This is a riff on a Mental Floss essay by Colin Scanlon.

Our furry and feathered companions are inextricably part of our existence, not just bystanders in human history. They’ve served as messengers, test subjects, and even soldiers. Animals have never merely plodded alongside us (often without choice or recognition) through history—they’ve shaped it.

Cher Ami

Charles Whittlesey and his battalion of the US 77th Infantry Division, surrounded by Germans with rapidly diminishing rations of food, water, and ammunition, sat isolated in the Forest of Argonne amid the carnage and chaos of WWI’s Meuse-Argonne Offensive. After the Germans captured or killed all his human messengers, Whittlesey had to use the Army Signal Corps Pigeon Service to communicate.

With the Germans closing in and his own people dropping artillery rounds on him, Whittlesey sent a pigeon named Cher Ami back with a message pinpointing their location and requesting help. The Germans shot Cheri Ami down shortly after taking flight, just like the two pigeons sent before him. But he miraculously took flight again and reached the rear with Whittlesey’s plea—despite being shot through the chest, blinded in one eye, and with one leg nearly ripped off. While medics rushed to save Cher Ami, the brave bird succumbed to his injuries some months later.

194 members of Whittlesey’s “Lost Battalion” owed their lives to Cher Ami. The United States recognized him as a war hero and awarded him the Animals in War and Peace Medal of Bravery posthumously in late 2019.

Cairo

On the evening of 1 May 2011, 23 U.S. Navy SEALs, alongside , descended on Al-Qaeda leader Osama Bin Laden’s compound. Operation NEPTUNE SPEAR was the culmination of a years-long manhunt undertaken by the United States government to capture Bin Laden after the events of the September 11 terrorist attacks.

A six-year-old Belgian Malinois dog, Cairo—on track to retire from the military just a month before—sniffed for any hidden explosives or passageways in the compound, and patrolled the perimeter while the SEALs located and killed Bin Laden; this bought the SEALs time to gather intelligence and escape.

Cairo’s handler, Will Chesney, adopted him after the dog retired from military service in 2013; Cairo remained his loyal companion until his passing in 2015.

Dolly the Sheep

Revealed to the public in February 1997, Dolly was the first mammal to be cloned via somatic cell nuclear transfer. The revolutionary cloning technique implants the nucleus of an adult cell into an immature egg cell. The egg cell has had its own nucleus removed, and this process produces a nascent embryo. Scientists at the Rosalind Institute in Scotland spearheaded the technique.

Although Dolly was not the first ever animal cloned, that distinction belongs to the tadpole, her preeminence as the first mammal cloned from an adult cell showed monumental progress in the practice of cloning, even leading some scientists to speculate the practice could someday revive extinct species. Scientists euthanized the “original” Dolly in 2003 because she suffered from severe arthritis and respiratory disease, but her miraculous existence has continued to spark discussions surrounding scientific ethics and the potential of mammalian cloning.

The Monkey That Killed A King

During an October 1920 stroll through the expansive grounds of his royal family’s Tatoi Palace, a poorly domesticated Barbary macaque attacked and bit King Alexander of Greece. Despite prompt dressing and cleaning of the bites, the Greek king’s wounds soon became infected and quickly turned septic. While doctors debated whether to amputate the king’s leg, the infection continued its spread, and just weeks later, Alexander was dead.

Alexander was just 27 years old at the time of his death and left no heirs, opening a massive power vacuum in the increasingly precarious Greek monarchy. An election and referendum led to the reinstatement of Alexander’s father, the previously deposed King Constantine. He abdicated the throne again in 1922 following Greece’s defeat in the Greco-Turkish War.

Smoky

In February 1944, an American soldier stumbled upon a 4-pound Yorkshire Terrier hiding in a deserted foxhole deep in the New Guinea jungle and returned to camp with the pup and sold her to William Wynne, who gave her the name Smoky. Smoky served as Wynne’s devoted companion, completing a dozen combat missions and earning eight battle stars for her service in the South Pacific. Wynne credited her with saving his own life by warning him of an incoming bombing. Besides providing entertainment and comfort to injured troops in hospitals across the South Pacific, Smoky was a crucial component in the construction of a critical Allies airbase on the Lingayen Gulf in the Philippines. She helped run a stretch of telegraph wire through a claustrophobic, 70-foot pipe, saving hundreds of soldiers from the risk of exposure to bombing by cutting a days-spanning project down to just a few minutes.

After returning from battle in 1945, Wynne and Smoky became a sensation, making over 40 television appearances together and never once repeating a trick. The duo spent the next 10 years traveling across the country to varying television appearances and veteran’s hospitals. Smoky passed away at approximately 14 years old in early 1957. Smoky posthumously became the first recorded therapy dog and sparked renewed interest in the Yorkshire Terrier breed.

Jim

Before the development of a diphtheria vaccine in 1923, doctors relied on antitoxin harvested from horses to treat the infection. Diphtheria, a serious bacterial infection targeting the respiratory system, was a very common and deadly disease that killed one in every 10 children infected prior to the antitoxin’s development. Diphtheria mortality plummeted when the antitoxin became widely available around the turn of the century before being functionally eradicated by the development and dissemination of a preventative vaccine.

One such horse, a retired milk wagon stallion named Jim, produced over 7 gallons of antitoxin before being diagnosed with tetanus and euthanized in 1901. After Jim’s death, scientists discovered that tetanus had contaminated his antitoxin, and that they had administered it to 13 children, causing their deaths. The first federal regulations for biopharmaceuticals then addressed instances of such contamination. This led to the formation of the Center for Biologics Evaluation and Research in 1902, and later the Food and Drug Administration in 1906.

