by Phil Mason
The US air force lost two F-16 fighter planes to crashes in the space of 30 months in 1991 – 93 because the pilot had encountered difficulties in controlling the craft while using his ‘piddle-pack’ to urinate during the flight. Each craft cost $18 million.
San Francisco’s Golden Gate bridge was on the point of collapse during its first severe weather test during a storm in December 1951. In the early evening 70mph winds caused the deck of the bridge to sway 24ft from side to side and 5ft up and down. The main cables, which in normal conditions are 32 inches apart, were rubbing together.
Calculations done at the time indicated that had the wind lasted for just another 25 minutes, the structure would probably have given way. The bridge was later strengthened with 250 seven-ton steel braces under the roadway.
It was the first time the bridge had had to close due to weather since its opening in 1937. It has done so only twice since.
Another curious possibility surrounds the bridge’s famous rust red colour. It was chosen because it blended best with the surrounding scenery. If the US Navy had had its way, the bridge would have been painted in bright yellow and black stripes to improve visibility for shipping.
As many as 6,000 people died in a mass poisoning in Iraq in 1971 because vital labels on imported contaminated grain seed warning against human consumption were printed only in English and Spanish.
The cargo of American barley and Mexican wheat had been exported to Iraq for use as seed only. To ensure it was not eaten, it had been sprayed with mercury, and dyed bright pink as a warning. The sacks were labelled in the languages of the exporting countries but not in Arabic. The consignment was quickly stolen after it had been offloaded in Basra, and sold to the poor.
The full scale of the tragedy only emerged two years later after an American investigative journalist pieced together the epidemic of mercury poisoning which had followed. The final death toll, from hospital reports, appeared to be at least 6,000, with more than 100,000 more suffering disabilities ranging from blindness, deafness, brain damage and paralysis. No one was ever prosecuted.
The West African state of Benin had its entire air force destroyed in 1988 by a single errant golf shot.
Metthieu Boya, a ground technician and keen golfer, was practising on the airfield during a lunchtime break when he sliced a drive. The ball struck the windscreen of a jet fighter that was preparing to take off, causing it to career into the country’s other four jets neatly lined up by the runway. All five aircraft were write-offs.
Winchester cathedral had to be saved from destruction in the early 20th century by a deep-sea diver. In 1905, the authorities discovered that the foundations of the medieval cathedral, which was begun in the 11th century, were resting on tree trunks that, in turn, were lying on a waterlogged peat bed.
The operation to strengthen the base before the structure collapsed centred on a solitary diver – William Walker – who was hired to descend into the watery bowels every day for nearly six years to dig out the peat. With 250 helpers above ground, it was replaced with brickwork, 115,000 concrete blocks and 25,000 bags of cement. A statue to the ‘Winchester Diver’ stands in the cathedral commemorating the bizarre feat.
The Fog of War
The divorce in 1152 of Eleanor of Aquitaine, Queen of France and one of history’s most powerful women leaders, and King Louis VII led to an Anglo-French war that lasted 301 years. She had immediately married the English King, Henry II, a bare six weeks later, gifting into our hands her ancestral lands across a swathe of central France. This infuriated Louis as it required him to acknowledge Henry as Duke of Aquitaine which occupied nearly a quarter of all France.
The reason for the divorce? When Louis had returned from the Crusades, Eleanor objected to him having shaved off his beard, which she thought made him look ugly. When he refused to grow it back, she split. It would lead to three centuries of running conflict between the two countries, including the Hundred Years’ War. Peace and stability were not restored until 1453 after the Battle of Rouen, when the English had eventually been driven out of all of France except Calais.
A 12-year war, the War of the Oaken Bucket, was sparked between two of northern Italy’s states in 1325 when a regiment of soldiers from Modena crossed the border into Bologna – to steal a bucket. Thousands died before peace was restored. Today, the stolen bucket can still be seen in the bell tower of Modena cathedral.
At a perilous moment in its history, the fate of England was decided by the fortunes of the weather. The 130-strong fleet of the Spanish Armada which attempted to invade the southern English coast in 1588 was defeated not by any force of arms but by the vagaries of the British climate. The English fleet in fact sank only one enemy ship, and then ran out of ammunition.
After an unscathed drive up the Channel, winds blew the Armada out into the North Sea and prevented a landing – precisely at the moment when the defending fleet had exhausted its ammunition supply. As the Armada made its way home around Scotland and Ireland, a hurricane-force storm then wrecked it. Only 65 ships – half the original fleet – straggled back to Spain. For good reason, the celebratory medal struck by the English authorities was emblazoned with the motto, ‘God blew, and they were scattered’.
A smallpox epidemic curiously ravaged the eastern seaboard of America throughout the War of Independence, from 1775 when it began until 1782, the year after the British were defeated and had left for home. Historians still dispute today whether Britain had deliberately spread the disease as an early form of biological warfare. The colonists were convinced of it.
