On this day in 1945, the Japanese Emperor announced he had instructed his government to comply with the Potsdam Declaration and cease hostilities with, well, everyone by then.

This image about sums up the reaction in the US: dental hygienist Greta Zimmer Friedman getting a big wet one from George Mendonsa, a sailor on liberty from USS The Sullivans, about to be deployed to the Pacific, who had never met before and would never meet again. The reaction in other parts of the world was less exuberant than it was in Times Square, almost certainly because the Americans had done most of the fighting in the Pacific.

The reaction in Japan was far more muted; for some, deadly. Fully half of Tokyo and most other large Japanese cities were ashes; two had been almost destroyed. Only a handful of Japanese had ever heard the voice of their Emperor until then; few could understand his court language address, but radio announcers gave colloquial Japanese translations afterwards.

It was the implications of the message that were fatal to some Japanese.

The samurai, especially the fanatical shishi steeped in the latest interpretations of bushido, had forbidden the idea of surrender for centuries. That the Emperor, without saying the word, implied surrender seemed unthinkable. Yet, Japan had been told to cooperate with the coming occupation forces. Faced with such humiliation, many top-ranking officers killed themselves, or at least tried. Tojo Hideki tried, failed and was hanged in 1947. Many common Japanese simply stopped living; their numbers are unknown. But most did their Emperor’s bidding; some did it, then killed themselves.

Still, the war went on in some places.

The announcement didn’t stop the Soviets, who still fought the dwindling Japanese resistance in Manchuria and Korea, and it didn’t prevent a handful of kamikazes from trying their luck—unsuccessfully—for another week. Fighting in Burma and the Dutch East Indies continued until mid-September, communications being so poor. In China, the KMT government and their CCP opponents still sniped at each other in the back country, and would start up in earnest by the end of the year—for them, this war was about who would run China, not what the Japanese were doing.

Who calls today what and when varies.

The date of VJ (Victory over Japan) Day, or VP (Victory in the Pacific) Day, varies with nationality and location. The Jewel Broadcast, when NHK Radio played the recording of the Showa Emperor Hirohito’s message to the world, happened at 12 noon on 15 August 1945, and took a little less than five minutes to conclude. In Moscow, it was still 14 August. However, some Americans like to observe VJ Day on 2 September, when Japan signed the Instrument of Surrender in Tokyo Bay.

Why The Samurai Lost Japan: A Study in Miscalculation and Folly

Japan attacked the West, knowing this day would come if the US and Britain didn’t give up within a year and a half. What they did not appreciate was what the human cost would be to get there.

And Finally...

On 15 August:

1945: The Japanese surrender is announced in Japan and most Western capitals. As it is still 14 August in Moscow, their VJ Day is early, but far more muted than their Victory Day over Germany, 9 May.

1945: The Kyūjō Incident ends in the morning with an unclear number of casualties (somewhere between 30 and 300) all around Japan, but mostly in Tokyo, where Japanese soldiers tried to destroy the recording of the Emperor’s voice.

And today is CHAUVIN DAY, celebrating a French soldier who may or may not have existed, but we observe his day on Napoleon Bonaparte’s 1769 birthday, which is also observed today. Chauvin, according to the stories, was a soldier entirely, blindly devoted to his Emperor, and is the source of the term “chauvinist.”

Click on Archive for the Substack archive.

Go to www.linkedin.com/in/jdbcom for more on JDB Communications, LLC and its sole proprietor.

If you’ve read this far, share this with someone who might need it.

Make a Comment here.

The American Civil War, unlike most American conflicts, engendered a mythology that has survived almost all attacks. An element of that mythology depends on what some call “alternate history,” the “what if’s” of the history hobby and, regrettably, of some professionals who claim that “counterfactuals” are useful tools…somehow. Two well-known "what-ifs" of the war suggest that the conflict would have had a different result if Albert Sidney Johnston or Thomas Johnathan Jackson, or both, had survived their wounds, or had not been wounded at all.

While we know much about “Stonewall” Jackson’s (overstated) military prowess, we do not know AS Johnston’s. In fact, Johnston’s martial skills seem to emerge from what he might have done someday, but clearly failed to do in his first action as an army or theater commander.

Albert Sidney Johnston, Gentleman of the South

Born in Kentucky on 2 February 1803 into a middle-class physician’s family, Johnston met Jefferson Davis at Transylvania University and attended West Point two years ahead of Davis, graduating in 1826. Throughout his formative years, Johnston’s friends and acquaintances all remembered his gracious charm and gentility, traits he would maintain all his life. He served in three different armies: the US Army, the Texas Army, and the Confederate States Army. Johnston met and came to know many future luminaries of the 19th Century US Army and later of the CS Army. All of them recalled his gentlemanly bearing, courtesy, and consistently gentle manner. His first conflict was the Blackhawk War (1832), where Lieutenant Johnston served as chief of staff to Henry Atkinson, who remembered Johnston for:

[T]alents of the first order, a gallant soldier by profession and education, and a gentleman of high standing and integrity.

Admirable, but not quite the praise one might want in a fighter. After resigning from the US Army in 1834 to care for his dying first wife, Johnston joined the Texas cause in 1836, leaving two young children in the care of family members in Kentucky. While he would pine for them often, he would see them seldom, and it is unclear how well he provided for them on his irregular salary.

Albert Sidney Johnston, Champion of Texas

Johnston served as a Private in the Texas forces until, through the influence of his many admirers, the Texicans promoted him to Colonel and Adjutant General of that force; five months later he was the senior Brigadier General in the Texas Army. History has never clarified why these massive promotions happened, other than that he possessed administrative skills from his time in the US Army and he had many admirers—he has had few major biographical treatments; most are hagiographic. Because of this meteoric rise, Johnston fought a duel that, though both parties survived, would have fatal consequences for Johnston. In 1838, Mirabeau Lamar named Johnston his Secretary of War, and he took to the field in another brief conflict, the Cherokee War (1838-39), winning praise “for active exertions on the field” and “having behaved in such a manner as reflects great credit upon [him].” Again, not really an endorsement as a field commander. Once again, Johnston quit, this time as Secretary of War because the pay wasn’t that good.

Albert Sidney Johnston, Failed Businessman

While Johnston owned several properties in his time and worked one well enough to subsist, he didn’t seem to have much of a head for business. The China Grove property in Texas was heavily in debt when he bought it. It never earned enough to bail it out; his adult son had to save his father from financial embarrassment. Real estate he owned in Kentucky earned rents but not much more. Johnston spent much of his adult life hand-to-mouth, trying to earn a living and support five (three from his second wife) children. Not unusual for soldiers, but for a Southern Gentleman of his exalted standing, embarrassing.

Albert Sidney Johnston, United States Army

Most of Johnston’s jobs/appointments came from friends and admirers based on his reputation as a gent and administrator, not as a combat soldier and certainly not as a businessman. He again flocked to Texas when the war with Mexico started. When their commander was wounded, Johnston assumed command of a division of volunteers at Monterrey in 1846, winning praise for his coolness and courage in that desperate fight. Then, once again, he quit. He did a five-year bit as an Army paymaster in Texas as a Major from 1849 to 1854 before being appointed Colonel of a newly formed cavalry regiment in 1855, thanks to his friend and then Secretary of War Jefferson Davis. Leading the march to Utah in 1857, Johnston felt disappointed that he had no one to fight after his six-month march, only logistical hassles. Ordered to command the Department of the Pacific and arriving by ship in 1861, Johnston again had authority but no one to fight.

Albert Sidney Johnston, Confederate States Army

Johnston quit his job once again in May 1861, after most of the Confederacy had left the Union, and made his way back east via Texas. In Richmond, his good friend President Jefferson Davis appointed him a full General that September, second in seniority only to Adjutant General Samuel Cooper, and sent him to command everything Confederate west of the Alleghenies. After US Grant captured Forts Henry and Donelson, cutting Tennessee in half and forcing the evacuation of Nashville in February 1862, Johnston pulled together every man and gun he could lay his hands on and devised a plan to strike Grant at Pittsburg Landing. Beginning on 1 April, Johnston commanded a rare but slight manpower advantage during a miserable five-day approach march with an army that hadn’t even done a pass-in-review. Surprising Grant’s army in the early morning hours of 6 April, Johnston’s untrained host pressed their advantage for the first six hours, isolating two wings but leaving a hole that might have been as much as a mile wide that Johnston didn’t think to look for. Early that afternoon, while watching one of at least thirteen futile attacks on the Federal left flank, something hit the pit of Johnston’s left knee, clipping his popliteal artery. But because of that old dueling wound, he probably thought little of it until he became faint from the loss of blood shortly before he fell off his horse and bled to death.

Albert Sidney Johnston, Wild Card of the Lost Cause

Johnston was the highest ranking officer of either army to be killed in combat in the Civil War, and though the praise of the gallant and brave administrator was fulsome at the time and since, it’s hard to see why some commentators insist that, had he survived Shiloh he might have won the war for the Confederacy. His one major combat command before Shiloh was Monterrey—praiseworthy, but brief. Johnston did a great deal of quitting in his time and had a hard time supporting the family he had in between jobs/assignments. But in his way, Johnston is a perfect wild card in the deck of Lost Cause Mythology and its endless stream of counterfactuals and “but if” arguments that end up nowhere.

The Lost Cause depends on its wild cards because it has no aces in its deck.

The Devil’s Own Day: Shiloh and the American Civil War

Johnston’s best known battle—the only one where he commanded over five thousand men—was against a man who would best all the rest. Johnston’s legend is better known than his accomplishments.

And Finally...

On 8 August:

1918: The Battle of Amiens breaks the German Army's morale in France, beginning what historians call the Hundred Days’ campaign that ended WWI in Europe. Called the “Black Day of the German Army,” it was when the German high command realized their war was effectively over.

1922: Rudi Gernreich, designer of the topless monokini swimsuit and the mini-skirt, is born in Vienna, Austria. After fleeing Europe in 1938, Gernreich landed in California and became immersed in both dance and fashion design, developing fashions that encouraged movement.

And today is NATIONAL DOLLAR DAY, commemorating this day in 1786 when the US Congress adopted a decimal money system roughly modeled after Spain’s. There would be many more discussions and acts before the money started flowing, though, because the states were still issuing scrip, and the federal government had to buy them all up. Feels like we’re still paying for it.

Click on Archive for the Substack archive.

Go to www.linkedin.com/in/jdbcom for more on JDB Communications, LLC and its sole proprietor.

If you’ve read this far, share this with someone who might need it.

Make a Comment here.

There were several events and phenomena in Japan’s history that supplied ample fuel to a simmering fire that seemed to have been burning in the minds of much of the military and naval leadership of Japan before 1941. While much of Japan was quietly intent on merely surviving, the dominant social group in the archipelago was constantly trying to either stay in charge or justify having been in charge. This essay is the last that visits the most important elements of samurai rage against the West and their own subjects, and their constant fear of being overthrown or even contradicted. As shown by the various “insults” and momentous events in Japan over the centuries, the formation of movements and societies and the ensuing incidents happened all too easily. Too, Japan and the Japanese were apparently masters at holding a grudge.

As of December 1939, the number of men deployed to China had reached 850,000; Japan’s population hovered just above 70 million, meaning over 1% of Japanese were fighting in China—about a third of Japan’s military strength. Japanese casualties up to 1941 exceeded 185,000 killed and 325,000 wounded. The body count on the China side was orders of magnitude greater. The China Incident had become Japan’s largest-scale war in history to that point, with the largest number of victims. Even having sent so many soldiers and sacrificing so many victims, Japan could still not win that war.

Japan, by then, saw this war as more than a dispute between China and itself; it was a conflict resolvable only through global political tectonic shifts. The war in Europe and Germany’s rapid string of victories created the sense of such a shift. To take advantage of the excellent opportunity represented by that shift, and to use it to resolve the China Incident, the samurai focused on Southeast Asia, where Western colonies and easier access to the Southern Area lay.

While they agreed on their racial supremacy, neither the IJA nor the IJN could agree on anything else. Beginning in 1937, the Imperial General Headquarters-Government Liaison Conference met regularly to help integrate the decisions and needs of the military with the resources and policies of the rest of the government. But although each conference should have made joint plans between the IJA and the IJN, more agenda items concerned material allocations than strategy. This body met fifty-six times between 18 April and 4 December 1941, but the best they could come up with were “opinions” that were often wildly divergent between the IJA and the IJN. At the end of one conference in 1941, one senior IJA officer flatly declared:

…so long as the navy failed to declare unequivocally that there was no chance of victory [against the United States], the army saw no reason to concern itself with the problem [of confronting the US].

According to several junior officers, as the China war went on and Japan’s resource situation grew worse, these meetings increasingly took on an air of bizarre unreality. There was a pervasive feeling within the conference that the fate of Japan was in the hands of the gods. Even at these supposedly “joint” meetings, the two branches didn’t share the intelligence they had, or the plans they had already made. [1]

Many in Japan wanted to believe that the Americans would not fight. Most Japanese had convinced themselves that America was soft, decadent, peace loving and, most significantly, totally unprepared for war, materially and psychologically. But Yamamoto Isoroku famously warned that he could “run wild” for 6 months to a year, but if the war continued beyond that, it would go badly for Japan. Yamamoto, a constant naysayer of the Fleet Faction’s plans, was ignored and kept far away from Tokyo as Commander of the Combined Fleet, in fear for his life.

When the IJA settled on a course of action to eliminate Western support of the Chinese once and for all and gain the resources they needed to survive, IJA planners worked closely with the IJN to move its troops to faraway islands and support them. But this plan came at a cost: the IJA needed steel and oil that cut into the IJN’s allocations. The IJN ended up bargaining with the IJA over resources so that they would have the ground muscle to grab Southeast Asia and the East Indies.

That the Pacific War began in 1941 and not 1938 was only a matter of timing, not of policy, or force strength, or German aggression (though that had an influence), or even economics. It was simply a matter of both military branches realizing that after the last American sanctions, the nation would grind to a halt within a calendar year.

The Fifth Imperial National Conference, concluding on 2 July 1941, spelled out what the country was going to be doing—creating the Greater East Asia Co-Prosperity Sphere and world peace—for the foreseeable future, but it was unclear as to just how. Indeed, the very last paragraph of the Summary states that “Concrete plans covering this program will be drawn up separately.” While it spoke of “effecting a settlement of the China Incident,” mentions the “Soviet question,” and casually refers to the possibility of a war with Great Britain and America, it names no state as the primary matter of interest.

Given the geography that Japanese plans encompassed, there were no good choices for a trans-hemisphere offensive other than to delay it long enough to build up a much larger merchant fleet. That would have taken at least a decade, given Japan’s shipbuilding capacity. Buying ships, because of the war in Europe that started in 1939, would have been too expensive. But without oil, there would have been no Japanese industry or military by late 1942, and that was less than palatable. So was born the Pearl Harbor attack and everything else that kicked off in December 1941, on which the hopes of the samurai leadership depended a great deal.

On 12 December 1941, the day after Germany and Italy declared war on the United States and the US declared war back at them, Radio Tokyo severely intoned that the four-year-old China Incident and the new conflict against the West was to be referred to as the Greater East Asia War. Since it was Japan’s natural place to lead all Pacific Basin peoples, plus the struggle for the liberation of Asia from the West—plus the conquest of everything from the Rocky Mountains to Madagascar to the Arctic Ocean to Tasmania being only a matter of time—consolidating both wars into one large conflict only made sense. The then-newer term for the global conflict, World War Two, made no sense in a Japanese context.

In the distance of history, Japanese planning for 1941 looks more like staff academy exercises without limits than rational outlines with contingencies for the unexpected. Samurai strategy for the first months of the war wasn’t a strategy at all, but an optimistic and aggressive plan developed and implemented without regard for logistical constraints, intelligence on the enemy’s capabilities, or consideration of any more than one course of enemy action: The West simply had to give up quickly.

And Japan had no Plan B.

Epilogue

On 11 December 1941, the same day as the German declaration of war against the United States and the Italian declaration, representatives of Germany, Japan and Italy signed an agreement, already hammered out on 8 December, barring any separate peace with the United States or Britain in partial obedience to the terms of the Tripartite Pact. In response, on 1 January 1942, the US, Britain, and representatives of 45 other governments signed the Declaration of the United Nations in Washington, DC, pledging the same thing.

Italy surrendered on 3 September 1943; Germany on 8 May 1945.

By 1 August 1945, even the most fervent samurai knew Japan’s war was doomed. Cities in ashes; people starving; flyers boiling pine nuts for aviation fuel. Yet, there were still enough shishi fanatics around the bastions of power to make discussing surrender dangerous. The fall before, an unofficial peace effort in Europe had tried to get even recognition from Tokyo, but could not. Though the record is unclear, one can infer that Tokyo was too frightened to answer clearly.

The only response to America’s repeated broadcast entreaties had been “stop shooting and we’ll talk.” The samurai, their rage over centuries of perceived insults from the entire world still boiling, would rather have seen Japan die than dishonor themselves in surrender.

On the night of 13-14 August, with Hiroshima and Nagasaki destroyed by single weapons, the Showa Emperor had had enough. He instructed his government to accept the Potsdam Declaration and announced his intention to go on the radio to say as much to his people and the world.

The Kyujo Incident (Kyujo Jiken) that followed was a failed coup d’état to stop the broadcast and place the Showa under house arrest. On the evening of 14 August, up to 1,000 IJA officers and men of the Staff Office of the Ministry of War and the 1^st Imperial Guard Division raided the Imperial Palace to destroy the recordings of the Emperor’s speech, but someone had already removed them.

The leading plotter, Hatanaka Kenji, hoped that simply occupying the palace and starting a rebellion would inspire the rest of the IJA to quash any thought of surrender. This notion gave him the blind optimism to move ahead with the plan, despite having little support. After hours of frustration, after murdering Takeshi Mori, commanding the Guards Division, Tanaka Shizuichi, who succeeded Takeshi, berated Hatanaka and co-conspirator Shiizaki Jiro into giving up the coup. They did and killed themselves hours later.

Somewhere between 30 and 300 people died in this plot and in scores of other uprisings all across Japan. Because of their failure to convince any other IJA units or members to join their plots, many of the participants committed suicide; most survivors ended their lives in prison.

