Historical Event of the Week: End of the Marathon of Hope

Many of you non-Canadians out there probably haven't heard of a fellow named Terry Fox. Terry was a young Canadian doing what lots of young Canadians loved to do in the late 70s. He played basketball and was noted for his determination, and went off to university at Simon Fraser. The difference was that Terry had cancer, and he died very young of the disease in 1981.

Instead of being a pussy, Terry refused to give up. They took his leg, but that just gave him a greater balls-to-dude ratio. Terry decided to run across the fucking country, from Newfoundland to BC. He dipped his leg in the Atlantic Ocean and ran across the island of Newfoundland. Nobody gave a fuck.

He ran across Nova Scotia. People started to care, they lined the highways in some places. Quebec was pretty rough on Terry, but then he hit Ontario, and realized he was a celebrity, and beloved. Millions came in to help fight cancer. And Terry was given interviews and Darryl Sittler gave him his All-Star Jersey, and everything.

But this is about the end of the Marathon of Hope, because Terry Fox's cancer metastasized to his lungs. He couldn't run anymore, because he had trouble breathing. He stopped outside of Thunder Bay, and the place where he stopped has become a point of national pilgrimage.

Terry couldn't run anymore, but his Marathon never really stopped. The Marathon of Hope continued as fundraisers went across Canada, and massive telethons raised over $24 million in Terry's name. Every year, kids across Canada (and the world) take place in the Terry Fox Run, wherein they raise money for cancer research with pledges to engage in mini-marathons. Crossing Canada has become a thing to do for anyone with a cause, like Rick Hansen did in a wheelchair.

Terry Fox died on June 28, 1981, but he remains a hero to many Canadians and cancer patients. I always think of him as the guy who spat in Death's face and said, "Fuck you. I'm gonna run across Canada, leg or no leg. Take my life if you want - because it's worth it."

But maybe we should look at Terry's own words about doing this:

...everybody seems to have given up hope of trying. I haven't. It isn't easy and it isn't supposed to be, but I'm accomplishing something. How many people give up a lot to do something good. I'm sure we would have found a cure for cancer 20 years ago if we had really tried.

Historical Event of the Week: Burning of Washington, DC

This week's historical event was a product of the last war between the USA and Britain, and is important only as a historical note for most people, though of late, it has been an element of pride in common Canadian culture. The War of 1812 was a war fought for misguided reasons by the Americans against the British Empire, an Empire entirely distracted by the Peninsular War in Spain against Napoleon. During the war, York (now Toronto) was captured and the Parliament there burned. So in return, the English decided to strike back and perform:

The Burning of Washington

At the time, Washington, DC wasn't quite what it is today. The government of the US was oft spread, as travel times from the capital to the states wasn't a train or a plane ride, but oft a long slog down the coast on a ship, or a horse or wagon ride of a lengthy period of time. There was no Pentagon at the centre of American military operations to strike out, and none of the famous memorials or museums had of yet been established.

Yet the English undertook to attack Washington - to damage the credibility of the young American state, and to prove to them what sort of fools they had become. In order to understand why this move was important, we must quietly examine the War of 1812 and what it came from - especially important for my European friends.

The War of 1812 was fought over the right of America to trade with Europe, free of the restrictions of the massive European wars that had raged on the continent since the arrival of Emperor Napoleon Bonaparte. In addition, the Royal Navy had been impressing US sailors who were supposedly escaped or mutineed men from the RN. Then the British had also been supplying arms to Native Americans fighting American expansion into the eastern frontiers.

Some said the war's real motivation was to snag the land now comprising Ontario and Quebec, as well as the lucrative and powerful British base in Halifax, whilst the British were busy fighting the French. Many Canadian historians have this opinion. My opinion is that the Americans simply wanted to prove they could fight the English, and probably wanted to secure their expansion westward, rather than northward. However, as the men who were the chief masters of the war never left any real indication, we'll likely never truly know.

What we do know is that nobody really won the war, because all it ended up being was a series of short-lived invasions on each side. The English never conquered anything of note in the US (just Detroit, nothing important at all); the US never held any English/Canadian territory for very long. Indeed, the most lasting legacies of the war have been symbols - the Star Spangled Banner is about the defense of Baltimore by the Americans, the USS Constitution was a famous frigate in the war, and Canadians have latched onto the concept of burning down the White House as a defining moment in our combined history.

Of course, the entire war was viewed by the English as a distraction; when Napoleon was captured in 1814, they actually started to send over regulars. The Americans quickly decided to look for peace once Napoleon was out of the war. The first, and only large-scale engagement of the British Army was at New Orleans, a battle easily won by Andrew Jackson. However, there can be no doubt that if the full scale of the British Army and Royal Navy was brought to bear on the US after Waterloo, that men like Wellington and his hardened regulars would have shown, and the US may very well have been crushingly defeated. I don't blame them for pussying out.

Pussers!

Anyway.

Washington was literally undefended. It was a civilian capital, and landing and occupying it was easy. A few partisans shot at the Brits, and that enraged the soldiery. The torches came out.

