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Post by justjohn on Oct 25, 2011 4:18:22 GMT -7
AP Newswire Oct 24, 5:39 AM EDT Marine Corps to teach story of first black MarinesBy JULIE WATSON Associated Press In this photo taken Wednesday, Oct. 5, 2011, Carrel Reavis poses for a portrait in front of an image of him, far right, with two friends taken in the late 1940s in San Diego. Nearly 70 years after the Marine Corps, the last military branch to racially integrate, accepted segregated black units, the Marine Corps' top general is pushing to honor the history of the Monfort Point Marines. (AP Photo/Gregory Bull)OCEANSIDE, Calif. (AP) -- Oscar Culp does not like to remember. His mind has erased the harshest details. But the pain still stings for the 87-year-old WWII veteran, who endured boot camp in a snake-infested North Carolina swampland as one of the first blacks admitted to the Marine Corps. He wipes a tear. Black Marines were barred from being stationed with whites at nearby Camp Lejeune. But what hurt worse, he says, was returning from the battlefield to a homeland that ordered him to sit at the back of the bus and drink out of separate fountains from the white Americans he had just put his life on the line to protect. "Excuse me," he says, pulling out a handkerchief. "Sometimes we get a little emotional about it." The story of the first black Marines is a part of history few Americans - and even few Marines - have learned. Unlike the Army's Buffalo Soldiers or the Air Force's Tuskegee Airmen, the Montford Point Marines have never been featured in popular songs or Hollywood films, or recognized nationally. The Corps' new commandant intends to change that. Nearly 70 years after becoming the last military branch to accept blacks under orders from President Franklin D. Roosevelt in 1941, Congress will vote Tuesday on whether to grant the Montford Point Marines the Congressional Gold Medal, the nation's highest civilian honor. The Corps up until now has not actively broadcast the painful chapter in the 235-year-old history of an institution that still is largely white, especially in the higher ranks where less than 5 percent of officers are black. But Commandant Gen. James Amos - whose own 2010 appointment made him the first Marine aviator named to the Corps' top job - has made diversifying the staunchly traditional branch a top priority. Amos has ordered commanders to be more aggressive in recommending qualified black Marines for officer positions. The Corps this summer named the first black general, Maj. Gen. Ronald Bailey, to lead its storied 1st Marine Division at Camp Pendleton. The Marine Corps also plans to teach all Marines next year about Montford Point, the base near the coastal town of Jacksonville, N.C., that the Corps set up for blacks to keep them separate from white Marines. It operated from 1942 to 1949. "Every Marine - from private to general - will know the history of those men who crossed the threshold to fight not only the enemy they were soon to know overseas, but the enemy of racism and segregation in their own country," Amos said. Amos has spent the year lobbying Congress to grant Montford Point Marines the civilian medal, which was given to the Tuskegee airmen in 2006. "It's long overdue," Amos recently told the last remaining Montford Point Marines. Most of the 19,000 Montford Point Marines have died, their fellow Marines say. "For the most part, we lost our history purposely," said Culp, who has only a few black-and-white photographs from those days. "They didn't want the world to know our history." Unlike the Tuskegee pilots - featured in the upcoming Hollywood film "Red Tails" to be released in January - the Montford Point Marines were not officers in the war. The Corps gave those promotions to whites, said University of North Carolina historian Melton McLaurin, whose book "The Marines of Montford Point" is being considered by Amos for his must-read list for Marines. "The Corps did not want these guys," McLaurin said. "The commandant of the Corps at the time said if he had a choice between 250,000 African Americans - he used the term negroes - and 5,000 whites, he would rather have the whites." Culp had just graduated from high school in Charlotte, N.C. at 18 when he volunteered to join in 1943 at the height of WWII. "The Marine Corps was advertised as the most elite military organization, and I wanted to be part of the best to prove, given the chance, that we can do whatever anybody else can do," he said. He was bused with the other black recruits and dropped at a small shed with a guard who led them into the woods to huts that would serve as their barracks. The white drill instructors let it be known