History of the Week: Okinawa, War of 1812, N.Greene, Waterloo, J.Rainey, ‘House Divided,’ Council of Ephesus, Vlad &More
This week was the anniversary of Winston Churchill’s historic WWII speech where he said, “Let us therefore brace ourselves to our duties, and so bear ourselves that, if the British Empire and its Commonwealth last for a thousand years, men will still say, ‘This was their finest hour.”’ Every great man—indeed, every good man—tries to bear himself so that he or his children can look back with pride instead of with shame on his actions. This week marked the anniversary of many heroic and many hideous actions, but we must remember them all, that we can resolve to avoid the villainies of the past, learn from the heroisms, and bear ourselves so that the men of the future can look back and say, “This was their finest hour.”
June 16
1487 - The Battle of Stoke Field happens in England, the last battle of the Wars of the Roses. The newly crowned Yorkist contender for the throne, King Edward VI, and his allies face off against the Tudor usurper Henry VII, who defeated the Yorkists and solidified his dynastic rule over England.
1779 - Spain declares war on Great Britain in support of the Americans during the American Revolution, launching the Great Siege of Gibraltar that would go on for three and a half years and be the largest engagement of the Revolution in terms of numbers, involving besieging French and Spanish and defending British troops. The British did manage to hold onto Gibraltar but, of course, not the American colonies.
1829 - Estimated date of the birth of famed Apache war chief Geronimo, who terrorized settlers and spent decades fighting U.S. and Mexican forces.
1858 - Attorney and former congressman Abraham Lincoln is declared the “first and only choice” for the new, anti-slavery political party’s senatorial candidacy at the Illinois Republican State Convention in Springfield. Lincoln delivers his famous, Biblically-based “House Divided” speech. “‘A house divided against itself cannot stand.’ I believe this government cannot endure, permanently half slave and half free,” Lincoln stated. “I do not expect the Union to be dissolved—I do not expect the house to fall—but I do expect it will cease to be divided. It will become all one thing, or all the other.” He would go on to lose the Senatorial election but soon after win a more important election—to the presidency.
1958 - Imre Nagy, Hungarian premier and leader of an unsuccessful rebellion against Soviet rule, is executed.
1977 - Scientist Wernher von Braun dies. A Nazi rocketry expert who worked for Hitler, he later surrendered to American troops and went on to suffer no punishment for his dedicated service to the genocidal regime, as the U.S. government brought him over to work for NASA’s space program. He received honors from the U.S. and societies worldwide for his work, and we can only hope he received more objective justice in the next life.
2015 - U.S. business titan Donald Trump comes down the golden escalator at Trump Tower in New York and launches what will become his historic and successful campaign for president.
June 17
1462 - Wallachian (Romanian) leader Vlad III, also known as Vlad the Impaler (the inspiration for the character of Dracula), surprises and terrifies his Turkish enemies. While Vlad did not succeed in killing Turkish leader Mehmed II as he aimed to do, he did end up scaring the Turks out of his domains. Vlad was the unlikely and imperfect champion who saved that area of Christian Europe from the bloodthirsty Muslim invaders.
1527 - Reported date on which Spanish conquistador Pánfilo de Narváez sets off to explore Florida.
1631 - “Mumtaz Mahal, the beloved wife of [India’s] Mughal Emperor Shah Jahan, died while giving birth to their fourteenth child in Burhanpur, Madhya Pradesh. Thereafter, Shah Jahan spent more than twenty years building the Taj Mahal in memory of his beloved wife.”
1789 - Radical members of the Third Estate (from the French Estates General) adopt the title of National Assembly, an entity that would go on to be the French Revolutionary governing body that became an agent of terrorism and mass murdering oppression.
1856 - The first national convention of the then-new Republican Party begins. The Republicans were specifically anti-slavery, and though most of their members were from the North or West, there were also delegates from the South.
1882 - Russian composer Igor Stravinsky is born.
June 18
618 - Reported date on which military commander Li Yuan is crowned as Emperor Gaozu of China, the dawn of the Tang Dynasty.
1155 - Pope Adrian IV crowns Frederick Barbarossa as Holy Roman Emperor.