Tesla’s Pigeon

Though he believed any romantic or sexual entanglements would only distract from his scientific work, the eccentric inventor and lifelong bachelor Nikola Tesla had one great love in his life: a pigeon. In 1922, Tesla told friends that a striking white bird flew to his room to tell him she was dying, emitting a great white light from her eyes before passing away. He also said that he believed his life's work was complete after the pigeon died. Tesla’s career continued its precipitous decline, and the once-renowned inventor spent much of the rest of his life destitute and self-secluded. Following years of financial instability and a seriously diminishing public reputation, Tesla, well into his eighties, died at the Hotel New Yorker on 7 January 1943, after suffering coronary thrombosis.

Laika

Because of her docile nature, Russian scientists chose a stray husky-spitz mix plucked from the streets of Moscow, nicknamed Laika (Russian for “barker”) as the Sputnik II spacecraft’s lone passenger . She underwent extensive space training and conditioning before making her one-way journey into outer space. Although expected to perish on her journey into Earth’s orbit, her handlers packed Laika inside Sputnik II’s diminutive cockpit with a few days’ of food and water before launching into space on 3 November 1957.

Conflicting reports exist regarding exactly how and when Laika died, but she likely succumbed to overheating after just a few orbits around the Earth. Sputnik II continued to orbit the Earth for five months before disintegrating while reentering the atmosphere. The Russian space training center in Star City erected a statue of the canine cosmonaut in Laika’s memory.

The Pig That Nearly Started a War

In June 1859, Lyman Cutlar, an American farmer on Washington’s San Juan Island, shot and killed a pig belonging to Charles Griffin, an employee of the British Hudson’s Bay Company, after he’d discovered the animal rooting through his vegetable garden. Griffin demanded compensation for the pig; Lyman refused, saying said pig was on his land. Who owned the island—the US or Britain—had been in dispute for years.

After British authorities threatened to arrest Lyman, the US Army sent Captain George Pickett and a few dozen soldiers to San Juan Island to defend the American settlers. The British, interpreting this as an act of aggression, responded by sending three Royal Navy ships to San Juan; the US then answered this by dispatching hundreds more troops. President James Buchanan sent General-in-Chief Winfield Scott to negotiate terms with Sir James Douglas, Governor of the Colony of British Columbia, to avoid all out war. This incident, known to historians as the Pig War, came about because of differing interpretations of the British–American agreement delineating territory borders in the Pacific Northwest, the Oregon Treaty. After agreeing to share military control of San Juan Island in 1859, Wilhelm I of Germany, acting as mediator, granted the US full control of the island in 1872.

Sergeant’s Business and Other Stories

Writing about animals is a tricky business—it either turns into a children’s story or science fiction. I ventured into prehistory when I wrote “Into The Fire” about a hungry hunter who takes on a partner as desperate as he.

And Finally...

On 26 September:

1580: Frances Drake completes his circumnavigation of the Earth—the first by an English subject—landing at Plymouth, England, after a voyage of nearly four years. Authorized by Queen Elizabeth I and originally comprising five ships, the “voyage of discovery” was an ambitious raid and the start of England’s challenge to the global domination of Spain and Portugal.

1655: Dutch Director-General Peter Stuyvesant led a fleet of warships to recapture Fort Casimir (today’s New Castle, Delaware) on the Delaware River from the Swedes, who had captured it the year before. This brought all of New Sweden bordering modern Delaware, Maryland, New Jersey, and Pennsylvania under Dutch control.

And today is NATIONAL JOHNNY APPLESEED DAY, commemorating the birth of John Chapman/Johnny Appleseed on this day in Leominster, Massachusetts in 1774 (yes, he was quite real).

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I love America. I love it for what it is. But I don’t always love what it does. My love for my country is not based on circumstance or performance. It is an unconditional love that does not ignore its flaws.

Zachary Cote

A lot of us can get behind that. Competent history teachers should teach the bad of America—along with the good—in a fair, commonsense manner. Unfortunately, we know folks like Cote express these sentiments until they say something like this:

[S]chools need to reevaluate history instruction to empower students to contemplate historical tensions and enable a type of patriotism that transcends our polarizing moment …A focus on content makes us choose between 1619 and 1776; a disciplinary approach empowers us to recognize the historical significance of both. A history education that prioritizes what needs to be learned forces us to choose between Juneteenth and Independence Day. A discipline that instructs us how we can learn more deeply about our nation’s past enables us to celebrate both.

Cote worries that Donald Trump’s edicts will “deemphasize” tragedies such as the fate of Native Americans and blacks during Reconstruction. Are contemporary teachers “deemphasizing” topics like slavery, the plight of Native Americans, and the like? The pushback (for lack of a better term) from Trump and others comes from an overemphasis on such topics to the exclusion of other material. Until the 21st Century, Juneteenth was a very local, often ignored day. Now people falsely claim it marks the day the US truly abolished slavery, instead of the day a Union General read an order in Galveston, because many in the area knew of emancipation long before.

No choice is necessary unless you want to believe a myth.

How have so many college students come to believe slavery was an exclusively American phenomenon? How can over 90 percent of college grads know that Thomas Jefferson owned slaves or that (may have) fathered children by a slave, but less than 10 percent know he wrote the Declaration of Independence and served two terms as president? Why have modern “educators” quickly embraced factually flawed programs like the 1619 Project? How is it that high school kids are being taught that Japan’s attack on Pearl Harbor resulted from American imperialism?

Should we take Cote at his word?

The stated mission of Thinking Nation is to “empower students to thrive as engaged and critical thinkers, support teachers with meaningful curricula, training, and technology, [and] “transform social studies education for the future of democracy.”

Thinking Nation’s main page says, “Historical Thinking Promotes Equity.”

The notorious DEI codewords “critical,” “transform,” and especially “equity” should set off our BS detectors. Too, one of the organization’s board of directors is Catherine O’Donnell, a history professor at Arizona State University who, a few years back, co-penned an article in which she lamented certain areas of academia no longer are “publicly perceived as authoritative,” and that these alleged experts “enjoy no special public esteem.”