they did not agree with the new policy forced on the Corps, with some calling it a disgrace. The Montford Point recruits were not allowed to enter Camp Lejeune unless accompanied by a white officer. The few times they went for a training exercise they had to wait to eat until the white Marines had finished. "Montford Point was hell really," Culp said. "The water was bad. The barracks were made out of some kind of cardboard. It was cold in the winter. There was ice on the deck where we would sleep." He saw drill instructors beat those who did not march correctly. "You just had to take it, take a rifle snapped across your head or be kicked. It didn't happen to me but I saw it happen to other people," Culp said. "I really try to forget about the worst things that happened." He was sent to the Pacific where his all black ammunition company dodged gunfire as they ferried supplies to the front lines and carried back the dead and wounded. He oversaw the care of white Marines in the brig. Montford Point Marines participated in the seizure of Okinawa and came under heavy fire at Iwo Jima, winning praise from some white officers for their actions. They were sent to Japan to clean up the ash after the atomic bomb was dropped over Nagasaki. But after the war, the Corps discharged all but 1,500 of them. Culp remained, driven by the injustice that "they wanted us to get out." "Even after the war they wanted it to be lily white again," he said. "They did certain things to try to get the African Americans out and show they were not needed anymore. But we had proven that we could do anything the whites could do and sometimes even better." Carrel Reavis, 88, was among those who were discharged. But he took a bus from Camp Pendleton across country to Baltimore, Md. where he signed up again. The Corps continued to resist desegregation even after President Harry S. Truman's 1948 order, historians say. It wasn't until the Korean war that black Marines fought alongside their white counterparts. Moving up the ranks remained difficult. Reavis stayed the same rank for 10 years while he watched the Corps promote white corporals over him to staff sergeant in a couple of months. "We resented things like that and that's what happened to us," he said, "but who could we go to correct it or stop it? Nobody." Montford Point Marines pushed each other. Those with college degrees taught the ones without education how to read and write. "The perseverance we had was all the same," said Reavis, who stayed in the Corps for 21 years and whose oldest son fought as a Marine in Vietnam, losing his left leg. "We were like a brotherhood." Reavis, who served in Korea, said they formed their own organization in 1965, the Montford Point Marine Association, to preserve their legacy. Culp left in 1966 as a master gunnery sergeant at Camp Pendleton. He settled in Oceanside, a Pacific coast military town bordering the base, where he opened a furniture store with another Montford Point Marine. Their business card reads: "Two people you can trust." Current Marines and their spouses browse through the store, unaware of the two men's place in history. Their offices are adorned with black-and-white Marine Corps photos, including one of Culp among a sea of white faces at Twenty-Nine Palms Marine base in the 1950s. He remains close friends with both white and black Marines. Joining the Corps, he says, was his life's "proudest" accomplishment. "If all of the Montford Point Marines had to go through what they had already gone through again to protect our country, they would," he said.
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Post by karl on Oct 25, 2011 6:33:11 GMT -7
It would so appear of each society, there will be the closet secrets that are wished to be hidden. In this instance, the mindset of prejudice and separation by skin colour of people by their own history as former slaves used as human machines traded upon an open market.
If kept within the proper context, it is an important historical back ground of the US, and not of shame to be hidden.
It takes time and generations for the change within the mindset of people. For once the habit in thinking is brought into proper resolution, so will the mindset.
If memory serves correctly, this was in early days of US frontier history, it was Chinese people that bore the brunt of wide spread prejudice. And of course during the war emergency days, it was the in fear gathering of Americans of Japanese decendent that were forcibly gathered and placed in fenced in encampments in the war years.
These are events that needs be not looked upon as a curse, but not in pride, but as events that needs be in the time epoch, to be taken as needs of the time.
