Everyone has heard of Charles Lindbergh, but only the most dedicated student of early aviation history would recognize the name Charles Nungesser. But he came close to beating Lindbergh across the Atlantic; and if we may believe the optimistic speculations of some, it is possible he may even have been the first to “cross” the Atlantic by air.
Justice, as we all know, does not always win out in the end. Sometimes the wicked escape unpunished for their crimes, for a variety of reasons. This seems to have been what happened with one strange murder case I read about recently. It is notable for the involvement of the future president John Adams in the affair, as well as for the role that politics can play in criminal trials.
The first of the Seljuk sultans was Togrul Beg. Of him Edward Gibbon said, “It would be superfluous to praise the valour of a Turk; and the ambition of Togrul was equal to his valour.” This is a supreme compliment, and entirely true. By the time of his death in 1063 he had firmly laid the foundations for the Seljuk Empire in the Middle East and Central Asia.
The Soviet Union is no more, as everyone knows. Its political system proved to be unsuccessful; it was incapable of adapting to the challenges of history.
Janusz Bardach’s Man Is Wolf To Man: Surviving The Gulag ranks among the best prison-camp memoirs of the Second World War era. As an epic of suffering and survival, it makes an excellent companion to Siegfried Knappe’s Soldat: Reflections Of A German Soldier, 1936-1949, another dark chronicle of a dark era.
I had a chance yesterday to learn more about a strange and tragic incident in recent Brazilian history: the country’s so-called “rubber soldiers” (soldados na borracha) program of the Second World War. The story is almost totally unknown in the United States, and for this reason I thought it would be worthwhile to share some details about it here.
Many decades before 1453 (the year Constantinople finally fell to the Ottoman Turks), the Byzantine “Empire” had become a sad parody of its former self. Mismanagement, bad leadership, and the inability of the old state to cope with the challenges of its strategic environment had fatally doomed it long before Ottoman cannon breached its walls.
A news agency recently reported the discovery of the tomb of Suleiman the Magnificient, who by general consensus was the greatest of all the Ottoman sultans. Suleiman, who lived from 1494 to 1566, is now nearly unknown in the West; but he was, in the words of one eminent historian, “the greatest and ablest ruler of his age.”
Today we take for granted the fact that infantry units are equipped with all sorts of portable firepower. Squads carrying light machine-guns are accepted as natural and part of the battlefield equation. But it was not always so.
War brought out the bulldog in U.S. Grant. A decent man but a failure in civilian life, he was good at one thing, and one thing only: war. His method was to hone in on his enemy, get in close, and figuratively grab him by the belt to keep him close. So positioned, he would then hammer away at his opponent relentlessly. He may not have had the panache and elan of some of his more exalted (or overrated) contemporaries, but he did have a quick mind that could grasp the military essentials of situations in ways that very few others could.
Quintus Curtius 
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