Abide With Me

Something for the weekend.  No hymn seems to me more appopriate for a Palm Sunday weekend than Abide With Me, a song that reminds us that we all must die and that death is only a new glorious beginning for those who die in Christ.  The song was written in a magnificent act of faith by Henry Lyte, a suuporter of the Oxford Movement, as he lay dying of tuberculosis in 1847.

In the movie A Bridge Too Far, wounded survivors of the British First Airborne Division are shown singing the song as they await capture by the Wehrmacht at the conclusion of Operation Market-Garden.

King Philip’s War Begins

The great war of Seventeenth Century New England, King Philip’s War raged from 1675-1678 with the New England colonists, now numbering about 80,000, and their Mohican and Pequot allies confronting the  Wampanoag, Nipmuck, Podunk, Narragansett and Nashaway tribes.  The war was savage on both sides, with quarter rarely given.

The conflict began due to the suspicions of the New England colonists that Metacomet, named by them King Philip, Grand Sachem of the Wampanoag Confederacy, was attempting to rally the Indian tribes of New England into a great alliance for war against the whites.  John Sassamon, a Christian Indian, graduate of Harvard and an advisor to Metacomet, informed the Governor of Plymouth colony of this plan.  Metacomet was brought to trial in Plymouth.  Lacking evidence the court merely warned him that further rumors of plots by him could lead to severe consequences for the Wampanoag. 

March 29, 1862; First Use of Gatling Guns in Combat

The history of warfare reached a milestone on March 29, 1862 when Union troops in the Shenandoah Valley won a skirmish against Confederate troops at Middleburg, Virginia.  The Union troops used two gatling guns, nicknamed “coffer grinders” by the troops, the first use of the new weapon in battle.

The gatling gun was invented by Dr. Richard J. Gatling in 1861.  In later years he wrote down why he invented his gun:

“In 1861 … (residing at the time in Indianapolis, Ind.) I witnessed almost daily the departure of troops to the front and the return of the wounded, sick and dead: The most of the latter lost their lives, not in battle, but by sickness and exposure incident to the service. It occurred to me if I could invent a machine—a gun—which could by its rapidity of fire, enable one man to do as much battle duty as a hundred, that it would, to a great extent, supersede the necessity of large armies, and consequently, exposure to battle and disease be greatly diminished.”

Rear Admiral Pavel Dzhons

 

In 1959 the film John Paul Jones starring a young Robert Stack in the title role, gave the old sailor the Hollywood treatment.  However, in this case Hollywood cannot be solely blamed for the numerous historical inaccuracies in the film.   Scholarship on Jones was badly skewed by Augustus Buell in a two-volume “scholarly biography” which appeared in 1900.  Buell was a charlatan who made up many incidents about Jones and then invented sources to support his fabrications.  Buell was not completely exposed until Samuel Eliot Morison, Harvard professor of history, and an Admiral in the Navy, wrote his definitive biography of Jones. Here is a list of the fabrications of Buell compiled by Morison.  Morison’s book appeared after the movie, which is to be regretted.

One of my favorite sequences in the film begins at 1:45 in the video clip with Jones in Russia.  With the ending of the Revolution he was without employment.  In 1788 he traveled to Russia to take up a command in the Russian fleet.  Jones was willing to do so under the two conditions that he would retain his American citizenship and his commission as an American naval officer.  Tsarina Catherine the Great appointed Jones a Rear Admiral in the Russian Navy and sent him off to take command of the 24 gun flagship Vladimir fighting against the Turks in the Black Sea.  While in Russia Jones went by the name of Pavel Dzhons.  Jones quickly proved that he retained his prowess as  a fighting sailor, repulsing the opposing Turkish naval squadron.  However, jealous Russian naval officers preferred false charges of misconduct against Jones, and he was relieved of command and ordered to report to Saint Petersburg for further orders.  Awarded the Order of Saint Anne, Jones left Russia in July 1788, disgusted at the intrigue that ended what would be his last taste of naval combat.

