting influence of urban life, combined with the absence of male roles, something that existed in the very early 20th Century and something that exists now, albeit for different reasons. Scouting, by having gone first soft, and then semi feminized, is no longer the organization that it was, that addressed that.
Footnotes:
1. Recently I read Doug Crowe's book A Growing Season, which is extremely off color, but extremely interesting. The back of the book, where the short review is, terms it a novel, but it isn't. The figures in it are all real, I either know of them or actually knew some of them.
It occured to me in posting this that part of the reason that the Boy Scouts lost its appeal to me here is that in a highly rural setting the first purpose of scouting, to introduce the outdoors, will be taken up by those who have a strong affinity towards it, which most young men do, all on their own. Going to Scouting events actually retards a person's ability to go outdoors and do what you want, with your young male associates, once somebody is of driving age, or at least it did then. As soon as somebody was 16, we were pretty much loose in the world.
As noted, not surprisingly, our companions in these forays were all male. I can't recall going on an outdoor adventure of any kind with a female of my own age until I was at the University of Wyoming. Nature segregates us in that fashion, even if society doesn't want us to. As A Growing Season demonstrates, that certainly gives rise to opportunities to engage in vice, although did not in any serious fashion, and the few of my fellows who really fell into it did so, notably, in town.
2. Only if troops adopted it, however.
3. Without putting too fine a point on it, two women I know of who were justifiably very proud of their military service, and neither of which might be regarded as libertine, had early discharges from the service for this very reason, followed by the birth of their oldest child not long after. The service with the biggest problem, seemingly, is the Navy, where close proxmity on ships has caused an alaraming pregnancy rate in some instances.
Related threads:
Youth organizations. Their Rise and (near) Fall, or is that a myth? And, did you join?
Blog Mirror: What Scouting Has Lost
Sunday, June 2, 1974. The Forest Brothers.
By Ivo Kruusamägi - Own work, CC BY-SA 4.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=37550773
Kalev Gustav Arro, age 58, and one of the last Estonian Forest Brothers, was killed in a gun battle with Soviet authorities.
Jigme Singye Wangchuck was crowned King of Bhutan. He had been king since 1972, but the coronation took place on this day under the direction of the kingdom's royal astrologers.
Algeria ended its partial embargo on the expert of oil to the Netherlands, breaking with OPEC in order to do so.
The African National Congress rejected proposals agreed upon by Methodist Bishop Abel Muzorewa, and later to become the only Prime Minister of Zimbabwe Rhodesia, and Ian Smith, the only Prime Minister of Rhodesia, for a settlement in Rhodesia.
Bishop Muzorewa died in 2010 at age 84, Smith died in 2007 at age 88.
Last prior edition:
Friday, May 31, 1974. The Golan Heights.
Labels: 1970s, 1974, China, Colorado, Golan Heights, Israel, Malaysia, People's Republic of China, Syria, United Kingdom, Vietnam War, Yom Kippur War
Friday, June 2, 1944. Eisenhower moves, Operation Frantic commences, Romania and the Soviet Union talk.
American medics from the First Special Services Force giving aid to a group of French soldiers... some of whom were killed and others wounded when three shells landed in Colleferro. Picture taken one minute after the shells landed. 2 June, 1944.
Hitler ordered Kesslering to abandon Rome, which Kesselring was already doing.
Some of the prisoners who were flushed out of the buildings on the eastern side of town. The Alied troops are from the First Special Services Force, which explains their baggy M1943 paratrooper field trousers. Artena and Colleferro area, Italy. 2 June, 1944.
3rd Division troops move into Valmontone, Italy, a strong point of German resistance for several days. 2 June, 1944.
Diplomats from the USSR and Romania met in secret in Stockholm to negotiate a Romanian surrender.
Sarah Sundin reports:
Today in World War II History—June 2, 1944 Countdown to D-day: Gen. Dwight Eisenhower moves his headquarters to a trailer at Southwick House in Hampshire.
The French Committee of National Liberation proclaimed itself to be the Provisional Government of France in a declaration from Algeria.
Operation Frantic, which saw U.S. aircraft fly from the United Kingdom and Italy on bombing missions, and then land in Ukraine, and then bomb again on their way back, commenced.
This would be done only seven times. By and large, the effort was not a success as the Soviets were hostile to it, U.S. personnel assigned to Soviet bases were wary of the Soviets (for good reason and because of their backgrounds as having come from refugee families), and the Soviets proved to be incapable of defending the airfields, which they had warned they might be.
B-17 landing in Ukraine, June 2, 1944.
An ammunition train derailed in Soham Cambridgeshire and exploded, killing two people.
Lost on this day in 1944 with all of its crew.
Last prior edition:
Thursday, June 1, 1944. Chanson d'automne.
Monday, June 2, 1924. All Native Americans granted citzenship.
The Indian Citizenship Act was signed into law making all Native Americans U.S. citizens. A little under half of the 300,000 Native Americans in the country became citizens for the first time due to the act.
It read:
Be it enacted by the Senate and House of Representatives of the United States of America in Congress assembled, That all non citizen Indians born within the territorial limits of the United States be, and they are hereby, declared to be citizens of the United States: Provided That the granting of such citizenship shall not in any manner impair or otherwise affect the right of any Indian to tribal or other property.
The Communist Party's Central Committee chose the real leaders of the country, the Politburo. The leaders chosen, in the wake of Lenin's death, were Bukharin, Stalin, Trotsky, Rykov, Kamenev, Tomsky and Zinoviev. They'd all be victims of Stalin's purge, save obviously for Stalin, with Tomsky being the only one who wasn't executed, but only because he killed himself rather than be arrested.
Frank Lloyd's The Sea Hawk made an early premier in New York City.
Last prior edition:
Sunday, June 1, 1924.
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)