Christmas Every Day

The birthday of a plethora of popular culture luminaries:

1903 Bing Crosby. Harry Lillis “Bing” Crosby was more than the quintessential crooner whose career coincided with the introduction of the microphone that suited his intimate baritone. He was an Academy Award winning actor; he dominated record sales for decades; he was star on radio and television. Sadly his last public appearance was a bizarre Christmas duet with David Bowie.

1906 Mary Astor. The gorgeous Lucile Vasconcellos Langhanke was a splendid actress with a tawdry personal life. She won eternal fame for playing villainess Brigid O’Shaughnessy in The Maltese Falcon, and an Oscar for The Great Lie. Her parents were leeches and a constant source of embarrassment while Astor herself enjoyed a string of husbands and lovers. Her diary, in which she kept details of her amorous encounters, proved a scandal during one of her divorces but she died a faithful Catholic and a recovered alcoholic. 

1919 Pete Seeger. A splendid folk singer and an engaging personality, Seeger never quite shook off his association with Stalinism in the 1930s. Following the Moscow line, Seeger and his fellow American Marxists opposed any war against Hitler until mid-1941 and the Nazi invasion of the Soviet Union. Seeger quit the Communist Party in 1949 but continued to have trouble with Washington who viewed his progressive politics as being subversive. He supported every conceivable left wing cause in his music, from Republican Spain, unionism, the Hollywood Ten, the Rosenbergs, the death penalty, the Vietnam War, Occupy Wall Street, Obama, and environmentalism. He professed communism until the day he died but, late in life, did express misgivings about the Gulags. I love his banjo-only versions of some traditional Christmas music.

1928 Dave Dudley. David Darwin Pedruska became a big cross-over star in 1963 with his truck-driving ballad,”Six Days on the Road”. The song set the fashion for a new genre of country music and provided a decent living for Dudley who found that his popularity lingered in Europe for decades after his star had faded at home.

1933 James Brown. “Mr. Dynamite.” “The Hardest Working Man in Show Business.” “The Godfather of Soul”. “Soul Brother No. 1.” No more need be said. 

1938 Napoleon XIV. In 1966 Jerrold “Jerry” Samuels gave us the definition of a one-hit wonder and a testimony to the debased taste of a lost generation with the immortal cry of existential angst that was “They’re Coming to Take Me Away”. With great sensitivity, he further examined the hilarious side of mental illness with such other gems as “Bats in My Belfry”, “The Nuts on My Family Tree”, and “Photogenic, Schizophrenic You”.

1920 Foundation of the Negro Baseball Leagues

Racial laws and hostile social attitudes in early-twentieth-century America precluded the integration of most professional sports. In the case of baseball, this had led to African Americans forming their own teams and leagues as early as the 1880s. In 1920 under the aegis of the National Association of Colored Professional Base Ball Clubs, the Negro National League was founded with eight teams (three of them named Giants and two named Stars): the Chicago American Giants, the Chicago Giants, the St. Louis Giants, the Cuban Stars, the Dayton Marcos, Detroit Stars, Indianapolis ABC’s, and the Kansas City Monarchs. The NACPBBC was augmented the next year by the addition of the Negro Southern League but competition was fierce and player raiding was common when it came to rival associations such as the Eastern Colored League and the American Negro League.

Teams folded frequently, whole leagues went under, but the 1930s might be considered the Golden Age of Negro Baseball with players such as Cool Papa Bell, Satchel Paige and Josh Gibson. The switch-hitting Bell was reckoned the fastest man in the sport; it was said that he could switch off the light and be under the bed covers before the room was dark. Another story had him hitting a pitch up the middle and being struck by the ball as he slid into second base. Paige was an astonishing pitcher who toiled for a host of clubs, among them the Chattanooga Black Lookouts, the Birmingham Black Barons, the Baltimore Black Sox  and the Pittsburgh Crawfords — one of them, the Bismarck Churchills of North Dakota, was integrated. He would often invite his infielders to take a break on the field while he struck out the side. Catcher Josh Gibson was one of the greatest hitters — for power or average — in history. He retired with a .441 batting average and hit close to 800 home runs.