1812 - President James Madison signs the Congressional act of war against Great Britain into law and the War of 1812 begins. Among the factors leading to the U.S. declaring war were Brits’ forcible induction of American seamen into the British Navy, Britain’s economic blockade of France, and British support for Great Lakes native tribes.
1815 - The Battle of Waterloo occurs between resurgent French Emperor Napoleon and allied Dutch, Belgian, German, and British troops under the Duke of Wellington, also Prussians under Von Blucher. It was Napoleon’s final and decisive defeat, and ended his Hundred Days of restoration to power after his first exile.
1901 - Anastasia Nikolaevna Romanov, daughter of the last czar of Russia, is born. She and her family were brutally massacred by Communist Bolshevik radicals under the evil Lenin in 1918. For many years, it was rumored that she had somehow survived the massacre, and a number of women even claimed to be Anastasia. Her remains have since been forensically identified, but the myth of the last of the Romanovs continues to be commemorated on stage and in film.
1940 - French General Charles de Gaulle gives a speech over BBC radio in England sparking French resistance against Nazi occupation as he declared “the flame of French resistance must not be extinguished and will not be extinguished.”
1940 - During WWII, following the fall of France to the Nazis, new British Prime Minister Winston Churchill gives his famous “Their Finest Hour” speech to the House of Commons. He ended:
‘What General Weygand called the Battle of France is over. I expect that the Battle of Britain is about to begin. Upon this battle depends the survival of Christian civilization. Upon it depends our own British life, and the long continuity of our institutions and our Empire. The whole fury and might of the enemy must very soon be turned on us. Hitler knows that he will have to break us in this Island or lose the war. If we can stand up to him, all Europe may be free and the life of the world may move forward into broad, sunlit uplands. But if we fail, then the whole world, including the United States, including all that we have known and cared for, will sink into the abyss of a new Dark Age made more sinister, and perhaps more protracted, by the lights of perverted science. Let us therefore brace ourselves to our duties, and so bear ourselves that, if the British Empire and its Commonwealth last for a thousand years, men will still say, “This was their finest hour.”’
June 19
1179 - Rebel and future king of Norway Sverre Sigurdsson wins a victory at the Battle of Kalvskinnet over the king’s forces.
1269 - Reported date on which King Louis IX of France orders that all Jews wear a yellow badge in public.
1306 - King Robert the Bruce of Scotland is defeated by the Earl of Pembroke at the Battle of Methven.
1566 - James, later James I of Great Britain, is born in Scotland, only son of Mary, Queen of Scots, and her second husband. Separated from his mother while young, he abandoned her Catholic faith to be a Protestant and successor of the vicious Queen Elizabeth I. James followed Elizabeth’s example in harshly persecuting Catholics.
1623 - Blaise Pascal, author of the famous philosophical work Penseés, is born in France.
1786 - American Revolutionary hero Nathanael Greene dies. “General Nathanael Green was an officer in the Continental Army during the American Revolutionary War. He was one of George Washington's most trusted officers and led American forces to a strategic victory in the Southern Campaign.”
1861 - Douglas Haig, 1st Earl Haig is born in Edinburgh. He ‘was a British field marshal, commander in chief of the British forces in France during most of World War I. His strategy of attrition (tautly summarized as “kill more Germans”) resulted in enormous numbers of British casualties but little immediate gain in 1916–17 and made him a subject of controversy.’
1862 - During the Civil War and Abraham Lincoln’s administration, slavery is abolished in all U.S. territories:
‘Be it enacted by the Senate and House of Representatives of the United States of America in Congress assembled, That from and after the passage of this act there shall be neither slavery nor involuntary servitude in any of the Territories of the United States now existing, or which may at any time hereafter be formed or acquired by the United States, otherwise than in punishment of crimes whereof the party shall have been duly convicted.’
1903 - Yankee player and baseball Hall of Famer Lou Gehrig is born.
1944 - The naval Battle of the Philippine Sea during WWII begins, as the Japanese attempt to win a decisive victory over the Americans. Instead, the decisive victory went to the Americans.
For the main historical events of June 20, including the Battle of the Catalaunian Fields, Barbary Pirates, King Philip’s War, the Battle of Cuddalore, the start of the French Revolution, Queen Victoria, Wolfe Tone, the KKK trials of 1871, and the Boxer Rebellion, read my previous piece.