The Jewel Recording broadcast, announcing to the world that the Showa had had enough and took more control of his country than any of his ancestors, started at noon Tokyo time on 15 August.

The last of the shishi died ignoble deaths either at the hands of their countrymen or at their own hands; some as they heard the voice of their Emperor for the first time. Their anger, fear, and frustration simply could not tolerate their lives any longer. Their deaths changed nothing, but their lives had changed the world.

This was the Showa Restoration, brief though it was. Unlike his grandfather’s hurried reading of the Charter Oath, the Showa Emperor Hirohito knew exactly what he was doing—saving millions of lives and Japan from the rage and fear of the samurai.

[1] Tojo didn’t know the specifics of the Pearl Harbor operation until 1945, when one of his interrogators filled him in.

Roots of Samurai Rage And Fear: Japan’s Road To Armageddon

This book will be published on 7 December 2026! Japan’s long path to near annihilation was paved with the best of medieval intentions, and might have resulted in the “glorious” death many of the samurai desired, regrettably along with everything else Japanese.

And Finally...

On 1 August:

1794: The Whiskey Rebellion begins in western Pennsylvania, triggered after the Washington government imposed an excise tax on distilled spirits. Falling, the rebels believed, excessively on rural farmers, the rebellion lasted two years, and federally raised militias put them down; a demonstration of national resolve. Combined fatalities were less than fifty, mostly to sickness.

1815: Richard Henry Dana is born in Cambridge, Massachussets. An attorney best known for his 1840 memoir Two Years Before the Mast, which described his voyages from Massachusetts to California and back aboard two cargo schooners and the brutal treatment and conditions aboard those ships.

And today is WOMAN ASTRONOMERS DAY, observing the birth of Maria Mitchell on this day in 1818 in Nantucket, Massachusetts. Mitchell was the first internationally known woman to work as both a professional astronomer and a professor of astronomy, and the first woman elected Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and the American Association for the Advancement of Science. In 1847, she discovered a comet she named 1847 VI (later known as Miss Mitchell’s Comet or C/1847 T1) winning a gold medal presented to her by Christian VIII of Denmark in 1848.

Click on Archive for the Substack archive.

Go to www.linkedin.com/in/jdbcom for more on JDB Communications, LLC and its sole proprietor.

If you’ve read this far, share this with someone who might need it.

Make a Comment here.

This is a riff on an Alan Frasier article on Military.com from November 2025.

Captain Martin Markley and everyone else knew an attack was coming to the barren rock the UN called Outpost Harry. Intelligence had spotted Chinese forces massing behind the ridgelines, and aerial reconnaissance confirmed attack preparations were being made by the PVA (Chinese People’s Volunteer Army) 74th Division’s 22nd and 221st Regiments.

On the evening of 10 June 1953, Markley briefed his 150 men from King Company, 15th Infantry Regiment, 3rd Infantry Division defending the 1,280-foot hilltop, barely 400 yards wide and 425 yards north of the Main Line of Resistance (MLR) in Korea’s Iron Triangle (defined by Cheorwon and Kimhwa in the south and Pyonggang in the north; this was also where the book, MASH, the film and TV series took place). A single infantry company rotated in and out every night.

Markley had but one order from his superiors: Hold Harry at all costs.

Outpost Harry comprised a network of trenches deep enough for soldiers to move unseen, connecting reinforced bunkers, a command post, and forward observation positions. Chinese forces on Star Hill, just 320 yards to the north, had been watching Harry for weeks, building up for an attack.

While the negotiators at Panmunjom droned on and on…

Starting just after dark, the Chinese artillery barrage threw over 20,000 shells into Outpost Harry, turning their barren hilltop into an apocalyptic scene of fire and screaming metal. As the Americans took cover, they could hear the whistles and bugles as Chinese surged up the slopes—about 3,600 of them against 150.

The battle for Outpost Harry would go on for eight nights.

Holding the Line

During the first night's assault, Chinese soldiers broke through the wire and poured into the trenches. American defenders gunned down countless enemy soldiers before fighting them off in brutal close-quarters combat. Meanwhile, American artillery shells exploded mid-air rather than on impact, ripping apart scores of Chinese troops.

When dawn broke on 11 June, the Chinese withdrew. Only a dozen Americans walked off the hill without serious wounds. The rest were dead or evacuated with injuries, while another company took King Company’s place. The Chinese came back that night. And the night after that, while US commanders rotated fresh companies onto the outpost every day, pulling off the battered survivors to regroup. A pattern developed where daylight allowed for the evacuation of casualties, resupply runs, and trench repairs under sniper fire. At nightfall, renewed Chinese assaults hit the outpost. The heroics of the first night repeated night after night as outnumbered Americans repelled thousands of Chinese with raw guts and firepower.

Different companies from the 15th Infantry and 5th Regimental Combat Team took turns on Outpost Harry, moving tanks and infantry in the valley to the east, drawing the Chinese into artillery kill zones. The tactic worked, channeling the enemy assaults into devastating fields of fire that killed countless Chinese before they reached Harry.

This late in the war, American casualties had become so high that reinforcements became scarce. All nine infantry battalions of the 3rd Division had suffered heavy losses and desperately needed time to refit and reorganize. They called for help…

Enter the Spartans.

On 16 June, the Sparta Battalion, Greek Expeditionary Force (GEF), Korea, moved into the sector. The parallel to the Battle of Thermopylae—where 300 Spartans held a mountain pass against a massive Persian army—and the battalion’s name was not lost on anyone.

Greek soldiers had fought alongside American forces since December 1950, when 849 volunteers arrived in Pusan. Their officers had World War II and Greek Civil War combat experience and English fluency. They had proven themselves at Hill 381, Hill 489, and most notably at Scotch Hill/Hill 313 in October 1951, where they’d suffered 105 casualties holding their ground against the Chinese.

The Greeks called Outpost Harry “Haros,” after Charon, the ferryman who carried souls across the river Styx to the underworld. The dark soldier humor explained the reality of what the otherwise worthless prominence had become.

The Spartans spent the day repairing trenches and reinforcing positions alongside the US 10th Combat Engineer Battalion. Then the engineers withdrew, leaving the Greeks to face whatever the night would bring.

The Greeks Hold the Line

The Chinese spent 15 and 16 June assembling what remained of their 74th Division for one final push. The division, shattered over the previous week of fighting, scraped together nearly 3,000 men for a last desperate attempt to take the outpost before the ongoing armistice negotiations concluded.

The assault began around midnight on 17 June. Chinese artillery pounded the hilltop, then infantry charged from the northeast and northwest simultaneously, moving through their own barrages and UN artillery fire. The Chinese quickly gained footholds on the northern slope and pushed into the trenches. Like the Spartans at Thermopylae, Company P refused to withdraw, counterattacking immediately, meeting the Chinese in hand-to-hand combat in the trenches, driving hundreds off the hill.

The Chinese regrouped and attacked again, retaking sections of the trench line in a second wave. Again, the Greeks counterattacked. As the close-quarters battle raged on the hilltop, Greek forces dispatched a platoon to the east of the outpost, luring Chines reinforcements into artillery kill zones.

For hours, the battle of grenades, rifles, bayonets, bare hands and feet, entrenching tools, and whatever else came to hand continued in the darkness. Greek and Chinese soldiers grappled in the trenches while artillery from both sides flew overhead and napalm lit up the landscape.

Finally, the Chinese pulled back. By the morning of 18 June, the attacks had stopped. The remnant of the PVA 74th Division retreated. It was the last Chinese assault on Outpost Harry.

The Price of Holding Outpost Harry

Over the eight-day battle, the Chinese fired over 88,000 artillery and mortar rounds at the small outpost. Impressive, considering less than 200 troops occupied the hill at a time. American and Greek artillery responded with 368,000 rounds.

The entire Chinese 74th Division—some 13,000 soldiers—took part in the attacks on Outpost Harry. Chinese casualties were about 4,200 known killed and wounded, with many more missing; most might have been unrecoverable because of the murderous effects of high-explosive artillery and napalm.

Allied losses totaled 102 killed, 553 wounded, and 44 missing. The Greeks alone suffered 15 killed, 36 wounded, and one missing. For their defense of Outpost Harry, Companies K, B, and A of the 15th Infantry Regiment, Company F of the 65th Infantry Regiment of the US Army, and P Company of the Sparta Battalion received Presidential Unit Citations, marking the first time in US military history that so many units earned the decoration for a single shared mission.

Why Outpost Harry Mattered.

The battle over Outpost Harry took place during the war’s last month of active combat. Just 50 miles away at Panmunjom, negotiators were hammering out the final terms of the Korean War armistice.

The Chinese wanted the position to gain leverage in negotiations and improve their observation of American lines. American commanders needed to show resolve and deny the enemy any strategic advantage before the ceasefire.

Both sides paid dearly for it. Thousands of troops died before the armistice, aside from Outpost Harry.

On 27 July, the armistice stopped the fighting across the peninsula, but the eight-day defense of Outpost Harry helped ensure that when the fighting stopped, the front lines favored United Nations forces.

Over seven decades later, that hilltop sits in the middle of the Demilitarized Zone. Despite its small size and seemingly insignificant strategic value, Outpost Harry saw some of the heaviest fighting of the Korean War. Unlike Thermopylae, the Greeks and Americans held their position and destroyed an entire Chinese division doing it.

Sergeant’s Business and Other Stories

I have two Korean War stories in this collection: “To Rest with Long Ears” is an epistolic saga about, well, finding a carcass. “Hold The Line” is a second-person tale about a guy in a hole on an icy knob in Korea fighting for his life.

And Finally...

On 25 July:

1941: President Rooseveldt freezes Japanese financial assets in the US and cancels all petroleum contracts in retaliation for Japan’s invasion of southern Southeast Asia—Vietnam—effective 26 July. Without fuel or the assets in the US, the Japanese economy would grind to a halt in six months or less.

1983: The lowest natural temperature ever recorded, -129 F/-89.4 C/183 K, was at the Soviet Vostok Station, Antarctica. Satellite data may have shown still colder temperatures that morning—5:45 Moscow time—but this was the lowest recorded surface temperature.

And today is both NATIONAL MERRY-GO-ROUND DAY and CAROUSEL DAY, commemorating the patenting of the two-story carousel in the United States on this day in 1871. The amusement, originally invented to joust without actual horses, has been around in one form or another since the 17th Century. Now they have spaceships…

Click on Archive for the Substack archive.

Go to www.linkedin.com/in/jdbcom for more on JDB Communications, LLC and its sole proprietor.

If you’ve read this far, share this with someone who might need it.

Make a Comment here.

This is a riff on an Andrew Paul article in Popular Science

A long-lost second memoir penned by a 19th Century British soldier surfaced in the Western Reserve Historical Society’s library in Cleveland, Ohio. According to the Memorial University of Newfoundland historian Eamonn O’Keeffe’s article in the Journal Of British Studies, “From Amputee to Author: Shadrack Byfield and the Making of a War of 1812 Veteran,” Byfield’s second book depicts a very different war veteran than the one described in his first book written 11 years earlier.

Who was Shadrack Byfield?

Shadrack Byfield (1789-1874) is familiar to many early American history scholars. In 1840, he published A Narrative Of A Light Company Soldier’s Service in the 41st Regiment Of Foot During the Late American War; Together With Some Adventures Amongst The Indian Tribes, From 1812 To 1814 (Bradford, England: John Bubb), a memoir detailing his experiences.

According to Byfield’s book, he started the war in Canada, fighting along the frontier from Quebec to Ohio. On 11 July 1813, during the Black Rock (NY) raid, a musket ball wound forced doctors to amputate Byfield’s left forearm. After learning someone had tossed his limb into a “dung-heap,” a common practice at the time, Byfield retrieved it and buried it in a makeshift coffin. Byfield returned to England in December 1814, but his disability prevented him from going back to his previous job as a weaver. After dreaming of an “instrument” to solve the problem, Byfield asked a nearby blacksmith to build the device he’d seen in his dream.

A New Chapter

For over 200 years, historians believed the 46-page Narrative to be Byfield’s only book until O’Keeffe discovered the only known copy of his 1851 History and Conversion of a British Soldier: Being an Account of God’s Merciful Dealings With His People as Exemplified in the Life of Shadrach Byfield, (formerly of the 41st Regiment of Foot), to which is Appended a Narrative of his Services and Adventures During the Last American War (London: J. Briscoe), which continues and enhances Byfield’s story. Where A Narrative explored the Byfield’s early life, military service, and receiving his prosthetic forearm, History and Conversion describes his chronic pain and everyday difficulties because of that injury.

It now pleased the Lord to afflict me with a violent rheumatic pain in my right shoulder, from which the [musket] ball was cut out…I was in this condition for nearly three years...oftentimes I was not able to lift my hand to my head, nor a teacup to my mouth.

Shadrack Byfield

In the second book, Byfield dwells on periods of indebtedness, illness, and unemployment after returning to England. Other memories were less flattering, such as abandoning his army duties to engage in a plundering excursion with other soldiers.

Resilience

Byfield’s difficulties didn’t end after publishing History and Conversion. In 1853, fellow church parishioners accused him of injuring a rival’s eye and face using his prosthetic. The dispute was part of a larger entanglement over rightful control of the village chapel, which eventually grew to include arson, vandalism, and even a riot. Although never convicted of a crime, Byfield and his supporters eventually lost the fight, and Byfield lost his job. By 1856, Byfield was a widower and returned to his hometown of Wooly. While he married a second wife, he continued to struggle financially. In 1867, he published another personal narrative, The Forlorn Hope, and died at 84 in 1874. Nobody has found any copies of this third book.

Uncovering these new details about his life provides remarkable insight into the suffering and resilience of Britain’s homecoming soldiers…Byfield’s 1851 memoir emphasizes the challenges of post-war reintegration, especially for veterans with disabilities, in the decades after the Napoleonic Wars.

Eamonn O’Keeffe

A Historical-Literary Journey

Eamonn O’Keeffe has done some fine detective work, but how he came to find this book in the Western Reserve Library is a good question for the ages; even he isn’t sure. How the lone surviving copy of History and Conversion got into that library is yet another.

The PDF copy of the Narrative I’ve seen appears to be part of a larger series. The PDF of History and Conversion is a transcription of a text with missing pages. Given the idiomatic place names, spelling, and grammar, both feel as if pre-Dickensian English speakers dictated them; at one point Byfield admits to his lack of education.

As an independent writer and publisher, I have to conclude that Byfield’s first book saw some success, or he wouldn’t have written the second, let alone the third. Probably written under subscription, where interested parties would pay in advance to read the story, the first book probably put down the stories he’d been telling for a quarter-century, and the second was likely the same. Any profits or royalties he got from the book must have kept him at least partly afloat until 1874.

This is this kind of grunt work that’s the drudgery of historical research, but it’s what tells us the material is authentic.

Steele’s Battalion: The Great War Diaries

When Curtis and Maria first started working on Ned Steele’s diaries, notes, and letters, that was all they had to work with. In time, three memoirs surfaced, and a treasure-trove of other material, all needing authentication. The result is Steele’s Battalion, hailed as a gripping and satisfyingly detailed war novel in the vein of Sergeant York: Kirkus Reviews.

And Finally...

On 18 July:

1895: George Kelly Barnes is born in Memphis, Tennessee. He is best known for the kidnapping of oil tycoon and businessman Charles F. Urschel in July 1933, and for his expertise with and preference for the Thompson submachine gun, becoming known as Machine Gun Kelly.

1954: George “Machine Gun” Kelly dies of a heart attack at the US Prison Leavenworth, Leavenworth, Kansas, age 59. Convicted of the Urschel kidnapping in 1933, Kelly spent 21 years behind bars as a model prisoner, telling exaggerated tales of his escapades and earning the sobriquet “Pop-gun Kelly.”

And today is NELSON MANDELA INTERNATIONAL DAY, observing the birth of Nelson Mandela on this day in 1918, in Mvezo, Eastern Cape, South Africa. Mandela spent 24 years in various South African prisons, was elected the first black president of the Republic of South Africa in 1993, and was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize in 2003.

Click on Archive for the Substack archive.

Go to www.linkedin.com/in/jdbcom for more on JDB Communications, LLC and its sole proprietor.

If you’ve read this far, share this with someone who might need it.

Make a Comment here.

This is a riff on a post by Matthew Robert Bennett and Sally Christine Reynolds of Bournemouth University on The Conversation.

You’ve probably tried to navigate the supermarket with a cart with at least one child in tow. Wheeled vehicles appeared in around modern Iraq about 5,000 years ago. Recent evidence found—drag marks together with the oldest human footprints found in the Americas—suggests the travois/drag/sledge first appeared about 22,000 years ago in New Mexico.

Footprints found at White Sands National Park have rewritten early American history, pushing back the arrival of the first people to enter the Western Hemisphere by 8,000 years. There is some controversy about the age of these footprints, with some researchers and Native American tribes unhappy with the dating methods, but these prints and tracks provide a picture of life on the margins of a large wetland at the end of the last Ice Age 12,000 years ago.

The footprints in the mud tell us how people lived, hunted, and survived, connecting us to the past in a way that a stone tool can’t.

Traditional archaeology is based on the discovery of stone tools; those made of wood are guesswork. At White Sands, researchers found drag marks while excavating for fossil footprints. Some marks appear as just one trace; others are two parallel traces. Dried mud, buried by sediment and then revealed by erosion and excavation, preserves these marks that extend for dozens of meters before disappearing beneath overlying sediment. They clip barefoot human tracks along their length, suggesting the user dragged the travois (from a French word meaning work, labor, or a frame for restraining horses) over their own footprints as they went along. Most people today have never made a stone tool, but almost all of us will have left a footprint, even if it is only in the sand on the beach.

The footprints and drag marks tell a story of the movement of resources at the edge of this former wetland.

Their inventors probably improvised these travoises as needed to move camp, haul meat from a hunting site, or casualties from a battle. Adults pulled the simple, probably improvised travois, while youngsters tagged along. The analogy of the shopping cart comes into view, as does the pained expression on the adults’ faces as they quest for resources with kids in tow.

Man has always had stuff to move from here to there.