The post-war integration of baseball, led by Jackie Robinson and the Brooklyn Dodgers spelled the beginning of the end for Negro Leagues. A few of the stars at the end of their careers found employment in the majors — Satchel Paige pitched into his late 50s for the Cleveland Indians, St Louis Browns, and Kansas City Athletics — and various teams lingered as barnstorming propositions. In 2020 Major League Baseball announced that it would acknowledge the Negro Leagues as fully professional and recognize their statistics.

 

 

 

1770 Birthday of David Thompson

A tip of the beaver hat today to the man dubbed the “greatest practical land geographer that the world has produced”.

David Thompson was born in London to a poor Welsh family and was given a practical education in mathematics and surveying by a charity foundation. At the age of 14 he was indentured to the Hudson’s Bay Company and sent to the northern port of Churchill in what is now Manitoba, Canada. After serving as a clerk at several of the company’s trading posts, he became a fur trader and surveyor, mapping routes deep into the interior, despite a limp and the loss of vision in one eye. He became fluent in four native languages, compiling dictionaries of these tongues, and was almost always on excellent terms with tribes he encountered.

In 1797, frustrated because the HBC wanted him to abandon surveying and concentrate on the acquisition of furs trapped by native hunters, he switched his allegiance to the North West Company which was then involved in a heated rivalry with his old employers. There, his surveying skills were more highly valued. He worked along the disputed American border, Lake Superior, up the Mississippi River, and into the Rocky Mountains. His contributions were so valuable to the NWC that he was made a full partner of the firm.

In 1799 he married a 16-year-old (some say 13-year-old) Métis woman, Charlotte Small, with whom he enjoyed a 58-year marriage and 11 (some say 13) sons and daughters. She and their children often accompanied him on his travels.

With American explorers such as the Lewis and Clark expedition  pushing farther west, the North West Company commissioned Thompson to find a way to the Pacific Ocean. From 1807 to 1812 Thompson explored territories in what is now British Columbia, Washington, Montana, and Idaho, claiming vast swaths for Great Britain as he went.

Before retiring to Montreal in 1812 so that his children could get an education, Thompson had walked or paddled over 55,000 miles and charted 1.9 million square miles of wilderness. His later years were marked by ill health, poor finances, and neglect by the companies he had worked so hard for. He died in poverty in 1857 and was buried in an unmarked grave. Only in the 20th century was his massive contribution to history recognized. Thompson’s journals, enormously valuable for geographical, botanical and sociological observations, were finally published; statues and memorials were erected to him in Britain, Canada, and the United States; an exploration vessel, an astronomical observatory, a highway, and a university were named after him.

1944 The abduction of General Kreipe

In May 1941, Germany launched a daring parachute attack on the island of Crete which was garrisoned by Greek, British, and Commonwealth troops. Though the price paid in blood was so high that Germany never again attempted another airborne attack like it, the paratroopers secured airfields into which reinforcements could fly, and, after 11 days of bitter fighting, victory was largely achieved. Guerrilla resistance by native Cretans and Allied troops hiding in the hills continually took its toll on the Wehrmacht, prompting harsh reprisals and atrocities. 

The British Special Operations Executive (S.O.E., responsible for violent behind-the-lines activities) decided that its agents should kidnap the brutal head of the German occupation, the so-called “Butcher of Crete”, Friedrich Wilhelm Müller, but, by the time the plan was to be put into effect, Müller was replaced by the milder General Heinrich Kreipe. With Kreipe now the target, Major Patrick Leigh Fermor (the brilliant travel writer whose works should be read by all of you) and Captain William Stanley Moss, with their team of native resistance fighters, plotted to abduct the general as he drove home. 

