Archive for January, 2007

The Ger­man U-Boat U-166, under the com­mand of Hans-Günther Kuhlmann, set sail from Lori­ent, France on June 17, 1942, for the Gulf of Mex­ico as part of Oper­a­tion Drum­beat¹. Now that Hitler had declared war on the U.S., their mis­sion was to harass U.S. ship­ping, of oil and mil­i­tary sup­plies, in the Gulf.

After being under way for roughly a month, Kuhlmann and his crew scored their first kill when the inter­cepted the Domini­can schooner Car­men off the coast of the Domini­can Repub­lic on July 11. Not want­ing to waste his valu­able (and finite) sup­ply of tor­pe­does, he sur­faced and destroyed the schooner with the sub’s deck mounted guns. Two days later he struck gold again, this time with the U.S. steam freighter Oneida, off the east­ern tip of Cuba. From there he and his crew con­tin­ued west­erly along the Cuban coast.

He encoun­tered the fish­ing ves­sel Gertrude on the evening of July 16 about 30 miles north­east of Havana. The trawler was too small to use a tor­pedo on, so he sur­faced, com­mand­ing the crew into life boats before he destroyed it with the sub’s deck guns once again.

For the next 2 weeks Kuhlmann’s crew sailed north­ward into the Gulf of Mex­ico hunt­ing for prey but find­ing none until he found the mouth of the Mis­sis­sippi River, an excel­lent loca­tion to sit and wait for tankers steam­ing east­ward. Patience paid off, when on the after­noon of July 30 he encoun­tered the pas­sen­ger steamer Robert E. Lee.

The Robert E. Lee had been pressed into ser­vice by the Navy, run­ning cargo here, pas­sen­gers there. On July 30 she was car­ry­ing pas­sen­gers from Port-of-Spain, Trinidad, some of which were sur­vivors of other attacks insti­gated by other Ger­man U-Boats. With the heat of sum­mer press­ing down upon the over­crowded Robert E. Lee, the cap­tain was try­ing to find a safe har­bor for his pas­sen­gers. After try­ing and being unable to dock in Tampa, Florida, he headed for New Orleans, along with his U.S. Navy escort, the U.S. sub­ma­rine chaser PC-566, where they met up with U-166.

After pick­ing up radio trans­mis­sions com­ing from the PC-566, U-166 homed in on the loca­tion of the 2 boats. Fir­ing a sin­gle tor­pedo into the freighter’s port side, the Robert E. Lee went down, tak­ing 25 lives with it.

Once the Robert E. Lee began sink­ing, PC-566 jumped into the fight, drop­ping depth 10 charges over the flee­ing U-166. After the drop­ping of the charges, an oil slick was seen ris­ing from the water, but since the other usual evi­dence that a sub was sunk (a rush of air to the sur­face) it was assumed that the sub had escaped. In real­ity the U-166 had been sunk by PC-566.

In 2001 the wreck­age of both the Robert E. Lee and U-166 were found by C&C Tech­nolo­gies while the firm was sur­vey­ing a pro­posed pipeline route for BP Explo­ration and Shell inter­na­tional. The 2 ships rest over 5000 feet down on the bot­tom of the Gulf of Mex­ico.²

1. Admi­ral Karl Dönitz ini­ti­ated this sub­ma­rine oper­a­tion, which was to tar­get all United States ship­ping on the Atlantic seaboard from Maine to the Gulf of Mex­ico. It included 5 long-range sub­marines and, all told, cost the U.S. 397 ships and roughly 5000 lives. [↩]
2. Large por­tions of this piece were researched from The Past Foun­da­tion and Wikipedia. [↩]

Texas, which is bet­ter than all other states because it was once its own coun­try, had, in its entirety as the Repub­lic of Texas, had 4 pres­i­dents, 3 if you’re not count­ing one of the office­hold­ers twice.

From March through Sep­tem­ber of 1836 Texas had as interim pres­i­dent a man named David G. Bur­net. Bur­net, a failed land spec­u­la­tor, was cho­sen at the Con­ven­tion of 1836 to be the interim pres­i­dent of the newly-formed Repub­lic of Texas fol­low­ing the adop­tion of the Texas Dec­la­ra­tion of Inde­pen­dence. After the Bat­tle of San Jac­into Bur­net, along with Mex­i­can pres­i­dent Anto­nio López de Santa Anna, signed the Treaties of Velasco on May 14, 1836, mak­ing Texas a free republic.