We made no record of it how we did it until we started to write about 5,000 years ago, but we didn’t write about such mundane things until much later. Modern shopping carts rust in ditches and rivers or lie abandoned in the hedges today, but we know that transportation technology must have existed for ancient man, who made their prehistoric equivalents out of wood, and those simply rotted away.

The researchers did tests to “prove” their theory, but any old Boy Scout could have told them what they were seeing.

The construction of travois was in the Boy Scout Handbooks of yore; I studied mine for years, using some of that knowledge in the Army. This Eagle Scout distinctly remembers travois races at camps and camporees. One race in the rain left both footprints and travois tracks in the mud. I built travois in both the Army Active and Reserve components to move equipment from one place to another.

Sometimes academics can’t see the forest for the trees.

The Persistent Past: Discovering The Steele Diaries

The sources we collect to describe the past vary as much as the stories it tells, and our interpretations vary as well. When Curtis Durand, the archivist, finds an old trunk filled with diaries, he not only has to verify their contents, but he has to interpret the stories those diaries tell while he makes sure they’re even what they appear to be.

This is how history books are written.

And Finally...

On 11 July:

1921: William Howard Taft is sworn in as Chief Justice of the Supreme Court in Washington, DC. Called a distinguished jurist, effective administrator, but a poor politician by some, Taft was the only person to hold both offices, and one of the few former Presidents to hold any federal office after leaving the White House.

1953: The second battle for Pork Chop Hill, called the Battle of Seokhyeon-dong or Northern Hill by the Chinese, ends in South Korea with the US possessing it, though they had to give it back later. The low-level skirmish for a prominence in what would become the DMZ, which no one really wanted, had started that March, intensified in April, and continued while the peace talks at Panmunjom were ongoing. SLA Marshall, and a 1957 film starring Gregory Peck, depicted this second brawl in a book of that name.

And today is BOWDLER’S DAY, commemorating the birth of Thomas Bowdler in Bath, Somerset, England, on this day in 1754. Bowdler, a physician known for publishing The Family Shakespeare, an edition of William Shakespeare's plays he believed was more appropriate for 19th Century sensibilities. Bowdlerize means editing any form of communication to make the product weaker or less effective.

Click on Archive for the Substack archive.

Go to www.linkedin.com/in/jdbcom for more on JDB Communications, LLC and its sole proprietor.

If you’ve read this far, share this with someone who might need it.

Make a Comment here.

This was the object of the Declaration of Independence. Not to find out new principles, or new arguments, never before thought of, not merely to say things which had never been said before; but to place before mankind the common sense of the subject, in terms so plain and firm as to command their assent, and to justify ourselves in the independent stand we are compelled to take. Neither aiming at originality of principle or sentiment, nor yet copied from any particular and previous writing, it was intended to be an expression of the American mind, and to give to that expression the proper tone and spirit called for by the occasion.

Thomas Jefferson

If only we may keep our freedom…

They who clamor loudest for freedom are often the ones least likely to be happy in a free society. The frustrated, oppressed by their shortcomings, blame their failure on existing restraints. Actually, their innermost desire is for an end to the “free for all.” They want to eliminate free competition and the ruthless testing to which the individual is continually subjected in a free society.

Eric Hoffer

For another 250 years…

Where there is no law, there is no liberty; and nothing deserves the name of law but that which is certain and universal in its operation upon all the members of the community.

Benjamin Rush

Well, let’s try anyway.

Altschmerz: Weariness with the same old issues that you’ve always had, the same boring flaws and anxieties that you’ve been gnawing on for years.

The American Revolution (or the American War), from 1775 to 1783, was only a part of a long string of Britain's Empire's Wars, during which squabbling ruling factions attempted to control what can be collectively known as Englishmen. After generations of bloodletting, marching, pillaging and building, the British Empire reached the limits of the administrative and communications systems then available by 1774. The 1774-83 conflict was the first failure of the Imperial system that had run Britain since the Glorious Revolution in 1688. However, its end changed the Imperial system in time for the conflicts triggered by the French Revolution. The American Revolution, thus, helped Britain to fight Napoleon by challenging its very fabric and requiring reform and change.

A Legal Empire: From Magna Charta to the US Constitution

England has had its share of kings and queens, but a common thread throughout its history has been a certain exceptionalism; it defies tyranny consistently, sometimes at substantial cost in blood and treasure. Not even the Romans could make Britons simply roll over and take orders. Resistance to arbitrary rule or privilege is even a part of its mythology. Well known to most are the traditions of Arthur of Camelot, a quasi-mystical king who may have had some substance. After the last shipload of Romans departed, they left behind a Pendragon—war duke. From there the record is hazy, but the legend is strong: a small body of men kept the peace in one part of Britain, a peace based on equality and fairness. The spirit of equality in Arthurian legends has persisted in British history since then, though scholars debate and dismiss the relevance of how Christian these "knights" were.

One successor to Arthur was Alfred, the only English king with “the Great” attached to his name. While there was an Aethelred (or Ethelred, depending on sources) of Wessex in the 9th Century who traditionally called himself the first King of the Anglo-Saxons, historians agree on little else about his life and the extent of his authority. Historians say his legal and military system formed the traditional foundations of the Anglo-Saxon-American system. Ethnographers and historians agree that Alfred’s name is attached to one foundation of the Anglo-Saxon legal system: under ideal conditions, the King's courts treat all persons equally, even if privileges that exempted many often confused the process. His military system was a defense in depth by locally living settlers, not unlike the late Western Roman Empire, but instead of central control, Alfred spread out the responsibility for local defense to nobles. This was the basis of the Anglo-American militia system, still seen as a remnant today.

Combined, the possibly real Arthur and the known-but-mysterious Alfred formed a considerable tradition of self-reliance, local justice, and a locally derived peerage that depended not on a faraway king but on local resources. While kings, queens, and lord protectors would come and go over the centuries, not one of them would easily rule the British Isles without their consent.

When William of Normandy conquered England in 1066, he radically changed the Alfredian codes but kept much of the military system, transforming it into his own admirable creature. The House of Anjou eventually joined the Norman/Anglo-Saxon union, merging the thrones of half of France and England by the mid-12th Century. The resulting House of Angevin/Plantagenet was ruling England and a third of modern Europe in 1215. In that year, John I's barons presented him with a statement outlining his limitations, a document we now call the Magna Charta, or Great Charter.

Based on the 10th Century Charter of Liberties, the 13th Century Great Charter limited how the British Isles raised taxes, deployed and raised troops, and approved or disapproved archbishop elections and the creation of laws. When John denounced it before the ink was dry, the result was civil war. The Charter was reissued in 1216, recast in 1225, and periodically hauled out for every monarch who ever claimed to rule in England. It remained in force intact in Britain and Wales until 1829, and has had only minor surgery since.

The Magna Charta’s lasting legacy is habeas corpus, which legally requires proving that anyone committed a crime at all, or that a legal person committed it. Under it, judicial abuse is nearly impossible when observed, and it has been one of the least abused legal traditions in the American-British system. But beyond that, the Charter’s limits on supreme authority—indeed, it denies that any temporal “authority” can be “supreme”—seem to have encoded themselves into the English language.

After the Great Charter there were centuries when no one expected anything worse could happen. Laws were observed by tradition; courts were perverted by “interest;” untimely deaths and civil wars put monarchs on the English throne, sometimes for only a few days. Only habit upheld the need of the people to have a uniform law and by grudging force. As Plantagenet, Lancaster, and York gave way to Tudor and Stuart, there were revolts, riots, and civil conflicts that assured whoever tried to rule England that they needed to be fair or they simply wouldn’t be around.

From the late Middle Ages, there has been discussion of the “English constitution,” which meant an inherited understanding of the basis of all laws. Although never written, this small “c” constitution has served as the basis of the Anglo-Saxon legal system, according to legal minds and philosophers. Parliament issued the "English Bill of Rights" to William of Nassau before his enthronement; this was the closest Britain ever came to a written constitution. That document let the new Dutch king know that there was a limit to his power. Since he assumed control of a country that had functionally ejected his predecessor, it had to have had an impact equal to that of the Declaration of Independence in 1776.

The American Articles of Confederation made little impression on Britain since they echoed those of the Swiss cantons in many respects, yet they preserved a semblance of unity, but the Constitution of 1787 made a slightly distinct impression, reflecting the two houses of governance that had been in European practice for generations. The independence of the judiciary, however, was intriguing to the Empire because it presented a means by which courts far away from Britain could effectively administer British interests by slamming gavels without reference from the home country. By that simple mechanism, governors from Ireland to Australia to India and Bermuda could act independently within a well-defined guideline: British law. The “checks and balances” found in the Construction was an important instrument of control if there was no large ground force, which Britain rarely had. When no single branch of government—Parliament, ministry or courts—could effectively trump the other, simply pointing to the bureaucrats and the process could avert civil conflicts, dynastic disputes and even contested elections. It made the crown autonomous and increasingly irrelevant. The British thought it odd that in America the head of state and government were the same (the President), where for most of the rest of the world they were separate (crown and prime minister). The incapacity of George III and the regency of his son Clarence (George IV) resulted from a strengthened balance between the Imperial government and civil authority. Britain never established its own constitution, but it has adapted the American Constitution's mechanisms since its publication.

Technical Realities: Limits of Imperial Governance in the 18th Century

Great Britain did not control the largest empire in the world in 1775, but it had to control much of a continent across a large ocean, an attribute that it shared with Spain. But Spain had been trying with often limited success to control its New World holdings for the better part of two centuries, fighting off England, the Netherlands, the Pope, North African corsairs and France, not to mention the occasional civil war and an ongoing conflict with Portugal and a few million aboriginals that resisted being enslaved. Since the Armada of 1588, Spain had slipped into an advanced state of decay, and by 1770 was still on the downhill to chaos. Holding all her overseas colonies for another century was unlikely, and it appears as if many Spaniards were aware of it. Spanish alcaldes in Latin America needing instructions from Madrid could wait for years or decades for an answer, sometimes until the principals were dead and the original bureaucrat had long before returned to Spain or moved elsewhere.

But the English still held onto everything east of the Mississippi and a rather vague line between Georgia and Florida. Russia held trading stations along the Pacific coast, in Alaska and in the Sandwich Islands (modern Hawaii). France moved many Acadians from Quebec to Louisiana, moderately under Spanish protection but really forming their own colony. Yet, the English colonies seem to have been the healthiest and most robust, even among the islands of the Caribbean. How?

English administrative methods and attitudes towards the government played key roles in the success of the English colonies, even with the “German” Kings that followed William and Mary. The colonial government, still controlled by bureaucrats, had limited reach and even less influence over business practices and daily life. Since the coronation of William of Orange in 1688, the dominant Williamite/Whig political economy posited that labor was the root of all wealth and allowed almost anyone access to the tools for self-reliance. A colony that could hold a piece of land, farm it for long enough to raise capital for improvements, could become self-administrating and could be self-supporting within a few years. Cash crops such as tobacco and hemp raised tremendous revenues with investors, as did sugar and maize (corn), both easily distilled into alcohol. New World cotton lacked profitability until the invention of the gin in the early 19th Century.

This emphasis on the power of labor was a Dutch philosophy, one that had made the Netherlands one of the wealthiest nations in Europe that had developed despite Spain’s theoretical control of the country. It also flew in the face of Renaissance political economy, which valued only the control of land. This outlook concentrated wealth in the hands of a few who owned the land, who, by extension, were the only ones who could decide what happened to it and how others living on it should be governed. This was the Continental viewpoint and that of the Jacobite/Tory English who supported James II Stuart in the 1688-89 crisis. It was this political and economic view that dominated Hanover thinking and the Southern colonies in North America. New England was decidedly Williamite; the Middle Colonies were about evenly split. This made New England the center of the American economic universe for manufactures, and because of its independent nature, the hotbed of revolution.

Believing that a ruling class that owned land should be in charge of everything made the American Tories very loyal to those in England who believed likewise, and when New England burst into open rebellion the South and the Middle Colonies remained quiescent for a time, most of the leadership believing that the whole thing would blow over. When the idea that Americans could create a new country with its own manufactures, based on an agrarian/commercial trading economy, caught on, the Tories remained loyal to the Crown, but increasing numbers of others found themselves drawn to the ideas and the apparent inevitability of independence. English administration methods were light-handed until the war went badly in New England, but then a “march of folly” began in Britain. The folly was that the English believed they could beat, shove, and cow the Americans back into obedience to English law and the Crown, and that they also had to beat, shove, and cow all those who did not agree. Tories pointed to Scotland and the eventual submission obtained there; Whigs pointed to Ireland and the grumbling submission that never lasted more than a generation there. Few knew of a way out of the ideological mess that originated with how money was to be made, and how much there could be of it.

As the war ended in New England and wound down in the Middle Colonies, Britain believed it could hold on to the South if it couldn’t hold everything. It could protect their Caribbean investments and provide a base against Spain in the future...and perhaps the Americans if needed. But the Americans fought just well enough to be rid of the British in the South, and while they defeated their former masters at Yorktown, they also defeated the former British Indian allies in the Ohio country with an ease that surprised even the Americans. As France and Spain, the Netherlands and even Russia piled into the war effort, Britain found itself not only overextended but overtaxed. The country was going broke, and only the manufacturing segment was making enough capital to keep the system going.

By 1782 it was clear that the British way of fighting and paying for wars wouldn’t work on the Americans. British aristocratic dominance depended on a subordinate relationship between the levels of nobles who provided the wealth and the direction for society, hopefully in concert with their worship at church. American/Whig free-market philosophy let citizens make whatever they could, whenever they could, and however they could. Whig rulers worked to protect wealth, not control it, and had no truck with churches. With the end of the war, many in Britain understood that the basis of wealth had to shift if they wanted to survive the next war.

Thus was born the economical basis for the continuing Industrial Revolution, where laborers became servants of the factories, not the lords. They earned wages, not an allowance, and they could turn their skills to their own use, even go into business themselves if they were so inclined. This kind of business innovation took hold in English manufacturing centers and spread throughout the British Isles wherever there was coal for fuel and water for transportation.

The Jewels in the Crown: The Colonies

Losing the American War wasn’t the end of the British Empire, merely the end of the first phase of growth. At the beginning of the, Britain was chronically short on everything but demands for more money, men and materials. By its end, though heavily in debt, Britain had replaced its shortages with innovation, forward thinking, and newer ideas that were only made possible by superior industrial and financial organization. The “wizard war” of 1939-45 had nothing on the “inventor’s war” of 1775-1783.

Critical among the campaigns of the war was the late naval campaign in the West Indies, where British forces held the Bahamas, Antigua, and Jamaica. Small in themselves, they formed a naval barrier between the parts of the Spanish New World colonies in the event of another war, and that was only a generation away. The West Indies bases were critical to the naval war that France secured supplies from the Americas, and once Spain became France’s ally, to destabilize Spanish specie shipments. The British hold on a few islands in the Caribbean was enough to affect Continental finance.

Far away from the Americas, British naval forces outfought the French in 1782. British traders were quick to export cotton goods, tea, and other high-value goods. Britain’s relationship with India, once the American War was over, gradually shifted from trader to competitor to ruler as they outfought and outmaneuvered the Mughals, who usually refused to cooperate with each other. Britain, fighting a handful of pitched battles against forces far larger than themselves, secured trade agreements with the largest and most powerful states in India. The result, by 1805, was British dominance of the second most populous country on Earth. Though it was expensive to maintain for a generation, that Britain had secure bases and access to markets and manpower that France could never match was enough to keep the engine of British finance running at top speed.

Discovered just before the Revolution and colonized just after, Australia was a faraway desert that could absorb whatever excess energies (and people) Britain could not afford to keep. Vagrants, petty and serious criminals, seditionists, and adventurers moved to the new land on the other side of the world, and there they eventually prospered and grew. But more importantly, the Empire kept growing throughout the wars with France, so that there was always hope for a future that investors could back and shipbuilders could get credit for.

Just across the St. Lawrence River from America, Canada was a cornerstone of the British Empire for the next century. Though not as populous as the US, it was a toehold on vast resources that was fought over one more time from 1812 to 1815. Fighting on a vast battle front that stretched from the Atlantic to Lake Michigan to the mouth of the Mississippi, one of Britain’s goals was to gain access to the Gulf of Mexico and the interior of North America. Holding onto the Great Lakes was critical to controlling a route to the Mississippi. The British defeat on Lake Erie in 1813 made Canada’s chance of being a trade competitor to the US fade; Andrew Jackson’s decisive victory in the swamps around New Orleans in 1815 ended them. When Napoleon invaded Russia in 1812, Britain rushed to her aid, and in return had leverage to get the Romanovs to reduce their Pacific power, allowing western Canada access to the Pacific. Two military losses and a diplomatic coup in the space of three years allowed Canada to become a treasure house.

Despite the apparent embarrassment of the loss of her most important colony, and because of it, the British Empire thrived and prospered after 1783. The demands of the global conflict strengthened it, reforming their economic and legal methods to compensate for the loss and make new profits. Britain had found the limits of the Empire in 1776, and improved its methods continually until World War I.

The American War stretched Perfidious Albion enormously, but she grew strong to take up the strain.

Steele’s Battalion: The Great War Diaries

Although Battalion takes place generations after the Revolution, a curious thing about the impact of the American War on Anglo-American relations was that, by the end of the 19th Century, the relations between British and American troops (though not their leadership) was as if nothing untoward had happened.

And Finally...

On 27 June:

1743: The Battle of Dettingen takes place near Karlstein am Main in Bavaria. It was the last time an English sovereign (George II) commanded and troops (English, Hanoverian, and Austrian) in battle, barely defeating/escaping the French during the War of the Austrian Succession.

1898: Joshua Slocum lands his 36-foot gaff-rigged oyster sloop Spray at Newport, Rhode Island, completing the world’s first solo circumnavigation by boat. Slocum left Boston on 24 April 1895 and sailed roughly 46,000 miles over three years.

And today is INDUSTRIAL WORKERS OF THE WORLD DAY, observing the creation of the IWW in Chicago, Illinois on this day in 1905. The Wobblies employ revolutionary industrial unionism as their philosophy and tactics, connecting with socialist, syndicalist, and anarchist labor movements, and they’re still around.

Click on Archive for the Substack archive.

Go to www.linkedin.com/in/jdbcom for more on JDB Communications, LLC and its sole proprietor.