The culprits behind this (accurate) perception? The free-speech right.

Sure, America has flaws; thousands of them. The country was born of people with flaws, and the republic developed more. But we overcame most of them, abolished the causes of many more, and have rectified many injustices through the centuries. To emphasize the flaws and ignore the achievements, which many “educators,” pundits, and other blowhards try to do, is just as “problematic” as doing the opposite. Doing so strays from teaching and marches straight to indoctrination by forbidding students from holding any positions other than that of the pedagog grading the exams.

The Past Not Taken: Three Novellas

People with flaws, biases, and access to sources write history, some sources better than others. Knowing how to put it together takes a great deal of work; trust me on this. Yet, it’s surprising how much of what we “know” about the past just ain’t so.

This is how history books are written.

And Finally...

On 19 September:

1853: The battle called Chickamauga entered its second day in northeastern Georgia near a creek by that name. The three-day brawl, fought between the forces of William S. Rosecrans and Braxton Bragg, ended the next day with the Union forces retreating to Chattanooga, Tennessee, to be besieged for two months. Although the Confederacy held the battlefield and is said to have “won,” they suffered more casualties than their counterparts in this second most costly battle of the Civil War.

1995: The Unabomber Manifesto, or "Industrial Society and its Future," appears in the Washington Post. The 35,000-word manifesto served as an ideological foundation for Ted Kaczynski’s 1978–1995 mail bomb campaign. His brother identified the writing, and authorities arrested Kaczynski on 3 April 1996 based on his information.

Avast ye swabs! ‘Tis Talk Like A Pirate Day!

This parodic holiday, created on 6 June 1995, by John Baur and Mark Summers of Albany, Oregon, came about because of an injury. During a racquetball game between Summers and Baur, one of them, in pain, said, “Aaarrr!” and the idea of talking like a pirate (Eglish with a West Country accent) today was born. Out of respect for observing the 1944 Normandy landings on that day, they chose Summers’ ex-wife’s birthday (19 September), as it would be easy for him to remember.

It started as a private joke.

The joke gained exposure when “Ol’ Chumbucket” Baur and “Cap’n Slappy” Summers sent a letter about their invented holiday to syndicated humor columnist Dave Barry in 2002. Barry, unable to let a good punchline go to waste, promoted the joke in his column…and it morphed from there into…well…it’s gone international, apparently, observed in Britain by 2023.

The Pastafarian movement has adopted it since.

The Church of the Flying Spaghetti Monster, another parody, got its start in opposition to the teaching of intelligent design in public schools. Adherents hold Pastafarianism is as legitimate a religion as any other, and the “faith” has received some limited recognition…and how it became associated with talking like a pirate is a mystery for the ages…

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When English polymath Charles Babbage received guests, he liked to show them a framed portrait of the French weaver Joseph Marie Jacquard seated beside a model of his loom. “Oh, that engraving?” the Duke of Wellington asked when he saw it. It wasn’t an engraving, but a sheet of finely woven silk—a thousand threads to the inch—so subtle and detailed that it deceived many who saw it. It also held the secret to Babbage’s analytical engine: Jacquard’s right hand rests on a stack of punch cards that controlled the loom’s operation.

(For those of you children who don’t know what “punch cards” are/were, the world of computation could not have gotten this far without them, and some niche systems still use them for data entry.)

Jacquard was born in Lyon on 7 July 1752 into a family engaged in the city’s principal trade, which involved some 40% of the workforce: silk weaving. Although his father was a man of property, Jacquard received no formal schooling and remained illiterate until he was 13, when his printer/bookseller brother-in-law finally taught him. He may have worked at many trades other than weaving; though his work history until the early 19th Century is murky, his later record as an inventor supports this. Weaving—silk or any other textile—was an arduous, physically demanding trade before both automation and steam power transformed the industry in the 19th Century, and Jacquard was apparently not physically capable of operating the looms of his early life.

Jacquard’s early inventions were unsuccessful.

He invented a treadle loom in 1800 and a loom to weave fishing nets in 1803, neither commercially viable. Starting in 1804, he began on the loom named for him to weave patterned silk automatically. Based on the work of an earlier weaver, Jean Baptiste Falcon, the possibilities of Jacquard’s device were endless and its potential immediately recognized. On 12 April 1805, Emperor Napoleon and Empress Josephine visited Lyon and viewed Jacquard’s new loom. On 15 April 1805, the emperor granted the patent for Jacquard’s loom to the city of Lyon. After that, Jacquard’s process was used to weave all the Emperor’s ceremonial clothes. In return, Jacquard received a lifelong pension of 3,000 francs. Jacquard received a royalty of 50 francs for each loom that was bought and used between 1805 and 1811.

Simplicity, Speed, and Complexity

The complexity and speed of the loom were avatars of the modern world. Weaving had been a two-person job; Jacquard’s loom only needed one operator and worked 24 times faster. The portrait Babbage later displayed required 24,000 individual cards, each with 1,050 hole positions, a level of sophistication that might have required a year for another loom to produce, but that Jacquard’s loom made in two weeks.

Adaptations

Babbage had spent the 1820s working on a cogwheel-based calculating machine, known as the Difference Engine. When he learned of Jacquard’s work, he saw its potential immediately.

The system of cards which Jacquard invented are the means by which we can communicate to a very ordinary loom orders to weave any pattern that may be desired…Availing myself of the same beautiful invention I have by similar means communicated to my Calculating Engine orders to calculate any formula however complicated.

Charles Babbage

Although Babbage receives credit for using such data entry means in computing machines, no evidence shows that he ever built one.

‘We may say ... that the Analytical Engine weaves algebraic patterns, just as the Jacquard-loom weaves flowers and leaves.’