On the night of April 26, disguised as German troops, they stopped Kreipe’s car, knocked the driver unconscious, and, holding the general at gunpoint, drove unmolested through 22 German roadblocks. Kreipe had a reputation for grumpiness and impatience with delays, so his kidnappers had an easier time. Eventually they abandoned the car and headed into the mountains, leaving false clues that they hoped would lead the Germans to believe that the team would be quickly evacuated by submarine. They eluded a vast Wehrmacht manhunt while they tried to arrange contact for a pickup that would take them to Egypt. 

Kreipe was a decent sort of chap, not a Nazi, and he had Fermor had many conversations. One morning, the captive German began to greet the dawning sun’s glint on a mountaintop with lines from an ode by the Roman poet, Horace, and, Fermor finished the recitation, as they both knew the Latin by heart. “We had both drunk at the same fountains,” wrote Fermor about the incident.

Though the general was successfully taken by boat to captivity in Egypt, the reprisals by the German army, led again by Müller, were bloody. Here is his order:

Because the town of Anogia is the centre of the English Intelligence on Crete, because the people of Anogia committed the murder of the Sergeant Commander of the Yeni-Gave, as well as of the garrison under his orders, because the people of Anogia carried out the sabotage of Damasta, because in Anogia the guerrillas of the various groups of resistance take refuge and find protection and because it was through Anogia that the kidnappers with General Von Kreipe passed using Anogia as a transit camp, we order its COMPLETE DESTRUCTION and the execution of every male person of Anogia who would happen to be within the village and around it within a distance of one kilometre.

CHANEA 13TH AUGUST 1944, THE GENERAL COMMANDER OF THE GARRISON OF CRETE, H. MULLER.

For this and other war crimes, Müller was executed by the Allies in 1947

1951

Canadians defeat the Chinese at Kapyong

The Korean War began with a North Korean invasion of the South, a surprise attack which just about succeeded in conquering the whole peninsula but which was eventually driven back by American troops. The American occupying forces were joined by units from other countries in a war authorized by the United Nations. Among them were Canadian soldiers.

The U.N. counterattack pushed the North Koreans deep into their own territory but, in October 1950, hundreds of thousands of Communist Chinese troops crossed the Yalu river and forced U.N. units to retreat. The front gradually stabilized around the original border on the 38th parallel. The Canadian Encyclopedia tells the story of the epic battle at Kapyong:

In mid-April, the Chinese withdrew just past the 38th Parallel as part of a plan to lure UN forces into a position where they would be vulnerable to a major counter attack, which was unleashed on the South Korean army on 22 April 1951. The South Koreans were dislodged by the Chinese offensive, and the following day the British brigade was ordered to protect the South Korean withdrawal through the Kapyong River valley (about 20 kilometers south of the 38th parallel in central Korea).

The second battalion of Princess Patricia’s Canadian Light Infantry (2PPCLI), and the 3rd Battalion of the Royal Australian Regiment, were assigned forward hilltop positions, the Canadians on the west side of the valley and the Australians on the east.

The Australians bore the brunt of the initial attack and after heavy combat were forced to withdraw, with 155 casualties, late on 24 April. While the Australians fought, Stone ordered his Canadians, about 700 troops, to dig in on Hill 677 and prepare to repel a large brigade of massing Chinese forces, estimated at nearly 5,000-strong. After attacking the Australians, the Chinese turned their attention to the PPCLI, which managed — through heavy all-night fighting on 24 and 25 April — to stop the Chinese advance.

At one point in the battle, 400 Chinese soldiers descended on a single Canadian company of roughly 100 men, but the attack was repelled with numerous examples of valour: Private Wayne Mitchell, despite being wounded, charged the enemy three times with his Bren gun. He earned the Distinguished Conduct medal for his efforts.

The Chinese launched most of their attacks at night, in successive waves, using an intensive and aggressive approach of mortars, grenades and machine gun fire close to the Canadian front. On the night of the 24th, the Canadian battalion headquarters was attacked, and the assault was repelled with heavy fire.