June 21
1377 - King Edward III, who led England into the Hundred Years’ War with France, dies.
1527 - Niccolò Machiavelli, an Italian Renaissance diplomat, philosopher, advocate of tyranny, and author of The Prince, dies.
1631 - English adventurer John Smith dies. “John Smith was an English soldier, explorer, and historian. He is most famous for his role in helping stabilize Jamestown, the first permanent English colony in America, and his legendary encounter with the Powhatan princess, Pocahontas.”
1788 - The U.S. Constitution goes into effect, as New Hampshire is the ninth state to ratify it.
1832 - Joseph H. Rainey is born into slavery. A remarkable man, first a barber, then forced to work on Confederate Charleston’s fortifications during the Civil War, he escaped to the West Indies but returned to enter politics in his native South Carolina. In 1870, he became the first black U.S. congressman, and went on to serve four terms as a member of the Republican Party, more than any other black member of the House in the Reconstruction era. He championed the civil rights of black, native Indian, and Chinese Americans against racist Democrats and complacent Republicans. He was later a U.S. internal revenue agent and a banker.
1834 - American inventor Cyrus McCormick patents his reaping machine.
1876 - Antonio Lopez de Santa Anna, the crazed and vicious Mexican president, general, and dictator infamous for massacring the American, European, and Mexican defenders of the Alamo, dies.
June 22
217 BC - At the Battle of Raphia, Egypt’s Ptolemy IV defeats Antiochus III, King of Syria, in the “battle of elephants.”
168 BC - The Battle of Pydna occurs, a “decisive military engagement in the Roman victory over Macedonia in the Third Macedonian War.” Roman general Lucius Aemilius Paullus outsmarted and defeated Macedonian King Perseus. “Perseus fled, allowing the Romans to end the Macedonian monarchy and divide Macedonia into four republics.”
431 - St. Cyril of Alexandria opens the Church Council of Ephesus, which will condemn the heresy of Nestorianism.
1535 - Cardinal—now St.—John Fisher is taken from the Tower of London and executed for refusing to recognize heretic King Henry VIII as the Head of the Church in England. Now celebrated as the feast day of him and fellow martyr St. Thomas More.
1865 - The CSS Shenandoah, a Confederate raider, fires the last shot of the U.S. Civil War—a blank—at a New Bedford whaling ship in the Bering Sea off Siberia.
1941 - Operation Barbarossa, the surprise Nazi invasion of the Soviet Union/Russia and the biggest such operation of all time, begins. “With some 3.5 million German and nearly 700,000 German-allied troops (Romanians, Finns, Hungarians, Italians, Slovaks, and others) facing off against a Red Army that numbered some 5.5 million men, the opening phase of Barbarossa saw nearly 10 million human beings locked in mortal combat from the outset. And Soviet mobilization wasn’t finished by a long shot—soon there would be more than 14 million men and women called up for the war against the Germans.” It became a deadly disaster for the Germans, and a costly victory for the Soviets.
1945 - U.S. forces have secured Japanese island Okinawa, a costly victory due to the entrenched and warped Japanese attitude that they must fight to the death rather than surrender. “The battle for Okinawa [was dragged] out over nearly three months and included some of the worst kamikaze attacks of the war. By the time Okinawa was secured by American forces on June 22, 1945, the United States had sustained over 49,000 casualties including more than 12,500 men killed or missing. Okinawans caught in the fighting suffered greatly, with an estimate as high as 150,000 civilians killed. Of the Japanese defending the island, an estimated 110,000 died. Some of the most well-known stories from the long fight include the heroics of conscientious objector Private Desmond Doss and the death of Ernie Pyle [at] Ie Shima. Twenty-four American military personnel we[re] awarded the Medal of Honor for going above and beyond the call of duty. In American hands, the island provided a vital airfield in the final drive on Japan, as the Allies finally brought about Japanese surrender less than three months later.”
1987 - Fred Astaire, one of the greatest and most innovative dancers of the Golden Age of Hollywood, dies.
Did I miss any important events? Let me know in the comments.