If you’ve read this far, share this with someone who might need it.

Make a Comment here.

This is a riff on a Daniel Brumstetter essay in Aeon from September 2025

Military members often write last letters to their loved ones they don’t want those people to see, because they were goodbyes; I did. Left it in my pack like the other guys did; still do, probably, hoping that there’s enough left of the letters to be sent home with whatever’s left of their carcasses. But this bit mostly contains the last letters written by Frenchmen about to be executed by the Nazis.

If I were a maker of books, I would make a register, with comments, of various deaths. He who would teach men to die would teach them to live.

Michel de Montaigne

A last letter is uniquely personal, yet there is a universal feel to them, almost as if they paint a naked portrait of the human condition. Last letters peer into the souls of those confronting death. They aren’t like everyday letters, diaries, memoirs, political tracts or philosophical treatises because of the urgency that shapes the act of writing. The authors know they will not have another chance to say what they must say.

Use your imagination.

Dawn breaks on what you know is the last morning of your life. A prison guard hands you a blank sheet of paper and a pen hours before your execution. To whom do you write? What do you say, knowing this is your last chance to say it? Do you soften the blow for your kids?

I can give no longer any further testimony of my affection than this letter…Colvert will never again see his Plouf, nor his little Plumette. He is leaving for a big, big journey,

Robert Beck

How about your parents?

They are going to rip me from this life that you gave me and that I clung to so.

Jacques Baudry

Or your lover? Here, you can be deeply philosophical, with death no longer on the horizon. The moment has been decided, and its arrival is imminent and irrevocable.

Be courageous, ma Cherie. It is no doubt the last time that I write you. Today, I will have lived.

Huynh Khuong An

To read these last letters is to take a journey deep into the world of emotions at the very frontier of living and dying. In one’s last moments, superficiality cuts away, revealing something meaningful and deep about the human condition.

In everything else there may be sham: the fine reasonings of philosophy may be a mere pose in us; or else our trials, by not testing us to the quick, give us a chance to keep our face always composed. But in the last scene, between death and ourselves, there is no more pretending; we must talk plain, we must show what there is that is good and clean at the bottom of the pot.

Montaigne

These last letters tell us what this something at the bottom of the pot is.

As I prepare for this last mission, I am a bit homesick...Mother and Dad; you are very close to me, and I long so to talk to you. America has asked much of our generation, but I’m glad to give her all I have because she has given me so much.

Arnold Rahe, USAAF, 1943

Do we realize, scribbling these last lines, what these words will mean to our loved ones? How much to we care? Should we be bitter? Sad?

This evening, I think of your sweetness, your kindness, of our sweet moments, those from long ago and those of yesterday, know well, my darling, one could not love you more than I did…And I will fall asleep with your sweet image in my eyes and the taste of our last kisses that are not that distant, my sweet friend, my gentle little Lienne. Be sensible ... Be reasonable. Love me, for a long time yet…I kiss passionately your photograph…the one from Luchon in which you are wearing flowers.

Georges Pitard

Or should we just remember those best of times we had? Those people will read these letters in moments of infinite sadness; leave them with the good and leave out the bad. But make sure to leave them.

I dreamt a great deal, this last while, about the wonderful meals we would have when I was freed…You will have them without me, with family, but not in sadness…I relived ..all my travels, all my experiences, all my meals…It is 8 am, it will be time to leave. I ate, smoked, drank some coffee. I see no more business to settle.

Daniel Decourdemanche

As I remember it, my last letter to Mom was a lot like this last one, but I wrote it in 1974, so I really don’t recall that well. I talked about her, my sisters, my step-family, my life. I mostly recall how I ended it.

Just remember, Ma; I volunteered for this job.

John D. Beatty

Steele’s Battalion: The Great War Diaries

Ned Steele knew every letter, every diary entry he wrote in France and Flanders could have been his last, yet he tried to keep that certainty out. It usually worked; it didn’t always.

And Finally...

On 20 June:

451: The battle called Catalaunian Plains near modern-day Châlons-en-Champagne in northeastern France took place between Western Roman and Visigothic forces led by Flavius Aetius and the army of Attila the Hun. The all-day brawl halted the westward Hun advance into Gaul.

1949: Gertrude “Gorgeous Gussie” Moran shocks the crowd with her visible and frilly underwear during match play at Wimbledon, London, England. While her outfit met the all-white requirements, apparently the tournament didn’t think to regulate women’s skirt lengths.

And today is NATIONAL AMERICAN EAGLE DAY, commemorating this day in 1782 when the US Congress approved the Great Seal of the United States, opting for the bald eagle instead of the turkey (Franklin’s suggestion) as the symbol of the country. If it had gone the other way, would we be calling those people “eagles?”

Click on Archive for the Substack archive.

Go to www.linkedin.com/in/jdbcom for more on JDB Communications, LLC and its sole proprietor.

If you’ve read this far, share this with someone who might need it.

Make a Comment here.

What on Earth is going on in America right now?

An opinion can be argued with; a conviction is best shot.

T.E. Lawrence

We’ve put criminals in office; we’ve even reelected them after their convictions. But the spin The Party (Democrat, Republican, “Independent,” all the rest in one lump) put on them belies the very idea of “leadership” and has turned our government into a kleptocracy maintained by a mass media machine bought and paid for by The Party. A sitting governor said the quiet part out loud recently, pleading for wealthy taxpayers to move back to her state and do their “patriotic duty” and pay her usurious taxes to cover her social welfare programs, including paying rent for illegal aliens. The bitter part of that story will be that the voters will comfortably reelect her in November not because she’s clearly a grifter or because they feel she’s acting in the best interests of her state, but because of the party box on the ballots.

And no one really cares.

It’s The Party that’s destroyed our political system—the one Washington warned us about—and will destroy the country. These grifters in suits screech they are trying to preserve the system through the SAVE America Act that will quietly die in Congress. Why? Because The Party can’t stand the idea that they can’t manipulate the voter rolls to make sure their grifters get in office. Even if, by some miracle, it gets signed into law, a federal judge will read his script and declare it unconstitutional, and then another will, and another, until the leadership changes in Washington and they stop pressing the issue. Oh, yes, judges have scripts, too, because they aspire to higher office like the other grifters in public office. Remember that The Party got them there, and they expect to rise in the system through the same means.

The electorate might want fair elections, but they don’t vote for them.

Voters forget stuff; they don’t know stuff; they believe in stuff that isn’t true; they like stuff that isn’t good for them, and they vote according to their scripts, mostly by checking their wing of The Party’s letter, especially in the pocket boroughs; you know, the guaranteed districts for the last part of The Party that drew the congressional district map.

Yes, The Party box is evil, but it will always be there because The Party runs the elections, says who’s on the ballots, what those ballots look like, and even how they’re counted. Electronic voting? Do you think anyone will count those votes fairly? Oops! Sorry; that bunch just disappeared! Can’t understand it; can’t recover them either; sorry! Do you think anyone really polices the voter rolls at all? Have your keeper adjust your meds if you think hundreds of voters live in that abandoned strip mall. Infinite ballot counts that find enough “mail-in” and “early” ballots with identical postmarks to make the distant third-place candidate leap safely into second place overnight? Perfectly credible only to the naïve and The Party.

It matters not who casts the ballots. What matters is who counts the ballots.

Joseph Stalin

The Party has to keep itself in charge.

And they will for the foreseeable future because we’re too lazy to kick them out. The hard work of looking at the voter roles, of unifying the crazy-quilt of registration and residency laws…you know, to make sure they’re not manipulated by the local kleptocrats. We can do it; we just don’t have the spine to do it, to fight The Party’s incredibly long reach. We’d rather let them just do what they want and act like it’s all in our/their best interests because of that letter after their name and, well, it’s easier than the alternative.

Take the (election) money out.

As I’ve advocated for decades:

• Take those letters off the ballot.

• Vote only for chief executives: presidents, governors, and mayors.

• End the pseudo-elections for representatives at all levels, eliminate all the districts, and draft those who represent us by lot from telephone company and utility billing records for a single term.

• Make the sheriffs, judges, district attorneys, clerks, and all others civil service jobs.

But, as we all know, that won’t happen because The Party won’t allow it and their media slaves live off the gravy train.

Ye are a factious crew, and enemies of all good government…Is there a single virtue now remaining amongst you? Is there not one vice you do not possess?...Gold is your God…Religion? My horse knows more of religion…Ye are grown intolerably odious to the whole nation. You [who] were deputed here by the people to get grievances redressed are yourselves become the greatest grievance…Go, get you out! Make haste! Ye venal slaves, be gone!...In the name of God, go!

Oliver Cromwell to Parliament, 20 Apr 1653

Do we need another civil war to get rid of these grifters who take our money and leave us in the ashes of our failed cities?

Crop Duster: A Novel of WWII

I don’t write about politics a lot—too divisive—but California drove me to do this. Crop Duster is tangentially about the fallout from a certain German election in 1933.

And Finally...

On 13 June:

323 BC: The latest accepted date for the death of Alexander the Great in Babylon; it may have been as early as 10 June. His cause of death is also unclear (may have been malaria, typhoid, poisoning, or a host of other things), as is his current burial place, as his tomb in Alexandria, Egypt, vanished in the 4th Century AD.

1920: US Post Office prohibits mailing children. After introducing Parcel Post in 1913, a few US parents technically “mailed” their children (accompanied by postal workers) to relatives to save on train fare. After several instances garnered media attention, the Post Office banned the practice.

And today is WORLD SOFTBALL DAY, in part commemorating this day in 1991, when the International Olympic Committee added women’s softball and men’s baseball to the Summer Games in 1992. Organizers dropped both softball and baseball in 2020 because of low interest, but they will make a comeback in 2026. Make up your minds, people.

Click on Archive for the Substack archive.

Go to www.linkedin.com/in/jdbcom for more on JDB Communications, LLC and its sole proprietor.

If you’ve read this far, share this with someone who might need it.

Make a Comment here.

There were several events and phenomena in Japan’s history that supplied ample fuel to a simmering fire that seemed to have been burning in the minds of much of the military and naval leadership of Japan before 1941. While much of Japan was quietly intent on merely surviving, the dominant social group in the archipelago was constantly trying to either stay in charge or justify having been in charge. This essay is one of several that visit the most important elements of samurai rage against the West and their own subjects, and their constant fear of being overthrown or even contradicted. As shown by the various “insults” and momentous events in Japan over the centuries, the formation of movements and societies and the ensuing incidents happened all too easily. Too, Japan and the Japanese were apparently masters at holding a grudge.

The Marco Polo Bridge and Gekokujo

On 7 July 1937, Japanese forces demanded entry into a suburban Beijing town, alleging that a Japanese soldier was missing. The Chinese objected; the shooting started, and Japan invaded. Despite the “missing” soldier returning to his unit, the Japanese persisted. Facts, of course, didn’t matter to the samurai, who would have whatever they wanted in China if they had to kill the last Chinese to do it. They proved this lack of regard starting in December at Nanking, where the death toll of civilians and disarmed Chinese soldiers may have exceeded 300,000 burned, shot, mutilated, strangled, and raped to death Chinese. Japanese officers had beheading contests. The international community watched from their churches, missions, and other more-or-less off-limits sanctuaries from samurai savagery, recording much of it in diaries which Japan spent generations denying.

Tokyo watched and waited as ammunition and fuel costs devoured the profits of Japanese businesses in Manchuria, and their soldiers and sailors plunged deeper into China. Diplomatically defensive while the atrocities piled up, the politicians and diplomats could only wait until the Chinese stopped fighting, which everyone hoped would be soon. In the meantime, American companies, at Washington’s behest, pleaded “limited availability” for critical exports, including tetra-ethyl led (TEL), high-nitrate fertilizers, and molasses used to make alcohols for explosive propellants. Suddenly copra, then jute, then nickel were in short supply. Almost everything Japan needed from elsewhere that the Americans could control became subject to silent sanctions.

Yet the samurai charged on, convinced that these Chinese vermin would end and that they could get the needed resources further into China. Just kill a few more, burn another town, rape a few thousand more women, and Chiang will give up. But the casualties kept piling up, the fuel and ammunition supplies burned up faster than expected, and the Chinese kept fighting in their ever-hopeless string of catastrophic losses punctuated by the odd Chinese pyrrhic victory, grubbing supplies and arms from Germany and the Soviets, the Americans and occasionally the British, begging for cash to pay for it all.

Tokyo could only watch, because at home, gekokujo incidents ran rampant. Ardent Shishi patriots murdered politicians and recalcitrant generals and even threatened the Imperial Palace. Neither the IJA nor the IJN could control or bargain with the fanatics dreaming of a “Showa Restoration” that would abolish political government, forgetting that it was the last Imperial “restoration” that enabled political government. Events after the 26 February Incident in 1936, controlling the samurai became nearly impossible. It was the day of the samurai and their Shishi, whether or not Japan liked it.

Useless Pacts

In 1936, Japan had signed the Anti-Comintern Pact with Germany as a threat to the Soviet Union and communism in general. Part of the fallout from that Pact was that the Soviets began supplying the Chinese, even if Stalin didn’t believe China was ready for communism (he didn’t back Mao’s CCP yet). In 1940, Japan signed the Tripartite Pact, a military alliance with Germany and Italy, that had practically no value to Japan other than the recognition by the two fascist powers of Japan’s “sphere of influence” in East Asia. While the three might have had common enemies—the US, USSR, and Britain—they had no means to help each other in any meaningful way. When Germany invaded Russia in 1941, Japan paid lip service to Germany’s plea for Japan to march into Siberia because they were so immersed in China, even if the IJA desired such a move. All that Japan’s strengthening of diplomatic ties with Europe did was make more enemies.

Indochina: The Steps Too Far

Desperate to cut off the supply routes to China, Japan bargained with Vichy for a “friendly occupation” of Tonkin (northern Indochina) in September 1940, which the French were in no position to resist. The tiny French garrison tried to resist Vichy control, but their pro-De Gaulle leaders were recalled. Staunch patriots, taking orders from Petain, replaced them. While the IJA said the move was strategic, the IJN said it was potentially catastrophic because it threatened their fuel and made expanding the occupation into Cochin China (southern Indochina) essential as a springboard to the Dutch East Indies, where they wanted to go, anyway. While this was so, Japan also knew that if they moved south, war with the US was almost certain—a war that Japanese realists knew it could not win.

The Tonkin move alarmed Washington, which reacted swiftly, cutting off most petroleum additives that only they controlled while throttling Japan’s credit. Enraged and frightened by the new sanctions, the samurai redoubled their efforts in China while they prepared to move into Cochin China, taking that fatal step in July 1941. Washington reacted by cutting off all petroleum products, all iron and aluminum scrap, and freezing all Japanese assets in the US.

The samurai believed they had little choice but to go to war with the rest of the world.

Roots of Samurai Rage and Fear: The Road to Destruction

There is practically no daylight between the samurai and the Tokyo government in most accounts of pre-1941 Japan, but the truth is far different. Yes, the samurai were savages, but the government was too frightened to stop them, and the war they were driving Japan into was hopeless before the first bomb dropped on Pearl Harbor.

And Finally...

On 6 June:

1916: Yuan Shikai dies of kidney failure in Beijing, China. Not satisfied with being a mere president of China, Shikai tried mightily to have himself crowned Emperor of China, and said he was the Emperor for 83 days, triggering the collapse of China’s central government and ushering in a period of chaos in China.

1944: The US, Britain, and Canada invade France at Normandy. The largest amphibious invasion in history—and it will probably ever be so—grabbed a narrow foothold on the continent that, within a week, contained nearly a million men.

And today is NATIONAL YO-YO DAY, celebrating the birth of Donald F. Duncan, Sr., in Kansas City, Missouri, on this day in 1892. Duncan was an American entrepreneur who founded the Duncan Toys Company and popularized the yo-yo, hence the day. I could never make them work.

Click on Archive for the Substack archive.

Go to www.linkedin.com/in/jdbcom for more on JDB Communications, LLC and its sole proprietor.

If you’ve read this far, share this with someone who might need it.

Make a Comment here.

This is a riff on an Aeon essay by Ben Chu.

A great wave of desire for more self-sufficiency is sweeping across the planet. Donald Trump has declared the “economic independence” of the United States, wanting to excise the US from the global trading system that it has so painstakingly built since WWII—a system that has delivered considerable economic benefits for everyone.

Trump is not alone in wanting to rely less on other countries for imports of goods and raw materials. China’s president Xi Jinping has been advocating self-reliance for China, discouraging imports and trying to enhance Chinese domestic production of everything from food to computer chips.

Others have followed this path too.

As the medieval world gave way to the Enlightenment and Romanticism in Europe, Jean-Jacques Rousseau reinvigorated the ideal of autarky. Rousseau held that primitive man had been naturally ‘solitary’, coming together with others only for mating, and was much happier for it.

…wandering in the forests without industry, without speech, without a home, without war, and without relationships, with no need for his fellow men, and similarly with no desire to harm them, perhaps even without ever recognizing any of them individually.

Jean Jaques Rousseau, Discourse on Inequality (1754)

Not a new idea, even to Rousseau.

The impulse has resonated deeply with both individuals and communities over many centuries. Understanding how the two interact and reinforce each other might be crucial to understanding the enduring appeal of this way of thinking, and for getting a sense of where it can lead us, whether as individuals, as nation states or as a global community.

Rousseau was wrong.

In Kenya’s Olorgesailie basin, anthropologists have found hand-worked axes made of obsidian—volcanic glass not from the area, suggesting that these Stone Age humans who lived some 320,000 years ago were trading with other groups. Part of what defines our species, making us distinct from other apes, seems to be Homo sapiens’ cooperative and social nature and, specifically, our capability for cultural learning.

Sakoku in Japan.

The Tokugawas imposed the policy of sakoku, or ‘closed country’ on Japan in the 17th Century, to maintain what they—Japanese, not just the shogun—saw as racial and ideological purity from especially Western ideas. They banned Christian missionaries; authorities persecuted Japanese citizens within the country and compelled their priests to abjure prior to execution. They forbade emigration and reduced Western trade almost to nothing. Economic isolationism also connected with resistance to foreign empires' incursions and served as a practical way to secure sovereignty and control, extending beyond mere abstract principles.

Self-sufficiency does not mean narrowness. To be self-sufficient is not to be altogether self-contained.