Ada Lovelace

Lovelace, who worked with Babbage, gets credit for having written the first computer programs which, like Babbage’s engine, never took physical form. Herman Hollerith took the Jacquard idea a step further, developing the “modern” punch card for the 1890 US census, forever wedding his name to the simple means that would endure as a mainstay of computing until the 1980s.

Not a terrible legacy for a silk weaver from Lyons.

The Fire Blitz: Burning Down Japan

Inventors often start out with one vision, just to see it used for something else entirely. By 1945, Wilbur Wright was still alive when the great-grandchildren of his invention laid waste to a country.

And Finally...

On 12 September:

490 BC: The conventional date for the Battle of Marathon between the forces of Athens and Platea and the Persian Empire in Attic Greece. After a one-sided battle where only a fraction of the Persian forces could engage, the Greeks pushed their enemies back to their ships, sinking several. According to legend, a Greek left for Sparta after the battle, running the entire 140 miles, giving the long-distance event its 19th Century name. (The modern marathon event is only 26 miles).

1933: While walking along London’s Southampton Row, Hungarian physicist Leó Szilárd conceived of the nuclear chain reaction while waiting for a red light to change. Szilárd had recently read a newspaper article detailing English physicist Ernest Rutherford’s dismissal of atomic energy as “moonshine.” Both would work on atomic energy and nuclear weapons.

And today is FEMALE POLICE OFFICER DAY, commemorating this day in 1910 when Alice Stebbins Wells was sworn into the Los Angeles Police Department and became the first female police officer in the US. Five years later, sixteen other cities and several countries had women serving in their police departments, working almost exclusively with women and children in police custody.

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As a cure for worrying, work is better than whisky.

Ralph Waldo Emerson

As it always does…

Early to bed, early to rise, work like hell, and advertise.

Ted Turner

And most of us take the day off…

I’m a greater believer in luck, and I find the harder I work the more I have of it.

Thomas Jefferson

But if you’re a self-employed small business owner or self-published writer, not necessarily…

Pleasure in the job puts perfection into the work.

Aristotle

Especially if you love what you do.

Happy Labor Day, everyone!

The Bayeux Tapestry is an embroidered cloth that depicts the events leading up to the Norman Conquest of England in 1066, led by William, Duke of Normandy, challenging Harold II, King of England, and culminating in the Battle of Hastings. But is this monumental work of art Norman, French, or something in between? Discussions regarding this late 11th Century embroidery suggest an English origin. From its inception and throughout its 950-year history, it has embodied a rich tradition of cross-cultural meaning and exchange.

Made in England?

The Tapestry’s link to Bayeux probably dates to its inception. Strong evidence suggests that William’s half-brother, Bishop Odo of Bayeux, commissioned it, though others, including William’s queen, Matilda, Count Eustace of Boulogne, and even William himself, may have paid for it, too.

The piece comprises 58 scenes captioned in Medieval Latin, embroidered (crewel) with dyed wool yarns (and so not technically a woven tapestry) on tabby-woven linen, a rare example of Romanesque art. Its size—nearly 230 feet (70 m, or a little over 76 yards) long and 20 inches (50 cm, just under 2 feet) tall—certainly suggests it was the work of many hands. The unembroidered background provides a large, clear field of cloth, which allows the figures and decorative elements to stand out clearly.

It’s been called a lot of things by both English and French scholars, including the Toile de St-Jean (canvas of St John, because of its regular display in Bayeux on the Feast of St John), Toilette du Due Guillaume (toilette meaning a small canvas), Tapisserie de Guillaume le Conquerant and the Tapestry of Queen Maud (Matilda). Almost every commentator recorded a local tradition attributing the Tapestry to Queen Matilda, a theory of origin which persisted until the mid-20th Century.

Regardless of who ordered it, the Tapestry represents a pro-Norman justification of the Norman Conquest of England. Its narrative asserts that Harold promised to uphold William’s claim to England and swore an oath of allegiance on sacred relics in Normandy before taking the crown for himself after the death of Edward the Confessor. This left William with little choice but to invade England and punish Harold as an oath-breaker. Yet, the narrative of the Tapestry is not one-sided; it depicts Harold a more tragic hero than an arch-villain, initially shown as a friend of William and fighting for him, even saving Norman soldiers from the mud of the River Couesnon, before ultimately falling prey to his own ambitions.

Despite its pro-Norman narrative, England, with a tradition of and high-quality needlework, has a better claim on the Tapestry’s origin. There is also a strong tradition of pictorial narratives in some of the best works of pre-Conquest English manuscript art, including the “Old English Hexateuch” (with over 400 scenes depicting the first six books of the Bible now in St Augustine’s Abbey in Canterbury) and many later 11th Century English narrative works. There is no evidence of such needlework in 11th Century Normandy, and none for Norman manuscript art before the 12th Century; these traditions probably developed because of exchanges with England. Finally, English-speaking designers and embroiderers were the only ones who knew the English variant spellings in the Tapestry. Indeed, there are few surviving 11th Century wall hangings of any size.

Wilderness Years

The unheralded makers (there would have been at least a score of them) must have completed the Tapestry before William exiled Odo in 1082, after a disagreement over the bishop’s planned expedition to Italy to proclaim himself pope. It is tempting to imagine what Odo did with it and how William received it. There may have been a grand public unveiling well received by William and his fellow Normans. We know the Tapestry must have been accessible before 1102, when a Norman poet, Baudry of Bourgueil, who imagined it kept in the bedroom of William’s daughter, Adela. Although Baudry probably intended this fanciful description to flatter Adela, with whom he hoped to win favor, the story reveals that he at least saw the Tapestry, but historians cannot determine when or where.

