This Day in History

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1935  "Shock Worker" Aleksei Stakhanov (1903-1977), allegedly digs 102 tons in 6 hours, at the Central Irmino Coal Mine

1995  the ashes of former Ensign George Gay, sole survivor of Torpedo Squadron 8, were scattered across the waters into which his comrades had fallen during the Battle of Midway

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1503  Si non e vero, e buon trovato.*

The great nineteenth century humanist Jacob Burckhardt, author of Civilisation of the Renaissance in Italy and other notable works, once told an interesting tale about how an Italian city-state dealt with a potential problem in civil-military relations.
During the Middle Ages and the Renaissance, it was common for the many little Italian city-states to hire mercenaries for their defense. These were the famous condottieri. Mercenaries were often very good troops, provided their pay was in order. But employing them had some risks. Some mercenary captains were less interested in fulfilling their contractual obligations than in providing for their own advancement. There were quite a number of instances of condottieri who sold out their employers to a higher bidder, or even attempted to seize power from their erstwhile employers. A few had even succeeded. So a state employing a mercenary had to be on the alert lest he involve himself in nefarious undertakings at its expense.
At one point during the early Renaissance, the ruling oligarchs of Siena, in Tuscany, faced with a military crisis, hired a mercenary captain and his company. The mercs proved quite effective in the city's service. He also became quite popular with common people of the city. Fearful that this popular support might enable the condottiero to seize the power, the city-fathers pondered long and hard as to how to get rid of him.
Then, at last, they had an inspiration.
In a carefully planned assassination, they bumped him off, planting evidence that the deed had been done by agents of a rival city-state. They then staged an elaborate funeral, and with lamentation ultimately had him proclaimed a saint, dedicating a shrine to his memory.

(* "It may not be true, but it is a good story.")

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31 BC On the evening of September 1, 31 BC, Octavian, the future emperor Augustus, settled down for the night amidst his troops at Nicopolis, a small place on the northern side of the entrance to the Ambracian Gulf, just across a narrow strait from Actium, where his sometime partner and now enemy Marc Antony was camped.
Emerging from his quarters on the morning of the 2nd, Octavian chanced to see a peasant passing, driving a donkey.   Asking the man his name, Octavian was surprised to hear Eutyches (Good Fortune) and that the donkey was named Nikon  (Victory).
Word of these omens soon spread, greatly cheering Octavian’s soldiers and sailors, and perhaps helping to win the naval battle of Actium that same day.
The cynical among us will, of course, point out how odd that a stranger could get so close to so important a commander’s person, in the midst of an enormous army, but it would wrong to suggest that Octavian had set up the encounter.
It was probably the work of his good friend and generalissimo Marcus Vipsanius Agrippa

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So The Ass of Victory was the good omen?

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1390  Geoffrey Chaucer was robbed of £20 of the King's money while traveling in Kent -- today easily c. £750,000 in comparable wealth