Gandhi

Gandhi’s vision of an India independent of British rule was for a network of economically autonomous villages growing their own crops and spinning their own cotton for clothing, writing, “every village has to be self-sustained and capable of managing its affairs even to the extent of defending itself against the whole world.” That’s why the image of the spinning wheel once sat at the heart of the tricolor Indian flag.

For Gandhi, self-sufficiency did not mean there would be no trade, but trade only in the things that the village could not realistically produce itself.

Yet at other times Gandhi struck a much more isolationist tone, insisting that ‘it is certainly our right and duty to discard everything foreign that is superfluous and even everything foreign that is necessary if we can produce or manufacture it in our country.’ Gandhi’s self-sufficiency movement - Swadeshi in Hindi - has to be understood as self-sufficiency for India primarily in relation to Britain, the imperial overlord. The movement's announcement occurred in Bengal in 1905, accompanied by a boycott of British goods. Swadeshi was Gandhi’s antidote to what he saw as the predatory imperial capitalism of the British.

That mindset of India needing self-sufficiency remained long after the nation achieved independence.

Germany's experience in WWI, when the British navy's blockade starved the country, prompted Hitler's autarkism. Writing in the 1920s, Hitler dismissed the idea that Germany could nourish its population through increases in agricultural productivity and lamented that “the German people is today even less in a position than in the years of peace to feed itself from its own land and territory.” The road to national self-preservation for the former lance-corporal would have to run through a radical program of building national self-sufficiency. And he believed that Germany’s salvation lay in conquering and exploiting the rural bounty of lands to the east, thus gaining the notorious Lebensraum (‘living space’). In a speech in 1936, when he had ascended to the German Chancellorship and crushed all internal opposition, Hitler made his expansionist territorial intentions plain:

If I had the Ural Mountains with their incalculable store of treasures in raw materials, Siberia with its vast forests, and the Ukraine with its tremendous wheat fields, Germany and the National Socialist leadership would swim in plenty!

Joseph Stalin, despite having Hitler’s fecund lands under his direct control, also felt a dread of national insecurity and pursued a policy of self- sufficiency for the Soviet Union in the 1930s, deliberately cutting off exports and seeking to establish Soviet economic independence from the capitalist world. Mao used similar justifications for self-reliance, based on national security in China during the Great Leap Forward of the 1950s, when he sought to create a national domestic steel industry from scratch by forcing farmers to melt down their pots and pans in backyard furnaces. In the 1950s, Kim II Sung made national self-sufficiency not just an important aim for North Korea, but the lodestar of his new regime, calling it Juche.

Establishing Juche means ... rejecting dependence on others, using one’s own brains, believing in one’s own strength, displaying the revolutionary spirit of self-reliance.

The specter of war primarily motivated Kim, Hitler, Stalin, and Mao, rather than ideals of national virtue, when they implemented their programs of national isolationism. The outcomes of their visions for self-sufficiency were catastrophic, resulting in genocide and suffering on a scarcely imaginable scale. North Korea remains a hermit kingdom, shaped by a totalitarian family cult, effectively a prison state for its people, a warning of the economic and social toll of isolationism. Yet despite the economic disasters autarky has often wrought, it’s important to recognize that some outstanding national economic success stories have also felt its allure.

A free people ought not only to be armed, but disciplined, and their safety and interest require that they should promote such manufactories as tend to render them independent of others for essential, particularly military, supplies.

George Washington, January 1790

The context was the threat of Great Britain, which was still a profound military danger to the nascent republic. Washington and his Treasury Secretary, Alexander Hamilton, believed they had to build up the states’ industrial base to enable the republic to defend itself. And this meant a high wall of tariffs to prevent the infant factories of the US from being suffocated by cheaper imported products from a more productive Britain. One of the first acts of the First Congress was the imposition of a tariff.

If we don’t have ... steel and lots of other things, we don’t have a military and, frankly, we just won’t have a country very long,..We used to make so many ships. We don’t make them anymore very much, but we’re going to make them very fast, very soon.

Donald Trump, 2025

When Trump explained why he had re-imposed tariffs on steel imports, he explicitly linked trade policy to national self-reliance and defense capabilities. Trump resurrected ideas that were influential at the very birth of the republic.

Like El Nino, the drive for self- sufficiency keeps returning.

Steele’s Battalion: The Great War Diaries

Arguably, America’s uneven performance in WWI resulted from American isolationism. A young man goes to France in an army that had never fought a war like he did. Yet, he and America prevailed.

…a novel about an all-American hero in the First World War…A gripping and satisfyingly detailed war novel in the vein of Sergeant York.

Kirkus Reviews

And Finally...

On 30 May:

1942: Operation MILLENNIUM begins, with as many as a thousand RAF aircraft targeting Cologne, Germany, in the largest air attack on a single target up to that time. A little under a thousand planes hit Cologne, dropping just over 34,000 tons of bombs, causing considerable damage and inflicting about 20,000 casualties.

1970: The US observes its last 30 May Memorial Day. Begun as Decoration Day in 1868, the Uniform Monday Holiday Act of 1968, which became effective in 1971, designated Memorial Day a national holiday and moved it from 30 May to the last Monday in May.

And today is NATIONAL CREATIVITY DAY, encouraging us to engage in making something never seen before, never imagined, or in describing something in a new way to stimulate not just imagination but a sense of accomplishing something—anything.

Click on Archive for the Substack archive.

Go to www.linkedin.com/in/jdbcom for more on JDB Communications, LLC and its sole proprietor.

If you’ve read this far, share this with someone who might need it.

Make a Comment here.

For your tomorrow, we gave our today.

John Maxwell Evans

Not everyone honors all graveyards and shrines, especially military ones, for a lot of reasons. In 1985, President Ronald Reagan drew criticism for his visit with West German Chancellor Helmut Kohl to a cemetery in Bitburg, Germany, that contained the graves of 2,000 German soldiers who died in World War II. Critics, including Holocaust survivor and Nobel Laureate Elie Wiesel, became especially incensed upon learning that the cemetery contained the graves of 49 deceased SS members.

Which SS were they in?

While it is popular (and partially accurate) to say that the Nazis tasked parts of the SS with implementing the Final Solution, it’s like saying water is wet. By 1944, it was impossible to have a profession that required a license, work for any part of the government or the Nazi party, or contract with the government without paying dues to the Allgemeine (general)-SS . Most senior military officers were also members, besides being party members, if they wanted to get promoted. And several German Army divisions built their own death camps in Russia, and many more took part in what is now called “ethnic cleansing,” and even “genocide” operations. Anyone condemning them lately?

The Waffen-(armed)-SS was a unique combat organization.

First formed as a bodyguard, the Waffen-SS grew from three regiments to over 38 divisions—about 900,000 men at its peak in 1944, outnumbering employees of the SS itself. Functionally, its units answered to the army commanders they served with, and by 1944 about a third of their ranks were draftees. Waffen-SS units included Germans and anyone else who wanted to serve, including Norwegians, Belgians, Englishmen, and Americans. While the organization took part in many atrocities (the International Tribunal declared it a criminal organization), so did the German Army. They all took a personal oath to Hitler; so did all German officers. The SS-Totenkopfverbände (TV, Death’s Head Units) ran the camps. Additional organs of the SS included the Gestapo and the Sicherheitsdienst (SD).

They all get painted with the same broad SS = war criminals brush.

If members of certain organizations have no moral right to be buried with “real” soldiers because of what’s on their collars, it’s hard to explain what morally differentiates the handful of poor (dead) sods in Bitburg from the camp guards. Revisionists can accept pragmatic reasons for treating them differently, but we should not dishonor all of them at the same time just because of who they’re buried with.

The Yasukuni Shrine is no different.

Emperor Meiji founded this Shinto shrine—the name means Peaceful Country Shrine—in Tokyo in 1869, and it commemorates all those who died in the service of Japan beginning in 1868 (the Boshin War). The shrine lists the names, origins, birthdates, and places of death of over two million people, including a thousand convicted war criminals from the Pacific War, and it commemorates anyone who died on behalf of Japan, including Koreans and Taiwanese, and it honors the souls of all the people who died during World War II, regardless of their nationality.

To dishonor the Yasukuni Shrine is to misunderstand both Shinto and the shrine…except for modern politics.

In the Shinto faith, the souls of the departed—kami—linger among the people they lived among, and people cannot ignore them just because they may have done something wrong in life. In Japanese culture, the dead are still part of the family. The Showa Emperor Hirohito visited the shrine eight times between the end of the war and 1975. However, he thereafter boycotted the shrine because of his (sudden) displeasure over the enshrinement of top convicted Japanese war criminals. Neither his son, the Heisei Emperor Akihito, nor his grandson, the Reiwa Emperor Naruhito, has visited the shrine because of those same “optics.” The Japanese Government’s involvement with the shrine remains highly controversial in some circles for reasons that have nothing to do with most of the souls honored there, which include Americans who firebombed Japan and those who died in the Bataan Death March.

We don’t boycott Arlington because of the handful of Confederate former slave-owners buried there in an obscure corner. They’re dead; they did what their societies wanted them to do; let them rest.

Click on Archive for the Substack archive.

Go to www.linkedin.com/in/jdbcom for more on JDB Communications, LLC and its sole proprietor.

If you’ve read this far, share this with someone who might need it.

Make a Comment here.

This is a riff on a Matthew Parker History Today article from 2014

It was supposed to have a glorious historical symmetry. August 2014, exactly a hundred years after the triumphant completion of the Panama Canal, should have seen the opening of the new $5.5 billion expansion. Amid strikes, huge cost overruns and rumors that the main construction consortium was in financial difficulty, the completion date slipped first to October, then to March 2015. The expansion project concluded in June 2016 at nearly twice the quoted cost. Each day of delay reportedly cost the canal company nearly a million dollars in lost revenue. Panama’s fiendish geology and extraordinary rainfall caused the cost overruns. The canal project has always attracted insane optimism, corruption, and disaster. Part of the danger of “the lure of Panama” was that, from the earliest days, it always looked so obvious and easy. Given the history of The Big Ditch, what is startling is that any of these setbacks should come as a surprise.

The Panama Canal has broken many people, fortunes, and reputations.

Having established a colony on the isthmus’ Atlantic coast in September 1513, the Spanish conquistador Vasco Nunez de Balboa led a party of men into the interior to search for the rumored Great Ocean across the mountains. Only a third survived the heat, insects, snakes and hostile Cuna Indians in the jungle, but on 25 September Balboa climbed a hill and ‘silent on a peak in Darien’ he turned one way and then the other; he could see both oceans clearly. Only a tantalizingly narrow strip of land blocked the way to the riches of the East. Alvaro de Saavedra, an engineer with Balboa, reported to Spain’s Charles V that although they should continue searching for a strait between the two oceans, if they did not find one, “yet it might not be impossible to make one.” In 1534, since no one found a waterway, Charles ordered a survey with a view to excavation. In an early example of the hubris that the canal dream attracted throughout its history, a priest wrote to Charles from Panama:

If there are mountains, there are also hands...To a King of Spain with the wealth of the Indies at his command, when the object to be attained is the spice trade, what is possible is easy.

Fortunately for future diggers, the Spanish authorities soon decided that it was safer to have a wall of land between the riches of Peru and rival European powers, so they did not undertake any work.

A bold plan from Scotland.

William Paterson was born in 1658. Part missionary, part buccaneer, and part speculator, he made a fortune as a promoter of moneymaking schemes, which included founding the Bank of England. After a sojourn in the Caribbean, Paterson had been in the grip of a venture to cap everything. By establishing ports on both coasts of the Panama isthmus, they could transfer cargoes over the narrow strip of land, saving ships the long and dangerous voyage around Cape Horn. Paterson identified a spot where, he said, there was “no mountain range at all” and where “broad, low valleys” extended from coast to coast. It was perfect enough to envisage not just a road but, in time, a waterway. Paterson intended a truly global entrepot, to rival any in the world, and whoever controlled it, proclaimed the Scot, would possess “the Gates to the Pacific and the keys to the Universe.” It is clear, however, that Paterson had never seen Panama. When the Scottish Parliament, jealous of the riches flowing into England from trade, passed an Act to encourage new settlements and commerce, Paterson rushed to Edinburgh to sell his Darien scheme, named for the dangerous and densely forested region on the modern Colombia-Panama border.

Do but open these doors and trade will increase trade, and money will beget money.

William Paterson to the Scottish Parliament

Warnings about Spain’s jealous guarding of the area and Paterson’s tendency to over-promote did not prevent the government from approving the plan. In June 1695, an Act of the Scottish Parliament established the Company of Scotland trading to Africa and the Indies, but then the English Parliament turned against the project. £300,000 in English subscriptions and royal assent to the Act vanished. However, a wave of Scottish patriotic indignation saw £400,000 pouring in from all levels of society, about half the country’s available capital.

It was a colossal risk for so much of the national silver.

In July 1698, five ships carrying 1,200 people left Edinburgh for Panama. Although over 40 of the colonists died on the three-and-a-half month voyage, at first all went well. They established friendly relations with the local tribes, cleared land, and found the soil to be highly fertile. But as soon as the Scots had landed in the New World, there were fierce protests from the Spanish ambassador and English merchants. In response, William III issued orders to the Governors of Virginia, New York, New England, Jamaica and Barbados, forbidding them to trade with or supply provisions to the Darien colonists. For a trading station, this was a fatal blow.

Everything unraveled.

The death rate from fever skyrocketed. No one attempted to open an overland route to the Pacific through Paterson’s imaginary valleys. Relations with the Indians cooled when it became apparent that the new arrivals were not preparing to attack the Spanish. Scarcity of food brought increasing weakness, disease, and demoralization; among the first to die was Paterson’s wife. Within six months, nearly 400 settlers had perished from fever or starvation. The onset of the rainy season in May and the concurrent further worsening of living conditions was the final straw. Utterly discouraged, on 20 June 1699, after just seven months, the Scots abandoned the isthmus. Only half of the weakened settlers would survive the journey home. Two more fleets sailed from Scotland, and twice settlers briefly re-established the colony. But in March 1700, the last settlers, weakened by hunger and disease, were driven out by Spanish troops. Paterson’s scheme cost over 2,000 lives, the savings of an entire nation and, with that, Scottish independence. Seeing the futility of trying to compete with England and stripped of capital from the disaster, Scotland merged into Great Britain in 1707.

The “Darien Disaster” hastened the coming of the Act of Union that dissolved the Scottish parliament.

Scotland’s tragedy did nothing to dampen interest in the dream of a transisthmian canal. Benjamin Franklin envisaged a canal to ensure world peace through enhanced commerce and communication. Thomas Jefferson saw the canal as an essential step towards the southward expansion of US power. But it was the lifting of the dead hand of Spanish rule in the 1820s and Europe’s Canal Age (ca. 1760-1860) and the United States, and the development of steam power, which gave the idea fresh momentum.

The isthmus saw a stream of optimistic surveyors and explorers.

It was an idea that, once taken on, seemed again and again to become an obsession. Backers were sometimes private companies, sometimes kings or emperors. The King of the Netherlands and Louis-Philippe of France were at various times interested. Most explorers got lost, perished from hunger or disease, or the Indians wiped them out. But they still sent back optimistic and false reports of “remarkable depressions” and Indian canals. The idea of a canal joining the Atlantic to the Pacific attracted amateur and proven engineers, millionaires, dreamers, charlatans like Paterson, and crackpots.

By the mid-19th Century, it was the greatest, unfulfilled engineering challenge in the world.

Which was why the isthmus remained the focus of international great power rivalry. In the 1840s it almost brought war between Britain and the US, only averted by the Clinton-Bulwer Treaty in 1850, pledging that neither would build a canal on their own. For the Americans, no canal was better than one under the control of a foreign power. At the end of the American Civil War, Washington launched an aggressive policy to reverse creeping European involvement in Central America. For Abraham Lincoln’s and Andrew Johnston’s Secretary of State William Seward, a transisthmian canal was a cornerstone of Manifest Destiny. Under Ulysses Grant (who, as a young Army officer, had transited the isthmus by train), surveyors meticulously carried out a series of surveys to decide the preferred route. They decided the best option was a canal in Nicaragua, using a high lake. But the Clinton-Bulwer Treaty and concerns that it did not have a strong enough navy to defend the waterway prevented any other action.

Here come the French.

Ferdinand de Lesseps, builder of the Suez Canal, brought the Compagnie Universelle du Canal Interocéanique to Panama in and began construction on a canal in 1881. The French public, told that it was their patriotic duty to back the canal project, duly did so in their hundreds of thousands. De Lesseps decided on a sea-level canal before he’d even seen the isthmus, but shared the enormous confidence of his age in the benign effects of new technology and tried to raise money in Britain and the United States. The Americans, infuriated that the French should be meddling in what they saw as their backyard, gave him nothing. Britain applauded him for his achievement at Suez, but his Panama plans were cold-shouldered.

The French effort, characterized by corruption, fantasy, and heroism, resulted in one of history’s greatest ever engineering disasters.

By 1884, the estimates of cost had been wildly optimistic, and there was a pretty much permanent epidemic of disease on the isthmus, the worst killers being malaria and yellow fever. People then thought "miasma"—toxic emanations from the rich corruption of tropical soil disturbed by the digging—caused malaria. The British Empire successfully used Jesuit’s bark, or quinine, as a preventive for malaria, but the French shunned it. Yellow fever was supposedly the result of filth or dead animals, or even, experts suggested, from a particular wind off the sea or from eating apples. Treatment comprised mustard, brandy, and cigars.

Knowledge that mosquitoes transmitted both diseases was still a decade away.

Over 20,000 died during the French canal period, most of them Jamaicans, who provided the muscle for the effort. Amazingly, some Frenchmen were prepared to die for the canal. Three out of four of the French engineers who set out to be part of de Lesseps’ scheme were dead within three months. Jules Dingier arrived in Panama as chief engineer in early 1883. Many people shared his theory that immoral personal behavior or moral weakness caused that yellow fever. To prove that the disease held no fear for him and to stiffen morale, he brought his wife, his son and daughter, and his daughter’s fiancé to Panama. Within a year and a half, all succumbed to the disease. Dingier returned to France a broken man. The sense of death all around, a sword of Damocles hanging over them, stoked a feeling of idealistic unreality. “The constant dangers of yellow fever,” wrote one engineer, “exalted the energy of those who were filled with a sincere love for the great task undertaken. To its irradiating influence was joined the heroic joy of self-sacrifice for the greatness of France.”