For the next eight centuries, scant descriptions of the Tapestry offer thin clues as to its whereabouts. In 1562, a Huguenot mob stormed the Bayeux Cathedral during Mass, ransacking the building and its treasures. Nicholas-Joseph Foucault, Intendant for Normandy between 1689 and 1704, commissioned a hand-drawn sketch/transcription which an unknown artist completed up to where William rescues Harold from Count Guy. This drawing of what was then an apparently little known artefact drew the attention of a succession of antiquaries, including Antione Lancelot (1675-1740) and Bernard de Montfaucon (1655-1741). Their work resulted in many published drawings and engravings of the Tapestry and a variety of (usually fairly critical) commentaries on its place in art history, as well as comparisons of its content with the surviving written sources for the Norman Conquest.

Rise to Fame

Legends and stories abound beginning in the 19th Century. An 1840 report claims a 1792 French battalion tried to use the Tapestry as cover for a requisitioned wagon until a police commissioner recognized the significance of the object and issued a recovery order for a more suitable canvas wagon cover. Between November 1803 and February 1804, the Musee Napoleon in Paris displayed the Tapestry, and Napoleon himself viewed it privately. The exhibition, accompanied by an official guidebook and widely reported by the French press, ensured that the Tapestry came into greater public prominence than ever before. In 1842, the Tapestry’s keepers moved it behind an eye-level glass case in a purpose-built exhibition space in the municipal library of Bayeux. It remained there for 70 years, moving only once during the Franco-Prussian War. During this period, conservators also repaired and re-lined it.

In the 1870s, the South Kensington (now Victoria and Albert) Museum requested permission to photograph the entire Tapestry for display and dissemination of reproductions outside Bayeux. In 1931, the organizers of an exhibition on French art in London requested permission to borrow the Tapestry. A barrage of protests followed, with emphasis on the potential damage to the tourist economy of Bayeux and to the Tapestry itself. They eventually rejected the request.

Life During Wartime

In 1938, the Tapestry’s keepers planned to place the work inside a zinc-lined wooden crate, rolled on a winder in a purpose-built concrete shelter below the Hotel du Doyen in Bayeux. During the German occupation, the Ahnenerbe (ancestral heritage) branch of the SS identified the artefact as evidence of early Germanic culture and subjected it to many studies. The SS academics displayed, photographed and examined the artefact, moving it around several times. Dr Herbert Jankuhn, an archaeologist from Kiel, even gave Heinrich Himmler a talk on the Tapestry. After the Allied invasion in June 1944, the Germans moved the Tapestry to Paris, storing it in the cellars of the Louvre. General Dietrich von Choltitz later recounted how Himmler had ordered its preservation in late August, but by then French Resistance fighters occupied the Louvre. The Louvre displayed the Tapestry in late 1944 and returned it to Bayeux in March 1945.

Homecoming?

The Bayeux Tapestry has been subject to immense public and academic interest in the decades since 1945. The exhibitors have kept it in climate and light-controlled conditions in a purpose-built space in a former seminary since 1983. Its size and its unique ability to be understood simply by being looked at mean that it continues to achieve its aim of telling its story to large audiences. The museum attracts almost 400,000 visitors a year, with audio guides available in 16 languages. In 2007, UNESCO registered the Tapestry as a “Memory of the World” artefact. Scholars and rulers have recognized the Tapestry’s rich significance and, we can also assume, the innumerable ‘ordinary’ persons who have viewed and formed their own understanding of the Tapestry over its roughly 950-year existence.

The Persistent Past: Discovering The Steele Diaries

Analyzing artifacts is just part of a historian’s work. Putting the artefacts in the right light, seeing them as their makers and users saw them, then translating those visions into the historical record is the rest of it.

This is how history books are written.

And Finally...

On 5 September:

1813: The US Navy’s 14-gun, 6-pounder schooner-rigged brig USS Enterprise captures the RN’s 12-gun (10 carronades) gun-brig HMS Boxer off Pemaquid Point, Muscongus Bay in what is now Maine during the War of 1812. Remarkably, both commanders died very early in this desperate battle, and locals interred them together.

1939: President Franklin Rooseveldt declares American neutrality in the recently begun European war. While this declaration was not required by US law, it was an important international fig leaf to protect American shipping from the predations of raiders and submarines.

And today is the INTERNATIONAL DAY OF CHARITY, observing the death of Mother Theresa in Calcutta, India on this day in 1997. While the head of the Mother House of the Missionaries of Charity in India, the Kosovo-born nun donated her 1979 Nobel Prize largesse to her charity.

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It has become fashionable for wags and quasi-historians to proclaim that the US somehow lost the Korean conflict of 1950-53, doing so smugly expecting an argument. Failing to get one from serious thinkers, they move on to other, more important topics. More than one scrivener has subtitled their books with “A/The (First) War America Lost.”

Lost the Korean conflict…how?

This latest Korean conflict wasn’t the first war in the Land of the Morning Calm. Historical conflicts with Chinese empires are beyond number, but the first documented invasion by non-Chinese is Japan’s Toyotomi Hideyoshi’s invasion of Korea—a Chinese satrap for most of its known history—under the Joseon Dynasty in 1592 in what was called the Imjin War, and again in 1597 in the Chongyu War. Despite initial success in both conflicts, the Koreans turned to irregular warfare, hampering Japanese logistics, while their Chinese masters/allies fought the Japanese to a standstill. That war ended in 1598 when the Japanese withdrew.

That didn’t mean Korea was peaceful. Everyone wanted her geographic position and unlimited access to the sea, including Japan. But faulty communications, relative poverty, and corruption at the highest levels always hampered Korea’s administration. Her coastlines were notorious pirate nests, prompting the US Marines to land in Korea in 1871 to punish pirates that attacked American ships. Two decades later, Japan used unrest in Korea (which they orchestrated) to justify sending troops to the peninsula to protect their interests and citizens, prompting the first Sino-Japanese War in 1894.