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1922 Sir Pertab Singh at 76.
Pertab Singh (1845-1922), one of the most notable Indian princes during the height of British Raj, was quite a character. A younger son of the Maharaja of Jodhpur, he was in his own right Maharaja of Idar (1902-1911), in what is now Gujarat, in western India, which he abdicated to his nephew, having no son of his own of princely rank, and three times served as regent of Jodhpur after the death of his brother and the latter’s successor. Eventually the holder of three knighthoods, Sir Pertab was an enthusiastic supporter of British rule. Commissioned an officer in the Jodhpur Army, one of the princely forces that supported the British Indian Army, Sir Pertab served in the field during the Second Afghan War (1878-1880), earning a mention in dispatches, fought gallantly in the Tirah Campaign on the Northwest Frontier (1897-1898), during which he was severely wounded, and earned a promotion to colonel. In 1900 he commanded the Jodhpur contingent during the Boxer Rebellion, and was promoted to major-general in 1902.
In 1907, a British officer serving in Jodhpur died, and when no fourth Christian of appropriate rank was found to assist at his burial, Sir Pertab voluntarily served as a pall bearer. , Brahmin priests claimed that he had thus broken caste, and demanded that he undergo a purification, to which he replied “I will do nothing of the sort, the deceased and I belong to the highest caste of all, that of a soldier.”
Sir Pertab believed that “a soldier’s death, wherever won, is the best and greatest gift of life,” and so, when World War I broke out, though pushing 70, volunteered for service. He led the Jodhpur Imperial Service Troops, essentially a brigade of two lancer regiments and a medical detachment, on the Western Front in the Indian Corps (1914-1915), and later in the Sinai and Palestine (1917-1918). The Jodhpur Lancers took a prominent role in the capture of Haifa (September 23, 1918), where Sir Pertab told them, "You can go forward and be killed by the enemy’s bullets, or you can fall back and be executed by me." Two of his sons and a nephew served with the lancers, and one son was killed at Haifa, an operation still commemorated annually in the Indian Army. Sir Pertab emerged from the war as a lieutenant-general and Knight Commander of the Bath.
During the course of his long and faithful service to the British Empire, Sir Pertab became a personal friend to Queen Victoria, her son Edward VII, and the latter’s son George V. So when, in 1921, the Prince of Wales (later Edward VIII), toured India, he quite naturally looked up the old family friend.
Sir Pertab took the young prince pig sticking, a favorite sport among the Indian horsey set, and one at which he was quite adept. The prince, although an accomplished polo player, was much less experienced in the pig sticking business, and made a careless mistake; He dismounted during the hunt, before the pig had been killed, which could have cost him dearly.
At that, Sir Pertab told him, “I know you are the Prince of Wales, and you know that you are the Prince of Wales, but the pig doesn’t know you are the Prince of Wales.”

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1638         Prince Louis-Dieudonné of France, later King Louis XIV (1643-1715).

On his deathbed, Louis XIV, traditionally regarded as one of the greatest kings of France (r., 1643-1715), told his 5-year old great-grandson, who was about to become Louis XV, "I have been too fond of war; do not imitate me in that . . . ."  It was plain statement of the truth; from the time Louis XIV assumed full power, at the age of 18 in 1661, France was at war for about 30 of the 54 years until his death
Oddly, the longest, most terrible, and most costly of these conflicts, the War of the Spanish Succession (1701-1714), might easily have been avoided.
The causus belli of the war was the death of the last Spanish Hapsburg, King Charles II (r. 1661-1700).  Despite having been married twice, Charles died without leaving any children, probably due to impotence, and without any clear close relative eligible to succeed him.  Now since Charles' health had always been precarious, the Spanish succession naturally interested the principal monarchs of Europe, Louis XIV, head of the House of Bourbon, and the Holy Roman Emperor Leopold I, head of the House of Hapsburg.  Leopold had married Charles' sister, Margarita Teresa, while Louis had wed the Spanish king's half-sister, Maria Teresa, and thus both had heirs would could claim a tie to the Spanish throne.
Attempting to settle the matter peacefully, in 1668 Louis and Leopold agreed that upon the death of King Charles, the Spanish Empire would be divided.  Louis would gain The Spanish Netherlands [Belgium], Lombardy, Sardinia, and Navarre, as well as Naples and Sicily (which France had been trying to conquer since the 13th century), plus the Philippines, while the Habsburg claimant to the throne would get Spain proper and the Americas.  This seemed an equitable solution to the problem, since each dynasty gained something from the deal, while Spain was united with neither, which would have created an unprecedented superpower.
Alas for peaceful settle of international problems, when Charles finally died in 1700, Louis promptly decided to scrap the agreement, hoping to secure the entire Spanish Empire for his middle grandson, Philip of Anjou, then about 17.  Naturally, Leopold, and most of the rest of Europe's monarchs objected.
The result was war, as the champions of the various claimants --at one point there were actually three!-- fought it out across much of Europe and goodly portions of the rest of the world as well.  In the end, exhaustion, the deaths of some of the claimants, and Bourbon victories in Spain, led to the accession of Philip of Anjou as King Philip V of Spain, who would reign, with a slight interruption, until 1746, over a rather diminished Spanish Empire.
So Louis had gained the throne of France for his family -- though with tough treaty arrangements barring the merger of the two kingdoms under a single ruler.  Of course Spain was devastated by the decade of war, while France’s economy was in a shambles.  Worse, France had lost its colonies in Hudson’s Bay, Newfoundland, and Acadia to Britain, while Spain had lost the Spanish Netherlands, Naples, Lombardy, and Sardinia to Austria, Sicily to Piedmont, Minorca, in the Mediterranean and Gibraltar to Britain, and territories in South America to Portugal

