Christmas Every Day

Alexander Roberts Dunn VC (15 September 1833 – 25 January 1868) was born in York (later Toronto) in 1833, the son of John Henry Dunn, a prominent politician. He studied at Upper Canada College and at Harrow School, England. He purchased a commission in the 11th Hussars in 1852. This would have been an expensive move because that regiment was one of the most prestigious and elegant units in the British Army, famous for its cherry-coloured trousers.

Dunn was awarded the Victoria Cross for his actions at the Charge of the Light Brigade during the Battle of Balaclava on 25 October 1854 when he was 21 years of age. Dunn rescued a sergeant by cutting down two or three Russian lancers who had attacked from the rear. Later in the battle he killed another Russian who had been attacking a private.

He sold his commission at the end of the Crimean War but rejoined the Army in 1858 as a major in the 100th Regiment of Foot. He exchanged into the 33rd Regiment of Foot, in 1864 in which regiment he remained until his death.

Dunn was promoted to the rank of colonel in 1864, making him the first Canadian to command a British regiment. He led the 33rd Regiment at the start of the 1868 expedition to Abyssinia (meant to rescue British hostages and teach the mad King Tewodros of Ethiopia a lesson), but he was killed in unusual circumstances during a hunting accident at Senafe before the military part of the campaign started.

His grave (in present-day Eritrea) had been neglected for many years. It was discovered after over a century by Canadian Army Forces for the United Nations Mission to Ethiopia and Eritrea (UNMEE) during their mission as peacekeepers in the Eritrea-Ethiopia war of 1998-2000. The discovery as narrated by Ben Mitchell of the Canadian Armed Forces is:

We had just advanced from our rear camp in Dekemhare into Senafe. We had crossed both trench lines in Senafe and their mine fields. Tensions were very high for not only the Eritrea and Ethiopian armies but for us as well. There was still military forces in the area, whom were not supposed to be there. We knew our task of getting the militaries to withdraw would be tuff. We set up camp in the school yard at the base of that amazing cliff. My Lieutenant and I left the camp right away to search for a well in the city and this is when it first happened. The children in the city gathered around us and said “Canada” while pulling our hands to lead us somewhere. Now there was no way we were going anywhere with these kids. This thing smelled of an ambush badly. How did they know the word “Canada” and why were they so eager to lead us away? The two of us then returned to the schoolyard and reported this unusual event to Headquarters (HQ). 2 weeks went by and each patrol that entered the city had the same experience with the kids. Each time they would report it to HQ and say they did not follow the children. Finally HQ got tired of hearing about these children and orders us to investigate. Now this is when it gets embarrassing for us. We geared up to follow these kids like we were entering an ambush…we were ready for anything that may happen. We had over 300 rounds of ammunition per soldier, flak jackets, radios, machine guns. We were not going to be caught off guard. When we entered the city, the same routine happened with the kids, but this time we let them lead us. Weapons on our shoulders we walked through the city slowly waiting for something to happen. I remember how hot it was that day and how much I was sweating. Finally we got to a cemetery on the outskirts of the city and the kids started pointing at this tombstone. We looked at the name “COL DUNN”. When we got back to camp we radioed in what had happened. HQ sent a report back to Canada asking them to figure out who this DUNN was. A week later we found out. The kids had led us to the grave of a Canadian war hero R. Dunn, one of the first winners of the Victoria Cross. The highest order of merit issues in the Canadian Forces. This man was a legend. He had gone on safari Africa in 1860’s and never returned. He was a Canadian hero who had been lost for over a hundred years. These kids whom we thought were leading us into an ambush had done Canada a great service and located Colonel R. Dunn Victoria Cross. If those kids were not as persistent as they were we would never have followed them and we would have never found Colonel Dunn.

His grave after the discovery was repaired in 2001 by a group of Canadian Forces engineers from CFB Gagetown.

If you go into the woods today, you’re in for a big surprise. So says the children’s song, “The Teddy Bear’s Picnic”. So said German chieftain Arminius to the Roman legions of General Varus in the Teutoburg Forest in 9 AD.

Arminius, or Hermann to the folks back home, was a young chief of the Cherusci tribe who spent his youth in Rome as a hostage and later as a soldier, being granted Roman citizenship and command of military units.

In 7 AD he returned to Germania where the Romans had penetrated beyond the Rhine, occupying large tracts of territory and reducing tribes to a tributary status. Arminius began to conspire with other chieftains to form a pan-tribal alliance and drive the Germans out. In the early autumn of 9 AD he convinced Varus, the governor of Germania, that a distant Roman garrison was endangered and that he should send troops to rescue them. Varus promptly marched three legions, the Seventeenth, the Eighteenth, and the Twentieth, out of his safe fortifications into an ambush in which the Roman army was hacked to bits and massacred.