After China’s defeat in 1895, Japanese forces stayed in Korea, displaced the Joseon Dynasty in 1897 and established their own satrapy, used the peninsula as a base for the first Russo-Japanese War in 1904, and finally annexed the country outright in 1910. When the Soviets invaded the peninsula in 1945, pushing the remnants of the Japanese out, the Americans hastened to establish a government south of the 38th parallel. Why there? There had long been a cultural distinction between northern and southern Korea, and the US/Soviet agreement about occupation zones in the wake of WWII merely reinforced what centuries of history sort of established. Like any country, there were parts of Korea that didn’t like other parts.

Then came the Cold War in (let’s say for the sake of argument) 1948, and the end of the Chinese Civil War in 1949. Everywhere, it seemed, there was this north/south-east/west confrontation with the Americans and their friends on one side and the Soviets and theirs on the other; Korea was just one more theater, albeit one that had seen this kind of nonsense twice in the previous hundred years and countless times before that. Only this time there was this outfit called the United Nations that took up the mantle of the failed League of Nations, which had the dignity to dissolve itself in 1946. The leader of the Republic of (South) Korea pled his case to the UN after the Democratic People’s Republic of (North) Korea marched south to “liberate” their southern cousins on 25 June 1950, murdering a few thousand people on the way. The UN membership responded by sending troops to reinforce the already-there and outgunned American and South Korean forces, placing American General Douglas MacArthur in overall UN command to repel this liberation-at-gunpoint.

Joseph Stalin over in Moscow had given his blessing for this liberation and a quantity of military equipment and supplies to the North Koreans. Mao Zedong up in Peking had given his nod, but he was busy trying to hunt down the last of the incorrect thinkers in his country, pledging what support he could afford. He, like Stalin, believed the time was ripe for the correct—their—way of thinking to express itself and take hold all over the world, as Eastern Europe and Vietnam were learning, and Greece was trying to learn, and the Philippines would try soon.

This was the first armed conflict of several that would mark the Cold War’s long and sordid history. This conflict, unlike most of the others, would test the resolve of the United Nations, its members, and of the growing “blocs” that leaned either east or west, north or south. It had nothing to do with Korea per se and everything to do with willpower, and in Robert S. McNamara’s famous (later) phrase, who would blink first. Korea was just the first test.

Regrettably, MacArthur had a tendency to believe he had the last say in all things military in Asia, and openly suggested using Nationalist troops and atomic weapons in Korea. This alarmed the Chinese, who were already concerned about her southern frontiers and hydroelectric power from the Chosin/Chonchon River dams in the northern provinces. Through proxies, China warned she would enter the conflict if UN forces moved into what had been North Korea.

Ignoring these warnings, UN forces—mostly Americans—swept north of the 38th parallel towards the Yalu River and the frontier with China in October. Having destroyed nearly all the North Korean forces, there was little to stop them. As she stated she would, China eased into the conflict in September 1950 and jumped in with both feet in November, sending the UN forces reeling southward again. This started a back-and-forth test of wills fought on hills and valleys and ridgelines that ran for scores of miles, up then down then up the peninsula again, chewing up Korea and making casualties from many lands.

In April 1951, MacArthur was relieved of his command for shooting off his mouth once too often for Harry Truman’s tastes, but the shooting didn’t stop. That July, truce talks began in Kaesong, then moved to Panmunjom along the much-contested front line while the fighting raged on. These talks continued for another two years. The major bone of contention had to do with returning prisoners of war: China wanted all hers back and the UN only wanted to send back those who wanted to go. The casualty lists grew, though at a slower pace than before.

On 5 March 1953, Stalin died. While some have called the death of Dear Leader Stalin and the end of the Korean War a coincidence, Georgy Malenkov, who succeeded Stalin as premier of the Soviet Union, had not been in favor of continuing the Korean conflict after 1950 as the military stalemate was costing far too much in Soviet treasure, agreeing with Omar Bradley’s “wrong war in the wrong place” admonition. But Stalin’s tyrannical hold on power and raving paranoia had kept any rational discussion of such issues from taking place—Stalin refused to think “his” revolution could lose anything anywhere; the “loss” of “his” slate of Reds in Vienna in ‘46 still stung.

Five days after Stalin’s demise, Mao’s advisors told him that the Chinese in Korea had run out of steam, morale-wise, and wouldn’t endure more bullying/indoctrination without executions to encourage recalcitrants, and even they may not have worked. Ten days after Stalin’s death, the Chinese negotiators agreed to discuss a format for exchanging prisoners of war who wanted to be repatriated, which began on 20 April 1953. After the exchange began, negotiations for a demilitarized zone roughly along the fighting lines—that to this day runs both north and south of the 38th parallel—began in earnest.

The armistice signed on 27 July 1953 ended the shooting after over a million military and three million civilian casualties (numbers, as ever, are sketchy). The United Nations fulfilled its mandate to free South Korea from aggression, showing it had the will and capacity to do what the League of Nations never had. Since the overwhelming majority of the troops fighting under UN Command were Americans, it might be safe to say that the US fulfilled the mission. So, how did the US “lose” in Korea?

One could say that MacArthur’s vain and hubristic ideal of “liberating” the entire peninsula failed, but that was not the UN mandate. While MacArthur pushed north of the 38th parallel, the UN didn’t tell him to do so; unfortunately, Truman didn’t tell him not to, either. Is this the “loss” that the wags refer to? Sometimes, yes, but usually the wag’s definition of “loss” begins and ends with victory parades and/or regime change. “Winners” have them and “losers” don’t. As many would later about Vietnam, and some still do and might with Iran (face it: we won’t know for a while), the “loss” in Korea left the “enemy’s” polity in place: there was still a communist regime in America’s opponent’s country/s. But that doesn’t answer the crucial question…

Lost what?