Karl
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Post by justjohn on Oct 25, 2011 8:17:31 GMT -7
It would so appear of each society, there will be the closet secrets that are wished to be hidden. In this instance, the mindset of prejudice and separation by skin colour of people by their own history as former slaves used as human machines traded upon an open market. If kept within the proper context, it is an important historical back ground of the US, and not of shame to be hidden. It takes time and generations for the change within the mindset of people. For once the habit in thinking is brought into proper resolution, so will the mindset. If memory serves correctly, this was in early days of US frontier history, it was Chinese people that bore the brunt of wide spread prejudice. And of course during the war emergency days, it was the in fear gathering of Americans of Japanese decendent that were forcibly gathered and placed in fenced in encampments in the war years. These are events that needs be not looked upon as a curse, but not in pride, but as events that needs be in the time epoch, to be taken as needs of the time. Karl Yes, this is a favorable development toward a more inclusive and comprehensive American History. It's almost funny what some people don't know about the past of their own country. Sometimes, for example, when they are giving tours in the Hessian Barracks at Maryland, people gawk in stunned disbelief when they say that some African-American soldiers serving under German arms played in the Hessian band while held captive here during the Revolution. Some of those freedmen went to Germany after the war in 1783. A member of another forum has a neat old drawing of one unit in Cassel resplendent in the special new uniforms which distinguished the soldiers as veterans of the War in America. What a singular honor. At the far right side stands a black drummer, formerly from South Carolina. Here's one for HQMC: A marine detachment served in this building at the turn of the century (1799), guarding 110 French sailors captured in the so-called Quasi War with France.
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Post by justjohn on Nov 15, 2011 4:10:58 GMT -7
GERMANY HAD A FIRST NUKE AND USED IT AGAINST RUSSIANS IN ESTONIA, HITLER DID NOT LET IT'S USE IN NORMANDY, AND JAPAN USED IT TO STOP RUSSIANS IN KOREA AFTER THE NAGASAKI Coping: With More "Historical Rewrites" We have been chatting a bit about the work of Anatoly Fomenko recently. He's the Russian scientist who has been piecing together how much of what we think of as "conventional history" is likely not as old as we'd like to think. I've only gotten through the first of the four volumes of his work, but already a clear pattern has emerged that a lot of "historical dudes" - such as Plato - may have been constructs put together in the Middle Ages in order to "create history" which would be acceptable to the folks who were then the PowersThatBe. Fast forward to John B. Wells' interview last night with Douglas Dietrich, who was a Department of Defense research librarian for almost 10-years. An amazing series of revelations about nuclear weapons in WWII! What? you thought only America had nuclear weapons? Sorry, you missed reality. According to Dietrich's work (based on documents within DoD but not widely known in military historical circles, Germany had nuclear weapons and actually used one up in the area around Northeast of Germany in the Latvia/ Estonia area to halt a Russian advance from the north. OK, you're thinking, why didn't Germany win WWII? Well, turns out that according to his research, if I followed the whole flow of it, Dietrich says Erwin Rommel (the "Desert Fox") had planned to use tactical nuclear weapons on Allied forces at Normandy. BUT Hitler said no to the plan because the Germans understood the biological risks and Hitler wasn't going to put the "purity" of the Aryan race in jeopardy. So what followed was the famed (and foiled) plot against Hitler which has been memorialized in movies and books. But the backstory seems to be that the Plot was hatched because Rommel and his coconspirators we so angry that Hitler wouldn't use the one tool which could have laid waste to the Allies. Oh, noted Dietrich, talking to Wells: That's why Geiger counters were carried by Allied invasion forces at Normandy. The rest of the interview was just as compelling (based on historical documents from DoD after all), including the assertion that the US actually deliberately triggered the war with Japan by sending B-24'as driven by American Flying Tigers to bomb Japanese soil a full five months before Pearl Harbor. The research is compelling... and to a student of military history, the US and Japan did not sign a surrender document on VJ-Day as most of the American public was led to believe - a myth perpetrated by the "approved" historical documents and texts. Seems history is coming down around our ears - thanks in large part to the internet and serious academics like Fomenko and the Russians involved in the new Critical Thought Movement as well as now, with Dietrich's work, a vastly different version of World War II. Wells' closing quote to ponder was Truman's Maraschino cherry: The only thing new in the world is the history you don't know. ~As quoted in Plain Speaking : An Oral Biography of Harry S Truman (1974) by Merle Miller, p. 26 And that, boys and girls, is why we don't speak German and why the war with Japan dragged out to 1951 and why the first Japanese import cars were made from American aircraft carriers. It's also why Dietrich's books and presentations are a must read for anyone serious about breaking through the mass-media induced mind trip and hidden history of the world.