American observers on the isthmus took a more cynical line.

To them, such patriotic reflections were so much “Gallic hot air.” “Nothing is ever done by the canal company without an inordinate amount of pomp, circumstance and red tape,” one American journalist wrote in late 1887. “Of what one hears in Panama disregard one third, doubt one third, and disbelieve the other third ... The air is as rife with deception as with miasma.” To raise money at home, the company had to cover up the death rate and set ever more unrealistic excavation targets while distributing over 12 million francs to the French press to keep it on side.

The money borrowed became ever more expensive.

As the de Lesseps adventure, bedeviled by disease and engineering problems (many because of Panama’s extraordinarily heavy rainfall) and also fire, war and earthquakes, slid towards failure, American technicians on the isthmus became convinced that they would assume control of the enterprise. Great Britain, just as de Lesseps’ Suez Canal had been, also assumed they would take the Panama Canal over. Yet, in the crunch at the beginning of the 20th Century, the American diplomats found their British counterparts at last willing to remove the restrictions of the 1850 treaty. Embroiled in a costly and unpopular war in South Africa, a naval arms race with Germany, and fearful of Russian ambitions towards India, Great Britain had to remove the shackles of the treaty and concede hegemony over the western hemisphere to the United States.

Theodore Roosevelt acted with utter ruthlessness to make the canal a reality.

The Americans bought out the French company for $40 million, a figure that dwarfs the purchases of Louisiana, Alaska and the Philippines. When the Colombian government seemed unwilling to give in to the American demands that they concede total control over a canal zone, Roosevelt made plans to invade Panama, but fomented, supported and protected a separatist revolution on the isthmus. He then bullied the new Panama republic into signing a treaty that reduced it to vassalage and established total military control of the new canal zone. US citizens reacted sharply, and they accused the president of dragging the country down to the sordid level of the European land-grabbing powers. But it was a fait accompli and a watershed for US presidential power and American imperial ambition.

America learned virtually nothing from France’s failures.

For the first two years, they hoped to build a sea-level canal, which de Lesseps had already shown was impossible. Because of the fallout from Roosevelt’s action, there was pressure to ‘make the dirt fly’ and excavation work started without proper preparation. They tied the project up in horrendous bureaucracy to avoid the corruption of the French era. Worst of all, although established scientists had proven the mosquito theory for transmitting malaria and yellow fever, conservative members of the US canal leadership called it “balderdash” and would not back William Gorgas, the Commission’s head doctor, who was an experienced yellow fever specialist. The disease inevitably struck and, lacking the motivation of the French, three quarters of the American workers fled the isthmus as panic broke out.

A year after the start, the project was on its knees.

After two years of chaotic bungling, planners decided on a lock and lake canal, a “bridge of water” rather than a sea-level through-cut. Roosevelt hired John Stevens, a successful railway engineer, as chief engineer for the canal. He fully supported Gorgas’ work and, in 1906, a visit by the president himself boosted morale. To attract and keep skilled labor from the US, the canal authorities offered generous holidays, high pay, and free accommodation. In 1907, Roosevelt handed the project over to the Army after a crisis arose from Stevens's resignation because of exhaustion; the project experienced a 100 percent technical labor turnover each year, and domestic criticism arose that graft and waste riddled the project.

The Army regime was utterly ruthless, arresting and deporting critics and keeping the Panama republic on a tight rein.

This achieved, its greatest challenge was the Culebra Cut, the highest point on the canal line. This nine-mile stretch required three quarters of the total excavation. At the peak of the work, it contained 76 miles of track carrying 160 trains, 300 rock drills, and 6,000 men. With temperatures reaching 120 degrees, it became known as Hell’s Gorge. As the workers removed the mountain, the ground fought back. Because of the extreme geological complexity of the isthmus, slides were numberless, eventually adding 25 million cubic yards to the total excavation, which in the end would be three times that required for the Suez Canal. An American called it the “land of fantastical and unexpected. No one could say when the sun went down at night what the condition of the Cut would be the next morning.” Or, as one West Indian put it: “Today you dig, tomorrow it slides.”

Most of the labor force was from Barbados.

Of a population of 200,000, some 45,000 went to Panama during the American period. Both the French and the Americans treated West Indians as cheap and expendable. One described the working conditions as “some sort of semi-slavery,” and a rigid apartheid system was in place throughout the canal zone under the Americans. The West Indian workers received all the most dangerous jobs, and disease or accidents on the works made them three times as likely to die as any others. Nearly 6,000 died during the American construction period, as well as 300 US citizens. Despite obvious resentments, the West Indian accounts are full of pride in knowing they were part of a civilizing achievement. “Many times I met death at the door,” wrote one worker 50 years after the completion of the canal, “but thank God I am alive to see the great improvement the canal had made and the wonderful fame it has around the world.”

When the canal opened, it started a whole new chapter in trans-Pacific power politics.

Building it was the easy part, because the same day it opened in 1914, Japan declared war on Germany while seeing the Canal as a direct threat to their position in Asia. After the Americans turned the Canal over to Panama as required by treaty, China installed their operating companies on both ends, stopped only in 2026 by the Panamanian Supreme Court.

Everyone wants to control the path between the seas.

The Persistent Past: Discovering the Steele Diaries

Uncovering the past often requires monumental effort by many hands. When influential people try to keep facts from being discovered, it gets even harder.

This is how history books are written.

And Finally...

On 23 May:

1618: The third Defenestration of Prague took place when Bohemian nobles threw two imperial regents and their secretary from a third-story window of Prague Castle. This act of defiance against Habsburg authority triggered the revolt that sparked the Thirty Years’ War. The 1419 Defenestration sparked the Hussite Wars; the 1483 Defenestration didn’t do much.

1908: John Bardeen is born in Madison, Wisconsin. Bardeen was a brilliant physicist and engineer, known as the only person to win the Nobel Prize in Physics twice—first for the invention of the transistor (1956) and second for the theory of superconductivity (1972). Marie Curie won two Nobels for chemistry.

And today is NATIONAL TAFFY DAY for no discernable reason. I never liked the stuff—makes my jaw hurt—but knock yourself out.

Click on Archive for the Substack archive.

Go to www.linkedin.com/in/jdbcom for more on JDB Communications, LLC and its sole proprietor.

If you’ve read this far, share this with someone who might need it.

Make a Comment here.

This is a riff on a Suzannah Lipscombe column in History Today.

In 1987, Natalie Zemon Davis published Fiction in the Archives (Stanford University Press). It focuses on the made-up (or fictional) elements of royal letters of pardon and remission in 16th Century France. Davis called it fiction because the writers crafted the letters into literary creations that told a version of the truth about their lives and the crimes for which they sought pardon.

Not everything in the archives is “true” like a time machine.

Scholars have to work with absences, erasures, violence, fibs, fabrications, and tabulations in the sources. What we take to be facts can be fictions. In Wayward Lives, Beautiful Experiments (2019), a study of young black women in the US in the early 20th Century, Saidiya Hartman finds that between 1882 and 1925 it was lawful to arrest a “wayward minor” (under the age of 21) who was “willfully disobedient to the reasonable and lawful commands of parent, guardian or other custodian and is morally depraved or is in danger of becoming morally depraved.” This included those who, without ‘just cause’ or parental consent, were absent from their homes. Young women walking home after working late hours, going to parties and drinking, having sex outside of marriage, or suspected of being about to do so were vulnerable to arrest at random and, if found guilty, to a sentence of up to three years at the State Reformatory for Women.

They could face jail time for acting like a mid-20th Century teenager.

In the worldview upheld by the state archive, which social workers, probation officers, journalists, sociologists, and investigators generated, people assumed women of color were susceptible to criminality and deviancy. What remains in the archive justifies the confinement of these women by branding their acts of freedom as “moral depravity”

The official documents made her into ... delinquent, whore, average Negro on a mortuary table, incorrigible child, and disorderly woman.

Saidiya Hartman

Hartman created a “counter-narrative” which presses “at the limits of the case file and the document, speculated about what might have been,” As well as grounding her research in what the archive says, she considers what it does not. Like Davis, she turns to other sources to find a way into the past. She speculates about what might have been but cannot be verified, poses counterfactuals, renders indirect speech into dialogue, and asks searching, imaginative questions. She terms it “critical tabulation” Hartman is one of several scholars attempting to infuse historical writing with narrative strategies and literary techniques borrowed from novelists.

In other words, she made stuff up but told her readers about it.

A founding principle of historical writing is that narratives do not fictionalize, invent or dissemble, or make things up—except some writers do it all the time while they claim to be tethered to the archive. How then should we feel about Hartman’s counter-histories and critical tabulations? Hartman’s stories are histories “written with and against the archive,” filling in gaps and working around them. When there is no other way to enter a story, Hartman makes it up—call it “truthiness.” She defines the edges of established knowledge but envisions the unprovable. She resists the hubris of speaking for her subjects and the temptation to fill in the gaps, but also refuses to let the judgement of the powerful who created the documents in the archives be forever the judgement of posterity.

The past is a foreign country; they do things differently there.

LP Hartley

Hartley’s admonition is important because the archives belong to the past, describing something Saidiya Hartman didn’t always like. She can’t change what’s in the archives, so she wrote a different worldview based on, you guessed it, presentism, that bugbear of historians and pundits alike. While the past is the past, some writers don’t like how it worked, so rather than just report what’s there, they put stuff in that isn’t because they don’t like the attitudes or the results of those in the past.

The only founts of historical truth are faith in the sources and time machines.

John D. Beatty

This is how statues get torn down, flags burned, buildings and institutions get renamed: applying present sensibilities and politics to the past and condemning it for not conforming to what we want to see in the present.

We can’t keep the past from happening, but we can simply report on it.

The Past Not Taken: Three Novellas

Many non-historians regard archives as where “truth” lies. Most historical scholars know what Henry Ford meant when he said, “History is bunk.” He implied that in his time it didn’t explore real people’s lives deeply enough to offer something usable in the present. One budding scholar wanted to change that, but had first to figure out what part of his archives were fakes and what was authentic.

This is how history books are written.

And Finally...

On 16 May:

1943: Operation CHASTISE begins in the Ruhr Valley of Germany. RAF Wing Commander Guy Gibson led 617 Squadron on the raid to destroy the Eder, Möhne and Sorpe (Röhr) dams using novel “bounding” ordnance designed by Barnes Wallace. Other than the flooding caused by the destruction of the Möhne dam, losing its hydroelectric power crippled German industry for months.

1975: Junko Tabei is the first woman to reach the summit of Mouth Everest. A member of an all-female Japanese team, she’d been in an avalanche just days before, but she continued her ascent to reach the 8,848-meter (5.4 mile) peak.

And today is the INTERNATIONAL DAY OF LIGHT, commemorating the demonstration of the first laser (Light Amplification by the Stimulated Emission of Radiation) by Theodore H. Maiman at Hughes Research Laboratories, Malibu, California on this day in 1960. Maiman, building on generations of physicists and engineers, used a ruby crystal in his pulsed device. And today, we use one to confuse the hell out of our cats and dogs.

Click on Archive for the Substack archive.

Go to www.linkedin.com/in/jdbcom for more on JDB Communications, LLC and its sole proprietor.

If you’ve read this far, share this with someone who might need it.

Make a Comment here.

This is a riff on a Michelle Aroney article in History Today by the same name.

Astrology, originating in the Third Millenium BC in Mesopotamia, where priests used celestial movement observations to interpret divine signs and omens. Originally used for forecasting weather, agriculture, and political events, it developed from mundane Babylonian astrology into the zodiac-based, personal, and horoscopic systems adopted by Hellenistic Greece and Rome. Conflated with astronomy for about two thousand years, the practice spread around the Old World, becoming a major influence on ancient culture, politics, and medicine. Once considered a respected academic discipline closely tied to mathematics, since the 19th Century academia and science have deemed it a recreational pastime, superstition, and pseudoscience.

In the 15th Century, it was a popular parlor game.

Appearing in 1482, the Libro de la Ventura (Book of Fortune) became a staple of Renaissance parties. Translated into many languages, lavishly illustrated, and surviving in many editions, this parlor game became a bestseller across Europe. The point of the game was to divine answers to tricky questions, a series of which players could choose from. Will my upcoming trip go smoothly? Will I recover from this illness? Does my spouse truly love me? After selecting a question, the player rolled three dice and followed prompts through the book until they landed on an answer.

The game’s appeal partly lay in its dry humor.

The creators intended many of the answers about love for amusement, including, “Your husband is cheating on you; go and cheat on him too!” This unseriousness made the game less daunting to play with difficult, anxiety-inducing dilemmas about life, death, and relationships. But the playful could easily slide into the serious. Some owners crossed out dice combinations that led to bad answers, so they could roll again if the dice landed in that inauspicious combination. A similar Italian game, Le sorti (The Fates, 1540), likewise marketed itself as amusement, yet its stock questions were poignant and evergreen: Will I have children and will they be healthy? Am I secretly disliked by others? Will the news I’m waiting for be good or bad? No matter how cynical the player, landing on a bad or uncannily accurate answer to such questions could be deeply unsettling.

The topics in these games struck directly at core anxieties.

The Libro de la Ventura and Le sorti featured timeless questions with answers phrased to apply to anyone, like any horoscope or seer prediction. We know these were questions that people grappled with in the 16th Century because of the evidence provided by the archives of practising diviners. The largest such archive is the case records of the London astrologers Simon Forman (1552-1611) and Richard Napier (1559-1634), which document around 80,000 horoscopic consultations, shedding light on the questions that bothered people around 1600.

The future is not some place we are going, but one we are creating. The paths are not to be found, but made, and the activity of making them changes both the maker and the destination.

John Schaar

The Church had long condemned astrology, and elite culture marginalized it. Physicians, who were also astrologers, looked down on self-taught practitioners like Forman and Napier, dismissing them as quacks. Yet none of this stopped clients from coming in droves to their clinics, asking the astrologers to make known the unknown.

Early modern astrologers were the most general of general practitioners, in that people sought their help with all kinds of fears and anxieties. Forman and Napier’s records are vivid indexes of what bothered early modern people. As with the parlor games, many questions were about love. People wanted to know whether they were courting the ‘right’ person. In 1600 Elizabeth Nichols - Napier’s servant - asked him whether her suitor John Chivoll, whom she did not actually love, was ‘a fit match for her’; her family was putting pressure on her and the dilemma was making her ‘mutch disquieted in mind’. The astrologers did not always record their answers, but in this case Napier noted the outcome was ultimately in Elizabeth’s favor: “Nowe the match is broken off because she is unwilling to have him.” In 1608 Edward Osborn asked whether he would get the love of the woman he sought; that he was still asking the same question two years later probably points to the answer. But he was far from the most anxious romantic. Barrington Mullens consulted Forman about his love life a dozen times in a single year, at first asking for his prospects with Mary Hambden, before setting his sights instead on Elizabeth Southwell, only to double check whether giving up on this new match would finally secure him Mary’s hand later.

Platonic relationships also brought anxieties. Some consulted astrologers to know if they would maintain good relationships with friends or if bitter disputes would ever be resolved. People fretted over whether to reach out. Many asked if they could trust a certain person.

A few questions seemed on the edge of paranoia.

In 1618 William Bouth asked whether he had “an evil enemy intending mischief.” Family dynamics also troubled many. Mothers worried about their children, and children about their parents. Would an absent family member who was traveling or at war be ok?

Career anxieties were also predictably rife.

Margaret Worsape asked whether she should keep working her trade in London or move to the country. William Tillye asked if it was better to stay in his current trade or to change (as his mother was urging him). Employees were curious about the possibility of promotion, while employers were anxious about new hires. Politics, plagues, and invasions also troubled Forman and Napier’s clients. Some were stressed about their health, when they would die and how, and what happened after death. Their mental health, and that of their friends and family, was also a keen cause of stress.

Divination archives teach us about the fears and anxieties of people in the past.

Anxiety and fear are historically contingent, as are ideas of what is and what is not risky. Some of Forman and Napier’s clients asked questions that would not concern (most) of us today (is my neighbor a witch?). Others asked questions that are ageless: Are there better days coming? During the 17th Century, European society increasingly marginalized astrology; universities removed it from their curricula, and mainstream culture pushed its practice to the sidelines. Other specialists—therapists, career and financial advisers, and even insurance agents—gradually took over many of the roles of astrological consulting.

Yet astrology never left us, because the questions astrologers answered without factual information also remain.

Crop Duster: A Novel of WWII

Flying B-17s in Europe in 1943 required a great deal of luck to survive, but the odds were always against the American aircrews. Likewise, the German fighter pilots assigned to kill those Americans relied not just on skill but on Providence to stay alive.

And Finally...

On 9 May:

1386: Portugal and England conclude the Treaty of Windsor at Whitehall, London, England. The oldest active diplomatic alliance in the world established a (so far) permanent pact of mutual defense and friendship between the two countries, sealed by the marriage of two noble families, both of which are now extinct.

1945: Elements of the US 36th Infantry Division capture Hermann Goering in Radstadt, Austria. The former #2 man in Nazi Germany had resigned from all his posts just days before, and was under a sentence of death after the fall of Berlin a week before. The Allies would try him at Nurnberg, sentence him to death, but he would commit suicide before his execution.

And today is the TIME OF REMEMBRANCE AND RECONCILIATION FOR THOSE WHO LOST THEIR LIVES DURING THE SECOND WORLD WAR, commemorating this day in 1945 when the Soviet Union declared VE Day. The UN created the day in 2004.

Click on Archive for the Substack archive.

Go to www.linkedin.com/in/jdbcom for more on JDB Communications, LLC and its sole proprietor.

If you’ve read this far, share this with someone who might need it.

Make a Comment here.

There were several events and phenomena in Japan’s history that supplied ample fuel to a simmering fire that seemed to have been burning in the minds of much of the military and naval leadership of Japan before 1941. While much of Japan was quietly intent on merely surviving, the dominant social group in the archipelago was constantly trying to either stay in charge or justify having been in charge. This essay is one of several that visit the most important elements of samurai rage against the West and their own subjects, and their constant fear of being overthrown or even contradicted. As shown by the various “insults” and momentous events in Japan over the centuries, the formation of movements and societies and the ensuing incidents happened all too easily. Too, Japan and the Japanese were apparently masters at holding a grudge.