If someone “wins” and someone “loses,” there has to be some kind of tangible evidence for either claim (win-win is a slogan, not a reality). When the UN mandate had been fulfilled, what else could the US claim to “win” in the Korean conflict to keep the wags happy? A united Korea? Unlikely as long as China had bodies to throw into the fray, but they were running out by ‘53, and American political will flagged after ‘51, and the election of Dwight Eisenhower in ‘52 spelled its doom since Ike wasn’t hot on that war either. What did the US lose in Korea that it didn’t have before, other than a few thousand men and women?

But what did the UN’s opponents lose? Well, they didn’t unite the peninsula under one polity from Pyongyang—or Moscow, if you wish. Between North Korea, China and the Soviet Union, they suffered at least three times the casualties the UN did. The revolution they wanted to extend didn’t make it either. So if all this is true, who lost the Korean conflict?

Who won what?

Just what was there for the US to “win” in Korea? If anything, bases and allies on mainland Asia as counters to the Moscow/Beijing axis, like NATO in Europe. Yeah, got that. How about the UN? They won a great deal more credibility that their predecessor lacked: the League never fought a war or sent any peacekeepers anywhere. The UN only had to fight the one, and now sends “peacekeepers” everywhere, if of dubious worth these days.

I would argue that, like all the other Cold War conflicts and events, the Korean War helped to define the limits of Soviet/communist power in the aftermath of WWII. Yes, while Moscow-backed movements and countries achieved some successes, these often came with costs they could neither sustain nor duplicate elsewhere. Korea was the only conventional military invasion of a non-communist country by a communist state; Vietnam a decade later had a very large indigenous element and lacked Korea’s overt battle lines. If anyone “lost” the Korean War in any conventional sense, it was North Korea.

Sergeant’s Business and Other Stories

My short story collection contains two Korean War-based stories: “Hold The Line” and “To Rest With Long Ears.” The first takes place entirely in Korea; the second, only partly.

And Finally...

On 29 August:

1862: The second day of the Second Battle of Bull Run near Manassas Creek, Virginia, on the same field as the first battle there in 1861, sees James Longstreet’s corps join the fray after coming through the Thoroughfare Gap. The Confederates held off John Pope’s attacks, setting up their destruction the next day.

1958: The US Air Force Academy at Colorado Springs, Colorado, accepted its first wing of 1,100 cadets, who had been training at Lowry AFB near Denver since 1955. The class of 1959 matriculated on 3 June 1959, and was the first class to fight in Vietnam.

And today is NATIONAL CHOP SUEY DAY, celebrating this day in 1896 when a San Francisco restaurant prepared a special dish for the Chinese premier’s visit. Like many such observances, the “invention” of chop suey (which means “leftovers” or “odds and ends” in Mandarin) is a matter of much speculation, but all sources agree it comes from the US.

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This is a riff on an Edward Shapiro article in Academic Questions.

On 5 January 2025, attendees at the annual convention of the American Historical Association (AHA) in New York voted to approve a resolution denouncing Israel for its response to the atrocities committed by Hamas on 7 October 2023. A group called Historians for Peace and Democracy (HPD), created in 2003 to oppose America’s war in Iraq, sponsored the resolution. HPD had submitted anti-Israel resolutions at the 2015 and 2016 conventions of the AHA that were voted down.

The 2025 resolution accused Israel of committing “scholasticide” in Gaza, attacked the United States for providing Israel with the weapons used to destroy the region’s educational system, calling for an immediate and permanent ceasefire in the Gaza war. Barbara Weinstein, a Latin American historian at New York University and a former president of the AHA, spoke in praise of the resolution. “Over the years, it has become increasingly clear that we can’t have a narrow definition of what our roles are as historians.” Those with memories of the chaos in higher education in the 1960s caused by its politicization could only shake their heads in bewilderment.

After the vote, supporters of the resolution broke into shouts of “Free Free Palestine.”

The resolution and its supporters omitted any mention of the 7 October events that led to Israel's actions; they merely accused Israel of genocide. Few of the resolution’s supporters were specialists in the history of the Middle East or even familiar with its contemporary political and military developments. HPD presented no evidence that Israel was guilty of any form of genocide. In fact, although Hamas has diverted aid away from civilians—even stolen it and sold it back to the intended recipients—since the Oct. 7 Hamas attack, Israel has facilitated the transfer of tens of thousands of humanitarian aid trucks into Gaza, delivering food, shelter, medical supplies, water, and educational materials to the battle-torn region.

Opponents made a convincing case.

[The Arab-Israeli conflict] is probably the most intensely debated historical question confronting us today…and [if Historians for Peace and Democracy] want to present their own simple-minded version of history, in which Israel is always the villain, they are free to do so under their own imprimatur. But they have no right to speak for the rest of us in the AHA.

Jonathan Rose, Drew University

Anne Hyde, a University of Oklahoma history professor and a member of the AHA’s council, worried that such resolutions undermined the AHA’s reputation for impartiality, noting:

[The war in Gaza] is not settled history, so we’re not clear what happened or who to blame or when it began, even, so it isn’t something that a professional organization should be commenting on yet.

Five speakers spoke against the resolution at the general meeting. The most important critique was by Jeffrey Herf, a University of Maryland emeritus professor of history and a prominent authority on the Holocaust and anti-Semitism. The resolution, he said:

[did] not meet basic standards of historical scholarship or, for that matter, of fair-minded journalism and political analysis. As such, it constitutes an assault on truth and on the skill and insight one expects from professional historians…. Were it to be adopted…it would severely damage, if not destroy, the AHA’s credibility as a professional organization devoted to the search for truth about the past. [The resolution] lent credence to the view that historians in the United States see no distinction between partisanship and scholarship.

The resolution, Herf observed, was based on the conclusions of the United Nations Office of the High Commissioner for Human Rights and the United Nations Human Rights Council, two notorious anti-Israel bodies. Their reports regarding Gaza both before and after the 7 October attacks ignore the virulent antisemitism of Hamas, the extensive tunnel system Hamas built in Gaza under the noses of UN officials, Hamas’ practice of hiding its troops in homes, mosques, schools, UN facilities, and hospitals, and take at face value unverified reports and data from Hamas.