Augustus Caesar was distraught, said to cry out for months afterward, “Quintilius Varus, give me back my legions!”He sent retaliatory raids back across the Rhine which laid waste to German villages and recovered two of the three lost legionary eagles. Roman troops happened upon the site of Arminius’ victory and according to the historian Tacitus this is what they saw:

In the center of the field were the whitening bones of men, as they had fled, or stood their ground, strewn everywhere or piled in heaps. Near lay fragments of weapons and limbs of horses, and also human heads, prominently nailed to trunks of trees. In the adjacent groves were the barbarous altars, on which they had immolated tribunes and first-rank centurions.

Some survivors of the disaster who had escaped from the battle or from captivity, described how this was the spot where the officers fell, how yonder the eagles were captured, where Varus was pierced by his first wound, where too by the stroke of his own ill-starred hand he found for himself death. They pointed out too the raised ground from which Arminius had harangued his army, the number of gibbets for the captives, the pits for the living, and how in his exultation he insulted the standards and eagles. 

This was a decisive victory for the tribes because it convinced the Romans that there was little to be gained in renewing their conquest; henceforth they built their border defences along the Rhine. 

The alliance that Arminius had put together soon collapsed and he was murdered in 21 AD by his own tribesmen who feared he was growing too powerful.

1900

Birthday of an Assassin

On February 15, 1933 President Franklin Roosevelt was giving a speech from an open car in Miami, Florida. From the back of the crowd of onlookers, a short man stood on a chair and began firing pistol shots. Before he was subdued, he had wounded five people, including Chicago Mayor Anton Cermak who later died from his injury.

The killer was brick-layer Giuseppe Zangara born on this date in 1900 in Calabria, Italy. It was assumed at first that his target had been the President, a motive that seemed to be corroborated when he stated in the police station: “I have the gun in my hand. I kill kings and presidents first and next all capitalists.” Despite a history of mental illness Zangara was quickly found guilty of first-degree murder and sentenced to death in the electric chair, a fate which he scorned, telling the judge: ““You give me electric chair. I no afraid of that chair! You one of capitalists. You is crook man too. Put me in electric chair. I no care!” He was executed on March 20.

Since his death suspicions have been expressed that FDR was not the intended victim and that Cermak had been the real target. This was at the time when Chicago housed gangsters such as Jake “Greasy Thumb” Guzik and Frank Nitti, Al Capone’s successor as head of the city’s organized crime syndicate. Cermak was rumoured to have ordered a hit on Nitti in which the mobster was shot three times, and Zangara was supposedly a hitman hired to take revenge.

September 6, 1522

The first circumnavigation of the globe completed

In August, 1519 a fleet of five ships under the command of Ferdinand Magellan set sail from the port of Seville for a voyage around the world. Of the 250 crewmen aboard those ships, only 18 survived to return home on September 6, 1522 from their journey of 14,460 Spanish leagues (60,440 km or 37,560 mi). The expedition was chartered by the King of Spain but the crew was drawn from Portugal, Spain, Italy, Germany, Belgium, Greece, England and France. Its purpose was to reach the Indies without travelling around the horn of Africa, a route controlled by the Portuguese.

The fleet crossed the Atlantic without incident but when resupplying in what is now Argentina, a mutiny broke out, forcing Magellan to execute the captains of two of his ships and a number of rebellious crewmen; other mutineers he marooned. After a winter spent on shore, Magellan laboriously navigated through the narrow channels at the tip of South America to reach the Pacific. In doing so, one ship was wrecked and another abandoned the voyage to return to Spain. The three remaining vessels headed northwest and in March 1521 they became the first Europeans to reach the Philippine archipelago. Magellan involved himself in local politics as well as trading with the natives; he converted some regional nobles to Christianity but others he chose to war with. On April 27, Magellan and dozens of his men were killed in battle, leaving the fleet seriously undermanned. The crew consolidated on to two ships and continued their journey through the Spice Islands but when Trinidad, the larger vessel, showed signs of damage the expedition split up. The smaller Victoria would continue west toward Africa while the crew of Trinidad would repair their ship and return via the route by which they had come. Trinidad was captured by the Portuguese and lost but Victoria would eventually limp home under his captain Juan Sebastián Elcano with a starving, skeleton crew and a hold full of spices. The three years of adventure had cost the lives of 232 sailors but laid the foundation of Spain’s empire in the East.