1916: A Year in Review
In 1916, what was then known as the war to end all wars still dominated the headlines. Losses on all sides were heavy and dispiriting. On the western front, French forces repulsed a major German offensive at the Battle of Verdun.* In July, after two years of stalemate in the trenches the British and French went on the offensive in the Somme, a campaign that lasted through November and is largely remembered for the number of casualties on both sides. In the East, the British withdrew from Gallipoli—another military stalemate--and Arab tribes rose up against the Turks, with British support. On the Eastern Front, the Russians launched the Brusilov offensive on June 4, beginning a string of crushing victories against the Austrian army. By the time Russian resources ran out in September, Brusilov's forces had cost the Austro-Hungarian army 1.5 million men and some 9600 square miles--leaving the Austro-Hungarians so weakened that Germany fought virtually alone for the remainder of the war.
The United States congratulated itself on staying out of the war. In fact, Woodrow Wilson campaigned for re-election as president with the slogan “He kept us out of the war”—a position he would reverse three months after he was elected for a second term.
But the war wasn't the only news that was fit to print in 1916. Here are a few other events worth remembering:
- On Easter Monday, April 24, 1916, a group of Irish nationalists proclaimed the establishment of an Irish Republic and rose up in rebellion against British rule in Ireland. IRA violence of the later twentieth century tends to cloud the image of the Irish independence movement for modern readers but British rule over Ireland was an ugly thing. The grievances outlined in the American Declaration of Independence were nothing by comparison.
- Sometime in the dead of night between December 29 and 30, Russian nobles murdered Grigory Rasputin, a self-styled holy man who effectively ruled Russia while Tsar Nicholas led Russian troops in the war.
- Mexican revolutionary general, and former ally of the United States, Pancho Villa raided Columbus, New Mexico, killing 17 Americans. General John Pershing led 6,000 troops across the border in pursuit. He spent 10 months searching with no success.
- Margaret Sanger opened the first birth control clinic on October 16. On October 26 she was arrested for obscenity because she promoted birth control. Apparently some battles have to be fought over and over.
- Daylight Savings Time was introduced in Britain under the more accurate name "Summertime". Not a plus as far as I'm concerned.
On a happier note:
- On August 25, President Woodrow Wilson signed the act that created the National Park Service.
- The Chicago Cubs played their first game in Weeghmann Park, aka Wrigley Field. Here’s what the Chicago Tribune had to say on the subject:
It is not unlikely that there will be Germans marching through the downtown streets of Chicago this morning, but they will be harmless, for they will be only the Garry Herrmann delegation from Cincinnati trying to make a better showing than Carley Weeghmann and his crowd made on the streets of Cincinnati last week.
- Clarence Saunders opened the first Piggly-Wiggly in Memphis, Tennessee, revolutionizing grocery shopping. For the first time, customers gathered up their own purchases instead of handing the list to a clerk to fill the order.
Come 1917, the pace of change was going to pick up.
*More accurately a siege, Verdun lasted for 300 days, From February through December. The Germans intended the siege to be a battle of attrition, designed to "bleed France white". In fact, it turned into a costly standoff, with a combined loss of between 600,000 and 700,000 men.
“A Ramayana of One’s Own”
I've written about the Ramayana before here on the Margins. It's a big enough topic to consider again whenever I stumble across a way for a new audience to come to it.
As I've said in a previous post, the Ramayana is a heroic epic, an important Hindu scripture, and a cultural touchstone for the peoples of South and Southeast Asia. Over the millennia, it has inspired poets, artists, dramatists, dancers, and more recently movie directors and video game designers. Its characters have been treated as archetypal figures, worshiped as gods, held up as role models and rejected as horrible examples. It's a story that most people of South Asian descent know in some form. It's a story that most North Americas barely know at all.
In its classic form the Ramayana as a sprawling epic that can be overwhelming for those of us who didn't grow up on the central story. Friends reading for the first time often have the feeling that they need flash cards, or some other kind of cheat sheet. The phrase "you can't tell the players without a program" comes to mind.
San Francisco's Asian Art Museum has a solution for those of you lost in the tangle of story. In The Rama Epic: Hero, Heroine, Ally, Foe, art historian and curators for an exhibit of the same name* explore the Ramayana as both story and social model, using art objects created over a period of fifteen-hundred years from many different countries.* Instead of allowing the audience to founder in the details, The Rama Epic focuses on the four characters who stand at its heart: Rama, his wife Sita, the monkey-god Hanuman, and the ten-headed demon-king Ravana. Each character is the subject of two thoughtful essays. One examines the changing nature of the character's role as hero, heroine, ally or foe. The second examines the character's basic iconography. The end result is a visual feast that allows readers to engage with and make the Ramayana their own.