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Post by justjohn on Nov 15, 2011 4:17:55 GMT -7
This is a response to the above post on another forum:
I don't get it. Fomenko's ideas of historical revisionism are ridiculous. Anything that does match his crazy timeline, like all of Chinese and Arabic history, he claims was fabricated by 17th and 18th century Jesuits. So what then, they took these fabrications to the Chinese and Arabs and said, "Oh, by the way, here are your new histories, you can throw out the old ones..."? Chinese and Arab historians must find this highly amusing.
Probably the truth - - -
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Post by justjohn on May 10, 2012 4:01:28 GMT -7
In 1845 - - - Marines from the USS Constitution and Old Ironsides landed at Tourane, Cochin China (Da Nang, Vietnam). This was the first time Marines landed in Viet Nam. Cochin China 1802 - 1863
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Post by justjohn on May 17, 2012 4:34:05 GMT -7
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Post by justjohn on May 25, 2012 4:36:13 GMT -7
Here's something much more recent that I was not aware of.
BBC News China
24 May 2012 Last updated at 21:24 ET
Documenting China's lost history of famine
By Michael Bristow BBC News, Beijing
The great famine that devastated China half a century ago killed tens of millions of people - but is barely a footnote in history books
There are few open public records of an event that is seared into the memories of those who survived this largely man-made disaster.
A documentary maker now hopes to redress that imbalance by collecting the stories of hundreds of people who lived through the famine.
He has sent young film-makers across China to video the survivors' testimonies.
Some of those videos have already been shown to the public in screenings at the 798 arts district on the outskirts of Beijing.
Stories are still being collected and the long-term aim is to bring all these video memories together.
Wu Wenguang, the man behind the project, said: "If we don't know about the past, then there will be no future." Stealing to survive
Armed with video cameras, Mr Wu's researchers have already travelled to 50 villages in 10 provinces across China.
So far they have collected more than 600 memories from the famine, the result of a disastrous political campaign launched by Mao Zedong.
The Great Leap Forward was supposed to propel China into a new age of communism and plenty - but it failed spectacularly.
Agriculture was disrupted as private property was abolished and people were forced into supposedly self-sufficient communes.
Interviews for this new project reveal that even though the famine happened a long time ago - between late 1958 and 1962 - memories are still sharp.
Those interviewed seem to remember exactly how many grams of rice they were allocated in the period's communal kitchens.
It was sometimes as low as 150g a day, occasionally they got nothing.
Just one of those featured in the public screenings was Li Guocheng, a pensioner from the village of Baiyun in Yunnan province.
He told the story of a relative who was so hungry that he stole a few ears of corn and took them home to cook.
"After he ate them he was caught and tied up with a vine. They bound him to a post at his house," said Mr Li.
But the next day he said the relative did the same again. He was once more caught and once more tied up as punishment.
His 10-year-old daughter was told not to release him.
"The next day he didn't steal again. He stayed home, put a rope over the beam of his house and hanged himself. He was so miserable," said Mr Li. 'Serious mistake'
The researcher who recorded this story is Li Xinmin.
The 23-year-old comes from the same Yunnan village as Mr Li, but it was not until she went back there to video its elderly residents that she realised the full horror of the famine.
"Only occasionally would older people talk about these bitter times - when they had to eat wild vegetables or other stuff that humans wouldn't usually eat," she said.
The 23-year-old is now finding out about a famine she learned little about in school.
Calculating how many people died is difficult. Not every government organisation kept accurate records at the time and there is little official appetite to investigate this dark episode in China's modern history.
One Chinese textbook used to teach teenage schoolchildren makes little attempt to explain what happened and why so many people died.
"The party made a serious mistake when it launched the Great Leap Forward and the commune movement as it attempted to build socialism," reads one of the few statements on this period.
Tens of millions of people died, but the book mentions no numbers.
It does not even say people did die - just that the country and its people faced "serious economic hardship".
The only illustration on the page is a poster of an overweight pig.
China is reluctant to talk about this period because those in charge then - the communists - are still in charge now.