The actual evidence is unclear, although the British army was known to be inoculating its troops. It could be just as likely that the disease was transported naturally through the large numbers of troops brought across from Europe. Whatever the cause, the disease played havoc with military operations. It frequently reduced available troop numbers to a third of the notional complement. In June 1776, one of the Continental Army leaders, John Adams, wrote to a friend that smallpox was ‘ten times more terrible than Britons, Canadians and Indian together.’ Thousands of soldiers succumbed, and it may have contributed to the war lasting much longer than it needed to.
If it had been a deliberate ploy to wipe out the leadership of the American rebellion, the plan suffered from one unknown flaw. George Washington, commander-in-chief of the Continental Army, was immune to smallpox, having contracted it in his youth. He was able to lead from the front without any fears whatsoever.
Washington narrowly escaped injury many times during the War of Independence. He is reported to have had at least three horses shot from under him and his hat shot from his head. But one event, in the early stages of the war, on 7 September 1777, came remarkably close to snuffing out the future leader before any of his great military or political triumphs.
The episode only came to light in the 1940s when a document was unearthed in the Public Record Office in London. It was a description by Major Patrick Ferguson, a renowned sharpshooter and inventor of the light breech-loading rifle, who was in service during the war near Brandywine Creek where the opposing forces were at one of their closest points. He gave an account of an encounter with a rebel patrol, led by one officer wearing ‘a remarkably large cocked hat’ denoting a rank of high importance.
Ferguson, who had once scored a bull’s eye at 100 yards demonstrating his rifle to King George III, recounted that ‘I could have lodged half a dozen bullets in him,’ but after initially intending to shoot when he was in range decided not to when they changed direction. ‘It was not pleasant to fire at a man’s back, so I let him alone.’ Instead he shouted for their surrender, and they raced off to safety.
At the Battle of Brandywine Creek in the days that followed, Ferguson was wounded, taken to hospital and overheard a surgeon recounting his recent work dressing the wounds of captured rebel soldiers. The prisoners had told of Washington’s pre-battle manoeuvres, and Ferguson realised that it had been Washington who had come within his sight
s.
Washington never knew how close he had come to being the victim of the British army’s best marksman.
The Battle of New Orleans in early January 1815, the last engagement between British and American forces in the so-called War of 1812, was a victory for the defending Americans and made future President Andrew Jackson a national hero for leading the defence of the country’s major southern port. The whole battle, however, ought never to have been fought.
It took place two weeks after the official peace treaty ending the war had been signed, on Christmas Eve 1814, in Ghent in modern Belgium. News was still on its way from Europe and too late to prevent the final encounter. Nearly a thousand men lost their lives in one of the most pointless battles in history.
The War of 1812 ended in farce. It had started in the same vein too. The main cause of friction lay in America’s belief that Britain was trying, through naval blockades and restricting trade, to squeeze the life out of the new republic. America eventually declared war on 18 June 1812. It would not have degenerated into conflict had they given themselves a few more weeks.
Back in England, a new government under Lord Liverpool had taken office 10 days earlier after the assassination of Spencer Perceval. Liverpool was in favour of a more conciliatory approach to America. He had had one of the key reasons for the war removed by withdrawing controversial orders allowing the conscription of American nationals into the British navy.
The orders had been rescinded just the day before the American declaration of war. The Americans could not be aware of this as there was no way for the news to reach Congress before it voted for war. Three more weeks, and news of the British climb-down would have been known. The war would last two and a half years and cost nearly 4,000 lives.
Only the weather saved what is now the White House in Washington from deliberate destruction at the hands of British forces during the War of 1812 (which despite its name, lasted until January 1815). One of the most disreputable episodes of the conflict was the wholesale sacking of the American capital in August 1814. All the main public buildings were torched, including the Capitol, the seat of Congress, along with the Treasury, State Department, War Office and every book in the National Library.
The president’s official home was also set on fire. It was saved by the fortuitous onset of a thunderstorm that put out the flames before the whole building could be destroyed. The modern White House building is still essentially the same structure. Until 1814 it was not actually white, but grey, the colour of the Virginian sandstone from which it was built. After the fire, it was painted white to cover up the smoke stains, and became familiarly known as the White House.
Had the president at the time been Thomas Jefferson and not the milder James Madison, St Paul’s Cathedral in London might be a different building today.
Jefferson had left the presidency in 1809. After the Washington events, he wrote to his successor with a reprisal plan for the destruction wreaked on the national capital. He offered to organise to burn down St Paul’s Cathedral and St James’s Palace and presented a plan for doing so. The Madison administration, however, declined to antagonise the British any further.
Napoleon possibly lost the Battle of Waterloo because on the day of the final denouement he suffered an acute attack of hemorrhoids that stopped him from riding his horse and keeping up his usual mobile supervision of troop movements. It was the only time he had been prevented from directing his armies in the way he preferred.
He had suffered earlier during the campaign. Two days before, his doctors had lost the leeches used to relieve the pain and accidentally overdosed him with laudanum, from whose ill-effects he was still suffering on the morning of the battle.
According to some analyses of his decisions that day, Napoleon’s delays in launching his opening assault had much to do with his indispositions: originally planned for 6am, then 9am, it did not actually start until nearly midday.