But Bur­net was not to con­tinue as pres­i­dent of the weeks-old repub­lic. Burnet’s polit­i­cal enemy, Sam Hous­ton, was elected as pres­i­dent on Sep­tem­ber 5 of that same year. Whether it was out of dis­gust with pol­i­tics or him just being a sour­puss, Bur­net resigned as pres­i­dent on Octo­ber 22, hand­ing over the reigns of power to Hous­ton, who was sup­posed to assume the pres­i­dency in December.

Hous­ton had been a vet­eran of the War of 1812, a lawyer in his adopted home state of Ten­nessee, and had also been a sen­a­tor there. Even with all of the suc­cess he’d had, Houston’s 2 year constitutionally-mandated term was plagued with prob­lems. Texas had a moun­tain of debt left over from the rev­o­lu­tion, and to com­pound on this the new coun­try had no money, and no real way to raise it. Also the new repub­lic lived under the con­stant specter of another immi­nent inva­sion, as Mex­ico had renounced the sign­ing of the Treaties of Velasco. Lastly, Texas was a coun­try that was unrec­og­nized by any nation of the world. Hous­ton sought to imme­di­ately join the United States to alle­vi­ate some of his country’s trou­bles, but, with the slave issue rag­ing, Texas was denied entry into the Union, as it would have entered as a slave state.

At the end of his 2 year term Hous­ton was suc­ceeded by his vice pres­i­dent, Mirabeau Bouna­parte Lamar. Lamar had fought under Sam Hous­ton in the rev­o­lu­tion, join­ing up after the mas­sacres at Goliad and the Alamo. He com­manded the cav­alry dur­ing the Bat­tle of San Jacinto.

Lamar, unlike Hous­ton, wanted Texas to remain an inde­pen­dent nation, even­tu­ally expand­ing itself out to Cal­i­for­nia, and to even­tu­ally rival the United States for con­trol of the North Amer­i­can con­ti­nent. He also was in favor of exter­mi­nat­ing all Texas Native Amer­i­cans. But on the plus side, under him Texas was rec­og­nized by sev­eral Euro­pean coun­tries, and he also founded the new cap­i­tal of Texas in Austin. Through all of this he spent money like it was going out of style, rais­ing the national debt to unheard of heights.

It may have been the prob­lems that Lamar faced that caused his old polit­i­cal rival to once again assume com­mand of Texas, and on Decem­ber 12, 1841, Sam Hous­ton once again became the pres­i­dent of the repub­lic and led the fledg­ling coun­try until it was finally annexed by the United States in 1845.¹

1. I got a major­ity of the infor­ma­tion for this piece either on Wikipedia (for the per­sonal infor­ma­tion about each man) and TexasEscapes.com. [↩]

On May 5, 1945 while out pic­nick­ing in the small town of Lake­view, Ore­gon, a min­is­ter, Rev­erend Archi Mitchell, his wife Elsie and five local chil­dren found a deflated bal­loon made from mul­berry tree pulp in the woods near the town. The were about to inves­ti­gate what it was when another min­is­ter ran up yelling for the oth­ers not to touch the object. He was too late and the bomb exploded. Killed in the attack were Sher­man Shoe­maker, 12; Jay Gif­ford, 12; Edward Engen, 13; Joan Patzke, 11; Richard Patzke, 13; and Mrs. Mitchell, 26.

The bal­loon had been made by con­scripted Japan­ese school­girls to carry a bomb across the Pacific jet stream from the town of Kokura and hope­fully land in the United States. A Japan­ese offi­cer urged the girls on, saying

“You will be defeat­ing Amer­ica with these arms. Work to your utmost. Achieve your goals!”