To unpick what went on then might encourage people to talk about how the country is ruled today - and that is something the party strongly resists. 'Learn from the past'
Mr Wu, the man in charge of this memory project, thinks Chinese people should know more about the famine.
"We have to know why it happened and what lessons we can learn from it. We have to be warned so it doesn't happen again," he said.
But getting people to talk publicly about it will not be easy.
Mr Wu himself seems aware of just how sensitive this subject still is, decades after it happened.
The title of his project does not mention the word "famine" or the phrase "Great Leap Forward" and he is keen to emphasise that this is an arts project, not a political campaign.
He knows there is little prospect that the current communist-controlled government will suddenly want to look again at this famine.
"Maybe we can change nothing, but at least we can change ourselves," said Mr Wu.
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Post by justjohn on May 25, 2012 6:40:17 GMT -7
Quasi-WarThe Quasi-War was an undeclared war fought mostly at sea between the United States and the French Republic from 1798 to 1800. In the United States, the conflict was sometimes also referred to as the Franco-American War, the Pirate Wars, or the Half-War. USS Constellation served with distinction in the Quasi-War More here: en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quasi-War
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Post by Jaga on May 25, 2012 9:35:15 GMT -7
The great famine that devastated China half a century ago killed tens of millions of people - but is barely a footnote in history books John, we were aware in Poland about it since this was a part of the cultural revolution. But thanks for a reminder for eveybody. I just found this article about China in Washington Post. I was surprised how little China changed: In China, foreigner-bashing brings backlashwww.washingtonpost.com/world/asia_pacific/in-chinaforeigner-bashing-brings-a-public-backlash/2012/05/24/gJQA4eAenU_story.html?tid=pm_world_popBeijing’s Public Security Bureau announced a 100-day crackdown on foreigners staying illegally in the city. Beijing is home to about 120,000 foreigners. The campaign was announced just days after a May 8 incident, caught on video, in which an apparently inebriated British man attempted to assault a young Chinese woman and was then set upon and beaten by several Chinese men passing by. Since then, official media and popular Chinese Web sites have been filled with accounts or depictions of similar incidents, most of which have drawn comments denouncing the foreigners’ bad behavior. A May 14 video posted online, for example, showed the principal cellist with the Beijing Symphony Orchestra, a Russian, getting into a fight on a high-speed train from Shenyang to Beijing after he placed his bare feet atop the seat in front of him. When a female passenger complained, Oleg Vedernikov hurled an unprintable Chinese slur at her. .... But public opinion appeared to shift after an anchorman on government-owned CCTV International — the channel that promotes itself as presenting China’s face to the world — delivered a diatribe against foreigners on his Sina Weibo account, the local equivalent of Twitter. “ Cut off the foreign snake heads,” Yang Rui wrote May 16. “People who can’t find jobs in the U.S. and Europe come to China to grab our money, engage in human trafficking and spread deceitful lies to encourage emigration. Foreign spies seek out Chinese girls to mask their espionage and pretend to be tourists, while compiling maps and GPS data for Japan, Korea and the West.”
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Post by justjohn on Jun 4, 2012 8:37:02 GMT -7
One more: bet you didn't know this! In the heyday of sailing ships, all war ships and many freighters carried iron cannons. Those cannons fired round iron cannon balls. It was necessary to keep a good supply near the cannon. However, how to prevent them from rolling about the deck?
The best storage method devised was a square-based pyramid with one ball on top, resting on four resting on nine, which rested on sixteen. Thus, a supply of 30 cannon balls could be stacked in a small area right next to the cannon.
There was only one problem....how to prevent the bot tom layer from sliding or rolling from under the others. The solution was a metal plate called a 'Monkey' with 16 round indentations. However, if this plate were made of iron, the iron balls would quickly rust to it.
The solution to the rusting problem was to make 'Brass Monkeys..' Few landlubbers realize that brass contracts much more and much faster than iron when chilled. Consequently, when the temperature dropped too far, the brass indentations would shrink so much that the iron cannonballs would come right off the monkey;
Thus, it was quite literally, 'Cold enough to freeze the balls off a brass monkey.'