Some buildings were spared. The US Patents Office was spared by the impassioned pleas of its superintendent, who said the contents were important to both Americans and British. The Marine Barracks were spared because, unlike the rest of the American soldiers, the Marines were seen as honourable foes.

Everything else was put to the torch. White House? Burned. Capitol? Burned. Treasury Building? Ooohyeah she burned. Navy Yards? Burned like a bitch, including the USS Columbia, currently under construction. Basically anything the government built went up in flames.

A hurricane came through the next day, spawned a tornado, put out most of the fires and killed a few soldiers, convincing the English to gtfo. Really, no major military victory came from the attack - at most, it was a minor embarrassment to the USA. But in recent years, it has been seized upon by Canadians as a point of pride.

Here's the rub: we didn't do it. It was the English.

So, let's take it for what it was. A burning of an enemy capital that wasted time and lives and accomplished nothing militarily. The end.

Historical Event of the Week: Operation Jubilee

This has nothing to do with the X-Men character of the same name. Operation Jubilee is the codename for a raid that occurred on the coast of France on August 19th, 1942. It was the largest seaborne raid of World War II that wasn't intended to make a lodgement, and also failed spectacularly. In Canada, this operation is synonymous with waste and failure. It's better known as:

The Dieppe Raid



This mission was a clusterfuck from the beginning. Basically, the idea was to use a major raid to capture a French seaport from the Germans to see what the reaction time of German High Command would be; in addition, the Allies wanted to see what the reaction of the Germans would be to a raid in force, and hopefully draw the Luftwaffe into a battle where the RAF would apply overwhelming force and cripple the defenders of German-held France.

None of this worked. First of all, the mission was originally set up to go in July, but the Germans figured the damn thing out, and hit the buildup with bombers. So, the Germans had a pretty good idea something was coming. Secondly, Mountbatten (the guy in charge of the raid) didn't really have much permission to launch the attack, so his intelligence was out of date. Thirdly, the forces brought were wholly insufficient to pierce Hitler's Atlantic Wall.

Let's talk about the Atlantic Wall for a moment. This was one of Adolf Hitler's little projects wherein he thought the Atlantic Coast of the Reich should have an impenetrable wall build up upon it. It wasn't a reality, but most French ports were already fortified, and so Hitler added a bit to them, specifically in the form of German soldiers. The Allies targeted Dieppe because, quite frankly so they could blow stuff up as they withdrew. They were to find out that hard targets were a poor choice for an amphibious assualt.

Finally, the plan needed soldiers. Canadians were chosen, for no better reason than they hadn't been in a fight in too long. Add in some commandos to take the flank, a few tanks, and no direct fire naval support, and you have a huge recipe for disaster and damnation.



As you can see, Dieppe is surrounded by fucking cliffs. Brilliant, isn't it? Fucking cliffs! Rule 1 in amphibious warfare: DON'T ATTACK FUCKING CLIFFS.

Rule 2 in amphibious warfare: have direct fire support from the fucking navy! It's not like Canada was bobbing around in rowboats, anyway. They were being brought along by the Royal Navy. They had ships. They just didn't care to use them.

Rule 3: air support is a good thing. The RAF sent in like 70 squadrons, most of which were Spitfires operating at their maximum range, and completely outclassed by the Fw-190s they came up against. With little time to linger, they had to bug out or be shot down after a very short engagement. Longer range fighters would be needed in order to support future raids.

Rule 4: DON'T ATTACK CLIFFS.

So, the attack went down, and was a total clusterfuck. The commandos did their job pretty well, but the Germans in the centre, where the Canadians were attacking, held and inflicted around a thousand fatalities on the day. The landings were delayed, letting the Germans take all the time in ze veld to get ready for the attack. Adding on to that, the Allies had no idea what the beach conditions were like - no tanks got off the beach past an anti-tank barrier.

It would have been nice to blast open the anti-tank barrier, with say, naval support, but six destroyers just didn't have the short-support capacity needed to effectively blow shit up for the landing. In the end, the boys barely got off the beach, and the Canadians took something like 60% casualties in the raid.

Dieppe changed the way the Allies looked at amphibious assault. It became obvious that you couldn't do this on the cheap, that you needed to plan and plan and plan. Future assaults would have prodigious aircraft cover and direct fire support; save for the Torch landings in November, there would be no more attacks on harbours. There would be airborne and better tank support. Armoured vehicles designed to clear beach obstacles were designed.

Still, though, 907 Canadians died on the beaches of Dieppe, a cost far too high to pay for lessons that should have been well-known already. A damn tragedy.

Historical Event of the Week: Fall of Tenochtitlan

Hernan Cortes was a Spanish conquistador who came to the New World with intentions of forging a new empire for Spain. Famously, he showed up on the shores of Mexico with his small army of cannon, horse, and musketmen and put the entire Aztec Empire to the sword. Burning his ships, Cortes showed there was no way out except victory. Within three years, the capital of the Aztec Empire would be conquered, in:

The Fall of Tenochtitlan

Hernan Cortes had formed an alliance with the native city of Tlaxcallan, combining his technical superiority with the numbers Tlaxcallan could offer. This helped to alleviate the difficulty that Cortes had originally faced: the Aztecs outnumbered him something like 200:1. The two allies then set out to divide and conquer, knocking out as many of the Aztecs' allies as possible before laying siege to the Aztec capital of Tenochtitlan in May of 1521.