China and Japan over the Centuries

The earliest historical mention of the islands of Japan in any written form is in the 1st Century Chinese Book of Han, or History of the Earlier Han. The brief mention refers to Japan as divided into more than a hundred countries that occasionally paid tribute to the Han dynasty of China (206 BC-AD 220). While this description seems minor, it would remain accurate until the 19th Century. Though Japan's origins remain hotly debated, China, as a trader, undeniably exerted the largest single influence on the structure of Japan’s society and economy up to the 19th Century, something that Japan has acknowledged.

Japan’s geography is unforgiving and not friendly to people. Over 85% mountainous, growing enough food to live has always been a challenge, which has made trade essential for Japan’s survival. Japan and China remained in continual contact through trade regardless of what was going on between politicians, soldiers, and emperors. As poor as Japan appeared to be in foodstuffs, she had rich deposits of gold and silver—some of the largest known before the 19th Century—and her artisans made some of the best steel in the world, albeit in small batches. While Japanese ships before the 1850s had limited range by design, there were many of them, and they could reach the markets of China in most weather.

What central law there was in Japan from about the 8th Century until the 19th was based on Chinese legal codes and traditions, except those affecting the Emperor. While Japan’s pre-Meiji domestic economy was based on rice, the yen used for foreign trade rose and fell on China trade. Chinese social mores and graces, the vague structure of its nobility, and Confucianism and Buddhism (alongside Shinto) thrived in Japan. At the same time, Japan was always suspicious of China’s contacts with the outside world while it tried to insulate itself from outside influences by keeping European traders restricted to enclaves.

China in the 19th Century

Through trade, Japan could see what was going on in China and shuddered at the outcomes of the two Opium Wars (1839-43; 1856-60) and the Taiping Rebellion (1850-64). While trade with Japan survived, Britain—and thus Europe and America—gained almost unfettered access to China’s vast resources while fueling China’s almost insatiable appetite for opium. Turkey may have been India’s biggest opium customer before 1860, but China quickly overtook it despite heavy prohibitions on opium consumption in China.

This sad phenomenon, coupled with the twenty to thirty million dead from the Taiping Rebellion (which had about ten million combatants) weakened the fragmented Qing dynasty’s hold on power, especially because it needed to use American, British and French mercenaries to defeat the rebels. At the west took what they wanted from China—as they did in Japan—the samurai especially looked askance at what China had become: a weak beggary with vast resources.

After Perry and the avalanche of Europeans made unequal treaties with Japan beginning in 1854, treaties that some welcomed but others reviled, Japan’s war of unification—the Boshin War (1868-69)—finally joined the clans of Japan under a central leader who wasn’t one of them. After another civil war or two, Japan had a central government, introduced politics, and still kept trade ties with China. As Western ideas and inventions flooded into Japan, barely paid for because Japan’s silver and gold became scarce, China’s political structure and society still had trouble absorbing modernity. (So did parts of Japanese society, but that’s another story.) Japan thought of China as ripe for the picking. Japan and China went to war in 1894, and Japan cruised to victory but lost her territorial gains in the European Triple Intervention—a political catastrophe that the samurai saw as a grave insult they would not forget. Tottering from the loss, the Qing Dynasty tried economic and social reforms, but the Empress Dowager Cixi imprisoned the Guangxu Emperor in 1898, ending them. Cixi then backed an anti-foreigner revolt known as the Boxer Rebellion that ended in 1900 with vast concessions to the hated foreigners, including Japan, that doomed the dynasty.

China in the early 20th Century

To pay the huge indemnity to Japan, China sold a leasehold to Russia to build a bypass of the Trans-Siberian Railroad through its territory, shortening the transit by at least a week while domestic chaos reigned and revolution brewed, finally breaking out in 1911. While well-intentioned, the civil wars that resulted made matters worse and gave rise to the warlords that fragmented the country, including China’s industrial heartland, Manchuria. While still legally a part of China, Japan had partly occupied Manchuria since 1905, when Russia turned the railroad concessions over to Japan as an indemnity for losing their 1904-05 war with Japan. China sent no troops or warships to fight the Germans in WWI, but she sent tens of thousands of laborers, and Japan captured Germany’s China colonies. Japan’s Twenty-One Demands (reduced to Fifteen) of 1915 stung China while granting Japan nothing more than what she had, but it was the principle of the thing, you see.

The rise of Chaing-Kai Shek’s decidedly anti-communist Nationalists beginning in 1927 marked a stern departure from the chaos of earlier Chinese warlords because Chiang got more warlords to work with him when he threw the foreigners, including the Japanese, out and negated their extraterritoriality. Foreign investment came pouring in while Chiang battled the nascent Reds under Mao Zedong.

Culturally and economically, Japan had grown beyond her China cultural ties, and China had become a semi-stable quasi-modern state by 1931, when Japan took over Manchuria. Emboldened by their success, the samurai took advantage of their firepower in the Shanghai Incident in 1932, burning down a Chinese factory after a riot. But Japan was still a poor, industrialized but essentially agrarian nation dependent on outside sources for petroleum and most metals. The international opprobrium that followed hurt Japan’s economy deeply, while the United States, with its decades-old Open Door outlook, took on China as something of a project. With increased foreign trade and the weapons markets of Germany, the US, and the Soviet Union open to them, China’s armed forces modernized, pushing the Reds into the hills while Japan had to disband divisions to research radios.

Samurai rage boiled.

Roots of Samurai Rage and Fear: The Road to Pearl Harbor

Without China, there likely would have been no Japan. As a trading partner, Japan could have had no substitutes to China’s easy access, but money was becoming tight. Their 1915 gambit to turn China into a vassal failed, so by the 1930s there was just one choice: takeover.

And Finally...

On 2 May:

1945: The Battle of Berlin ends with the surrender of the city to Soviet forces, which had been fighting day and night, block-by-block for just over two weeks. Though casualty figures are still unclear, the human cost was easily 1.25 million German (including Martin Borman on the last day), Soviet and Polish dead. Germany would surrender to the Allied powers seven days later.

1952: The first flight of a commercial jet airliner, a BOAC DeHavilland DH.106 Comet I, took place between London and Johannesburg, with 36 passengers on board, flying in quiet and fast luxury above the weather that other airliners had to fly through. All passengers were first class.

And today is NATIONAL LIFE INSURANCE DAY, marking the day in 1760 when the Presbyterian Corporation of New York sold the first life insurance policies in America. Life insurance salesmen have beset us at dinnertime ever since.

Click on Archive for the Substack archive.

Go to www.linkedin.com/in/jdbcom for more on JDB Communications, LLC and its sole proprietor.

If you’ve read this far, share this with someone who might need it.

Make a Comment here.

Imagine a world for just a movement where there was no such thing as a lie and everything everyone said is the truth.

Not hard to do, really…or is it? In this world, there’s no such thing as fiction; there’s no question that could go unanswered because no one makes anything up and, most importantly, no one seeks answers. So there’s no humor, no satire, no religion…yeah, no religion because this world only believes what it sees, feels, knows. Bear with me, Christians and other believers, because I’m trying to make a point.

There’s this movie…

Released in 2009, The Invention of Lying (Ricky Gervais, Dan Lin, Lynda Obst, Oly Obst) and distributed by Warner Brothers is a quirky semi-comedy film in a modern setting. The storyline has the lead character, a "screenwriter," Mark (played by Ricky Gervais), who got fired from his job because nobody wanted to read about the 13th Century’s Black Plague. Since there's no fiction, and someone else has already claimed all the other, better subjects for narrative films, that’s the topic he’s stuck with. There are no actors in this world because no one knows they can impersonate someone else. So movies are just somebody telling unembellished stories of the past. But Mark gets canned for having lousy ratings.

In a time of deceit, telling the truth is a revolutionary act.

Eric Blair/George Orwell

In a time of truth, can there be revolution?

Mark needs to pay his rent because the landlord knows they fired him. So he goes to the bank and says he needs $800. The teller says he’s only got $300 in his account. Mark says, “but there’s at least $800 in there.” Now, there’s no lying in this world, so the teller says, “oh, our mistake; here,” and hands him the money. Now, he has no name for what he just did because there is no word for “truth,” either. The very concept of falsehood doesn’t exist here, so he just picks up his money, walks away and pays his rent.

Truthiness: the belief that something is true because of preexisting biases, even when directly contradicted by facts

This world is truthiness on steroids.

Only Mark doesn’t know what to call what he did because there’s no opposite. He tests this new concept of not-truth on a woman who passes him in the street (Stephanie March) uttering a mild insult. Mark says, “we have to have sex because the world is ending!” The next scene is in a hot-sheet motel where she’s entirely willing because, after all, the world is ending! Mark fakes a phone call from NASA that tells him the world is not ending, and the woman, relieved, insults him again and leaves. She doesn’t ask how NASA would even know why this random guy on the street would have such information, let alone how they would know where he was at that moment because there is no such thing as a lie in this reality.

The best jokes are dangerous, and dangerous because they are in some way truthful.

Kurt Vonnegut

Getting a job by lying.

Mark comes up with a “manuscript” he discovers about an alien invasion in the 13th Century, brings it to his former boss (Jeffery Tambor) and, naturally, gets his job back based on this lie. Mark declares that his movie will be the greatest story ever told and, of course, everyone nods in agreement because only Mark knows how to lie and becomes quite wealthy because he can just walk into the bank and say he has money there, and voila! He redirects the attention of the croupier at the casino and moves his bets around before he tells the floor boss his slot machine hit but didn’t produce his money and he gets paid off. When his mother was dying, Mark invented Heaven to make her and everyone around her feel better as she passed. This invention becomes widely known and, of course, believed. Mark invents the concepts of good and evil (since everything is true, there can be no good or evil except what someone says is good or evil) and a Man in the Sky who controls everything that he documents in ten rules on two pizza boxes. Really.

It is a comedy, after all, but in its way, it’s also a tragedy.

You can see where this is going. While Mark reads his rules in front of a vast audience and the media, they ask questions like, “how many bad things will keep me out of Heaven?” and “what happens to my mansion in Heaven when I go to live with my loved ones?” We don’t know what all the rules are because the film says it takes two hours to get through them, but we can imagine that coveting and the like is covered somewhere. The film turns into a get-the-girl (Jennifer Garner) romance where the rival (Rob Lowe) loses out at the altar, and we fade into the happy-ever-after and two kids, both of whom can lie, for Mark and his love interest.

What does lying tell us about truth?

The film is entertaining , and it did bank at the box office, but anyone thinking about the implications of this fantasy long enough will see the obvious holes. For one thing, what questions can there be in such a world? When everything is true, ambiguity, spin, explanations, and questions cease to exist. How can there be curiosity without questions? Without curiosity, where did all those inventions come from? Without the concept of sin or modesty, why is everyone clothed fashionably? There can be no art because images are false, and thus no fashions—and forget cameras. The cars, the TVs, the movies…none of it could exist because no one could imagine wanting, needing, or building them.

Can we have a world—a society—without curiosity and questions that are never asked because everything is already true?

Truth is the only safe ground to stand upon.

Elizabeth Cady Stanton

While the above may be true, it’s also misleading. The old joke about no naked man ever refusing anything from a naked woman—Adam and Eve—reminds us that truth and fiction are frequently subjective. Genesis tells us that the serpent gave Eve the apple of forbidden knowledge (about everything) after she bit it, who handed it to Adam, who bit it himself. God then banished both from the Garden of Eden for disobedience and for now knowing what God didn’t want them to know. Without those bites of the apple, how would we ever have “known” anything except what the God who made the garden, and the snake, and the apple, and Adam and Eve, wants us to know, which is nothing? How would anyone have ever followed Adam and Eve if they didn’t know the “sin” of procreation?

God in this reading sounds like an earthly dictator who only wanted two subjects.

OK, the creators of the Garden of Eden story had to have a mechanism for their narrative to move along, but that mechanism raises as many questions as it answers. The obvious plot hole in Invention of Lying is that the people still have questions, but they’re all directed at other people, not the natural world or the nature of the historical record, even the “record” Mark “discovers.” The script for the film grew from a skit the writer created about two people on a date who could not lie. Funny, no doubt, but expanded into a film, it has a tendency to reach into the absurd and avoids the nature of technological development and the historical profession.

No technology came about from a continuous string of successes.

Many failures occurred along the way, and documentation exists for them. But inventors need patrons, and in a world where there are no lies, progress has to be absolute. Many inventors sugar-coated their less-than-stellar results (and still do) until they finally succeeded. So did explorers and historians; they still do. Those old maps with monsters in the margins and exotic-looking people in those barely mapped parts; think they’re there? How many legends do we accept as historical fact? It’s not just politicians, pundits, advertisers, journalists, and “spokespersons” who lie; it’s just about everyone who needs to create a narrative to please or placate an audience or benefactor.

Scholars rely on accurate documents.

Great idea, but are they all accurate? In The Invention of Lying, people accept Mark’s “manuscript” as true since no false documents exist in that world. As a movie, it works to entertain. But in real life, do we take treasure troves such as the Epstein files as absolute truth because, well, we want all those people to be discredited? How about the Steele Dossier? Hunter’s Laptop? Are all documents in all archives and attics and drawers, and steamer trunks true just because they’re old? Any archivist or researcher will admit that forgeries abound, and locating them can be a perilous business because reputations are at stake and, sometimes, so is the historical record.

Lying says as much about us as truth does.

The Past Not Taken: Three Novellas

Some lies are defensive; some are offensive; some are just lies. Imagine a prestigious archive potentially half-full of forged documents, some of which can change the nature of the record in radical and dangerous ways, and half-full of helpful and reliable documents. How would a budding scholar, whose life is half-a-lie, work with those documents? This is how history books are written.

And Finally...

On 25 April:

1644: The last Ming Emperor, Chongzhen, hangs himself on the manmade Coal Hill/Jing Mountain outside of Beijing, China. Rebel forces under Li Zicheng had breached the city walls days before, and the Ming coffers were empty. Chongzhen is one of five Chinese emperors (of nearly 2,000) known to have committed suicide.

1953: Francis Crick’s and James Watson’s double helix DNA model is published in Nature Magazine, London, England. The model explained how genetic information stores and copies itself, earning Watson and Crick the Nobel Prize in medicine in 1962.

And today is ANZAC DAY, commemorating the day in 1915 when the Anglo-French-Australian-New Zealand landings began WWI’s ill-fated Gallipoli campaign in Turkey. People Down Under mark the day as a national day of commemoration, and it is best known for the participation of the Australia/New Zealand forces, collectively called ANZACs.

Click on Archive for the Substack archive.

Go to www.linkedin.com/in/jdbcom for more on JDB Communications, LLC and its sole proprietor.

If you’ve read this far, share this with someone who might need it.

Make a Comment here.

We have received assurances for decades that the world will end any decade now. Just you wait…here it comes…three…two…one…

No one can deny the impact of the climate crisis anymore. At least I hope they don’t. They must be brain dead if they do. Scientists report that with warming oceans powering more intense rains, storms like Helene are getting stronger and stronger. They’re not going to get less; they’re going to get stronger.

Joe Biden, 2 October 2024

This is from the man who “beat Medicare.” Here’s a couple from another futurist who wasn’t very good at being accurate, either.

The trouble with almost all environmental problems,’ says , the population biologist, ‘is that by the time we have enough evidence to convince people, you’re dead. . . . We must realize that unless we are extremely lucky, everybody will disappear in a cloud of blue steam in 20 years.

Paul R. Ehrlich, The New York Times, 1969

And…

No real action has been taken to save the environment, (Ehrlich) maintains. And it does need saving. Ehrlich predicts that the oceans will be as dead as Lake Erie in less than a decade.

Redlands Daily Facts, 1970

Check your calenders now and see if the oceans are dead; Erlich is and they ain’t. Erlich wrote a great deal about demographics and a “population bomb” that should have exploded some years ago. Last I saw, the population was cratering in most of the industrialized world.

As a teenager, I remember these prognostications of the coming ice age:

Scientist Predicts a New Ice Age by 21st Century: Air pollution may obliterate the sun and cause a new ice age in the first third of the next century . . . (I)f the current rate of increase in electric power generation continues, the demands for cooling water will boil dry the entire flow of the rivers and streams of the continental United States. . . . (B)y the next century ‘the consumption of oxygen in combustion processes, world-wide, will surpass all of the processes which return oxygen to the atmosphere.’

The Boston Globe, 1970

The world could be as little as 50 or 60 years away from a disastrous new ice age, a leading atmospheric scientist predicts. ... In the next 50 years,’ the fine dust man constantly puts into the atmosphere by fossil fuel-burning could screen out so much sunlight that the average temperature could drop by six degrees. If sustained ‘over several years’ — ‘five to 10,’ he estimated — ‘such a temperature decrease could be sufficient to trigger an ice age!’

Washington Post, 1971

And here come the academics:

Dear Mr. President: . . . We feel obliged to inform you on the results of the scientific conference held here recently. . . . The main conclusion of the meeting was that a global deterioration of climate, by order of magnitude larger than any hitherto experienced by civilized mankind, is a very real possibility and indeed may be due very soon. The cooling has natural cause and falls within the rank of processes which produced the last ice age. . . . The present rate of the cooling seems fast enough to bring glacial temperatures in about a century. However widely the weather varies from place to place and time to time, when meteorologists take an average of temperatures around the globe they find that the atmosphere has been growing gradually cooler for the past three decades. The trend shows no indication of reversing.

Brown University, Department of Geological Sciences, 1972

Some at the time questioned this orthodoxy, which wasn’t required for journalists yet.

Climatological Cassandras are becoming increasingly apprehensive, for the weather aberrations they are studying may be the harbinger of another ice age. Telltale signs are everywhere — from the unexpected persistence and thickness of pack ice in the waters around Iceland to the southward migration of a warmth-loving creature like the armadillo from the Midwest.

Time Magazine, 1974

But the “experts” reversed themselves just in time.

A senior U.N. environmental official says entire nations could be wiped off the face of the Earth by rising sea levels if the global warming trend is not reversed by the year 2000.

Associated Press, 1989

Check those calendars again and see how many nations have vanished because of rising sea levels. And here comes a Nobel Laureate/political hack/“expert” to assure us all is not well yet.

Unless drastic measures to reduce greenhouse gases are taken within the next 10 years, the world will reach a point of no return.

Al Gore, 2006

And one more “expert:”

The world is going to end in 12 years if we don’t address climate change.

Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, 2019

And her credentials are impeccable, no doubt, having gone to the same science schools as Gore.

A Common Thread: Time

“Experts” are especially careful to put their ends of the world comfortably in the future or in vague terms. Gore’s “point of no return,” for example, means…what? And if the predictions are closer in time, the predictor is a vague “senior official” who can’t be called on it when it didn’t happen, which brings up another common thread…

Recall, or A Lack Thereof

Few remember the global cooling/coming ice age claims from the ‘70s, and few will recall the earliest, most hysterical claims that said we’d all be dead by now. That’s in part because the predictions are wrong, and because people’s memory for such things is very, very short. While the climate catastrophes pronounced earlier in this century have yet to come to pass (depending on interpretation, of course), many of the draconian mandates are still in place. Germany’s industrial production has practically come to a standstill, and many homes are chilled because their “green energy” programs can’t keep the lights on and the furnaces running. Similar “earth-friendly” diktats mean rolling blackouts in California in the heat of summer.

Cynics win either way: everyone’s relieved when they’re wrong, and they’re regarded as seers when they’re right.

John D Beatty

Sensationalism Sells

The third common thread is how catastrophe becomes popular, often swiftly. Predict the end of the world tomorrow and most people will yawn. Predict it in a century, and some will listen, even start building an ark (figuratively). But predict that it will become inevitable if something doesn’t change in fifty years, and suddenly (nearly) everyone (important) scrambles to change whatever needs changing. We can see this in climate hysteria, and we’ll keep seeing it as long as someone with power gets something out of it. For example, now one of the biggest names in the climate change hysteria has changed his tune.

Although climate change will have serious consequences—particularly for people in the poorest countries—it will not lead to humanity’s demise. People will be able to live and thrive in most places on Earth for the foreseeable future. Emissions projections have gone down, and with the right policies and investments, innovation will allow us to drive emissions down much further.

Bill Gates, October 2025

But which prognostication do we think will people remember? His earlier pronouncements about the end of the world in line with Broadway Al Gore of St Albans and his bunch, providing we don’t end industrial society, or the later “yeah, it’ll be tough for some, but the sky ain’t falling?”

No one is interested in houses that aren’t on fire. No one is interested in fires that don’t require massive government intervention to extinguish.

Journalistic truisms

The ice age predictions didn’t come with “we can fix this” programs requiring massive state intervention into every aspect of human life, like the global warming/climate change alarums have. Gate’s prediction, too, has nothing politicians and bureaucracies can use in their campaigns to gain more money and power. It’s worth noting that Erlich passed away last month at age 93. Ya gotta wonder if he had anything to say about how wrong he was about, well, pretty much everything he predicted. Most journalistic outlets just announced his demise; few mentioned his erroneous predictions, which is not surprising.

Predicting the end of the world has become nothing more than a power grab.

Why The Samurai Lost Japan: A Study of Miscalculation and Folly

My co-author and I have endured a great deal of criticism about our failure analysis by those who insist that the Japanese leaders who attacked the West in 1941 felt they could dictate terms on the Potomac. Well, no; most only ever felt they might just break even.

Some predictions are more dangerous than others.

And Finally...

On 18 April:

1942: James Doolittle and his eighteen B-25 raiders launch from USS Hornet 250 miles east of their intended launch point. They would reach Japan around noon, catching the Japanese flat-footed. The physical damage they did was negligible; the psychological damage great and lasting.

1943: Betty Tramer and Hudson Beatty were joined in matrimony in a small ceremony in Detroit, Michigan. The groom, on leave from the Army, remained in town for another five days before he was off again to Ft. Bragg, thence to France. Dad would return in 1944.

And today is NATIONAL COLUMNISTS’ DAY, commemorating the death of Ernie Pyle on Ie Jima Island on this day in 1945. A well-known human interest columnist before the war, Pyle won a Pulitzer Prize in 1944 for his reporting on “GI Joe,” the common soldier.

Click on Archive for the Substack archive.

Go to www.linkedin.com/in/jdbcom for more on JDB Communications, LLC and its sole proprietor.

If you’ve read this far, share this with someone who might need it.

Make a Comment here.

This is a riff on a Bradford Morrow article of the same name on the Literary Hub from January 2025

Imagine waking up one morning and deciding to become William Shakespeare. You have fantasized about it for years, and now you’re taking the fateful step. Overcome by a heady mixture of zeal, naivete, and hubris, you’re freed from feelings of shame or guilt. Although you live in the late 18th rather than the early 17th Century, time won’t be an impediment for you because you’re gifted, studious, and even visionary in a deranged sort of way. Your father is a renowned collector of the original Shakespeare works, an authority in the field, so this transition is in your blood. Most important, when you present Dad with your handiwork, he will finally come to love you.

William Henry Ireland (1775-1835)

You find some period paper, mix the correct tone of iron gall ink, sharpen your quill. Then, you write a love letter to your wife, “Anne Hatherrewaye” and attach to it a lock of his—well, your—hair bound elegantly with pink and white silk thread you find in your mother’s sewing basket. Next, you scribe some hitherto unknown poems for Anne and, emboldened, fabricate passages of the original manuscripts of Hamlet and King Lear. You produce missives to Queen Elizabeth I. Careful not to create anachronisms, you autograph and annotate the margins of books printed before that other Shakespeare’s death in 1616.

Out of fear that one of the Elizabethan playwright’s legitimate descendants might step forward to lay claim to the growing sheaf of valuable artifacts you’ve so expertly forged, you counterfeit a genealogy that proves the trove is rightfully yours. You draft a legal document, and in it, your alter ego gives him this archive in 1613, because he was grateful to be rescued from the River Thames by one of your imaginary ancestors. You even manufacture a coat of arms that combines your family’s with his.

Your distinguished father is so proud of you for discovering these miraculous long-lost treasures, he publishes a book to memorialize your achievement. To your anxious delight, Miscellaneous Papers and Legal Instruments under the Hand and Seal of William Shakspeare [sic] becomes a bestselling cause célèbre in 1796, the same year Matthew Gregory Lewis’s The Monk appears, a lurid Gothic novel that also relies upon deceits and masked identities. It isn’t long before your worst fears come true, and eagle-eyed critic Edmund Malone accuses you of fraud that same fraught year, destroying your reputation. Soon, you confess. Ireland is one of the more notorious con men in the history of literary forgery, as old as literature itself.

As soon as man set foot on the slopes of Parnassus, the shadow of the forger fell on the path behind him. The first historian records the first literary fraud.

E.K. Chambers, The History and Motives of Literary Forgeries, 1891

Chambers refers to Herodotus—heralded by Cicero as the “Father of History” and excoriated as the “Father of Lies” by Plutarch since he played fast and loose with historical facts, concocting events in his Histories whenever he didn’t have first-hand knowledge and it suited his purposes. The faker of history, however, told the truth when he fingered its first forger.

Onomacritus of Athens (c. 530–480 BC)

For reasons we can only guess, based on the motivations of later forgers, this devious chresmologue (compiler of oracles), started inventing his own prophecies and verses, interleaving them with those of poet-polymath Musaeus of Athens’s originals. Herodotus accurately states that when one Lasus of Hermione, a lyric poet, snitched, they inevitably caught Onomacritus, and exiled him to Persia, where he simply continued his faux-oracular shenanigans, even urging Xerxes the Great to invade Greece, which he did.

Eugene Field II (1887-1944)

The son of the 19th Century author of children’s verse like “Wynkyn, Blynken, and Nod” and “Little Boy Blue,” Field II specialized in faking Abraham Lincoln documents, forging the president’s ownership autograph in books from his uncle’s library. After the president’s assassination in 1865 and well into the next century, members of this cohort of Lincoln “specialists” were busy reinventing honest Abe’s life and work. Today, Field II is part of a large rogues’ gallery of Lincoln forgers.

Henry Woodhouse (1884-1970)

Born in Italy, Mario Terenzio Enrico Casalegno changed his name after being released from prison for manslaughter in upstate New York. Unbowed, he reinvented himself as a credible scientist, aeronautics expert, economist, historian and forger.

Woodhouse—or Colonel Woodhouse, or Dr. Woodhouse, as he styled himself while ascending into higher echelons of society—produced fake Lincoln documents and missives by the signers of the Declaration of Independence. He even forged letters by his newfound friends Teddy Roosevelt, Amelia Earhart, and Alexander Graham Bell, to name a few. At some point Woodhouse positioned his creations side by side with authentic materials—not unlike his ancient predecessor, Onomacritus—though he did so in order to sell them at Gimbels Department Store in Manhattan, not archive them in the repositories of the tyrant Pisistratus in Athens. And while he served time for killing a fellow cook (he was a professional cook, too) and his illicit expertise was sometimes called into question, the good doctor Woodhouse was, astonishingly, never exposed as a forger during his lifetime.

If Abraham Lincoln has the unhappy distinction of being among the most forged of historical figures—maybe the most frequently forged of all—at least he attracted the best of the worst. Others famous for their first-rate simulacra of Lincoln documents are Harry D. Sickles (Field II’s partner-in-crime), John Laffite (or Laflin—names are fluid in the forgers’ subculture), and the masterly if careless Charles Weisberg, who died in Lewisburg Prison in Pennsylvania, serving one of several sentences after being convicted on fraud charges. The ink he used in supposed Civil War documents was wrong for the era. He wrote lengthy Lincoln letters, though Lincoln himself tended toward brevity. His last gaffe was to write an authorial inscription in Katherine Mansfield’s posthumously published The Dove’s Nest. You can, as a wise man once said, always get it right most of the time.

Joseph Cosey (1887-1950)

Born Martin Coneely, Cosey ran away from home and led a solitary, shady existence as a small-time crook, living hand to mouth as he developed a taste for alcohol and phony Lincoln letters. Cosey produced many thousands of unsurpassed forgeries of Washington, Benjamin Franklin, and Edgar Allan Poe with legendary ease. If you bought him a drink at a bar, he would knock out a masterful forgery for you on the spot; buy him another, get another. An unknown but likely considerable number of his forgeries remain unidentified to this day, reposing in private collections and temperature-controlled archives of institutions around the world. Scholars even cited some of them unwittingly in biographies of Poe and others, perverting our knowledge of influential writers and historical figures, revising American history itself. The mere mention of Cosey can provoke an apoplectic response from otherwise refined, mannerly collectors of 19th-century Americana.

We can appreciate the exasperation of being deceived by Cosey even decades after his mysterious disappearance and probable death in 1950. To buy unknowingly an immaculate fake for the same money that an original fetches, only to learn later that it’s by Cosey, not Jefferson or Twain, must be a vexing and expensive misstep. Forgers less skilled than Cosey have tricked even the most experienced collectors.

Thomas J. Wise (1859-1937)

Equal in skill to Cosey, but with an antithetical lifestyle and approach to forgery, Wise was the well-liked, esteemed dean of book collecting in his day and an illustrious bibliographer—president of the Bibliographical Society, no less. His Ashley Library was among England’s finest in private hands, subsidized by his shrewd dealings as a behind-the-scenes bookseller. He also covertly printed severely limited editions of pamphlets by the likes of Tennyson, Kipling, Rossetti, and Swinburne, editing them together from genuine published texts, then falsely dating them earlier than their first editions. Any serious, completist collector of one of his counterfeited writers really had to add these manufactured rarities to their holdings.

Given Wise’s impeccable reputation, together with the fact that he catalogued his fakes alongside genuine first editions in his erudite, elegant bibliographies, the scheme was, for a long time, a failsafe. Offering them a “newly discovered” Browning, Shelley, or Ruskin satisfied prospective buyers, and Wise usually received money. The British Museum was happy to pay the then-strong price of three guineas for a copy of his George Eliot pamphlet, Brother and Sister Sonnets, by Marian Lewes.

An intrepid pair of young rare book dealers, John W. Carter and Henry Graham Pollard, who published their shocking landmark bibliographic investigation, An Enquiry into the Nature of Certain Nineteenth Century Pamphlets, ran Wise to ground in 1934, three years before Wise died. While the authors never explicitly accused him of wrongdoing, controversy swirled around him, and he went to his grave denying any involvement.

Given what a precision craft forgery is, it’s intriguing that pride, precociousness, diffidence, depression, alcoholism, and a tendency to suicide feature in the lives of many of its finest practitioners.

While some are gregarious, like Wise, and others reclusive, like Cosey, most major forgers possessed the intellect, creativity, and energy to have pursued legitimate careers as historians, poets, professors, and the like, socially negotiable but for one countermanding trait. All forgers—even those who create fakes to make ends meet—share a compulsion to outwit experts and outmaneuver authorities.

The elite among them try to transcend accepted reality, nudge their bizarre way into the known, and be a player in history from a skewed and illegal angle. The forger’s own genius temporarily subsumes the genius of an authentic writer, which dovetails with it. With a defiant, willful, and full flowering of hubris, they aspire briefly to become the very person they forge. It is an intoxicating enterprise, this fusion of imagination and chicanery.

A white collar crime as sophisticated as it is deplorable.

Eventually, experts identify and expose most forgeries, just like most deceits unravel. Examples abound. In one recent case, a Galileo document dating from 1610, with historically groundbreaking sketches and notes depicting the orbits of Jupiter’s moons, stored at the University of Michigan Library for a century before being outed in August 2022 as the work of the infamous 20th Century Italian forger, Tobia Nicotra. Following extensive research into the document, focusing on a telltale watermark of the paper used by Nicotra, the library announced that their once-priceless “jewel” was a fake and, as a result, the revisionist history of Galileo prompted by this manuscript required yet another revision.

One might reasonably assume that all such proven forgeries would instantly lose their value and become worthless curiosities, but this is not always the case.

Indeed, some counterfeits and forgeries are collectible in themselves and even boast values similar to the originals. In the Sotheby’s October 18, 2024 sale of books from the magnificent Renaissance library of T. Kimball Brooker, an authentic 1502 copy of Dante’s Divine Comedy—one of eight known copies printed on vellum in Venice at the Aldine press, beautifully illuminated, brought $165,100. Several lots later, the Gabiano-Trot forgery of the same book printed on vellum just a year after in Lyon, France—the first edition of Dante ever printed outside Italy—sold at auction for a competitive $158,750. The intrigue behind Lyoness Aldine counterfeits is the stuff of legend, and in the history of intellectual property theft it is hardly surpassable for prowess, guts, and mendacity.

Were there a Forgers Hall of Fame—or, Infamy—influential sleight-of-handwriting artists would certainly include the precocious, deeply troubled

Thomas Chatterton (1752-1770)

As a boy, Chatterton brilliantly forged the spurious, inspired “Rowley” poems that would have a major impact on the Romantic poets Coleridge, Wordsworth, Keats, and Shelley. Precoious and deeply troubled, Chatterton killed himself in London at just 17.

James MacPherson (1736-1796)

The Scottish poet, politician, and collector claimed to have discovered and translated a Scottish/Gaelic epic from the third century by a Bard named Ossian. Though the subject of withering attacks from critics like Samuel Johnson, who claimed the “Ossian cycle” was a fraud, MacPherson’s forgery proved popular and is credited, for worse or better, with helping to fashion Scotland’s national self-image.

Robert Spring (1813-1876)

Spring migrated from England to America, erased his past, and set up an antiquarian bookshop in Philadelphia, where he began forging payment orders and letters by George Washington and others. Authorities arrested him, and he fled to Canada, but he returned to America, leaving a trail of fake documents before they apprehended him again. Like Cosey and Wise, Spring has the distinction of being collected in his own right as an upmarket forger whose work, whether identified as fake, is no doubt held in the archives of prestigious collections. Many, if not most, university or public libraries of any size could mount an exhibit of literary forgeries.

Good artists copy. Great artists steal.

Pablo Picasso

Forgers do both. And whether we think of them as twisted imitators, diabolical artificers, antiauthoritarian heroes, or whatever else, it is reasonable to believe that they will continue to cast shadows where legitimate writers tread. As E.K. Chambers long ago suggested, those of us who value originals over fakes will ever owe gratitude to the Lasus of Hermione, Edmund Malones, Carter and Pollards of the world for revealing the truth. After all, the history of literary forgery is still actively being made. More than one bookseller friend of mine is even now involved in exposing brazen forgeries of iconic modern writers.

This kind of ongoing work represents just the kind of erudite, diligent, passionate investigation that will bring forgers to heel at least most of the time. For as long as writers write and forgers forge, there will be astute, idealistic book sleuths—often book dealers, auction houses, and librarians—shining a true light into devious shadows.

The Past Not Taken: Three Novellas

The Truxton Archive at New England’s Crest University is a trove of over 20,000 documents, with an unclear provenance. Some of those documents could upend our view of America’s past, but may also be forgeries. How to tell the difference?

Curtis Durand walks us through the painstaking process of detecting fakes, showing us how our history books are written.

And Finally...

On 11 April:

1814: Napoleon I, Emperor of the French, signs the Treaty of Fontainebleau, abdicating his throne and ending the War of the Sixth Coalition, which had been raging for two years. Though stripped of his power, he kept the title and sailed off to his first exile on the island of Elba.

2007: Kurt Vonnegut dies in Manhattan, age 84, of complications from a fall when he hit his head. The author of Cat’s Cradle, Sirens of Titan and other absurdist novels, he is best known for his semi-autobiographical Slaughterhouse Five, or, The Children’s Crusade, partly based on his experience in Schlachthof fünf, where he sheltered from the British bombing of Dresden in January 1945.

And today is NATIONAL SUBMARINE DAY, commemorating this date in 1900 when the US Navy accepted its first true submarine, Holland IV, from her builders at Newport, Rhode Island.

Click on Archive for the Substack archive.

Go to www.linkedin.com/in/jdbcom for more on JDB Communications, LLC and its sole proprietor.

If you’ve read this far, share this with someone who might need it.

Make a Comment here.