The bal­loon that landed near Lake­view was one of 9300 oth­ers launched into the west­erly winds dur­ing the war. Oth­ers landed as far east as Ontario and Michi­gan, but the bal­loon that exploded on May 5 killing the woman and the chil­dren caused the only wartime deaths due to enemy action in any of the 48 states.¹

1. The orig­i­nal idea for this piece came from Stan­ley Weintraub’s excel­lent book, The Last Great Vic­tory. [↩]

In 2002 James Earl Jones was invited by the town of Lauder­hill, Florida to be their fea­tured speaker at their annual Mar­tin Luther King Day cel­e­bra­tion. As appre­ci­a­tion they wanted to pro­vide their guest with some sort of gift, so they turned to a local pro­mo­tions com­pany. The pro­mo­tions com­pany came up with a plaque that included an inscrip­tion thank­ing Jones for his par­tic­i­pa­tion sur­rounded by sev­eral postage stamps depict­ing promi­nent African-Americans, headed by one of MLK him­self. They sent the idea off to a com­pany in George­town, TX for pro­duc­tion of the plaque.

Four days before the MLK cel­e­bra­tion the city received the plaque, but instead of Jones’ name, the plaque read :

“Thank you James Earl Ray for keep­ing the dream alive. City of Lauder­hill, Jan­u­ary 19, 2002.”

Ray, of course, was the man who plead guilty to assas­si­nat­ing MLK at the Lor­raine Motel in Mem­phis in 1968.

Snopes¹ has some stuff about it, a lit­tle more about the reac­tion of the com­pany, Merit Indus­tries, that cre­ated the plaque -

AdPro hastily checked to ensure that the blun­der hadn’t been the result of a mis­take on their part:

Ger­ald Wilcox said he knew the error didn’t come from his com­pany, but he sent a com­pany sec­re­tary scur­ry­ing through order forms — just to be sure.

“In all my com­mu­ni­ca­tions with the ven­dor, I never used [the name James Earl Ray)). I almost fell off my chair when I saw it,” said Nor­bert Williams, 68, a for­mer mid­dle school prin­ci­pal who is an AdPro account exec­u­tive. The evi­dence pointed to George­town, Texas.

Even with his doubts, Wilcox said he was will­ing to call it an error but wanted Merit exec­u­tives to tell him what hap­pened. He said the first phone con­ver­sa­tion broke down when a Merit employee became unco­op­er­a­tive and cut the call short. On a sec­ond try, Ger­ald Wilcox talked to the owner, Her­bert Miller.

“I explained to him why this was so impor­tant. He said I was mak­ing a moun­tain out of a mole hill,” Wilcox said. “They had no sense of his­tory. First I was stunned, then the anger kicked in.”

Miller, appar­ently lack­ing any diplo­matic skills what­so­ever, assuaged nobody’s feel­ings by blam­ing the error on some of his poorly-educated employ­ees and terming the mix-up an inno­cent mis­take that had been “blown out of proportion”:

He said some of the company’s work­ers are barely in their 20s, pos­sess poor Eng­lish lan­guage skills and have lim­ited grasp of his­tory. “[They)) don’t know who James Earl Ray is from James Earl Jones from the man in the moon,’’ he said. Miller said the worker respon­si­ble for engrav­ing this plaque was han­dling another one about the same time bear­ing the name “Ray John­son.” He said the “Ray” from that plaque ended up on the Lauder­hill plaque, sup­plant­ing the word “Jones.”

He said the mis­take slipped through qual­ity con­trol because it was a rush job. “It was a stu­pid, stu­pid error,” he said.

Mr. Jones, to his credit, brushed it off. From CNN² -

James Earl Jones brushes off engrav­ing mistake

LAUDERHILL, Florida (AP) — James Earl Jones brushed off a mis­take by an engraver who erred while inscrib­ing a plaque meant to honor the actor dur­ing a Mar­tin Luther King Jr. tribute.

The plaque was engraved: “Thank you James Earl Ray for keep­ing the dream alive.” Ray was the man con­victed of assas­si­nat­ing King in Mem­phis, Tenn., in 1968.

Jones said the com­pany made a com­mon mis­take and he’s been intro­duced as James Earl Ray before.

“There’s no point in get­ting too sen­si­tive about it,” Jones said Sat­ur­day at the ceremony.

Instead of the plaque, the city gave Jones a col­or­ful Ashanti stool sim­i­lar to ones tra­di­tion­ally used as a throne in the African tribe.

Merit Indus­tries, the plaque’s maker, said the mis­take hap­pened when an employee was prepar­ing the Jones plaque at about the same time as one for some­one named Ray Johnson.

1. The link for the Snopes arti­cle is here. [↩]
2. The link for the CNN arti­cle is here. [↩]