Cortes's plan was fairly simple. He sent his Spaniards to block off the three causeways that were the only route into Tenochtitlan, and to take out the water supplies by Tlacopan. The Aztecs used canoe-warriors to outflank the Spaniards and won the Battle of Tlacopan, stopping that advance. So Cortes opened up a causeway to allow his brigantines access to the lake, letting him dominate all the waterways around Tenochtitlan.

The Spaniards attacked the Aztec positions on the causeway during the day and fell back during night, but this led to very little motion in the end. However, Cortes was wearing the Aztecs down; dysentery and smallpox were ravaging Tenochtitlan, and no reinforcements were coming from the few Aztec tributary cities left, as they feared being left open to Spanish attack. However, the Spanish did receive more soldiers and ammunition from their port at Vera Cruz.

Eventually, with extra reinforcements, Cortes broke the Aztecs and entered Tenochtitlan. After the Spanish encountered a traditional "Aztec Owl-Warrior" and failed to kill him, the Aztecs took this as a sign that though defeated, they would live on. They surrendered.

Yeah. Right. Cortes killed the Aztec leader, Cuauhtémoc, and sacked Tenochtitlan. Something like 240,000 Aztecs died during the siege. And Cortes laid the foundation for New Spain, a colonial empire that would last until the 1800s and exploit the New World for pretty much everything it could.

Also, the conquest of the Aztecs set a dangerous precedent of "the savage" that would be popularized in Europe, leading to similar treatment of Native Americans for hundreds of years. While the various anti-native atrocities of the European settlement of the Americas likely still would have happened, Cortes was part of the first major extermination of a native group; and many more would follow.

Historical Event of the Week: Atomic Bombings of Japan

Welcome to the fourth installment of "Of the Week" on my blog. This time I've chosen to do the Historical Event of the week, when I'll discuss a historical event that had an anniversary over the past week. Today's feature will discuss one of the seminal moments in human history:

The Atomic Bombings of Japan



On August 6th, and August 9th, 1945, the United States of America struck Japan with two atomic bombs, ushering in the Atomic Era. B-29s flying from Alaska dropped the newly devastating weapons, obliterating both targets. The two nuclear weapons were the extent of the American nuclear arsenal, but they appeared to be all that was needed. By August 15th, Japan transmitted its willingness to surrender.

Japan, of course, was already in quite the pickle at the time. The massive and battle-hardened (and utterly vicious) Soviet Army had been unleashed on Japan's puppet Manchukuo (aka Manchuria). The fleet of USAAF B-29s flying from Saipan, Iwo Jima, and Okinawa had levelled several Japanese cities with a campaign of firebombing. To all appearances, those Japanese who favoured peace had been ousted from power.

When Okinawa fell, there was no further obstacles to an American invasion of mainland Japan, an invasion that made even the most bloodthirsty US generals more than a little anxious. The vicious campaign for Okinawa had demonstrated the Japanese capacity for defense; despite overwhelming Allied forces and firepower, the defenders of Okinawa had killed or wounded 50,000 Americans while still managing to die nearly to a man.

This may not represent the reality of the situation; some historians have stated that the resistant Japanese psyche was crumbling, and they may have yielded before the invasion of Japan eventually came, or shortly after that invasion. Such historians point to the force already being brought against the island of Japan as evidence that the Japanese would have given in. Truman wanted to use nukes to avoid the huge amount of casualties that would have occurred in the case of a mainland invasion; the generals wanted to test the bombs to see how effective they were in neutralizing enemy hard targets before an invasion.

Since the date, people have accused the United States of being cruel or overly violent. I am disinclined to believe such things; war is a time of unnecessary cruelty in general, and the unnecessary cruelty of Japan's empire is very well documented. In addition, the US had already inflicted hundreds of thousands of deaths and injuries to Japanese civilians in their vicious firebombing campaign, essentially destroying most of the built-up areas on the main islands already. What Truman was hoping for was that the immense shock and awe of the bombs forcing the Japanese to capitulate.



Hiroshima was destroyed on August 6th. The United States waited three days for a response to their demand for surrender; on the 9th, Nagasaki was destroyed. The cities have since been rebuilt but both city cores were utterly obliterated. Somewhere in the range of 110,000-150,000 people were instantly killed, with perhaps as many as half a million more dying of radiation over the next ten years.

Criticism of this ultimate weapon continues to this day; my opinion is not important. But I hope that this interests you enough to further educate yourself on these two days, seared by atomic fire into the fabric of our combined history.

"If the radiance of a thousand suns were to burst at once into the sky, that would be like the splendor of the mighty one...now I am become Death, the destroyer of worlds."

-Translation of the Bhagavad Gita as recalled by J. Robert Oppenheimer, as he watched the first atomic bomb explode.