(All this time, you thought that was an improper expression, didn't you.) HA
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Post by karl on Jun 4, 2012 16:10:53 GMT -7
One more: bet you didn't know this! In the heyday of sailing ships, all war ships and many freighters carried iron cannons. Those cannons fired round iron cannon balls. It was necessary to keep a good supply near the cannon. However, how to prevent them from rolling about the deck? The best storage method devised was a square-based pyramid with one ball on top, resting on four resting on nine, which rested on sixteen. Thus, a supply of 30 cannon balls could be stacked in a small area right next to the cannon. There was only one problem....how to prevent the bot tom layer from sliding or rolling from under the others. The solution was a metal plate called a 'Monkey' with 16 round indentations. However, if this plate were made of iron, the iron balls would quickly rust to it. The solution to the rusting problem was to make 'Brass Monkeys..' Few landlubbers realize that brass contracts much more and much faster than iron when chilled. Consequently, when the temperature dropped too far, the brass indentations would shrink so much that the iron cannonballs would come right off the monkey; Thus, it was quite literally, 'Cold enough to freeze the balls off a brass monkey.' (All this time, you thought that was an improper expression, didn't you.) HA J.J. Very so sorry to inform, but I had learnt that whilst attending my maritime studies in wheel house management whilst in attendance with Interschalt maritime in Hamburg so long past ago.. But, please do not become reluctant of phases such as deck monkey balls. Love it....once you are infected with salt water, it is a life time. For this very reason of so many years past in the war. A submariner to sink a fellow submarine is to tear out the soul. Whilst in school, more then a few instructors were former war time submarine personnel. As a young man of little knowledge and an escapee from any form of responsibility, I was cannon fodder for those fellows, they were merciless. But, I learnt a great deal from them other then what was the curriculum. Karl
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Post by justjohn on Jun 22, 2012 5:14:10 GMT -7
Antipope Who was the pope in 1409? It sounds like a simple question, but in fact the answer is far from clear. From 1409 to 1415 there were three people who simultaneously had a credible claim to being pope, all holding their own rival Papal Courts. In Rome, there was Pope Gregory XII, who is now considered to have been the valid pope. In Avignon in southern France, a rival papacy had elected Benedict XIII in 1394. Meanwhile in Pisa, Italy, there was a third pope, Alexander V. Of course, in principle the pope is God's sole appointed representative on earth, but among Catholics at the time there was disagreement about which pope was legitimate, while the others were deemed 'antipopes'. The interesting fact is that even today the Catholic Church's list of historical popes suggests that at certain points there were two simultaneous, legitimate popes.
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Post by justjohn on Jun 26, 2012 2:48:48 GMT -7
10 wars you didn't know about
The Pig WarThis little-known conflict in 1859 could have changed the course of American history forever, and it all started with just one swine. On the tiny island of San Juan off the coast of Washington state, both America and the British Empire claimed possession. The two nations kept an uneasy peace until an American farmer shot a British pig that was in his potato patch. The death of the hog caused the British to try to arrest the farmer, who called in the American military in support. The two nations squared off on the tiny island, with the British Navy sending three warships and over 2,000 men. No further shots were fired and eventually the island was ceded to the Americans.l The Stray Dog WarSticking with animals kicking off international conflicts, we’ll look at the long-running rivalry between Greece and Bulgaria. The two nations have never gotten along, so when a Greek soldier chased his runaway dog across the border in 1925 and was shot dead by a Bulgarian border guard, that was all it took to set off a firestorm. The very next day, the Greek army mobilized and invaded the border region of Petrich, routing the Bulgarian army there and preparing for further incursions. The League of Nations (the predecessor to the U.N.) quickly stepped in and cooled things down, ordering Greece to withdraw and pay Bulgaria about $90,000 in damages. The War of Jenkins’ EarWars get started for all sorts of reasons -- land disputes, religious differences, assassinations -- but this is the only one that we know of that involves a severed ear. When British sea captain Robert Jenkins’ boat was boarded by the Spanish in the Caribbean, he was accused of piracy and had his left ear cut off. He brought the ear to Parliament in 1738 and it was enough to cause