Truman Doctrine Speech

 

On March 12, 1947 Harry Truman gave a speech to a joint session of Congress which has gone down in history as the Truman Doctrine Speech.  Alarmed by the Soviet imposition of Communist regimes throughout Eastern Europe and Soviet support for Communist guerillas in Greece, Truman recognized that the United States was in a new type of conflict with the Soviet regime and he was determined that the US would prevail.  This speech set the policy which would lead to the creation of the Marshall Plan later in the year, and culminate with the creation of Nato in 1949.  Harry Truman, machine politician from Missouri, laid the ground work for eventual US victory in the Cold War forty years later, and it all began with this speech.  Here is the text of President Truman’s address to Congress:

For Greater Glory: Viva Christo Rey!

Hattip to Ed Morrissey at Hot Air.  I have been waiting for this movie for over a year and now it is finally being released on June 1, 2012.  For Greater Glory (formerly entitled Cristiada).  The must see movie for 2012 for me, and perhaps all Americans who cherish religious freedom.  At a time when the Obama administration is engaging in actions in regard to the HHS contraceptivee mandate that many Americans view as an infringement on religious liberty, a film is being released this election year detailing the struggle of Mexican Catholics in the last century against a bitterly anti-Catholic regime.  Most of the time in life coincidences are merely coincidences, but sometimes I suspect they are sent by God for His purposes.  In any case it appears to be a worthy movie to retell the heroic story of Mexican Catholics and their fight for the Church and freedom.

The story of the Cristeros is the tale of the attempt by the Mexican government to crush the Catholic Church.  Mexico had a long history of anti-clerical political movements prior to the revolution of 1910.  However, the Mexican Revolution brought to the fore radical elements that pushed through the Constitution of 1917 with its anti-clerical articles 3, 5, 27 and 130.  In his encyclical Iniquis Afflictisque, the first of three encyclicals he wrote condemning the persecution of the Church in Mexico, Pius XI described the war against the Church waged by the Mexican government:

Ides of March

(Oringally posted at The American Catholic.  I think the history and Shakespeare mavens of Almost Chosen People will enjoy it.)

This was the noblest Roman of them all:

All the conspirators, save only he,

Did that they did in envy of great Caesar;

He, only in a general honest thought

And common good to all, made one of them.

Mark Antony referring to Brutus in Julius Caesar

I think it would have amused the Romans of Caesar’s generation if they could have learned that the assassination of Julius Caesar would eventually receive immortality through a play written more than 16 centuries after the event by a barbarian playwright in the Tin Islands that Caesar had briefly invaded.  It would have tickled their well developed concept of the ludicrous, judging from Roman comedy.

The High Chapparal

Something for the weekend.  The theme song to my favorite television western of the Sixties, The High Chapparal.  Broadcast on NBC from 1967-1971.  Set in the Arizona territory in the 1870′s the series was well acted by regulars Leif Erickson, Cameron Mitchell, Mark Slade, Linda Cristal and Henry Darrow.  The scripts were literate with a more realistic feel than was common at the time.  Here is a longer rendition of the theme song:

Ronald Reagan: For God and Country

The things that you find on YouTube.  Ronald Reagan in a training film for Army chaplains, For God and Country (1943).  Much higher production values than the average training film, and I found it moving.  Reagan was assigned to the 1rst Motion Picture Unit of the United States Army Air Corps.  During the War it made some 400 training films for the Army.

March 22, 1862: Third Corps Ordered to Fort Monroe

 

 

In the latter half of March of 1862, General McClellan began massing his forces at Fort Monroe to begin the Peninsula Campaign in Virginia in April, perhaps the most strategically brilliant and operationally inept campaign of the Civil War.  In the Peninsula Campaign McClellan came achingly close to winning the War in 1862, only to see Robert E. Lee, in a brilliant counter-offensive, establish complete dominance over McClellan and gain the strategic initiative in Virginia which would only be ended with Grant’s Overland Campaign of 1864.

Logistically the Peninsula campaign was an immense undertaking, involving the transport by sea of some 121, 500 troops, 44 artillery batteries, 1050 wagons, 15,000 horses and endless tons of supplies.  Here is the order for the movement of the Third Corps: