|
|||||||
|
|
|
|||||
|
|
|||||||
|
|||||||
|
|
|
|||||
|
|
|||||||
Highlights for September 29
Horatio Nelson, Britain's most celebrated naval hero, is born in Burnham Thorpe, England. In the French Revolutionary and Napoleonic wars, he won a series of crucial victories and saved England from possible invasion by France.
The son of the village rector, he entered the British navy as a midshipman at the age of 12. He traveled the world's oceans and at age 20 was made a captain. After Spain joined France in its alliance with the rebellious American colonies, he raided Spanish holdings in Central America and the West Indies. In the years after the American Revolution, his zealous enforcement of the Navigation Acts, which restricted England's carrying trade to English ships, made him unpopular. Between 1787 and 1792, he received no new naval commission. In 1793, however, war broke out with Revolutionary France, and he was immediately given command of the 64-gun Agamemnon.
He served in the Mediterranean, fighting at the port of Toulon and helping to capture Corsica. While ashore on Corsica assisting in the siege of Calvi, he lost the sight in his right eye after being injured by debris from a French shot. Four years later, on February 14, 1797, he acted boldly and without orders and single-handedly took on an entire squadron of Spanish ships that were about to surprise a British fleet off Portugal's Cape St. Vincent. For his heroic contribution to British victory at the Battle of Cape St. Vincent, Nelson was knighted and made a rear admiral. Later that year, he led the unsuccessful British assault on Santa Cruz de Tenerife in the Canary Islands and was shot in the right arm, forcing its amputation.
After his recovery, he pursued a French expeditionary force to Egypt and succeeded in destroying the French fleet at the Battle of the Nile in August 1798, thereby stranding French General Napoleon Bonaparte and his army in Egypt. Nelson was hailed as a great hero and went with his squadron to Naples, where he began an affair with the wife of a British minister. Nelson had a wife in England. He aided Ferdinand, king of Naples, in his struggles against republican revolutionaries but later was recalled to England after he refused an order to take his ships to Minorca. Due to his overwhelming public popularity, however, Nelson was made a vice admiral instead of being punished when he returned to England.
In April 1801, Nelson engaged Danish naval forces at the Battle of Copenhagen. Ordered to withdraw by his superior officer during the fiercely contested battle, Nelson put his telescope to his blind eye and said, "I really do not see the signal." An hour later, victory was his. He was made an admiral and viscount and instructed to return to England to protect the Channel against an expected French invasion. In 1802, a brief interlude of peace with the French began, and Nelson lived with the minister's wife in the countryside.
Upon the renewal of war in 1803, he was given command of the Mediterranean fleet, and he blockaded the French port of Toulon, trapping a French fleet for nearly two years. Meanwhile, French Emperor Napoleon planned an invasion of Britain. He induced Spain to declare war against England and in 1805 ordered the French and Spanish fleets to break out of the British blockades and then converge as a single enormous fleet in the West Indies. The Franco-Spanish fleet, Napoleon hoped, would then win control of the English Channel, and an invasion force of 350,000 could cross to the British isle.
In March 1805, French Admiral Pierre de Villeneuve's fleet broke through Nelson's blockade at Toulon under cover of bad weather. Nelson set off in pursuit, chasing the French to the West Indies, where Villeneuve found himself alone at the appointed meeting place in the Antilles. Not daring to attack Nelson, he recrossed the Atlantic and retreated to the Spanish port of Cádiz, where a Spanish fleet lay. Napoleon called off his English invasion for the time being, and the British blockaded Cádiz.