My own favorite version of the Ramayana didn't make it into The Rama Epic. A shame really. Sita Sings the Blues is a great example of a modern artist creating a Ramayana of her own.**
*I haven't see the exhibit in person. Just the catalog, which is pretty dang spectacular. The exhibit runs through January 15. If you get a chance to see it, let me know what you think.
** Time for me to watch it again I think. Right after my annual viewing of A Charlie Brown Christmas.
The guts of this review previously appeared in Shelf Awareness for Readers. LINK
Eyewitness to Pearl Harbor
Tomorrow is the 75th anniversary of the bombing of Pearl Harbor. Commemorative posts have already begun to fill the parts of the internet where history buffs hang out. I suspect that you know the story. I'm sure you know the historical consequences. I'm not going to rehash the big picture. Instead I'd like to share a smaller story.
Cornelia Fort was a certified civilian flight instructor who worked for the Andrews Flying Service in Honolulu, a Nashville debutante who had kicked her way into the male dominated world of general aviation. * She was only 22 and already an experienced pilot with hundreds of flight hours to her credit.
On December 7, 1941, Fort was in the air with a student pilot, a defense worker named Suomala who was practicing landings prior to taking his first solo flight. As was typical at the time, they had no radio, so the only way to avoid other aircraft coming and going at Honolulu's John Rodgers Airport was to scan the sky around them
Prior to what was scheduled to be Suomala's final landing before soloing, Fort scanned the sky. She saw a military plane heading in from the ocean. She was so accustomed to military traffic from the nearby military bases that she nodded to Suomala to turn into the first leg of his landing pattern. She looked again and saw another military aircraft headed right for them. She grabbed the controls away from her student, jammed the throttle open, and pulled above the oncoming plane. The plane passed under them so close that their celluloid windows rattled in the plane.**
Fort glanced down to see what kind of plane it was. Instead of the star and bar of the US Army Air Corps, painted red balls on the wings shone in the morning sun: the "rising sun" emblem of the Japanese. With a chill tingling down her spine, she looked west to Pearl Harbor, where she saw billowing black smoke and formations of silver bombers headed toward the harbor. Something detached itself from one of the planes and she watched as a bomb fell and exploded.
She landed the plane at John Rodgers as quickly as she could, surrounded by machine gun fire. As they touched down, Suomola asked "When am I going to solo?" (Fort later said she wasn't sure whether he didn't understand what was happening or trying to lighten the situation with humor.) A contemporary newspaper account reported her answer as "Not today, brother." A few seconds later, the shadow of a plane passed overhead and bullets spattered around them. Pilot and student sprinted for the cover of the hanger.
Once inside, Fort tried to warn her co-workers that the Japanese were attacking. She was met with disbelief and laughter. The men she worked with tried to pass it off as some sort of maneuvers that she had misunderstood. Fort was "damn good and mad."*** She was about to tell them off when a mechanic from another hanger ran in and told them that strafing planes had just killed another pilot and his student as they ran for cover.
As scores of Zeros roared by, some of them no more than fifty feet off the ground, Fort and her companions took shelter in the hangar. When she examined her plane the next day, she found it riddled with bullets.
Newspapers soon picked up the story of Fort's encounter with the Japanese--it would have been a good story no matter who was involved. But a pretty young female aviator gave it an additional human interest element. For a time, she was part of the speaking tour that sold war bonds. But she was determined to use her flying skills for the war effort. Lamenting the fact that she she couldn't be a fighter pilot and face the Japanese in the air again, she was the second woman to volunteer for the Women's Auxiliary Ferrying Squadron (WAFS).
For several months she delivered training planes**** up and down the east coast. In February, 1943, Fort and several other WAFS was assigned to Long Beach California to deliver the much larger BT-13s. They were thrilled with the "promotion" to larger planes, but some of them were frustrated by the fact that they were not allowed to become fighter pilots. Determined to acquire some of the skills needed, Fort and a few of her companions began to experiment with formation flying, an activity that was forbidden during delivery flights. On March 21, 1943, while participating in a forbidden stint of formation flying on a delivery, Fort's plane was destroyed when she hit another plane mid-air, making her the first WAFS pilot to die while on duty.
What a waste.
*Her father made her brothers promise never to fly. He never thought to ask for the promise from his daughter. Her brothers were royally pissed off when they found out she had been taking flying lessons in secret.
** Fort's written account of the incident claims that at this point she felt "a distinct feeling of annoyance that the Army plane had disrupted our traffic pattern and violated our safety zone." My guess is that she swore like a fighter pilot--or at least gave vent to a string of the "dangs" and "sssssss--sugars" that passed for profanity among women of the Middle South at the time.
***And can you blame her?
****PT-19s, for the propeller heads among the Marginalia.