The relentless waves of Chinese soldiers almost overran the position of D Company. With his men securely entrenched below ground, company commander Captain J. G. W. Mills, desperate and overrun, called for an artillery strike on the position of his own 10 Platoon. A battery of New Zealander guns obliged, firing 2,300 rounds of shells in less than an hour, destroying the Chinese forces on that position. The following night, Private Kenneth Barwise recovered the lost Vickers machine gun position in D Company, grabbed the gun, and ran back to his platoon. He had also single-handedly killed six Chinese soldiers during the attack on D Company, earning the Military Medal.

Amid the fighting, Stone refused to allow his men to withdraw — believing that the hill was a critical strategic point on the UN front — thereby stemming the tide of the Chinese offensive. While they defended the hill, the Canadians were cut off, and had to be supplied via air drop, allowing them to continue the fight until the Chinese retreated. As Canadian soldier Gerald Gowing remembered: “We were surrounded on the hills of Kapyong and there was a lot of fire. We were pretty well out of ammunition and out of food too. We did get some air supplies dropped in, but we were actually surrounded . . . that was a scary moment, let me tell you.”

The 2PPCLI were eventually relieved on the front line by a battalion of the 1st US Cavalry Division

The holding action of the Australians and Canadians at Kapyong allowed the UN forces to consolidate their troops for the next stage of operations. The Canadians had fought tenaciously against a Chinese army with a force several times their size. Stone, and other veterans of the Second World War, utilized their experiences in fighting on the rugged terrain of Sicily and Italy and applied it to the hills of Korea to good effect, but at a price. There were 23 Canadian casualties, including 10 soldiers killed, as well as an estimated 2,000 Chinese casualties.

The battle contributed significantly to the defeat of the general Chinese offensive against the South that spring, protecting the capital city of Seoul from re-occupation, and plugging the hole in the UN line to give the South Koreans time to retreat. The wider Communist offensive of 1951 was halted about a week after the battle, and from that point on the Korean conflict became largely a war of patrols and enemy harassment, rather than large-scale attacks, as the front lines stabilized and the two sides embarked on peace talks.

Both the Canadians and the Australians received the United States Presidential Unit Citation from the American government, the first time a Canadian unit had been so honoured.

1184 BC

The end of the Trojan War

Now as for the carrying off of women, it is the deed, they say, of a rogue: but to make a stir about such as are carried off, argues a man a fool. Men of sense care nothing for such women, since it is plain that without their own consent they would never be forced away. The Asiatics, when the Greeks ran off with their women, never troubled themselves about the matter; but the Greeks, for the sake of a single Lacedaemonian girl, collected a vast armament, invaded Asia, and destroyed the kingdom of Priam.

So said Herodotus, the inventor of history. In trying to explain the centuries-old antipathy between Europe and Asia, he had recourse to the story of the Trojan war, a 10-year siege prompted by the kidnapping of Helen of Sparta by a prince of Troy. This story was told most famously by Homer in the Iliad and the Odyssey but also by dozens of oral bards, Greek playwrights, and Roman poets.

For centuries, scholars debated the truth of these legends and most were sceptical; it was not until the excavations undertaken in 1873 by Heinrich Schliemann on a mound near Hisarlik that academics began to take the existence of a Bronze Age Troy seriously. Schliemann’s discovery of golden treasures there and at Mycenae in Greece convinced many that the events described by Homer had actually taken place (even though the archaeological layer Schliemann declared to be Homeric was later shown to be too early in time.)

If the Trojan War legends do describe a real conflict between a prosperous city guarding the entrance to the Black Sea and a confederation of Greek raiders, when did it take place? My money is on the calculation by the Alexandrian Greek genius, Eratosthenes, who placed the end of the war at 1184 BC, a date that corresponds to Level VII on the chart below.