After the vote, the association’s elected council received the resolution, which would decide whether it would become the AHA's official position. By a vote of 11 to 4, the council rejected the resolution, stating that it lay outside the Association’s mission and purpose.

As a membership organization, we keep our distance from issues that are controversial within and among our members. And we keep in mind that our effectiveness rests on our legitimacy, our reputation for even-handedness, professional integrity, and appropriately narrow boundaries.

James Grossman, Executive Director of the AHA

The council’s vote outraged Daniel A. Segal, a professor at Pitzer College in California. “In a time of emerging fascism,” he avowed, the AHA should be “an active part of the democratic resistance” rather than caving in to the powers that be in this Age of Trump. The council’s vote, he asserted, was part of a campaign to silence those dissenting from sunny views of American history. “The best U.S. history,” he said, “teaches that sexism, racism, settler colonialism, ethnic cleansing, and genocide are central to US history and society.”

Yet this oppressive Hell has, at least for the last 150 years, been the chosen destination of the largest portion of the world’s migrants.

The AHA council, despite its vote, accepted the unproven charge of scholasticide, stating that it “deplores any intentional destruction of Palestinian educational institutions, libraries, universities and archives in Gaza.” There is no evidence that the Israeli military intentionally targeted educational sites in Gaza, or that the destruction of such sites was something other than collateral damage caused by Hamas’ practice of hiding within civilian institutions.

The charge of scholasticide was a red herring.

John Maynard Keynes believed that the history of ideas was crucial for understanding the contemporary world.

The ideas of economists and political philosophers, both when they are right and when they are wrong, are more powerful than is commonly understood. Indeed, the world is ruled by little else. Practical men, who believe themselves to be quite exempt from any intellectual influences, are usually slaves of some defunct economist.

The resolutions presented at the AHA convention did not emerge de novo from defunct economists and political philosophers, but from ideas propagated by academic historians and social scientists, namely…

Settler Colonialism

Settler colonialism claims that the most important theme of the history of the last several centuries has been the dispossession of native peoples in Asia, Africa, and the Americas by “white” settlers from Europe and the United States. A profoundly anti-Western theory, it targets the prosperous countries of Europe and North America, such as Great Britain, Holland, Canada, and the United States. Among the earliest founders of settler-colonialist theory was the Anglo-Australian historian Patrick Wolfe (1949-2016), author of Settler Colonialism and the Transformation of Anthropology: The Politics of an Ethnographic Event (1999) and Traces of History: Elementary Structures of Race (2016). Settler colonialism differs from traditional colonialism because it features not only the control of the economy and government of a foreign land by the imperial power (the British in India and Holland in the Dutch East Indies) but also the mass migration of settlers from the imperial country. The Boers in South Africa and the British in North America and Australia are models of settler colonialism. Believers hold that there is a fundamental difference between traditional colonialism and settler colonialism. Traditional colonialism seeks to exploit the native population; settler colonialism seeks to replace it either by forcing it to move or by exterminating it.

Adherents often use “genocide” in connection with settler colonialism.

For a half-century, “Palestine” cheerleaders have used settler colonialism to frame their cause as part of a much larger and more significant story: the global conflict be- tween Western imperialists and their native victims. As Natan Sharansky has noted, the ideology of settler colonialism has “galvanized public opinion against the alleged crimes of the ‘settler colonialist’ Zionist oppressor.” Those who voted for the 2025 AHA resolution view Israel as a prime example of contemporary settler colonialism and the genocidal tendencies inherent in it. They often hold that the most important theme of Israel’s history has been the forceful displacement by Westernized Jewish immigrants of the native Arab population of “Palestine” who now live under intolerable social, economic, and political conditions in Gaza, refugee camps, and settlements in the West Bank.

As Adam Kirsch points out in his book On Settler Colonialism, “For many academics and activists, describing Israel as a settler-colonial state was a sufficient justification for the Hamas attack.” Hamas is thus no longer an antisemitic gang of murderers, rapists, and kidnappers; they are merely responding to Israel’s settler colonialism. Congress asked the presidents of Harvard, the University of Pennsylvania, and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, during their testimony, whether calling for the killing of Jews violated their campus rules. They responded it would depend on the magical concept of “context” that turns lies into truth and black into white.

“Settler colonialism” provided the context, and its popularity among progressive historians explains the efforts to bend over backwards when discussing the barbarism of Hamas on 7 October; so does historian’s malpractice. When he heard of the idea that American troops had come to Europe not to fight the Germans but to put down a left-wing English revolution during World War II, one Englishman supposedly remarked:

One has to belong to the intelligentsia to believe things like that; no ordinary man could be such a fool.

George Orwell

The Past Not Taken: Three Novellas

Writing history has always depended on the best sources interpreted for what they are, not pushed through a filter of pre-existing ideas and undemonstrable theories about what others did before the historians were born. Historians can prove facts; they can only hold opinions.

This is how history books are written.

And Finally...

On 22 August:

1485: The Battle of Bosworth Field results in the death of King Richard III. His death, and the end of the Plantagenet dynasty that had ruled England for two centuries. Richard’s death makes Henry VII king of England, beginning the Tudor dynasty.

1771: Henry Maudslay is born in Woolwich, Greater London. Maudslay, said to be the father of machine tool technology, invented the screw-cutting lathe, which enabled standard screw thread sizes, thus interchangeable parts and mass production.

And today is NATIONAL BE AN ANGEL DAY, dedicated to performing random acts of kindness, selflessly helping those in need, and brightening the lives of others. On the other hand, there’s no “be a devil day,” so make the best of this one.

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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.”

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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.

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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.

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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…

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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?”

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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