In October, Napoleon ordered Villeneuve to run the blockade and sail to Italy to assist a French campaign. On October 19, Villeneuve slipped out of Cádiz with a Franco-Spanish force of 33 ships, but Nelson caught him off Cape Trafalgar on October 21. Nelson divided his 27 ships into two divisions and signaled a famous message from the flagship Victory: "England expects that every man will do his duty." In five hours of fighting, the British devastated the enemy fleet, destroying 19 enemy ships and capturing Villeneuve. No British ships were lost, but 1,500 British seamen were killed or wounded in the heavy fighting. The battle raged at its fiercest around the Victory, and a French sniper shot Nelson in the shoulder and chest. The admiral was taken below and died about 30 minutes before the end of the battle. Nelson's last words, after being informed that victory was imminent, were "Now I am satisfied. Thank God I have done my duty."
Victory at the Battle of Trafalgar ensured that Napoleon would never invade Britain. Nelson, hailed as the savior of his nation, was given a magnificent funeral in St. Paul's Cathedral in London. A column was erected to his memory in the newly named Trafalgar Square, and numerous streets were renamed in his honor. The HMS Victory, where Nelson won his most spectacular victory and drew his last breath, sits preserved in dry-dock at Portsmouth.
The Babi Yar massacre of nearly 34,000 Jewish men, women, and children begins on the outskirts of Kiev in the Nazi-occupied Ukraine.
The German army took Kiev on September 19, and special SS squads prepared to carry out Nazi leader Adolf Hitler's orders to exterminate all Jews and Soviet officials found there. Beginning on September 29, more than 30,000 Jews were marched in small groups to the Babi Yar ravine to the north of the city, ordered to strip naked, and then machine-gunned into the ravine. The massacre ended on September 30, and the dead and wounded alike were covered over with dirt and rock.
Between 1941 and 1943, thousands more Jews, Soviet officials, and Russian prisoners of war were executed at the Babi Yar ravine in a similar manner. As the German armies retreated from the USSR, the Nazis attempted to hide evidence of the massacres by exhuming the bodies and burning them in large pyres. Numerous eyewitnesses and other evidence, however, attest to the atrocities at Babi Yar, which became a symbol of Jewish suffering in the Holocaust.
1953 Russians want the American dream
An article in the New York Times claims that Russian citizens want the "American dream": private property and a home of their own. The article was one of many that appeared during the 1950s and 1960s, as the American media attempted to portray the average Russian as someone not much different from the average American.
Despite the fact that the vast majority of Americans supported the anti-Soviet Union policies of their government, most had a more difficult time trying to dislike the average Russian. During World War II, after all, the U.S. government had launched a propaganda campaign to convince the American people that the Russians--though they lived in a communist nation--were good allies in the war against Hitler's Germany. Even Hollywood got into the act, releasing movies portraying the stoically heroic Russians and their battle against the Nazi hordes. When World War II ended and the rupture between the United States and the Soviet Union began to develop into the Cold War, many Americans were confused about the new portrayal of Russia as a threat to the United States.
The U.S. government and a cooperative media soon developed an answer to this confusion. The message they spread was clear and direct: the Soviet government was a communist dictatorship bent on world domination; the Russian people, on the other hand, were not much different from their American counterparts. They just craved freedom, liberty, and material comfort. A story in the September 29, 1953, edition of the New York Times was a perfect example of this approach. It began by explaining that a "fortunate Russian" might eventually receive a "small plot of land on which to build a home." The piece asked, "What is the first thing he does then?" According to the article, he "erects a fine, big fence all the way around the lot." Decades of communist rule had "succeeded only in sharpening the instinct of the Russian people to hold private property." The Times reporter opined that the "Soviet Government, if it wants to have a contented population, will have to go a long way in making concessions to satisfy it."
The article was also evidence of the idea that some of the best American propaganda directed toward the Russian citizenry relied on describing the immense material wealth and comfort available in the United States. In 1959, the first American exhibition to be held in the Soviet Union consisted largely of automobiles, kitchen appliances, fashions, and vast amounts of other consumer goods. Nearly 3 million Russians crowded in to get a look and snatch away the catalogs.
Other Highlights For September 29
1066 - William the Conqueror invades England
If you have other Birthdays or events to add for this day please E-Mail me.
Today Tomorrow