There might actually never have been the need for the Battle of Waterloo at all. Napoleon had tried to commit suicide over a year before, in April 1814, after surrendering to the Allies following the collapse of French forces and the occupation of Paris by the troops of Britain, Russia, Prussia and Austria.
Before the plans for exiling him to Elba had been settled, on 12 April he swallowed a vial of poison that he had carried with him since his retreat from Moscow. All it did was to give him a violent bout of hiccups, which caused him to vomit before the poison could do any harm.
The most infamous military debacle in the history of the British army – the Charge of the Light Brigade in October 1854 at the Battle of Balaclava during the Crimean War – hinged on a simple misunderstanding in orders which could have been cleared up easily had the two soldiers involved not been sworn enemies.
The charge against a Russian battery, down a narrow ravine flanked on both sides by heavy Russian forces, was suicidal. The order had not been to do that, but to head off some escaping Russian guns which the commander of the British forces, Lord Raglan, could see from his high position overlooking the field of battle, but which General Lucan, lower down, could not. They were in an entirely different direction to the ravine.
Raglan sent a messenger across to Lucan with the ambiguous order to ‘prevent the enemy carrying off their guns’. The messenger happened to be his aide-de-camp, Captain Nolan, whom Lucan detested. The feelings were reciprocal. When Lucan, who could only see the valley ahead of him, and assuming the guns being referred to were those at the far end, queried the order, Nolan, who failed to see that he had misunderstood, thought he was simply being troublesome. He failed to clarify, repeated the order and departed.
Lucan passed the order on to his second in command, Lord Cardigan, who also queried it but Lucan could only reply that it was the commander-in-chief’s order.
The brigade proceeded – they never actually charged – at a steady pace down the valley to oblivion towards guns that were never meant to be attacked. Nearly half the 675 men were killed or wounded and nearly all the horses.
But it did give rise to a good poem.
The leaders of the two rival Republics in the American Civil War, the President of the Northern Union, Abraham Lincoln, and Jefferson Davis, President of the secessionist Confederacy, were both born in Kentucky less than a hundred miles (and just eight months) apart.
Both their families migrated out of the state when the boys were young, Lincoln’s family northward, to Indiana, Davis’s southward, to Mississippi. Historians have often speculated that had the choices of their parents been reversed, the competing forces in the Civil War may well have had reversed leaders, with who knows what historical consequences. Might the Confederacy have just managed to win under the sharper political talents of Lincoln? Would Davis’s authoritarian style have survived in the more challenging and competitive North? What momentous difference did the parochial choices of two families 50 years before have on American destiny?
The battle that turned out to be the most decisive engagement of the Civil War, the Battle of Gettysburg in 1863, began entirely by accident, and may have happened because of a newspaper advert. It was not a fight either side had planned.
Both forces, Union and Confederate, were widely scattered around the area in Pennsylvania. A rebel brigade commanded by Henry Heth had picked up a rumour that a supply of new boots lay in the town. One account has it that he got the information from picking up a stray copy of the local newspaper, the Gettysburg Compiler, where he saw an advert from a shoe store announcing the arrival of new stock. His troops were sorely in need of new footwear, having been marching for months.
Heth sought permission to go and get them. His commander, conscious of an order from General Lee not to engage the enemy in battle until the Confederate forces could be concentrated, had been cautious to avoid contact with the enemy. He refused Heth’s request.
Had Heth not wanted those shoes so much, there would have been no battle at Gettysburg. But he did. Heth took his request up to the
next level, to Major General Ambrose Hill, and convinced him that there were no enemy forces in the town. Asked if he had any objection, Hill said, ‘None in the world.’
On 1 July, around 8 o’clock in the morning, Heth blundered into a Union cavalry unit and as hostilities broke out both sides rushed reinforcements to converge on the town. In three days, the fate of the whole war was decided. It was the greatest and bloodiest battle fought on the North American continent – 90,000 Union troops pitched against 75,000 Confederates. A third of all those engaged were lost. The South suffered 28,000 casualties against the North’s 23,000.
By late on 3 July, Lee was in retreat and although the war would go on for nearly two more years, he was never to regain the strategic initiative. He had been unable to pick his own moment for a decisive battle. A junior’s hunt for some shoes had catapulted him into an engagement against his expressed instructions and it ended up losing the South the war.
The South, however, did come within 24 hours of entering the American capital a year later in July 1864 in the last major Confederate assault in their campaign to take the war into the north. The only reason why Washington escaped destruction was the mercenary greed of the officer in command of the invading forces.
Major General Jubal Early had dallied for a day at Frederick, Maryland, just 40 miles from Washington. It had become a successful practice of enemy troops to demand ransoms from communities they passed through to save their towns from being burned down. Early had made $20,000 (perhaps the equivalent of around $1 million in modern value) from the residents of nearby Hagerstown three days before. At Frederick he demanded $200,000. He had to wait an extra day as the townsfolk collected the cash together. That lost day allowed 8,000 northern troops to pour into the defences three miles outside the town at Monocacy Junction to block the road to Washington.