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1914  As German troops began to drive deeper and deeper into France and Belgium during their stunning series of victories in the “Battle of the Frontiers” (August 2-26, 1914), an enormous feeling of optimism began to infect the entire army, from the lowest Soldat to the Supreme War Lord himself, Kaiser Wilhelm II. But Helmuth von Moltke the Younger, Chief-of- the-Great-General Staff, did not share that optimism. Following a train ride from Koblenz to Luxembourg on August 20th in the company of the Kaiser, who kept speaking in the most blood-thirsty terms about the imminent defeat of the French and their allies, Moltke told their traveling companion, Admiral George Alexander von Muller, Chief of the Naval Staff, “Contrary to the Kaiser’s fantasies, we have pushed the French back, but they are not yet beaten. That still has to happen”
Less than a week later, on September 4th, as the German armies were but 50 miles northeast and east of Paris, and the infectious euphoria had risen to enormous heights, Moltke confided to Karl Hellfeich, a prominent German banker and conservative politician, “We must not deceive ourselves. We have had success, but not victory. Victory means annihilation of the enemy’s power of resistance. When armies of millions of men oppose each other in battle, the victor has prisoners. Where are our prisoners? There are some 20,000 taken in the Lorraine fighting, another 10,000 here and another 10,000 there. Besides, the relatively small number of captured guns shows that the French are conducting a planned and orderly retreat. The hardest work is still to be done.”
Moltke was right, of course.
The Germans had entered the war with a "Perfect Plan," commit everything in a sweep on the right, a plan in which Moltke himself had little confidence, despite his efforts to strengthen it. The plan seemed premised on the idea that the French would not notice the movement, that the Belgians offer at best no more than token resistance, that the British not honor their promise to defend Belgian neutrality (or, if they did, that their “contemptible little army” would be swept aside), and that German troops would manage heroic feats of marching, averaging over 30 kilometers a day for 39 days under a summer sun, to encircle Paris from the west. In fact, of course, none of these assumptions held. The Belgians did fight, inflicting a series of small delays on the advancing Germans, as did the British as well, with great effect, and the French dropped their initial, and costly, offensives into Alsace-Lorraine and began juggling troops by rail to bolster their left, while the Kaiser’s men found themselves at the end of an increasingly tenuous line of supply, staggering ever onwards, fighting fatigue, hunger, and heat as much as the enemy, and unable to encircle Paris.
On September 6th, two days after Moltke’s comment to Hellfeich, the supposedly beaten French and British took the offensive in what has come to be known as the First Battle of the Marne, forcing the Germans to fall back or suffer devastating losses, and setting the stage for the long horror of the Western Front.
There are several morals to this story, one is embodied in an adage by Napoleon, “The moment of victory is the moment of greatest danger.”  Another is a comment by the Great Moltke – uncle to the one of 1914 -- that "No battle plan survives contact with the enemy", which his hapless nephew should have known. And then, of course there’s the homelier, “Don’t count your chickens before they hatch.”