Great Britain to declare war on the Spanish, but after seven years of conflict, both parties backed out with no major territorial changes on either side. The Moldovan-Transdniestrian WarThe fall of the Soviet Union left the myriad countries subsumed into the Communist juggernaut looking for something to do. In some cases, that something was war. Moldova was a country caught in the middle, with one partisan faction wanting to stay allied with Romania and the other with Mother Russia. Nearly a thousand people were killed before hostilities were quelled, but the weirdest part of the war was the relationships between soldiers. During the night, it was common for fighters on both sides to mix and mingle at bars in the disputed zone, often apologizing to each other for the day’s events. The Honey WarBack in the early days of the United States, the federal government didn’t have the iron hand of control that it does today, so states would often get into ridiculous squabbles with each other that sometimes escalated to violence. In 1839, the governor of Missouri decided to redraw that state’s border with Iowa for giggles, and then sent tax collectors into the disputed area to get some cash from its new citizens. This didn’t go well, with the only spoils from the raid being three beehives full of honey. The Missouri militia was dispatched and got into armed conflict with Iowa citizens, who captured a sheriff before Congress finally got involved, drawing a permanent border line and telling both states to chill the F out. Anglo-Zanzibar WarHolding the world record for the shortest war in history, this conflict lasted a staggering 38 minutes. Imagine stepping out for a sandwich and coming back to find that a war happened while you were at Quiznos. In 1896, a new Sultan of Zanzibar came into power, but Khalid bin Bargash wasn’t satisfied with having his protectorate be a British puppet like his predecessors. So he refused, declared war and barricaded himself in the palace. Less than an hour later, the British had shelled him out, removed him from power and installed a new Sultan in his place. The Football WarLasting just four days, this conflict between Honduras and El Salvador was about more than just a soccer game. By the late 1970s, Salvadorans had been emigrating to Honduras in the hundreds of thousands to find work. Tensions between the two nations were at a boiling point, and the spark that started the fire was the FIFA World Cup qualifying matches between the two. After each side won a game, the Salvadoran Air Force (made up of passenger planes with bombs strapped to the bottom) started attacking Honduran targets, occupying a decent amount of territory in the rival nation. Obviously, an extended war could never be supported, so a cease-fire was negotiated, but the countries would remain bitter enemies for more than a decade. The Watermelon WarHere’s another war that started over a totally trivial thing and quickly spiraled out of control. In the late 1800s, the United States’ occupation of Panama to build the canal displaced much of the nation’s white-collar workforce, leaving tons of natives unemployed. When a boat carrying an additional 1,000 American workers landed in Panama City, things got real. One passenger, a man named Jack Oliver, grabbed a piece of watermelon from a Panamanian vendor and refused to pay for it. The vendor pulled a knife, Oliver pulled a gun, and before long we had two nations duking it out, with casualties on both sides. A railroad car of riflemen eventually arrived and brokered a peace, but the brief war laid the groundwork for the later American occupation of Panama. The Emu WarWe’ve seen animals start wars, but an actual war on animals? It happened in 1932. Australia found itself ravaged by emus, the large, flightless birds that resemble ostriches. Over 20,000 of the creatures were wreaking havoc on crops, which prompted the Australian government to actually declare all-out war on the species, dispatching machine-gun-toting soldiers into the desert with orders to shoot emus on sight. The birds proved tougher than estimated, however, and after a week, the commanding officer gave up, having killed barely 10 percent of their target. The Chaco WarAnother South American conflict, this one started over a postage stamp. The Chaco region lies on the border between Bolivia and Paraguay, and both countries believed that it was incredibly rich in oil. (It wasn’t.) In 1932, Bolivia issued a postage stamp featuring a map of their country, including Chaco. Paraguay struck back by issuing their own stamp with their own map, also featuring Chaco. It didn’t stop there, though. In 1932, hostilities erupted for real in the region, with both sides buying armaments from the United States and Europe. After all the dust settled, Paraguay was on top, the proud owners of a completely useless bit of land. Peace !!!!!
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Post by pieter on Jun 26, 2012 11:40:33 GMT -7
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