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1870. HMS Captain founders with heavy loss.
The brain child of Cowper Phipps Coles, a Captain in the Royal Navy, H.M.S. Captain was one of a number of radically innovative warships built during the early days of the ironclad revolution. Funded only after bruising parliamentary and press debates, and against the better judgement of the Admiralty, Captain sported two turrets of a novel design, each mounting two 12-inch muzzle loading rifled cannon. Intended to displace 6,950 tons and make nearly 16 knots, Captain had a number of flaws. One was that upon completion, she actually displaced 7,767 tons. This gave her a freeboard (height of her deck above water) of only 6½ feet, 18 inches less than intended. Moreover, due to poor construction, her metacentric height was about ten inches higher than as intended, making her roll a good deal. Finally, to top it all off, she was furnished with a full ship rig, and sails; her masts were the tallest and at 50,000 square feet her sail area the largest in the history of the Royal Navy. The Royal Navy’s ship design specialists concluded that the ship would prove unstable and dangerous in any weather, and would probably not recover if she rolled more than 20 degrees. Captain was commissioned in April of 1870. Surprisingly, she did well on initial trials, sailing as far as Gibraltar on several voyages. Then disaster struck. Late on September 6, 1870, Captain was cruising under sail with eleven other warships off Cape Finisterre, the westernmost part of France. Shortly after midnight on the 7th, a strong wind struck her and she began heeling over. Although the Captain ordered the sail cut away, before this could be done her roll increased and then very suddenly she capsized. Of some 500 officers and men aboard Captain, there were only 18 survivors, men who’d been lucky enough to be thrown clear when the ship rolled over. Among the dead were Coles himself, as well as Captain Hugh Talbot Burgoyne, the ship’s skipper, who had earned a V.C. in the Crimean War. In addition to the terrible loss of life, the sinking of H.M.S. Captain also represented a significant loss for students of ancient and ecclesiastical history, due to Lieutenant John Trevithick, the ship’s second lieutenant, who was among the dead In 1858, Trevithick had accompanied an expedition led by Lord Napier to explore and map portions of the Arabian Sea and adjacent waters. Being a man of antiquarian interests, Trevithick had spent part of his time buying up old manuscripts in local bazaars. He had an unknown number of these with him aboard Captain when she went down. Precisely what was lost can never be known, but a bit of barbarous vandalism on Trevithick’s part may provide a hint. It seems that shortly before Captain’s final voyage, Trevithick cut a parchment page from one manuscript and gave it as a gift to a fellow officer from another ship. It’s an attractive page, in two columns. One column is of text, in Coptic script carefully written in black ink with little red crosses for punctuation. The other column is an illuminated picture showing five women and a man placing a body in a tomb. This alone survived of Trevithick’s collection, and now rests in the Ashmolean Museum at Oxford. The page is from an ancient Ethiopian Life of Pontius Pilate.

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1855         the French stormed the Malakof Bastion at Sebastopol.
Whatever his faults as a ruler and commander, Napoleon III did have the knack of doing things with a certain flair, as can be seen in his treatment of Pierre François Joseph Bosquet.

One of the paladins of the Second Empire, Bosquet (1810-1861) entered the prestigious École Polytechnique in 1829, emerging two years later as a sous-lieutenant in the artillery.  In 1834, having been promoted to lieutenant, he went to Algeria, where he would serve for nearly nineteen years.  Demonstrating great courage under fire, deft diplomacy when dealing with local peoples, and considerable ingenuity in solving problems, Bosquet distinguished himself on numerous occasions, being several times wounded, while rising to captain, then to major with command of a battalion of tirailleurs, and then lieutenant colonel and later colonel of a line regiment.  In 1848 Bosquet’s swift action in suppressing an uprising among the Berber tribesmen of the Kabylie, during which he was severely wounded, secured his promotion to general de brigade, an outstanding achievement for a man with just 17 years’ service.
Promoted to general de division, in 1853 Bosquet returned to France, for his first taste of garrison duty in the motherland, having been cited in the General Orders of the Army six times and won three degrees of the Légion d'honneur.
With such an outstanding record, Bosquet was one of the first officers selected for command in the Crimean War (1853-1856).  In the Crimea, his division spearheaded the French attack at the Battle of the Alma (September 20, 1854), earning him another degree of the Légion d'honneur and a corps command for the subsequent siege of Sebastopol.  Present at the Battle of Balaklava (September 20, 1854), Bosquet witnessed the “Charge of the Light Brigade,” of which he said “C’est magnifique, mais ce n’est pas la guerre: c'est de la folie – It’s magnificent, but it’s not war: it’s madness".  A few weeks later, his corps played a critical role in the Battle of Inkerman (November 5, 1854), and he later assumed control of the Allied right wing.  In September of 1855, Bosquet ‘s corps took part in the final phase of the siege, the capture of the Mamelon and Malakoff bastions.  On the 7th, Bosquet personally led his troops as they stormed the Mamelon, and the following day in the capture of the Malakoff, at great cost, he himself being very severely wounded.  For this, he received the Grand Cross of the Légion d'honneur and the coveted Médaille militaire.
Returning home with great honor, Bosquet was invited to a banquet by Napoleon III.  It was a very grand affair at the Tuileries Palace, with all the glitterati of the Second Empire present, lavish entertainment, and much outstanding food and drink.
After the tables had been cleared, the Emperor ordered that all present fill their glasses for a toast.  When this had been done, he stood, raised his glass, and said, “To the health of Marshal Bosquet,” thereby announcing the award of the coveted baton to his surprised guest.
Alas, Bosquet, who was also named a Senator of the Empire, didn’t enjoy his exalted status for very long.   His wound proved quite troublesome, and his health deteriorating rapidly/  The marshal soon had to leave active service, and died in 1861, aged only 50.

 1935 the British Chief of the Imperial General Staff, Field Marshal Sir Archibald Montgomery-Massingberd proposed that officers of the Royal Tank Corps be provided with horses for use on parade.

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During the 1930s both the U.S. and the Japanese Navy attempted to calculate its needs in the event of a future major war. Pre-war construction programs were based on these estimates, as were the emergency programs which were adopted in 1940 and 1941. But the war came rather sooner than planned, and was somewhat different than anticipated. As a result, the actual fleets were different from those that were planned.
U.S. Navy Prewar Projections vs. Wartime Reality
Type   Plan   Actual   Percent   Inc   Canc
Battleships:   New   17   10   58.8   2   2
                        Old   5   15   300.0   --   --
Carriers:   Fleet   15   28   186.7   11   2
Light   0   9   --   2   0
Escort   5   85   1700.0   11   4
A/C   1600   4500   281.3   1920   310
Cruisers:   Large   6   2   33.3   1   1
Heavy   26   38   146.2   14   0
Light   49   51   104.1   17   6
Destroyers:   Fleet   450   620   133.8   65   5
Escort   0   337   --   0   0
Submarines      200   350   175.0   39   24
Key: "A/C" is the number of aircraft slots on the carriers, not the number of aircraft available. "Planned, " the number of ships which the Navy expected to have available by the outbreak of war, sometime around 1944; "Actual," the number of ships in commission during the Second World War (note that figures for destroyers and submarines have been rounded). "Percent," the number of ships actually in commission at any time during the war, as a proportion of the planned figures. "Inc" (incomplete) covers ships laid down but still not in commission by the summer of 1945, when the war was effectively over. "Canc" shows how many of these were canceled, the balance being completed post-war.

The table gives a fair notion of the difference between the war which was expected and that which occurred. Clearly in the '30s the U.S. Navy's brass still believed the battleships would play a major role in the next war, and they planned to have an almost completely new battle line for the occasion. However, the exigencies of war resulted in fewer new battleships being built and all (except two demolished at Pearl Harbor) the older ones were upgraded and put to work. Note, too, that the Navy certainly did not dismiss the aircraft carrier as a useful weapon, and planned to have about as many flattops as battlewagons. But it certainly greatly underestimated the need for carriers.

Of particular interest are the figures for escort carriers, which ultimately included about a quarter of all carrier-borne aircraft (listed under "A/C Capacity"). In fact, the escort carrier was an idea more or less foisted upon the Navy by President Roosevelt His enthusiasm was well rewarded, for their role in anti-submarine and amphibious operations was one of the more interesting developments of the war.

Figures for cruisers are also rather interesting. The so-called "large" cruisers, often erroneously termed "battlecruisers," were really super-heavy cruisers built in the erroneous assumption that the Japanese were building similar vessels. They turned out to be fine ships, but fulfilled not particular role; the Navy would have gotten more from its investment had it used the money that went into designing and building these vessels to buy a couple of more Essex Class carriers. On the other hand, the predicted need for heavy cruisers was rather lower than the demand, though that for light cruisers was pretty much on target.
is interesting to note that despite the experience of World War I, the Navy underestimated the need for destroyers to curb the submarine menace. Indeed, the average monthly completion rate for destroyers rose enormously during the war: 1.33 per month in 1941, 6.75 in 1942, and peaking at 10.83 in 1944. The shortage of destroyers was a critical factor in the creation of the destroyer escort, a sort of "second class" destroyer designed primarily for anti-submarine operations, rather than general fleet operations. In addition, considering that the Navy's prewar plans were predicated upon a submarine campaign against Japanese shipping, the prewar estimate of the need for submarines was extremely low.

In addition, a great many ships that had been ordered, were never laid down, including five battleships, three Midway Class carriers, and three large cruisers. By mid-1944 the Navy had begun to cancel orders for ships which it considered no longer necessary for the war effort, including many which were already under construction. Another area in which prewar estimates fell short was in terms of auxiliary and amphibious warfare vessels. The Navy actually ordered very few of these before hostilities broke out, but by the war's end these actually formed the greatest proportion of the Navy's approximately 75,000 or so vessels, counting everything from battlewagons and aircraft carriers to lighters and "honey bucket" barges.

The Imperial Navy projected its needs in the 1930s and adopted what it considered a realistic program for expansion. Between 1931 and Pearl Harbor a large number of warships were ordered to be built, or converted from other types of vessel. When war came, additional orders were made, and changes authorized in existing orders, leading to a quite different fleet.
Imperial Navy Prewar Projections vs. Wartime Reality
Older   1930s   41-45   Total   Compl   Fleet   Canc   Inc
Battleships:   10   4   0   4   2   12   1   0
Aircraft Carriers
Fleet:   2   9   13   22   11   11   0   3
Light:   2   3   3   6   5   7   0   1
Escort   0   3   4   7   5   5   0   0
A/C   200   800   960   1760   970   1170   0   200
Cruisers   25   17   8   25   14   39   1   0
Destroyers
Fleet:   58   89   38   127   77   135   0   2
Escort:   0   0   113   113   32   32   0   9
Submarines:   53   90   642   732   151   204   1   18
"Older" indicates pre-1930s vessels that were available for first line service at the outbreak of the Pacific War. Figures include conversions from other types: Battleships, includes one converted to an aircraft carrier; cruisers include six ordered as light cruisers in the 1930s and converted to heavy cruisers, plus one ordered as a heavy cruiser during the war, and then taken in hand for conversion to a light carrier. "Warship Orders" include vessels not laid down. "Completed" covers only ships that entered service. "Fleet" is the gross total available to the Imperial Navy of each type during the war. "Canc" covers ships that were laid down, but canceled during construction. "Inc" includes ships laid down but not completed by the end of the war. Escort carrier figures omit the so-called Army escort carriers; aircraft figures are approximate; cruisers omits two captured from the Chinese; destroyers omit one captured from the US; submarine figures omit midgets, transport boats, and a number taken over from Italy and Germany.

To a great extend, the differences between the Imperial Navy's pre-war expectations as to the composition of the fleet and wartime reality were caused by much the same factors that helped alter the composition of the U.S. Navy, the changing nature of the war. Another factor at play was the weakness of Japan's economy, which made it difficult for Japan to complete many ships projected, and the unwillingness of Japan's senior naval leadership to take the American submarine threat seriously, which led them to concentrate on completing the three almost useless units of the Yamato Class (two as battleships and one as a poor aircraft carrier), rather than concentrate on producing escorts.

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1936, during the Spanish Civil War, the British Admiralty received a message from Vice-Admiral Charles G. Ramsey complaining that preparations for the upcoming Coronation naval review were being interfered with by the need to provide escort for British ships against "pirate" (i.e., Italian) submarines ambushing shipping bound for Republican ports in Spain.

1977  Hamida Djandoubi, c. 27, having the honor of being the last person guillotined in France

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0 AD  Feast of St. Elvis/Ailby/Ailbe/Eilfyw of Emly, Patron of Wolves.

1912. Cadet Dwight D. Eisenhower, of the West Point football squad, flubbed a tackle of Jim Thorpe, who then scored a touchdown, helping the Carlisle Indian School thump USMA, 26-6.

1919  Gefreiter Adolf Hitler joins the "Deutsche Arbeiterpartei -- German Workers' Party", becoming its 55th member

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Good stuff